WHEN DOES THIS END? HERE’S WHEN.

“PEACE ACTIVISTS” BLAME ISRAEL FOR WAR. THEY SHOULD BLAME THEMSELVES.

The fingers say peace. The actions say Death to the Jews.

Shortly after the October 7 terror attacks, when Israel began its inevitable military response to the atrocities, a family member posted on my Facebook, “One side attacks, the other retaliates and when does it all end?”

More recently, one of my oldest friends pm’d to tell me that, while he’s always supported Israel, what we’re seeing in Gaza now is “overkill” and the October 7 attacks were a trap by Hamas to egg Israel into attacking — “and Netanyahu fell right into the trap.”

These are just two personal experiences within a prevailing narrative in the global discussion around Israel and Palestine. Put succinctly, the point is that when someone comes along and kills Jewish families in their beds, beheads them, immolates them alive, rapes them and kidnaps them, the Jews should take it like the nice Jews we know from history. (I summarize.)

The most infuriating part of this is that these are the voices of peace and coexistence. Oh, why do the Jews have to fight back?! If they would just lay down and die, we could all just move on to the peace part. Things were so much simpler when they went like sheep to slaughter.

This, of course, is why people hate Israel so much. A lot of Zionists argue that anti-Zionism is nothing more than antisemitism redirected from Jewish people to the Jewish state. Of course that’s part of it. But perhaps a bigger part of it is that Israel represents a truly revolutionary historical shift. It is the transition of the Jews from a stateless people incapable of collective defense to a nation that, having learned from history, has built up one of the world’s foremost defense capacities because others simply won’t stop coming for them.

The larger point is the subtext — which is that all of this death and destruction is not because the terrorists started this conflict, but because Israel responded. If the Jews would just take what they had coming, this wouldn’t have had to explode into a mass casualty event in Gaza. Violence begets violence. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, they like to say. (How pithy! What insight!)

It all comes back to this: In the Western imagination (we’ll leave Islam aside here), Jews have played the role of scapegoats. No matter how advanced or woke we become, we do not just discard millennia of civilizational DNA. It is precisely those who self-aggrandizingly assume they have cast off the yoke of primordial prejudices who are almost certainly most guilty of exhibiting them. Those who recognize we carry them can address them. Denial is the enemy of progress.

Humans are storytelling peoples. (Jews, arguably, are among the foremost cultural progenitors and perpetuators of this truth.) Our lives, societies and civilizations depend on the continuity of these stories. And Jews (or, more specifically: our reactions to them) are a thread that runs through Western civilization like a sad, bloody and shameful tragedy. In the Western narrative, Jews are the prototypical scapegoat. Need proof? Every Sunday, just down the street from you, your neighbors gather before an image of a scapegoated Jew, dump their sins on him, eat his body, drink his blood and then get back to their weekend busy-ness.

Again, a shitton of people say, Well, we don’t believe in that hocus-pocus anymore. And here I respond: these are precisely the people who do not understand how those ancient rituals they consciously reject have seeped into their unconscious and distorted in the creepiest of ways.

Israel subverts the Western uber-narrative. Zionism is the revolutionary idea that Jews won’t take the world’s shit anymore. (Again, I summarize.) That drives plenty of people absolutely batshit.

We demand that people play the roles we assign to them. Without getting too far into the weeds, this foundational truth is why feminism has been so disruptive, why the civil rights movement affronted so many complacent white people, and why transgender rights, which affect no one but the individuals directly affected, have inexplicably become one of our top political issues.

Western civilization’s narratives around gender, race and other such topics are foundational to our self-understanding. Movements like those for gender and racial equality are so disruptive because they shake the very foundations of an ancient, cherished narrative.

Our civilizational narrative about the role of Jews is arguably as strong — maybe stronger — than these other disrupted narratives. We’ve adapted — most of us, anyway — to new understandings of the roles of women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color. Yet something about the disruption that Zionism has created to our narrative about Jews is insurmountable.

There are a whole bunch of reasons for this. I might address them specifically in future. But, in short, it is because Jews and antisemitism are more than just one thing in the Western narrative. They are everything. Feminism disrupted our gender dynamic and that is no small thing, for sure. Gay rights disrupted that dynamic indifferent, profound ways. Antiracist movements upended centuries of injustice but, again, left most of the other assumptions we carry unaffected. Zionism — the Jewish assertion that they were done taking our shit — upended everything.

Why?

Because Jews, in the Western imagination, have always been the empty vessel upon which we poured everything. Guilt, jealousy, rage. Whatever emotion we were feeling and for whatever reason — our own shortcomings, business failure, social change, economic upheaval, natural disasters, everything — our civilization always blamed the Jews.

And they always took it. (I’m talking about the Western narrative, BTW. In truth, Jewish history is filled with heroic resistance. But that’s Jewish history and non-Jews know little to nothing about that.) Non-Jewish history has always viewed Jews as the stoic recipients of our hostility. And like the outrage that an abuser or a bully exhibits when their victim finally retaliates, the global indignation when Jews defend themselves is an almost primal, ferocious rage.

People with the intellect to know what arguments will or won’t wash — that is, those who know better than to express verbally whatever their animalistic subconscious tells them — translate this thus …

They can’t literally say, “Why won’t the Jews just allow themselves to be slaughtered like they did in the good old days?” because even they know that sounds callous. So they wrap themselves in a peace flag and declare, “Attack. Retaliate. When will it ever end?”

Here’s when.

It ends when people stop killing Jews for the crime of being Jews.

It ends when “peace activists” worldwide condemn the perpetrators and not the victims.

It ends when Palestinian leaders and the broader Arab world agree to live in coexistence and give up their determination to annihilate the Jews.

It ends when “activists” around the world stop rewarding rape, immolations, kidnappings and mass murder by making the oxymoronic, suicidal case that, if Jews would just allow themselves to be murdered, the killing would end.

However, as I will write soon … I’m done trying to convince people of these realities. Why would I spend time arguing with people who don’t care whether Jews live or die?

Ultimately, this is why I am a Zionist. Because I don’t care what these people think. This is why I, who at one point in my life considered myself a pacifist, now view an armed-to-the-teeth Israel as an existential necessity.

Because there are people like these in the world. People who think Jews should let themselves be raped, immolated, beheaded, kidnapped and mass murdered because to fight back is to perpetuate violence and war.

People like these form a majority at the UN. They march by the millions on streets around the world. They pm me when I’m trying to get my Christmas baking done.

When will all this violence end? When people like these realize that Jews have a right to live and to defend themselves against those (like them) who think otherwise.