October 7

Israel, with all its Flaws, isn't Making me a Zionist. Anti-Semitism Is.

This is one of those essays in that series that I dread writing. My heart hurts just contemplating my pouring out of these feelings onto the page.

It is October 7, 2025, two years after the horrific terrorist attacks on the Israeli music festival Nova, attended by innocent civilian young people, and on the kibbutzim (collective farms) across the Gazan/Israeli border from which whole families of innocent civilians were abducted, including babies and the elderly; or were shot where they were hiding.

Forty-eight Israeli hostages, some still living — about 20, it is estimated — and many now corpses, their deaths yet unknown to their waiting families, are to this day held in Gaza. We know some of the hostages were raped; we know others were starved, kept in tunnels, tortured.

As many now seem to have forgotten, prior to the 2023 attack, indeed two decades ago, in 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip.

In a highly controversial decision, the government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a “roadmap to peace”, withdrew 8000 Israeli settlers in 21 Jewish settlements from Gaza, thus forcing these Israelis, under the management and compulsion of the Israeli army, to leave their homes and buildings behind, and to relocate to Israel.

This withdrawal of Israelis was experienced by Palestinian Gazans, of course, as a “Day of Happiness”:

So in 2023, Gaza was, I remind the world, under the leadership of — Gazans.

It is still under the leadership of — Gazans.

“Free Palestine” does not make sense as a slogan in Gaza, or in the West Bank, because Gaza and the West Bank are under the leadership of — Palestinians. Palestine is led by Palestinians.

The elected leaders of Gaza are a terrorist group called Hamas. Many of these leaders do not live in Gaza and do not share its misery. Many Hamas leaders live safely in Qatar, Egypt and Turkey.

There have massive pain points, and what Gazans experience as severe injustices, over the decades since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza strip; in 2014, after Hamas abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, Israel bombed Gaza; Hamas sent 735 rockets into Israel, many of which were intercepted by the Iron Dome. Israel responded to this with more bombings; these displaced 500,000 people, most of them civilians.

It was in my protesting Israel’s attacks at that time on civilians, including the IDF’s bombing of hospitals, as well as in my protesting of Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians, that I met my husband; because the death threats I was receiving from both “sides” were so specific and so serious, that I had to hire him to protect me.

It seemed to me as a journalist trying to cover civilian suffering in Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank, in 2014, that everyone everywhere was just lying.

I would try to follow up on Middle East Eye’s pro-Palestinian reports of atrocities committed by Israel, and their stories would evaporate upon scrutiny. I would try to confirm IDF “Hasbarah” — “explanation” or propaganda/PR — claims, and those stories too would fall apart.

I knew that both “sides” maintained a massive propaganda effort, aimed at skewing events and influencing public opinion in the rest of the world.

Was Hamas indeed hiding behind a civilian population? Was it keeping its weaponry in tunnels and its fighters in schools and hospitals, thus using civilians as “human shields”, as Israel claimed? Impossible to confirm or to debunk. Was Israel in fact targeting hospital and schools, or was it responding to rocket attacks launched from hospitals and schools? Impossible to verify.

Palestinian journalists were definitely targeted by Israel; and Western journalists could scarcely cover Gaza.

I hosted, in my Greenwich Village apartment, a documentary screening for the film “The War Around Us.” This documentary was co-produced by reporters Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros, who were trapped in Gaza during the bombings. It had shocking eyewitness video from the bombardment. The film helped put Mohyeldin’s name on the global map — he is now an anchor at MSNBC — just as it helped to launch Sherine Tadros, who is now Deputy Director of Advocacy and UN Representative of Amnesty International.

So — bottom line — I tried.

I studied the Holy Koran and saw that indeed it was, properly interpreted, a religion of peace.

I covered my hair and went to NYU Jumaa (Friday) services to learn, and pray, and also to show a hand of friendship.

I was moved by the palpable spirit of Islam, one of the Abrahamic religions, that at its best, seeks to connect worshippers directly to God.

I did peace-oriented work like that — for a number of years.

