Stop Explaining to People Who Already Convicted Us

For decades, Israel and the Jewish people have run the same failed play. We explained ourselves to people who had already decided we were guilty. We produced the documents, the maps, the timelines, the legal opinions, the carefully worded statements, and we delivered them to audiences that had reached their verdict before we opened our mouths. In business, when a strategy fails year after year, you change it. You study why it failed, you accept the loss, and you build something different. We kept the strategy and hoped the audience would change. Hope is not a strategy. It never was.

The deeper habit behind this failure is older than the State of Israel. Jews learned to treat antisemitism like weather. You cannot argue with a storm, so you build shelters. Legal teams formed to fight discrimination after it happened. Security departments hardened buildings once the threats arrived, and monitoring organizations counted incidents that had already occurred. I respect that work and I will never dismiss it. Some of it keeps children alive on Saturday mornings. But every one of those systems activates after the hatred is already visible. They manage the symptom. The disease keeps producing new symptoms faster than we can respond to them, because the disease lives somewhere our systems never reach.

It lives in education and culture. It lives in the old habit of blaming Jews for everything wrong in the world. The accusation changes its costume every century and keeps its skeleton. Jews poisoned the wells. Jews control the banks. Jews run the media. Today the same skeleton wears academic clothing: the Jew is a colonizer, the Jewish state is an apartheid regime, Jewish self-defense is genocide. A student can absorb this framework for four years, graduate, and sincerely believe he has never had an antisemitic thought in his life. He was simply taught a worldview in which the Jew is guilty by definition, and the only remaining question is which crime to assign this week.

Israel became one of the strongest military powers in the world. Jewish communities in the diaspora became more organized, more funded, and more connected than at any point in our history. And yet our public posture still sounds like a man asking permission to survive. Watch an Israeli spokesperson after any military operation. He stands at the podium and proves that warnings were issued, that leaflets were dropped, that targets were verified, that lawyers reviewed every strike. All of it may be true. All of it is also the posture of a defendant. We walk into every conversation already standing in the dock, and then we wonder why the world treats us like the accused.

“Hasbara” (“explaning” – in Hebrew) was built on an assumption: people hate us because they lack information, and if we give them better information, the hatred will recede. Forty years of effort have tested that assumption thoroughly. The people who could be persuaded by facts were mostly persuadable from the start. The rest were never looking for facts. They were looking for a respectable way to make the Jew guilty again, and when you hand facts to someone like that, the facts become exhibits in your own trial. You explain that Hamas embeds in hospitals, and he hears you confessing to bombing hospitals. The information gap was real but small. The accusation was the engine all along, and we kept fueling it with explanations.

I see a version at my work all the time. I teach Krav Maga in NYC and work with people who are trying to understand what safety means in real life. One of the first things I teach is the timeline of violence. An attack has a beginning long before the first strike. There is selection, approach, positioning, and only then contact. The person who controls the early timeline controls the event. Now look at what happens when a Jewish student is cornered on a campus, or a community responds to an attack on a synagogue. All of our energy goes into justifying the reaction. We audit our own proportionality, our own tone, our own right to have responded at all. The attacker chose the time, the place, and the frame, and we accept all three, then spend our strength explaining our behavior inside his story. In any violent encounter, that is a losing position. It is a losing position in public life for the same reason.

The alternative is moral counterattack. I want to be precise about the term, because it will be misread by people who profit from misreading. Moral counterattack means naming the corrupt standard behind the accusation and forcing the accuser to answer for it. It means moving the pressure to the other side of the table. It means refusing to participate in a frame where Jewish defense is treated as the problem and Jewish death is treated as context. When someone demands that Israel justify its existence, the disciplined response is to ask why he requires that justification from one nation on earth, and to make him defend his answer in public. The question itself is the evidence. It should be examined like evidence.

The standards expose themselves once you start looking at them directly. A person who demands restraint only from Jews, and never from the people killing Jews, is applying a corrupt standard, and he should hear that word. A professor who wraps terrorism in academic vocabulary, who calls massacre resistance and hostage-taking decolonization, is laundering violence the way a criminal launders money, and the laundering deserves more scrutiny than the Jews he is lecturing. A journalist who can watch footage of murdered families and reach first for the word context has revealed something about his own judgment, and that revelation belongs in the open. None of this requires shouting. It requires the discipline to put the accuser’s question on trial before answering it.

I want to close the door on one misunderstanding before it opens. The argument here is for clarity and for standards, and cruelty has no place in it. Jewish strength must stay moral, or it stops being Jewish strength. Restraint, law, and responsibility remain binding. I teach my students that the goal of self-defense is to solve a violent problem and return to safety, that you carry legal and moral responsibility for every action you take under pressure, and that you use your knowledge according to your needs and then stop. Controlled force ends the moment the threat ends. Training exists so that a person can walk in peace and protect what he loves without becoming the thing he trained against. The same discipline applies to our people. We can name corrupt standards, expose laundered hatred, and put accusers on the stand while keeping our own hands clean and our own law intact. Discipline under pressure is the whole craft.

So the next strategy is clear. Stop explaining Jewish defense and start exposing anti-Jewish hatred. Stop asking the world to understand us and start making the world answer for its double standards, by name, in public, with the same persistence our enemies bring to accusing us. Build it into curricula, into legal strategy, into every spokesperson’s training, the way we once built hasbara. Hope is not a strategy. Survival requires strength, and strength begins with posture. For too long, we have stood with lowered heads in the courtroom of people who wrote the verdict before the trial. They were never going to acquit us. The only move left is to stop recognizing the court.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh