Oct. 10: For Elon, the Law

Afghan man charged in Election Day ISIS plot; “Fourth Reich” perpetrates new “holocaust”; Adventures in campus free speech with antisemitic foreign elites

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The Big Story

Milton made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane near Sarasota, Florida, last night, lashing the state’s west-central coast with winds over 120 miles per hour and inundating low-lying areas with rain and storm surge. At least nine deaths have been confirmed, several of them in tornadoes that accompanied Milton, but the damage was not as severe as experts warned it might be earlier in the week, thanks largely to the storm weakening and shifting south prior to landfall, avoiding a direct hit on the densely populated Tampa Bay area. Still, state authorities estimate that more than 3 million Floridians are currently without power. 

Federal authorities and private relief groups are also still struggling to restore power to wide swathes of rural Appalachia devastated by flooding from Hurricane Helene. (While climate change might have played a role here, so, too, did the absence of Tennessee Valley Authority flood-control dams in western North Carolina, where flash flooding has been a problem for as long as Europeans have settled in the region.) But, as The Wall Street Journal argued in a Wednesday editorial, one of the bright spots of this relief effort has been the effectiveness of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service in restoring internet and cell phone service to devastated areas. As the Journal notes, more than 1,000 Starlink terminals have been deployed to restore internet access in Appalachia, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted Starlink permission to “test a direct-to-cell service to broadcast emergency alerts.” Musk has said that Starlink will provide the emergency services for free. 

As the Journal points out, Musk’s current indispensable role is more than a little ironic. Last December, the FCC canceled an $855 million grant, awarded in 2020, for Starlink to provide rural high-speed internet access, including in some of the areas where it is now providing emergency services. The decision, rammed through on partisan lines, claimed that Starlink was “unproven” and “unreliable”—despite its regular battlefield use in Ukraine—and that it wasn’t making fast enough progress in delivering on its promises. The FCC’s Republican commissioner, Brendan Carr, noted at the time that the decision “cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy” and attributed it instead to “the Biden administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment” of Musk and his companies. 

Indeed, one doesn’t need to be a conspiracist to see that pattern. Under Biden, at least seven federal agencies—the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—have sued or investigated Musk’s companies, as has the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Some of those investigations have bordered on the preposterous, including a DOJ complaint filed last summer that SpaceX was engaging in employment discrimination by privileging U.S. citizens and green-card holders over “refugees and asylum-seekers.” Most were only launched after Musk purchased Twitter and blew the whistle on the company’s previous collusion with the Biden White House and the U.S. security state. 

Allies of the Biden-Harris administration have received considerably better treatment. The Journal notes that in September, the FCC granted Dish Network a three-year extension to meet its FCC deadlines for building out a rural 5G network, despite being further behind its commitments than Starlink was. On the other hand, the chairman of Dish Network, Charlie Ergen, is a major Democratic donor. Around the same time, the FCC fast-tracked an application to transfer the ownership of more than 200 local radio stations to the Fund for Policy Reform, an NGO funded by George Soros and governed in part by his son. We keep hearing that Donald Trump will punish his enemies and reward his friends if elected, though it’s hard to imagine how he could be much more brazen than this. 

For a sense of the sort of infrastructure development the administration does prefer, we can turn to Kamala Harris, who was appointed Biden’s “Broadband Czar” in April 2021. Here’s Byron York from a Monday column in the Washington Examiner:

Harris likes to say that “President Biden and I made the largest investment in affordable, high-speed internet in history.” (She often makes it sound like it was her money rather than that of the taxpayers.) On June 26, 2023, [Harris] took part in a White House ceremony celebrating the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, known as BEAD, which was intended to bring internet service to “unserved and underserved” rural areas. “In the 21st century in America, high-speed internet is not a luxury. It is a necessity,” Harris said. “Every person in our nation, no matter where they live, should be able to access and afford high-speed internet.”

BEAD received a whopping $42.5 billion from the 2021 infrastructure bill to complete this task. As the Journal noted in an editorial last week, however, BEAD has not broken ground on a single project in the three years since Congress appropriated the money and Biden placed Harris in charge of it. Literally nothing has been built. As part of the same bill, Congress appropriated $7.5 billion for the construction of 5,000 electric-vehicle charging stations. How many of those have been built? Seven—which is at least a larger number than zero, so we suppose that counts as a success. 