I tried to bring light to the suffering of Palestinian civilians. I tried to hold Israel to account when she violated human rights law. I tried to do the same on behalf of Israeli civilians targeted, injured and killed by Muslim terrorists. I tried to call for all in the region, in the conflict, to observe international law, which categorically forbids the targeting of civilians.

I tried to fight evenhandedly for peace. I tried to give my platform especially to the many Palestinian thought leaders I met in the “diaspora” — their words — who stood courageously for building a peaceful civil society.

I met and was inspired by many Palestinians who articulated a longing for peaceful civil society in Israel and Palestine. These thought leaders engaged in sincere outreach to Jewish and Israeli counterparts, who wished also to engage with pro-peace Palestinians across the ethnic and religious divide. I met members of both communities eager somehow to find a way forward together.

When I was a young mom, I travelled to the West Bank, Eilat and Morocco, with my then-husband and our one-year-old baby girl.

I spent New Year’s Eve with my then-husband and our toddler in Ramallah, in a simple, pristine, cold-grey-stone-floored Christian nunnery, that gave shelter to guests. We went out to celebrate the turning of the year. We were seated with laughing, mixed-gender crowds, all in modern dress; all of us eating shawarma under bright multi-colored lights, our breath visible in the frosty air.

I could see, in the bustling Palestinian-run city, even with all the hardships it faced from Israeli military presences — in the thriving businesses and mosques and churches, and in the celebrating families exactly like ours — many possibilities for peace.

One day on that journey I travelled to visit my childhood friend Devorah, who had grown up after a secular Jewish upbringing in Jerusalem, to become an orthodox woman, to my surprise, as well as a settler, with her family, illegally living on the West Bank. Her orthodox Jewish settler husband described hating Palestinians generally, but ‘of course’ he liked a handful of Palestinian friends.

I had the weird experience, a few weeks later, of having the exact same conversation with a Muslim fundamentalist young man in Marrakesh, Morocco; he similarly proudly stated that he hated Jews in general but that he liked his few Jewish friends, and that we of course were fine.

Even more vertiginously, these two young men, who were quite ready murderously to hate one another, looked almost exactly alike; and they admired the same Western rock bands, and collected the exact same rock ‘n roll albums. Their favorite songs in the albums were the same.

The hatred and the humanity in these two young men were literal mirror images of one other.

While traveling in Morocco, I met civil society leaders; and I learned from our visits to their homes, that the modest and retiring roles for women in public often yielded in private to the same women being just as authoritative and as strongly opinionated as Western women can be.

Everywhere, even in the furthest reaches of Moroccan countryside, even in the remote, beautifully-named “Valley of Roses”, my little family experienced the warmest possible welcomes — from everyone; and everyone knew that we were Jewish.

The hospitality — and hospitality is a positive value in Islam — was unchecked and unequivocal.

You could imagine, then, possibilities for peace.

A decade later, when my then-partner who was a filmmaker was shooting a feature film in Amman, Jordan, I came back to the Middle East.

Through his and the director’s film crew, I met a few members of the Jordanian royal family, who were welcoming filmmakers to the region. One of these, Princess Rym Ali, whom I admired deeply from the moment I met her, is a former CNN and BBC anchor who married into the Jordanian royal family.

Princess Rym Ali co-founded the Jordan Media Institute, which trained young women and men; students from all over the Arab world came to Amman to learn, in a three-year master’s program, about the ethics of journalism, about solid reporting, and about, to whatever extent it could exist in less-than-fully-free nations, freedoms of speech.

This undertaking of hers was an incredibly exhilarating prospect to me. In education and in the uses of liberty, at that time, and in figures such as she and in other Muslim and Christian Arab civil society leaders whom I met, I saw hopes for peace in the region.

I met passionate Muslim feminists in Amman, as well; highly educated and accomplished women, including businesswomen. They explained to me why fully liberated Muslim women might choose to wear a headscarf. They opened my eyes to the massive movement in Muslim countries at that time, sparked by women leaders, toward a more egalitarian role in Arab societies, living within a reinterpreted Islam.

