The Blood Has Not Ceased to Speak
From my vantage point—even as an outsider who has long supported Israel and the Jewish people—it is still October 8th.
Three years have passed. The blood has not ceased to speak, nor have the dead bodies gone cold.
Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people around the world continue to weaponize the lie that Israel is some European colonialist project, or an apartheid state. Israel has never, is not, and will never be either of those things. Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. Its history is complicated, its governments are imperfect, and its conduct is not beyond criticism. But the historical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is not something that can simply be erased because it is politically inconvenient.
I openly criticize the Israeli government, just as I criticize my own government. I do not believe that a government is entitled to a blank check simply because I believe in the country’s existence.
All that said, the State of Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable.
An entire people ought not to be condemned on account of the uniquely dangerous incompetence, corruption, or wrongdoing of the public officials who represent them. Governments can change. Leaders can be voted out. Policies can be repudiated. Crimes can be investigated and punished. States can reform themselves.
And especially here in America—the one country which all others have striven to emulate for the past two and a half centuries; the one country that has time and again uniquely defaulted on the promissory note of equality handed down from generation to generation—my Jewish fellow citizens have likewise been given a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds”.
I have been called an “honorary Jew” and a mensch for standing with Israel. I do not take either description lightly. To me, they are not merely compliments. They are reminders of just how profound Israel is to Jews around the world—to a people whose history has been defined, again and again, by exile, persecution, dispossession, and the terrifying knowledge that their safety could depend upon the goodwill of somebody else’s government. And that is precisely why Israel has become such a singular target.
There are few things in this world more extraordinary than the degree to which the existence of one small country has become a matter of global fixation. Israel is simultaneously a sovereign state, the modern-day national home of the Jewish people, and a place of ancestral significance reaching back thousands of years. Its existence carries a significance for Jews throughout the world that cannot simply be dismissed as a matter of contemporary politics.
And yet the very existence of that state is treated by so many of us not as a political reality to be debated, criticized, or negotiated, but as a crime to be corrected.
Common sense, morality, and simple human decency demand that we recognize the right of peoples to live in safety and dignity, to govern themselves, and to defend themselves against those who seek their destruction. Israel is no exception.
And yes, I still give Israel the benefit of the doubt, because I refuse to believe that an entire nation should be condemned for the actions of its worst leaders, its worst soldiers, or its worst moments. I extend that same principle to Palestinians. Palestinians are not Hamas. Israelis are not their government. Jews are not Netanyahu. Muslims are not Hamas. And no people should be reduced to the actions of those who claim to speak in their name.
And bringing Israelis and Palestinians together—rather than teaching each to regard the other as an enemy by birth—is every bit as much a moral mandate as ensuring that Jews can continue to live freely and safely in their ancestral homeland.
Jews deserve to live. Palestinians deserve to live. And neither proposition requires the negation of the other. Yet so many of us have laid bare something uglier still: a willingness to celebrate mutilation, murder, and human suffering when the victims are people they have already decided are undeserving of sympathy.
They rob Jews and Arabs alike of their selfhood; their dignity; their humanity. I never thought I would live to see antisemitism become so shockingly mainstream that it could simultaneously encroach upon college campuses, workplaces, Hollywood, and Washington itself.
There is nothing virtuous about hatred. There is nothing virtuous about calling for the destruction of a people or the abolition of their homeland. There is nothing virtuous about lying, attacking, bullying, intimidating, or defiling another human being.
And it must be made absolutely clear: antisemitism, in every form it takes, is so much more than a political issue. It is a moral issue.
If a Jew cannot express his Judaism publicly because he fears being brutalized or murdered; if he cannot attend a university without being treated as though his Jewish identity itself makes him culpable for the actions of a foreign government; if he is regarded as a legitimate threat to his own neighborhood or place of business simply because he is Jewish—then I ask:
Who among the rest of us would willingly live that way?
Who among us would consent to having blood libels spat in our faces?
Who among us would be content to live perpetually at tiptoe stance, harried by day and haunted by night by the mere fact of who we are?
Who among us would accept being accused, without evidence, of controlling banks, controlling the media, controlling governments, or secretly determining the course of American foreign policy?
These are not new accusations. They are among the oldest lies humanity has ever told.
When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, you teach him to see that brother not as an equal, but as an alien. When you teach him that another person is lesser because of his religion, his ethnicity, or his political beliefs, you teach him that domination is justified.
And once we have learned to see our equals as aliens, it becomes remarkably easy to see them as parasites; as vermin; as something to be removed. This is how the moral imagination dies. It is how ordinary, unthinking human beings become inhuman instruments of hatred. It is how politicians, propagandists, ideologues, and profiteers can convince ordinary people to accept misery, mass destruction, and the distortion of reality itself.
And it is an affliction that has followed humanity for as long as human beings have divided themselves into us and them.
The Jew has been called the outsider; the parasite; the conspirator; the corrupter; the alien; the enemy within. The accusation only changes its clothes while the lie sticks.
I will not surrender my conscience simply because there are those among us who have found it inconvenient, traitorous, malicious, or an arbitrary transgression against who I am and what I am.
Because keeping the peace does not guarantee peace. Sometimes, it merely protects privilege. It safeguards anonymity at the cost of courage. It preserves comfort by asking someone else to bear the consequences.
Three years after October 7th, I refuse to forget. I refuse to forget the Jewish lives destroyed. I refuse to forget the Palestinian lives destroyed. I refuse to forget the hostages. I refuse to forget the families who lost them. I refuse to forget that grief does not become less sacred because the grieving person belongs to the other side. And I refuse to accept the proposition that justice for one people requires injustice toward another.
Jewish survival and Palestinian liberation must not be competing ideals. They must become mutually reinforcing ones, because the alternative is not justice. It is simply another generation inheriting our hatred.
And, as far as I’m concerned, it is still October 8th.
Od yavo shalom. We shall overcome.