The BEAD program, by the way, was specifically written to prevent Starlink from bidding, since the money was available only to companies intending to lay fiber-optic cable (and to implement hiring preferences for “‘aging individuals,’ prisoners, racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, ‘Indigenous and Native American persons,’ ‘LGBTQI+ persons,’ and ‘persons adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality,’” per the Journal). 

For the same amount of money as Congress appropriated for BEAD, Mollie Hemingway noted last week for The Federalist, Starlink could have provided broadband to 140 million Americans—and the job would already be done.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Shimon Refaeli on the post-10/7 renaissance of Zionism

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The Rest

→An Afghan man living in Oklahoma has been charged with plotting an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on Election Day, the Justice Department announced earlier this week. According to the criminal complaint, Nasir Ahmad Tawhidi, 27, who was active on ISIS Telegram channels, conspired with a juvenile associate to obtain assault rifles, ammunition, and explosives for an attack targeting “large gatherings of people,” in which he and his co-conspirator “were expected to die as martyrs.” Fox News reports that Tawhidi entered the United States in September 2021 on a special immigrant visa provided to Afghan nationals during and after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the time, then White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “I can absolutely assure you that no one is coming into the United States of America who has not been through a thorough screening and background check process.” But a September 2022 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General concluded that DHS lacked “critical data”—including names, dates of birth, identification numbers, and travel document information—to “properly screen, vet, and inspect” the more than 79,000 Afghans who entered the United States between July 2021 and January 2022.

→We like to periodically check in on the left to get a sense of the media ecology / extended fictional universe in which a significant portion of the American elite is living (see also: the CBS staffers driven to tears by lèse majesté against Ta-Nehisi Coates). For instance, here was lawyer and “Palestinian Jew” Dylan Saba—a man quoted five times in the New Yorker profile on Jewish Currents, where he is a contributing editor—saying yesterday on the news that the IDF was stepping up raids in northern Gaza: 

The “holocaust,” according to the IDF, killed 12 fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including “several” who participated in Oct. 7. But don’t laugh too hard at Saba’s histrionics: Your average 25-year-old New Yorker fact-checker or Biden-Harris State Department junior staffer is reading stuff like that every day, and they don’t get the joke.

→On the other hand, China—a major supporter of Palestinian “human rights” and instigator of anti-Israel radicalism in the United States over the past year—is apparently impressed with the “Fourth Reich’s” new “holocaust,” as David Goldman explains in our Post of the Day: 

→Another recent cause célèbre has been Cornell University’s threats to “deport” (i.e., suspend) Momodou Taal, a foreign graduate student, for exercising his “free speech” rights (i.e., disrupting a career fair and tussling with campus police officers after having been previously suspended in the spring and warned by school administrators against further disruptions). Back in September, Cornell informed Taal, an Afro-British PhD candidate in the university’s Africana Studies department, that he would be suspended after helping to lead and organize an anti-Israel protest at a campus career fair, which the university at the time declared “unacceptable, a violation of University policy, and illegal.” Because Taal is in the United States on an F-1 student visa, a suspension would have meant potential deportation back to the United Kingdom—apparently a fate worse than death. 

If you were skeptical that an Ivy League university would enforce its code of conduct against a foreign radical flouting university policy in order to mau-mau the Jews, well, points for you. After a public pressure campaign featuring petitions, faculty and student protests, a declaration of solidarity from Bernie Sanders, and sympathetic press coverage, the university caved. On Thursday morning, Taal posted on X that Cornell had “decided to allow me to remain an enrolled student.” And, as if the world weren’t already conforming to our stereotypes enough, it turns our that Mr. Taal, far from being one of the damned of the Earth, is a child of the Third World elite. In an X post from Feb. 2023, Taal boasted of his “maternal great grandfather” declaring Gambia’s independence from Britain 58 years prior. Included in the post was a picture of said relative: Dawda Jawara, who ruled independent Gambia for the first 29 years of its existence. 

→Tablet contributor Lee Smith has a new book coming out on Oct. 22. It examines the “unprecedented campaign of domestic spying, election rigging, brute-force censorship, and political violence” organized by the American ruling class—first to undo the results of the 2016 election and then to remove Trump from power and attempt to ensure that he can never reclaim it again. Disappearing the President, which picks up on a number of the threads Lee has previously explored for Tablet, is available for preorder here: 

https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/disappearing-the-president/ 

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Old Carpenter

Tablet Original Fiction from Avraham Reisen

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The New Zionist Renaissance

The Zionist analysis of the conditions of modern Jewish life have once again been proved correct, both in Israel and in the diaspora. Here’s what that means.

By Shimon Refaeli

The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent “Iron Swords” war have thrust profound philosophical and political questions to the forefront that will in turn shape the future of Zionism and with it, the fate of the Jewish people. What role should the State of Israel play in the life of the Jewish people? What is the meaning of Jewish consciousness in the life of the individual? What historical lessons should be learned from the events of the past year that might help ensure the survival of the Jewish nation?

Grappling with these questions has yielded an unequivocal conclusion: a resurgence of the relevance of the “Zionist idea” in the 21st century, both in Israel and in the diaspora.

Since the dawn of the Jewish emancipation in the 18th century, the Jewish people have wrestled with the question of their collective fate. Some argued that Jews should strive for full cultural integration into non-Jewish society, while abandoning religious, social, and cultural traditions and instead adopting the customs of the host countries. Conversely, others contended that one should not trust foreign societies or rely on the aid of host nations during times of crisis. According to this view, the Jewish people should direct most of their resources and efforts toward building internal Jewish resilience—culturally and politically. After the Holocaust, this debate was largely settled by the comprehensive vision of Zionism.

In addressing the distress among the Jews of Eastern Europe, and assimilation in the West, the Zionist movement sought to revitalize the Jewish people economically, socially, and most of all, politically and culturally. It aimed to ensure the continuity of an autonomous Jewish life through the ingathering of Jews to their ancestral homeland and the establishment of an independent sociopolitical base that would secure their existence, security, and well-being. Otherwise, assimilation within host societies and persecution from without would lead to their physical and spiritual destruction.

The Holocaust proved the prescience of the Zionist prognosis, at least regarding physical existence in the diaspora, in such a definitive manner that even its most ardent proponents could not have dared to imagine. It became evident that the Jewish people could not count on help or shelter from other nations, but must rely solely on an independent army and state.

In the ensuing decades, as Jews integrated into Western society alongside the establishment of the State of Israel, these hard-learned truths began to fade. Many came to believe that this existential diagnosis was a relic of the past with no relevance to contemporary reality. Senior political and security figures, both from within the Israeli establishment and the international community, exerted significant influence on decision-makers in Jerusalem to rely on international guarantees for existential issues concerning security and well-being.

The attacks of Oct. 7 have once again thrown into stark relief the “normal” historical condition of the Jews throughout history, including now. The attacks did not uncover unknown facts. However, only after their occurrence did these facts transform from abstract concepts into a bitter reality that could no longer be ignored. For many Israelis, Oct. 7 catalyzed an experiential and ideological shift in their fundamental beliefs, leading back to the Zionist idea.

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A first fact that events since Oct. 7 have reaffirmed is the Jewish people's status as a persecuted nation. The length and severity of this persecution over time represents a historical phenomenon unique to the Jewish people. From our identification as Hebrews in Egypt to our current designation as “settlers” in our own ancestral homeland, each century has witnessed persecution in various forms: slavery, exile, forced conversion, mass slaughter, pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust.

While Israel’s military and political triumphs had fostered a sense of security, Oct. 7 showed that sense of safety to have been an illusion. The harrowing scenes of helpless civilians seeking shelter from their attackers drew horrific comparisons to the Kishinev pogrom and the atrocities of the Holocaust. The overt efforts of the Palestinians, backed by Iran and other Muslim nations, to undermine Israel's existence, coupled with the entrenchment of antisemitism in the West, have reminded Jewish communities worldwide that their own security remains precarious.

Of course, the intense and uncompromising hostility in the Arab world toward Israel and the Jewish people is not new. Since World War I, there has been consistent opposition to Jewish settlement in the region, often manifested in appalling violence. However, in the years since the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, most of the Jewish population has been insulated from the Arab population around them. This successful separation reduced the idea of Arab hostility to an abstract political concept, even as it was understood that sooner or later, war could erupt anew, and that Arab intentions still included not only the erasure of the state but also the extermination of the Jewish population.