In such circumstances, one could imagine that with familiarity and good policy, peace could follow.

I learned that in virtually every Arab nation, a grassroots feminist movement was seeking to disrupt what these women called the medieval, tribal mores of Muslim fundamentalism, that sees women as second-class citizens. These women leaders made the case that these regressive, reductive views of women were not innate to Islam.

Among my friends at that time in New York was a filmmaker from Iraq, whose family deeply mourned the vibrant, highly cultured society that Muslim extremism had quenched in that nation; I also interviewed Iranian civil society leaders in exile, who mourned as well the rich, sophisticated, relaxed culture, with its accomplished professional women, of pre-Fundamentalist Iran.

In those years, the 20-teens, there were many such people.

I remember being at a panel for Jewish-Palestinian dialogue in New York, and hearing a Palestinian man who had grown up in Haifa, describe what it was like to realize, as a gifted teenager, that “there is nothing here for me.” He chose self-exile to the US.

I remember apologizing to him, the tears brimming in my eyes as I thought about how his biography exactly mirrored the experience of young Jews in various cities in Europe in centuries past:

“There is nothing here for me.”

What a loss his self-exile was for Israel — and for Palestine, I thought.

He spoke comfortingly to me — his life in America was productive and successful — and he returned the conversation to discussion of hope for the region, to collaborations between our peoples, for the future.

One can imagine possibilities for peace, in such rooms.

What struck me after many, many conversations with educated, idealistic, progressive Palestinian thought leaders, was how very similar the progressive Palestinian and the progressive Jewish/Israeli cultures were, in many ways.

How compatible these cultures could have been, if leaders and policies had taken a different turn in their parallel histories.

I would walk into rooms full of Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli thought leaders, and literally not be able to tell, before people opened their mouths, who was who, because we all looked like one family.

“We are cousins”, as Palestinian friends of my parents’, in Jerusalem’s Old City, used to say to them, back in the 1970s, when Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem could still have friendships across the ethnic and religious divide.

At least according to Genesis, this is indeed the case.

We are cousins.

Educated Palestinians’ culture is so much like educated Jewish/Israelis’ culture in so many ways: these groups are in both cases, generally speaking, made up of families who prize education more than anything; who are ferociously curious and eager to learn; families who center all on their children. With leadership in Palestine and Israel focused on building initiatives such as Princess Ali’s journalism program, or tech hubs, or other civil society partnerships that give everyone a stake in success - what could these two peoples not accomplish together?

I imagined often, during the 20-teens, what could be possible if Palestinian as well as Israeli leadership focused on building an intact civil society in the region: investing in businesses; building jointly run schools and universities; creating cross-national tech partnerships.

I also, as anyone should, understand the Palestinian longing to go home.

I spent two formative years as a child and as a young teen in Jerusalem, and I spent many summers there, also as a teenager. I was a schoolgirl there during the 1973 war.

As a 19-year-old Sophomore at Yale, I returned to the region on a Mellon fellowship; rather rashly, I spent time in the West Bank alone — and in Jerusalem alone — and I travelled to Southern Lebanon with the IDF, alone, wearing a bullet-proof vest, all to collect and study children’s art about war.

What I learned on that trip disturbed me deeply and was part of what led me to disconnect, finally, in recent years, from this painful conversation and this mutually destructive struggle.

What I learned was that all the Israeli children whose artwork I collected, made art about peace: doves, hands clasped, rainbows, peace symbols. That was what they were longing for, and what they were being taught.

And I learned that all the Palestinian kids’ art that I was permitted to collect —- without exception — was about continued violence: Israel was represented as a blood-dripping sword, butchering Palestinian families; the US appeared as a blood-dripping scimitar; bombs were exploding; terrorist martyrdom was celebrated; dynamite sticks were depicted in loving detail; IDF soldiers were portrayed as monsters to be dismembered; the Palestinian flag arose, triumphant, overcoming the submissive, bleeding map of Israel.

