“It was hot, and by the end of the day, I was sweaty, dizzy, exhausted by the numbing depth of depravity I had reabsorbed. In this state, a clarity of evil had returned.”

A friend of mine blames Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for everything from the worldwide rise in antisemitism to Israel’s public relations problems. “Until you get rid of Bibi, nothing is going to change,” he asserts. My friend, who supports Israel’s right to exist, also thinks “from the-river-to-the-sea” ideology is fringe among Arabs in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria (which he calls the West Bank).

I know my friend’s problem.

Another friend of mine is fully invested in the ‘Israel as settler-colonialist, apartheid, genocidal state’ narrative. In dozens of text exchanges, I provided ample material to refute these blood libels and pointed out their Nazi-Islamic, Soviet roots. None of it mattered.

I doubt he read any of the stuff I provided. How could he? It would undermine his ideological framework. Blame Israel instead. That’s easy.

Ironically, my first friend, a non-Jewish American expatriate who has lived in the Middle East and now resides in a Central Asian country, is more open-minded than my second friend, who is Jewish and lives in America. My first friend is coming to Israel for a visit. I’m thinking of setting up a Shabbat dinner intervention.

Both my friends suffer from the same problem. We all have–or had–such friends.

October 7 holds the answer.

««»»

I toured the Gaza Envelope for the first time in June 2024. I was in Israel for a wedding. Sitting in my daughter’s home in Carmei Gat, I could hear bombs exploding and jet fighters swarming in the distance. Walking to shul among Carmei Gat’s young stroller-pushing families, with husbands home for Shabbat from Gaza and Lebanon, carrying IDF-issued assault rifles slung over their shoulders, I felt the kelipah, an evil force, lurking in the distance. It had only been eight months since October 7, and Carmei Gat is about a fifteen-mile drive from the Gaza Envelope. The aftermath of October 7 drew me in. I had to face this evil.

I snagged the last spot on a tour led by Rabbi Gary Alon Rogoff. He picked me up in his Range Rover off a Carmei Gat highway exit. There were eight of us, as I recall, from the U.S., Australia, South Africa, and maybe even England.

We went to Sderot, a southern city less than a mile from Gaza, where Hamas murdered 37 civilians, 11 police officers, two firefighters, and three IDF soldiers. We watched a movie compiled from surveillance footage showing terrorists indiscriminately murdering passersby before storming the police station.

***Sderot Memorial Mural at the police station site.***

We went to the Nova Festival site, where I waded through a sea of pictures and biographies posted for each of the 344 men and women murdered by Hamas and Palestinian tagalongs.

***The Nova Festival Memorial exhibit.***

We were allowed into the Nahal Oz military base, where the terrorists overtook a communications center. I walked through a blackened, burned-out room with monitors and computer cables melted into the metal desks. The Hamas terrorists had hurled grenades and torched the place. Several soldiers were burned alive. Ten soldiers were taken hostage, seven of them female.

***The communications center at Nahal Oz military base.***

We visited two kibbutzim—I don’t even remember which ones; it was an emotional blur. At some point, I saw the burned-out shells of homes—the sites of kidnapping, rape, murder. Ashes of terror still lingered.

We spoke with survivors who lost family and friends. We learned about the bravery of soldiers and civilians who risked their lives to rescue others trapped in their safe rooms. We heard firsthand accounts of entire families being murdered, including mothers and children who were burned alive.

We visited the “Burnt Cars Exhibition” near the village of Tkuma. One thousand five hundred and sixty cars, some with passengers inside, were burned by Hamas terrorists. These objects of terrorist depravity were brought to this site in Tkuma from across the Gaza envelope area.

***The Burnt Cars Exhibition. Piles upon piles of cars burned by marauding terrorists. The two pick-up trucks with machine gun mounts were terrorist vehicles.***

I didn’t know what to do with all the percolating emotions from this tour. Then I thought of the survivors and their families, imagining what trauma they carried.

A week later, I attended my friend’s daughter’s wedding in Jerusalem. That simcha helped me process some of my Gaza envelope feelings. Jewish joy has always been our source of strength.

I went back to Oakland a few weeks later with the aftermath of joy beating back my Gaza anger. I resolved that battle six months later when I suddenly realized my time in Oakland was up. I started the Aliyah process in January 2025. By early July, I was living in Israel and knew fewer than a handful of people. But I was home.

««»»

It had been twenty-six months since my Gaza envelope visit. When my friend Tania announced in a group chat that she was organizing a Gaza envelope tour in July, I knew I had to return.

We toured some of the same places I had visited the first time: the Nova Festival site, Sderot, the Burnt Cars Exhibition. We also went to Be’eri, a kibbutz established in 1946. Dan, a kibbutz resident, described how he survived the Hamas attack in his safe room while receiving pleas over the phone from his sister and others whom he later learned were murdered. We toured the grounds. All but one of the burned houses were gone. The community was rebuilding.

It was hot, and by the end of the day, I was sweaty, dizzy, exhausted by the numbing depth of depravity I had reabsorbed. In this state, a clarity of evil had returned.

««»»

On October 7, in the name of Islam, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Palestinian civilians launched a brutal attack against the Jewish people with the aim of murdering Jews and destroying the Jewish state. We know this to be true because, in the name of this perverted version of Islam, Iranian leaders have openly declared these murderous intentions and have done so for decades. We know this to be true from the genocidal admissions of Hamas leaders and contained in their charter and Statement of Principles. We know this to be true by October 7.

It’s this truth—this barbaric river-to-the-sea ideology— acted out on October 7 that my two friends refuse to look squarely in the eye. It’s the same ideology that has been exported to America [1] and animates the likes of Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar,[2], Rashida Tlaib,[3] and Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed [4]—to name just a few. The difference is that these public figures and others like them articulate this ideology through coded expressions such as “Free Palestine,” “From the River to the Sea,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and the “genocide,”[5] “colonizer,” and “apartheid” libels.

That’s their problem.

My two friends refuse to face Hamas’s monstrous depravity; as Duquesne Law School professor Rona Kaufman documented: “an attack motivated by their genocidal desire to ‘Free Palestine’ from the river to the sea—that is, according to their own governmental charter and repeated statements, to replace the nation of Israel with an Islamist state and kill all Jews. To that end, they engaged in mass murder, rape, mutilation, beheading, burning, and kidnapping. They filmed their barbaric attacks to show to the world. In addition to murdering 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages, they gleefully engaged in some of the most horrific methods of torture including ripping an unborn baby from its mother’s belly, and then murdering both mother and baby; raping girls to death using nails, bullets, and other weapons; baking a baby to death in the family’s kitchen oven; gang raping girls with such violent force they broke their pelvises; publicly raping girls and women; viciously murdering families; slicing off girls’ breasts; and uploading video documenting their murder of a woman to her own Facebook account”(footnotes omitted).[6]

My two friends, like many Americans, refuse to allow this truth in. It’s too cognitively dissonant. It ruffles their cleaned and pressed ideology, so it’s dismissed as fringe even though Palestinian think tank surveys have shown that river-to-the-sea ideology is mainstream among Arabs in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.[7]

It’s far easier to latch onto the no-thought-required genocide, colonizer, and apartheid libels; all part of antizionist rhetoric that Izabella Tabarovsky has demonstrated are the product of a massive Soviet propaganda campaign that ran from 1967 through about 1988,[8] and that Adam Louis-Klein has shown are part of an antizionist ideology “emerged from the convergence of three principal sources: the Nazi–Islamist axis, Soviet antizionist propaganda (articulated in alignment with secular Arab nationalism), and Western settler-colonial theory” and “articulated in Soviet antizionism through the reconstruction of the ‘Zionist’ through Marxist-Leninist categories, constructing Jews as Imperialists, colonists, and Nazis.”[9]

I know. That’s a mouthful. Hard to digest. Who wants to admit that their view of Israel is a product of Nazi-Islamist, authoritarian ideologies; that they’ve been duped; a victim of a well-orchestrated Soviet propaganda campaign?

Which is why we must burn October 7 into our brains, because letting this evil in, looking this evil directly in the eye and not turning away from the grotesque atrocities committed by Hamas and ordinary Gazans in the name of Islam has the power to pierce antizionist lies; to force you to see, feel, taste the ideology of evil that Israel faces; to understand the context in which Israel acts. It is this clarity of evil that upends antizionist ideology.

________

Notes

egyptian-branch-muslim-brotherhood-america-yesterday-and-today. For

how the French government has identified the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in France, see Ministère de l’Intérieur, Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France, unofficial translation using Grok AI, published by the Center for Security Policy, June 2, 2025, fohttps://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/new-french-internal-security-report-on-muslim-brotherhood-confirms-the-centers-writings-over-the-past-25-years/

[2] See also ToI Staff and Agencies, “ADL Accuses Rep. Omar of ‘Blood Libel’ for Saying Some Jewish Students Pro-Genocide,” The Times of Israel, April 28, 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/adl-accuses-rep-omar-of-blood-libel-for-saying-some-jewish-students-pro-genocide/; Ilhan Omar, “Rep. Omar Statement on Foreign Aid Supplemental Bills,” April 20, 2024, https://omar.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-omar-statement-foreign-aid-supplemental-bills; Corey Walker, “Ilhan Omar Says Trump Has ‘No Legal Right’ to Take Over Gaza, Blames Harris Loss on Israel-Hamas War,” The Algemeiner, February 24, 2025, https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/02/24/ilhan-omar-says-trump-has-no-legal-right-take-over-gaza-blames-harris-loss-israel-hamas-war/.

[3] Rashida Tlaib, “Tlaib Introduces Resolution Recognizing 78 Years of Ongoing Palestinian Nakba,” May 14, 2026, https://tlaib.house.gov/posts/tlaib-introduces-resolution-recognizing-78-years-of-ongoing-palestinian-nakba.

[4] Haley Cohen, “Abdul El-Sayed Calls Israel a ‘Rogue State,’” Jewish Insider, July 12, 2026, https://jewishinsider.com/2026/07/abdul-el-sayed-calls-israel-a-rogue-state/.

[5] See also Norman J. W. Goda, The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel with Genocide, ISCA Research Paper 2025-3 (Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University Bloomington, February 2025), https://isca.indiana.edu/publication-research/research-paper-series/norman-jw-goda-research-paper.html.

[6] Rona Kaufman, Never Again: Zionism and the Jewess, 19 FIU L. Rev. 737 (2025), https://doi.org/10.25148/lawrev.19.3.8.

[7] As to “West Bank” Palestinians, a November 2024 poll showed that 60% support (29%) or somewhat support (31%) the escalation of militant actions in the northern West Bank. An October 2025 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that 59% of West Bank Palestinians agree that Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7 was correct. When asked whether Hamas committed the October 7 atrocities shown in international media videos — of Hamas fighters systematically killing Israeli civilians, including women and children in their homes — an overwhelming 86% claim Hamas did not commit such acts, while only 10% say it did.

A September 2025 survey by the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University shows that “a majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, at 56% (mainly young people) believe that the State of Israel has no right to exist; an overwhelming majority of 70% think Israel will not endure over time; and 50% believe Israel can be destroyed following the events of October 7.” Additionally, a majority of the Palestinian public in the West Bank (71%) views normalization measures between Israel and Arab states as a betrayal of the Palestinian people.

An August 2026 poll showed weakened support for Hamas in Gaza, with 33% expressing support for the terrorist group. The same poll found that 45% of the West Bank Palestinians are satisfied with Hamas. Overall, however, the August 2026 poll showed a decline in support for Hamas. A June 2026 poll found that 46% of West Bank Palestinians believe the state of Israel has no right to exist. The good news from this poll is that only 4% of West Bank Palestinians indicated they would vote for Hamas and 40% for Fatah if elections were held. However, 46% indicated they would not vote.

[8] Izabella Tabarovsky, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 5, no. 1 (2022): 2, https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/5.1.97

[9] Adam Louis-Klein, “Antizionism as a Distinct Anti-Jewish Bigotry,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 9, no. 1 (2026): 65-68, https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/9.1.203