Nevertheless, a prolonged period of relative calm, roughly since the 2006 war in Lebanon, fostered an illusion of normalcy, deferring the moment of reckoning. Oct. 7 dispelled this illusion, revealing a harsh truth: In this generation, too, like in every generation before, the Jewish people confront enemies intent on their annihilation. Today, those enemies are actively working on seven fronts: in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran.

A second fact that has been underscored is that antisemitism continues to shape the Jewish people's relations with the rest of the world. This reality has shattered assumptions and forced a reevaluation of the Jewish position among other nations.

Prior to Oct. 7, many believed antisemitism was an anachronistic vestige of the dark era. The prevailing assumption was that the image of the educated, productive Jew—well-integrated into Western culture and adhering to its values—had decreased antisemitism toward Jews.

We told ourselves, “We're different from our grandparents—those diaspora Jews of yesteryear with their distinctive shtreimels, caps, and long black coats. We're citizens of the global village, wearing sport shirts like the rest of the world, participating fully in Western culture.” We believed our identity was shaped more by global culture than by tradition or nationhood. In academic and public discourse, questions like “How much longer can we keep playing the Jewish 'victim card' and presenting ourselves as victims because of our Jewishness? How long can we dwell on historical injustices?” were commonplace.

These thoughts had profound implications for our cultural identity. They led many of us to abandon our historical identification with the collective Jewish story. However, it became clear that antisemitism hadn't disappeared; it had merely receded temporarily from organized public political activity.

Since Oct. 7, antisemitism has resurged with terrifying intensity worldwide, shattering the illusion of “normalcy” between Jews and other nations. The Israeli public has come to realize that hostility toward Jews and toward the Jewish state is a deeply rooted force that openly shapes the political positions of many countries. It turned out that the fact of our being Jews has meaning in the eyes of our enemies in the world.

These developments have led to a deep sense among Jews of betrayal by Western societies, the painful realization that what we're facing is antisemitism in contemporary guise, masquerading as opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel in the name of liberalism and humanism.

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It has become clear that no matter how we attempt to downplay our Jewish identity, “enlightened” nations continue to perceive us as “the other.” The elite institutions of the West—academia, media, and international justice organizations—persist in applying double standards to the Jewish state. Let's examine some manifestations of this betrayal across various sectors.

In leading and prestigious universities, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations force Jewish students to hide and conceal their religious identifiers. In humanities and social science faculties, antisemitism has manifested blatantly alongside so-called “anti-racist” politics.

In the name of these values, some academics have justified atrocities by developing distorted social theories. They have crafted a version of Marxist theory positing that the world is dichotomously divided between oppressors and the oppressed, and then created a fake history in which the world’s most persecuted people are magically transformed into the world’s most noxious oppressors. They view Zionism as representing a white (false), colonialist (false), oppressive (false) movement against the native populations, when Jews are by any sane definition—buttressed by thousands of years of written and material history—the aboriginal population of the land.

Yet the purpose of these arguments is hardly to debate history, but rather to license terrorist violence against civilians. Consider renowned feminist scholar Judith Butler, who also serves as a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In a shocking display of moral equivalence, following the Oct. 7 massacre, Butler questioned why Hamas should not be called an “armed resistance movement“ instead of a terrorist organization. In 2006, she claimed “Hamas and Hezbollah should be understood as progressive social movements that are part of the global left,” after Hezbollah’s then-leader, Hassan Nasrallah, decreed in 2003 that gay individuals should face execution, claiming “they pose the primary threat to Lebanon.” More recently, in April 2024, the IDF unveiled documents detailing Hamas' brutal treatment of gay people, including executions and torture-based interrogations. These practices implicated even high-ranking Hamas officials.

Views like Butler’s, representative of a prevalent intellectual current in Western academia, reached their public zenith during a hearing in the U.S. Congress in December 2023. The presidents of America's leading universities—Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT—were questioned about antisemitism on campuses and the alarming calls for genocide and politicide emanating on campus. Harvard's president contended that such statements fall under “the university’s commitment to freedom of expression.” UPenn's president asserted that classifying these calls as bullying or violence “depends on their context.” MIT's president argued that genocidal calls violate university policy only if directed at individuals, not as general statements.