That was what these children were experiencing, perhaps, and also what they were being taught.

I was taken by a Palestinian guide to a refugee camp on the West Bank: and brought into a home.

I saw there the crushing poverty; I felt on my skin the hot, close room, in a home with no plumbing, no air conditioning, and with darkness invading every corner.

I felt the desperate thick hopelessness in the air; the sense, again, palpable, like a third dimension, of “no future”.

How could children not be radicalized in that condition? To what could they aspire; to what could they turn their energies and their hopes?

In such no-future-ness, such closeness, how could they fail to embrace that iconography of Israel as a bloody, dripping sword?

What else were they being offered?

I never wanted to write my report about that trip and its research. The conclusions were too stark.

In a generation, I knew, there would be no partners for peace; or almost none.

I was in such distress about what I had seen that I barely wanted to write a thank you note to the funder, which understandably greatly annoyed the Dean of the college that awarded me the research grant. (Sorry, Mellon Prize funders; sorry, Dean of Stiles College).

I have never written about this trip since.

That was forty-three years ago.

The kids who made that art, are now in their fifties. That generation of Palestinian children was not taught Hebrew, nor were their counterparts in Israel taught, for the most part, Arabic.

Almost no one, for that matter, in Israel or Palestine, is taught the others’ history in school, or even in museums, narrated from the others’ point of view.

The “other” is policed on both sides as being eternally “other”; you can’t talk to them; you can’t understand their rage.

There have been 43 years since, with virtually no secular cross-cultural outreach.

There have been 43 years with almost no cross-cultural soccer games, almost no cross- cultural photography exhibits or chess contests, almost no cross-cultural music or theatre events. The few artists or thinkers who cross those boundaries, risk a great deal.

The children of that generation are grown; their own children in their twenties.

These grown Palestinian children are the same age as the young adults who attended the Nova concert.

So now the children of the generation who colored in the scimitars, is the generation of young Palestinians that is celebrating the dead, broken, naked body of one of the Israeli women hostages, a body that was dumped in the back of a truck, surrounded by gleeful, armed, cheering men.

This is the generation that re-elected Hamas.

This is Na’ama Levy, who was kidnapped and abused:

There have been accusations by UN observers and other human rights advocates of tens of thousands of atrocities committed by the IDF, and of mass graves, in Gaza as well.

The Palestinian elders, in their fifties, are the generation of the leaders of Hamas — the ones that right now have the opportunity to end the violence in Gaza, and spare that appallingly abused population any further danger - -by simply releasing the remaining hostages, and by sitting down with the emissaries now in Egypt, to negotiate a lasting peace.

It is now Day Three of President Trump’s having issued them the invitation, to join in a 20 point plan for peace.

They have not yet released the hostages.

For the Israeli part — a generation has also grown up and grown old dehumanizing Palestinians.

I understand the origin of many Israelis’ of my generation’s, and of the next generation’s, aversion, and their fears as well. I am not justifying it. I am trying to shed light on it.

The most destructive thing the PLO, and then Hamas, could have done for peace in the region, was to support and celebrate suicide bombers murdering civilians in Israeli cities.

When we were growing up in Israel, we constantly feared the sight of a Palestinian civilian boarding a bus; entering a shop; browsing in the covered market.

Why?

Because that was how suicide bombers entered Jerusalem’s public environs, to commit their mass murders; it was how they entered public areas in other Israeli cities as well.

This repetition of Palestinian suicide bombers detonating their bombs on Israeli buses, or of Palestinian terrorists murdering Israeli teenagers who were on a school field trip — which happened in 1974, in Ma’alot, when I was a young teenager myself — only caused there to be even less one-to-one contact, even fewer approaches, and thus almost no friendships, let alone partnerships, between Israelis and Arab-Israelis, or between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ma’alot:

So two generations of Palestinians and Israelis have grown up othering the “others”, with almost no non-terrifying contact.

Many cynical leaders on both sides, not to mention the global defense industry, have profited from that estrangement.

#####

I also understand the longing on the part of Palestinians for home. It mirrors our own longing.

