‘Ceasefire Now!’ Was a Lie All Along

On November 19, some 200 masked and keffiyeh-clad protesters gathered outside Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue to chant, “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” and “Resistance, you make us proud. Take another settler out.” Some shouted anti-Jewish slurs at people attempting to enter the house of worship, while one demonstrator repeatedly yelled, “We need to make them scared!”
The open calls for violence rattled Jewish communities across one of the world’s most Jewish cities. But perhaps equally concerning was the response from New York City’s own mayor-elect. In a statement provided to several news outlets, a spokeswoman for Zohran Mamdani, a vocal anti-Zionist, said that he “has discouraged the language” used at the protest before offering a soft defense of its participants: “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
What violation of international law, you ask? The night of the demonstrations, the synagogue was hosting an informational event held by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel, but, contrary to the protest organizers’ claims, does not sell “stolen land” in violation of international law. Mamdani’s deference to those demonstrators sent a clear message to Jewish New Yorkers: You’re welcome here, provided that you don’t support the state of Israel.
That’s a tough standard. Eight in 10 Jewish Americans say that caring about Israel is an “essential or important” part of their identity. Nearly half of the world’s Jewry lives in Israel. Virtually all religiously observant Jews pray in the direction of Jerusalem. But Mamdani’s attempt to whitewash antisemitic harassment on the basis of alleged international law violations also has roots in a familiar historical pattern on both left and right: We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their Marxist ideology. We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their support for the capitalist West. We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their embodiment of the progressive agenda. We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their lone state.
In many ways, Israel has emerged from two years of war stronger than before. Yet internationally, October 7 and the war that followed unleashed a wave of antisemitism unmatched in most of our lifetimes, with the Anti-Defamation League recording a 140 percent spike in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023. The figures speak for themselves, but so too do high-profile acts of violence against Jews and Israelis, including the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, the murders of two employees of the Israeli Embassy outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the deadly firebombing of demonstrators marching on behalf of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
That resurgent antisemitism coincided with the longest war in Israel’s history is no mistake. Nor is it simply a reflection of outrage at the prosecution of that war. A shaky, U.S.-brokered truce has held since early October, yet efforts to delegitimize Israel and its inhabitants continue, exposing much of the “ceasefire now” movement for what it is—a thinly-veiled call for the destruction of the Jewish state. This phenomenon masquerades on the left as peace-minded advocacy and on the right as “just asking questions,” but both iterations are part of a decades-long conspiracy theory: the idea that peace will elude the Middle East as long as the Jewish people govern themselves, itself an offshoot of a much older, equally sinister tradition. As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur often notes, antisemitism isn’t merely anti-Jewish bigotry—it’s the notion that the Jews are what stands between your society and redemption.
The surge of anti-Jewish hostility is particularly concerning in light of what sparked it: meticulously planned pogroms in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the abduction of hundreds of innocents. The hostages were condemned to terrorist captivity, where they endured physical and psychological torture for the crime of being born Israeli. Each of their stories has left an enduring wound on the nation’s psyche, just as their captors knew they would. Hamas broadcast its crimes during the initial attack and continued to do so throughout the war, releasing hostage videos in a concerted effort to break the spirit of the Israeli people.
In Judaism, preserving human life is a principle held above all others. This idea, known as pikuach nefesh, is as lived as it is theoretical in Israel. The nation that once supported the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners to free one Israeli soldier (perhaps misguidedly, as hindsight shows) embodies this ideal of individual sacrifice for the collective in smaller ways each day. During my two years in the country, I saw this ethos in the outpouring of volunteerism in support of the more than 200,000 residents of Northern and Southern Israel displaced from their homes over the course of the war, as well as in the readiness of hundreds of thousands of protesters to drop everything each Saturday night to demand that the government prioritize securing the hostages’ release.
So, when a deal to bring home the abductees was announced, the outpouring of joy on the streets of Israel that followed came as no surprise to me. What did was the muted response from the most outspoken critics of Israel, who for the first time were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: Most Israelis meant it when they said the war was about bringing their people home. The posters of hostages adorning benches and buildings across the country were not moral cover, but rather an urgent reminder of those in peril. Hundreds of soldiers gave their lives for that cause, not for the far-right vision of annexation and ethnic cleansing so often treated as representative of the broader Israeli public.
And they did so on one of the most challenging battlefields of the 21st century. For more than a decade, Hamas devoted its resources to building an elaborate underground network beneath Gaza in preparation for just such a war. The dense urbanity of the Strip, sprawled atop layered networks of tunnels and subterranean bunkers, protected terrorist operatives while leaving Gazan civilians exposed. Unable to beat its opponent in a conventional war, Hamas relied on a strategy of maximizing international pressure to weaken and isolate Israel.
The result was a deadly and destructive war. Each and every innocent death over the last two years is a tragedy deserving of the name. Yet very rarely has blame for those tragedies fallen on their main orchestrator: Hamas. Nor has the world’s outrage over the scale of human suffering in Gaza been extended to devastating conflicts elsewhere, such as in Sudan, where a campaign of ethnically motivated violence has left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead since April 2023.
While Hamas’ strategy of generating international pressure on Israel partially worked, culminating in arms embargoes and the decision by several U.S. allies to recognize a Palestinian state, it also served to prolong the war. With each surge of anti-Israel protests in capitals and on college campuses across the West, Hamas negotiators grew more intransigent in their demands for any eventual ceasefire. Only regional and U.S. pressure, together with a looming Israeli siege of Gaza City, finally forced the group to come to the table in a meaningful way.
But even though the war has ceased, anti-Israel sentiment has not. “This is not the world of the Zionist, this is not the world of Netanyahu, this is not the world of Trump, this is not the world of the Western Empire. October 7 told us this is our world, it is the people’s world,” a speaker at a Seattle rally proclaimed on the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack, amid reports of the forthcoming truce. “We can’t ever, until liberation, adopt an attitude of defeat and hopelessness.” The anti-Israel advocacy group Samidoun, despite hailing the ceasefire as a victory for the “resistance,” insisted that the fight for liberation is not over: “This is our moment to escalate, and to make clear, that we will become a strong bulwark of support for the Resistance as it continues the struggle, as we stand for nothing less than … the complete international isolation and dismantling of Zionism and the Zionist entity.”
Have the “ceasefire now!” champions abandoned their guiding slogan? Or do many of these purported human rights activists share Hamas’ belief that the armed struggle is not over until Israel ceases to exist—from the river to the sea?
The latter theory grows more convincing by the day, but the writing has been on the wall since October 7.
The growing international popularity of this eliminationist goal should’ve been evident in the outbreak of anti-Israel protests in cities across the West after October 7, featuring chants of “gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House before the besieged southern kibbutzim had even finished collecting their dead.
And it should’ve been evident in the rapid rise of Holocaust inversion and an accompanying upsurge in Holocaust denial. The two phenomena are incompatible: The former claims that the Jews are doing to the Palestinians what was done to them, while the latter posits that the Shoah was either exaggerated or wholly fabricated. But their simultaneous prevalence demonstrates the lack of a coherent logic guiding the anti-Israel movement.
Today, it’s now mainstream to identify as an anti-Zionist, particularly among young people. In a Harvard Harris poll conducted in August, 60 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 said they supported Hamas over Israel in the war. In other words, the majority of Gen Z Americans have sided with a terrorist group that espouses an explicitly genocidal ideology—and acts on it. Indeed, in its 1988 founding charter, Hamas said judgment day will not come until Muslims “fight the Jews and kill them.”
Opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition isn’t antisemitism, nor should it be treated as such. But it’s well past time to confront anti-Zionism for what it is—not measured political criticism, but a call for the annihilation of the country that represents a sanctuary to the world’s most persecuted religious minority. The rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment has spillover effects for Jews in diaspora not because the war in Gaza inspires antisemitism, but because anti-Zionism is often antisemitism’s more immediately palatable outgrowth. And its biggest purveyors on the American far left and far right have found a convenient opportunity to plunge into the mainstream, buoyed by an array of malicious state actors.
In October, left-wing journalist Mehdi Hasan, an outspoken critic of Israel, noted his surprise at finding himself in agreement with Candace Owens, perhaps the right’s most outspoken peddler of antisemitic conspiracy theories (among them, her description of Judaism as a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons … [and] child sacrifice”). Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his online talk show to discuss the threats posed by “these Zionist Jews” (prompting Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to come to Carlson’s defense against the so-called “venomous coalition” daring to criticize Carlson’s softball interview with an open Hitlerite).
The growing legitimacy of figures like Owens and Fuentes has consequences for Jews in diaspora and in Israel. Jewish communities in Western countries long considered “safe” are now confronting ever more threats of violence. And Israel, which relies heavily on the U.S. for diplomatic and military support, must reckon with the likely possibility that future American leaders—driven by souring public opinion toward Jerusalem—will be less inclined than Donald Trump and Joe Biden to stand by its side through another long war.
In a recent sketch by Eretz Nehederet, a satirical Israeli comedy show, an American woman and an Israeli man meet by chance at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport. Suitcases in hand, they both appear to be fleeing somewhere: “You know us Jews, if history has taught us anything, it’s knowing when it’s time to leave,” the American remarks. The Israeli agrees, before realizing that his acquaintance is not leaving Israel but arriving there from New York—his destination. “Wait a second,” he says, “you’re telling me you’re coming to Israel? Now? Are you crazy?” They part ways, each muttering about the absurdity of the other’s decision.
To many people, the war and its international reverberations underscored the necessity of a Jewish state. To others, they underscored Israel’s unique vulnerability. May it continue to thrive despite the rearing of history’s oldest hatred.