For nearly five hours, these academic leaders maneuvered, clumsily, around the explicit condemnation of calls for violence and genocide against the Jewish people. This moral paralysis was particularly glaring in comparison to their typically resolute stances on other moral issues in the sociopolitical sphere. It is impossible to imagine the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT spending hours justifying the legality of mass demonstrations on their campuses calling for the mass extermination of African Americans or gay and lesbian people. Apparently it was understood within leading Western academic institutions that Jews are considered oppressors even when they are being beheaded, raped, and burned alive.

Such responses engendered a profound sense of betrayal among Jewish academics worldwide. They also affected brilliant Jewish students worldwide who had comprised a significant percentage of these universities' student bodies and now found themselves compelled to confront the rising tide of antisemitism within their alma maters—even as they were increasingly being pushed to the institutional margins, and seeing their numbers steadily reduced in what appears to be a campaign of active discrimination against Jews as “white.” Disgusted by what they were seeing, numerous Jewish alumni ceased donations to these elite institutions and resigned from their governing boards.

These events triggered a profound identity crisis for many Jews who had integrated into diaspora societies, even at the highest levels. They experienced a jarring estrangement from their former associates, once viewed as exemplars of morality and integrity. This shift compelled them to reexamine their cosmopolitan identity and their social group affiliation, challenging long-held assumptions about their place in Western intellectual circles.

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Nor can Jews reasonably look to “international institutions” such as the press, international bodies, and courts, to repair the injustices they suffer in their home countries.

While Israelis are used to biased coverage, the comprehensive moral failure the international media has exhibited in its selective coverage and glaring omissions has been shocking. There are no more pretenses: the international media has overtly abandoned objective reporting and has failed to present Israel’s position fairly to the global public.

The United Nations is even worse. On Oct. 27, 2023, the U.N. General Assembly condemned Israel and called for an “immediate and sustained” humanitarian cease-fire and a “cessation of hostilities” by an overwhelming majority of 121 nations. This resolution conspicuously omitted Hamas' atrocities and disregarded the ongoing rocket barrage from Gaza into Israel concurrent with its issuance.

A fortnight after the attack, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres posited: “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation … Those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people … The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties … are deeply alarming.” This proclamation implicitly legitimized Hamas' atrocities while drawing a specious moral equivalence between the aggressors and Israel's defensive actions, which try to minimize civilian casualties.

Then there’s the ICJ and ICC: South Africa and other nations appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging genocide in the Gaza Strip—a charge with zero basis in reality.

Additionally, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has requested arrest warrants for Israeli and Palestinian leaders for war crimes, equating the leaders of a terrorist organization with those of a state defending itself against them. This equivalence is drawn while Israel strives to avoid harming innocent civilians with a success rate that exceeds that of any Western army in any urban war. Similarly, the prosecutor’s allegation that Israel carried out a policy of “starvation of civilians” is a demonstrable falsehood.

These accusations against Israel again received backing from most of the international community, which expressed confidence in the objectivity of the courts’ decisions.

One of the most striking revelations since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack is the systematic use of rape and sexual violence as a military strategy. This was confirmed by multiple sources including survivor testimonies, rescuer reports, Hamas videos, and captured terrorists.

The conspicuous silence of human rights and women's rights groups regarding these atrocities, juxtaposed with their focus on the situation in Gaza, has intensified among the Israeli public the sense of betrayal by the international community, which otherwise purports to be concerned with issues like violence against women.

On Oct. 13, UN Women issued a statement that read: “UN Women condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls.” This statement omitted any reference to the rapes or the abducted women. A week later, the organization published a second statement on “the devastating impact of the crisis in Gaza on women and girls,” again ignoring the crimes committed against Israeli women. The message—both to Israelis and the wider Jewish world, as well as to those who rejoice at the images of Israelis being murdered, raped, and traumatized—are entirely clear. Jews simply don’t count. Raping and murdering them is fine.

The sense of betrayal has been particularly painful for Israeli human rights activists who have worked closely with similar organizations worldwide. Professor Ruth Halperin-Kadari, head of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women's Status, who formerly served as vice chair of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), articulated this sentiment eloquently last November. She noted that when similar crimes against women and children were committed by ISIS against Yazidi women, or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bosnia, Rwanda, there was a standard response from the United Nations. “What we went through on October 7 ... the scale, the fact that it was part of a war plan, the extent of the atrocities—it's more egregious than ISIS. As a dedicated defender and fervent believer in international law and the UN's role in protecting human rights, I feel betrayed.”