No one who has not lived in Israel — let alone in Jerusalem, the holy city - -can imagine the hold it has on the heart.

Part of why I can’t bear this discussion — why I avoided it, for the most part, since 2014 — is because everyone involved lies all the time.

But also because I can’t bear to face what I now miss.

What they miss.

I remember white honeysuckle spilling over the golden sandstone walls, weighting the air with its scent.

I remember how it felt to roam, alone or with my young teenage friends, over the then-unbuilt hills that dropped away from Rehov Tshernechovsky, the spine of the modern residential street where most of my friends lived. The built-up street with its pale golden apartment buildings set in their gardens, looked clear down in a glass-pure open vista to the Israel Museum, that rests in the Judaean hills. Its white curves, meant to simulate the sides of the jars where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, gleamed in the golden-bronze sunshine.

We could see all the way to Ein Kerem, the monastery. Everywhere we went, the heaven above us was like a turquoise inverted bowl.

There is something called “Jerusalem Syndrome” — in which the holy air of the holy city is so intoxicating that religiously-oriented tourists lose their minds. You feel Jerusalem touches the feet of God in heaven. It makes you a little euphoric all the time.

On the bare golden hills, then, in the early 1970s, in the spring, little cyclamens bowed their heads — “rakefet”, a word I loved. These were pale pink and pale purple, the color deepening always toward the lowered circle of the flower’s crown. There were also “narkis,” or narcissus, white and golden; and florid scarlet poppies with black powdery centers.

Vista after vista, in both the new city and in the older neighborhoods, and certainly in the Arab Old City, revealed, everywhere you looked, in ruins and mosques and plaques and half built walls, the fact that no one had ever “owned” Jerusalem for the ages.

Layer upon layer of waves of human habitation in “Palestine”, now Israel, showed their presences: Judaean and Israelite— the city of David, and then Solomon; then Assyrian and Babylonian, Persian and Greek; then Roman structures and foundations and ruins and then Byzantine Christian, then Muslim after the 7th century Islamic conquest, then Crusader Christian again — a different kind of Christian; then the Ottomans, who oversaw a multi-ethnic society — Muslim, Jewish and Christian; then the British.

Then modern Israel, with its newspaper headlines in a resurrected language resting on stalls, and with its streetlights reflecting red in rain puddles on concrete sidewalks.

In the older residential areas, such as Rehavia, where I had lived with my family when I had been younger, elderly survivors of the Holocaust, with tattoos on their arms still, laid out pastries remembered from Budapest and Berlin — “Berliner” jelly doughnuts for Hanukkah, and chocolate-rum spheres coated in chocolate sprinkles for every day, too rich for a little girl to manage to consume — in their bakery shop windows.

I saw the abandoned or sold or conquered Palestinian houses from the 1940s — so different from the Jewish apartment buildings, that were built functionally, square, with the recent memory of European Bauhaus.

I saw the Arab structures’ half-domed roofs, their grape trellises, their courtyards. I understood that the owners and the descendants of the owners of those houses, elsewhere, in exile, still have the rusted iron keys.

“If I forget you, O Jerusalem,” we say, from Psalm 137:5: “let my right hand forget her cunning.” The psalm was written when we were refugees; in Babylonian exile.

How can I not imagine the suffering of Palestinians who feel just as we do?

But; but.

That empathy alone cannot move us forward.

You have to understand that the civil society leaders of Palestine, and of the Arab world apart from Palestine, in whom I had such great hopes a decade ago — are not the leaders of the Palestinian community in Gaza and the West Bank, let alone in Qatar and Turkey, today.

They are not now the leaders of Iran or Iraq or Syria or Yemen.

Their own deeply feared enemies are the ill-educated, tribal Islamic fundamentalists.

The ill-educated tribal Islamic fundamentalists, for now anyway, have won.

These populations have been flooded, for the past decade, into Western Europe and North America - by design; as a globalist/Marxist strategy, to bring about the end of the progressive diverse open societies that my old Palestinian and Arab friends had championed.

This cynical deployment worldwide has ratcheted up its next stage of disruption.

There is two-tier policing and justice in the UK, with fundamentalist tribal Muslims, now being privileged over Britons.

There is a clear open policy encouraging the rape and abuse of women and children by tribal fundamentalist Muslims, in the UK and France and the Netherlands and Sweden. These assaults are encouraged via legal impunity and even legal justifications. “Cultural differences.” Even though rape is punishable by death in many of those Islamic fundamentalist societies.

There is more and more strategic public prayer and public demonstration by these fundamentalist groups — to intimidate members of the diverse, open civil society that my old friends loved.

The discourse of the “center” of “the global intifada” has dramatically also shifted.

In the 20-tens, thoughtful Israelis and Jews, and Palestinians, sought to bolster peace in a two-state solution.

Now the two-state solution — proposed as long ago as 1948 — has been completely abandoned, wholly erased from the talking points and hypnotic chants distributed in a massive, funded outreach effort to credulous and historically illiterate Western young people in America, the UK and beyond.

Now the center of the “globalized intifada” is a one-state solution, and that state is a fundamentalist Islamist “Palestine.”

“Free Palestine!” the throngs now chant, showcasing a map that has wiped out the State of Israel altogether.

How do you “free” a Palestinian-led region — say Gaza, or the West Bank, or East Jerusalem — from what is Palestinian control?

No one now asks that question.

“From the River to the Sea!” the frenzied crowds now chant. They are either geographically illiterate — which river? Which sea?

Or else they are chanting genocidally, as the three million Israelis living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, have been magically done away with.

To my absolute astonishment, October 7th this year was chosen around the world, to “honor our martyrs.”

The posters for these “protests” are all designed in the same hand. The graphics are all the same. The funding is no doubt from similar sources. (Qatar is sending many millions to fund anti-Israel curricula and protests on US university campuses, and China funds pro-Palestinian activism, as do Democratic funders George Soros, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Pritzkers).

But Western people — bit.

They accepted this grotesque sliding and wholesale reconstruction of the 2010s premise for “peace” and “freedom”.

And they gathered on October 7th 2025 to celebrate terrorists who committed atrocities.

So few on social media manage to mourn the innocent Gazans killed or displaced — AND to call for the release of the hostages. Indeed almost no one.

A grotesque surge of anti-Semitism erupted all at once as if from nowhere.

Tucker Carlson sent Jewish writer Alex Berenson a convoluted “apology” for his having virtually stated, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, that Kirk was assassinated by Jews. (The “Israel did it” theory of Kirk’s assassination swept the entire globe, especially among formerly sane people on the Right, uncritically and with no evidence.)

But Carlson’s “apology” ended with Carlson’s blaming our “narcissism” for others’ “hate” of us: “Hate and narcissism are twins.”

Two elderly Jews were murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist on Yom Kippur outside a synagogue, in Manchester UK.

New York City mayoral candidate, Muslim Ugandan-American Zohran Mamdani, issues a statement on October 7, 2025 — blaming Israel and the US for genocide in Gaza.

A woman cut down the yellow ribbons that had been put up in Londoners in Muswell Hill to commemorate the Israeli hostages that are still in Gaza.

The mores of tribal fundamentalist Islam suddenly emerged all at once, as if at a signal, throughout the West.

My progressive Muslim friends’ 2010s vision of interfaith civil society and the seeking of peace, can scarcely stand in the face of it.

An imam calls on worshippers to “destroy Jewish homes”; In Houston, “Sharia patrols” attack stores for selling alcohol and pork; fundamentalists call for Sharia compounds in Texas, leading Texas Governor Abbot to ban such compounds.

Sharia law can mean the demotion of women to second class citizens — women must obey their husbands “in a reasonable manner” and they must secure the permission of their male guardians to marry, divorce or get custody of their children.

In Brunei, the government backed down from Sharia law’s call to stone homosexuals to death, but maintained the guidance within Sharia law to amputate limbs from homosexuals, and to whip them as punishments for homosexual sex.