In a saner world, one that adheres to previously accepted international norms, these international institutions would have ruled to arrest Hamas leaders, who, implementing their movement's charter which calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, began to carry out genocide for nearly half a day. They would have brought to justice Hamas terrorists who use civilians in Gaza as human shields and operate from hospitals, schools, U.N. shelters, mosques, and churches. Moreover, they would have condemned and ended all support to the movement's educators who have instilled generations with hatred for Israel. Instead, the terrorists were given employment at U.N. agencies and U.N.-run schools.

In the real world, Israel stands alone.

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The surge of antisemitism and the political alienation of the State of Israel, as reviewed above, have been a wake-up call to Israelis and Jews alike to return to the core principles of Zionism:

1. We must rely on independent Jewish defensive capabilities for our national security.

2. We cannot escape the Jewish association. Individual fate is inextricably linked with the broader Jewish nation.

The events of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war have vividly illustrated and revalidated the relevance of the Zionist idea, that the Jewish condition cannot rely on the world's goodwill in times of crisis. We cannot expect democratic nations to stand with the only democratic state in the Middle East. And we must recognize, now more than ever, the state's crucial role in Jewish life.

Despite the Oct. 7 attack and the unleashing of antisemitism, Israel has given the Jewish people the ability to fight back. Today, we are no longer helpless nor are we a people at the mercy of foreign rulers. We are fighting, and we are winning. This moment of our isolation as a nation and as a people is also one of the greatest moments of pride and strength in our history.

This is the essence of political Zionism, starkly revealed on Oct. 7: In the face of terror, the soldiers of the Jewish state regained their composure and fought back. Not since the days of Bar Kochba has there been such a potent Jewish response to existential threats.

For 12 months, Israel has resolutely repelled those who seek its destruction, writing a new chapter, distinct from the chronicles of Jewish persecution. With our own hands we have now destroyed the entire leadership of Hezbollah, the largest terrorist organization on the planet. The Iran-sponsored organization had, over four decades, murdered hundreds of Americans and kidnapped foreigners, violated the sovereignty of nations near and far by committing large-scale atrocities and setting off bombs, with very few repercussions. Meanwhile, the world stood by mute. Now, it is Hezbollah’s leaders who are mute.

Our adversaries make no distinction among Jews; the Oct. 7 atrocities transcended all sectors and was rooted in pure antisemitism. Recordings of the interrogations released by the Shin Bet revealed that the central motive of the attackers was that the victims were Jewish.

The perpetrators made no mention of their targets' sectoral affiliations—whether they were settlers or kibbutz members, religious or secular, conservatives or progressives. Non-Jewish individuals, too, were condemned to death, their fate sealed by the perception of their complicity with the Jewish populace. Echoing the ethos of Nazi Germany, our enemies view us as a monolithic entity destined for annihilation, whether justified through theological doctrine or pseudo-scientific racial theories or postcolonial academic-political gibberish.

The hope that becoming a “normal people,” as author A.B. Yehoshua posited, by integrating into global culture or adopting a cosmopolitan worldview, would lead to acceptance and support from the “enlightened world” has proved illusory. The historical lesson we must derive from Oct. 7 and the international community's subsequent response is that we must not be complacent, neither in the military sphere nor in the realm of consciousness, regarding the world's attitude toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel. If our enemies declare that in their heart, mind, and plans they aspire to annihilate us—we must not trivialize, mock, or doubt them. We must take their aspirations seriously, treat their words with the utmost gravity and believe them, and act accordingly.

In closing, we must confront the following questions: Is it conceivable that there is global animosity toward Israel without factual foundation? Is it plausible that the international community is erroneous, while our stance alone is righteous?

The question is entirely absurd, as can be seen from our own history. Is it plausible that slavery was righteous, and only the Jewish people had a law that required that slaves be set free? Is the Earth flat? Was the rest of the world right when they sacrificed their own children to idols? Do Jews in fact bake their Passover matzo with the blood of gentile children? No.

What the rest of the world does and wants can never be our yardstick. Otherwise, we’d all be dead. Jews need to trust in the lessons of our own history, and in each other. If we can do that, we will write a new and even more glorious chapter in the long history of our people.