British PM Keir Starmer moved to block a bill banning cousin marriage, which is accepted in fundamentalist tribal Islamic curcles, but is forbidden as incest in Jewish and Christian systems.

As I mourn on social media for Gazan civilians and Israeli civilians who were killed since 2023, and I call for the release of the Israeli hostages, very few people join me to call for peace and justice on both sides.

I feel profoundly demoralized by this silence.

Very few people — on the Palestinian side — still call for a two-state solution.

My friends, the civilized Palestinian thought leaders of the 2010s, have not won.

Their enemies have won.

Hamas kills suspected “collaborators”; people like my friends who sought for peace across the Israel/Palestine divide; my friends from the 2010s.

Dare they even speak any longer?

I do not know if there are “partners for peace” any longer on the Hamas side of the equation.

How can we know? Supporters of peace can’t speak without risking their lives.

Again I get death threats.

I am called a “deep state” operative falsely on Substack, by an otherwise reasonable writer.

Ordinarily I would shrug this off. But now, in a world drenched in crazy, murderous anti-Semitism, such lies put me directly into physical danger.

This baseless claim morphs into an atmosphere supportive of the views of a crazy lady in Canada, who now issues serious death threats against me. She is going to come to New York to “stop” me. I am a “deep state whore”, she posts, and a “Mossad” agent.

Turns out she has a long police file in Canada, dating back years, for serious harassment of others. I am advised to file a police report and to beef up my personal security.

The world gets smaller.

I have to take more care of where I go. I stop accepting public speaking invitations.

I start to see that the frenzied hordes who are binding their faces and shouting “Globalize the intifada!” do not seem to care about the massacre of Christians and Alawites in Syria, or the fact that women in Saudi Arabia need male guardians to make decisions on their behalf, or that Saudi Arabia comes in 126th out of 143 nations for its abusive treatment of women.

They don’t seem to care that Egyptian police and others hunt gay people on dating apps. “Naked, terrified, forced to dance at knifepoint” — criminal gangs as well as law enforcement stalk gay people in Egypt and extort or torture them.

Afghanistan, Egypt, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE — all criminalize same-sex contact.

In Qatar:

“Death for any sexual act by a married person outside of marriage

Flogging for sexual acts by non-married persons”

In Saudi Arabia, sodomy is punished thus: “Married men: death by stoning

Unmarried men: 100 blows of the whip and banishment for a year”.

In Gaza — the punishment for gay sex is ten years in prison.

So — cool! Globalize the Intifada!

The masked Western crowds chanting, just do not care.

I once spoke at Concordia University. It was peaceful, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, full of charming friendly people, and the campus was sane.

Pro-Palestine student protesters were invited into Concordia University classrooms, in Montreal.

Then a student was arrested with a metal bar and “several incendiary devices”.

Then the school shut down to “protect the community”.

Globalize the intifada!

This is what it means.

What did you think it meant?

#####

Israel is flawed indeed.

I will continue to push for that nation to observe human rights law and to seek peace.

But all of Israel’s enemies surrounding the country, also need to observe international human rights law and seek peace.

It is not Israel, with its flaws, that led me to conclude at last that it is okay to want a Jewish homeland.

It is not Israel, with its flaws, that led me to notice that the whole world is turning against a single religion — almost metaphysically — yet again.

It is not Israel, with its flaws, that led me to conclude that it is okay for people who are Jews in Israel to love Israel, just as it is okay for people in the West Bank and Gaza to love Palestine, or Lebanese to love Lebanon, or Jordanians, Jordan.

It is not Israel, with its flaws, that led me to wonder if there are any “partners for peace” left on the other side, to pursue a just, lawful two-state solution.

What led me to accept — sadly, somberly — at last, the need for a secure and safe —and, ideally, peace-seeking and law-abiding — Jewish state,

Is not Israel

With all of her flaws;

But rather

It is

The extraordinary orgy

Of pure hatred of my kind,

Exploding almost metaphysically

In all the rest of the world.