Emergency personnel work at the site of an Iranian strike, after Iran launched missile barrages following attacks by the US and Israel on Saturday, in Beit Shemesh, Israel, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
There’s a line people love to quote — usually attributed to Mark Twain — that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” It’s clever, memorable — and almost certainly not something Twain ever said.
The now-famous “rhyming” version seems to have emerged in a 1965 essay by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who suggested that while events don’t replay exactly, they follow very familiar patterns with subtle variations. However you phrase it, the idea lingers — because every so often, the present arranges itself in ways that feel so familiar, it’s as if we’re watching history echo in real time.
And right now, that echo is getting harder and harder to ignore. If you’ve been paying even passing attention to the news, you’ll have noticed something unsettling — not just isolated incidents, but a pattern.
Israel is now under daily missile attack from Iran, a regime that has made no secret of its ambitions. Its goal is explicit: to obliterate Israel — and with it, the millions of Jews who live there. The threats are now being matched with action — direct, sustained, and deadly.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in places that pride themselves on liberal tolerance, something darker is stirring. Antisemitic attacks are rising at a pace not seen in generations. This week in London, three men were caught on camera torching ambulances belonging to Hatzolah, a volunteer emergency organization whose sole purpose is to save lives.
The attackers didn’t care. A shadowy group claiming responsibility didn’t just justify the act — it promised more. “This is only the beginning,” the assailants warned.
And in Los Angeles — a city synonymous with diversity — a lawsuit filed by Madison Atiabi tells an almost unbelievable story. According to court documents, Puka Nacua, who plays for the Los Angeles Rams, allegedly launched into an unprovoked antisemitic outburst on New Year’s Eve.
The lawsuit goes on to allege that later, Nacua physically assaulted her, biting her shoulder with such force that it left a visible imprint. Nacua seems to have form. In December, he apologized after performing a gesture that plays upon antisemitic tropes on a live stream.
Different continents. Different contexts. But it’s the same hatred. And with it comes a powerful sense that we’ve been here before. Not exactly like this — history never replays with perfect symmetry — but the echo is unmistakable. Which brings us to Passover — and to the Haggadah.
Every year at the Seder, we say the familiar words: בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם — “In every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.” We are not being asked to remember. We are being asked to see ourselves as having left Egypt — a seemingly impossible task, given that the Exodus took place over 33 centuries ago.
The answer is that the Exodus was never intended to be a one-off event. It was meant to become a template — a lens through which we interpret history as it unfolds in real time.
Read the Exodus story carefully, and you’ll notice something unsettling: Things get worse before they got better. When Moses first appears, demanding the Israelites’ release, Pharaoh doesn’t just refuse — he escalates.
As conditions deteriorate, the people turn on Moses in frustration: “May God judge you … You have made us loathsome in the eyes of Pharaoh, placing a sword in their hand to kill us.”
And then comes one of the rawest moments in the entire Torah. Moses turns to God and says: “Why have You done evil to this people? Why did You send me?” He had come as the redeemer — and instead, everything had spiraled downward.
If you had been there, watching hope collapse into despair, you would have said — quite reasonably — this isn’t redemption; it’s a disaster. And yet, we know how the story unfolds. What looked like deterioration was in fact the prelude to transformation — the pitch darkness before the first crack of dawn.
Suddenly, the words of the Haggadah don’t feel abstract anymore. They feel current. We are living through a moment when things seem to be getting worse before they get better. Iran, like Pharaoh, is digging in. Even as pressure mounts, there is no sign of retreat — only defiance, and doubling down on aggression.
Beyond the geopolitical arena, there is the resurgence of antisemitism — less a series of isolated incidents and more a gathering wave. It is deeply unsettling for those of us living through it. But that is precisely the point.
The Haggadah does not ask us to relive the Exodus at its triumphant conclusion; it asks us to place ourselves inside the process — to feel the uncertainty, the fear; to stand where Moses stood and ask, “Why is this getting worse?” And then to hold our nerve. Because embedded within the Exodus story is a radical idea: that chaos and distress can be the precursor to the moment when everything finally comes together.
The night is always darkest before dawn — not as a cliché, but as a description of how redemption actually works.
And when it happens, it doesn’t unfold gradually. It happens, as the Torah describes it, כַּחֲצֹת הַלַּיְלָה, at the stroke of midnight, in an instant. One moment, Egypt is the most powerful empire on earth; the next, it is shattered. One moment, the Jewish people are slaves; the next, they are walking out toward freedom. It is a pivot — a complete reversal of reality.
Which means that if we are living through a chapter of that same unfolding story, we may be closer to the turning point than we think. The signs are there: a world order that feels increasingly unstable; an enemy under mounting pressure that still refuses to yield; a surge of hostility that defies reason. But all that will be over in a moment, as the divine will changes it in one stroke.
And so, this year, when we sit at the Seder and say, “In every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt,” we don’t need to stretch our imagination quite so far. For the first time in a long time, it doesn’t feel like ancient history — it feels immediate.
And one day — soon, and all at once — the shift will come. And when it does, those who held their nerve, who stared into the darkness and still believed in the dawn, will simply nod and say: of course. The Exodus never really ended. It has been unfolding all along — until we finally learn to recognize it while we are still inside the story.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
McGill University’s law school in Montreal, Canada lost the chair of its advisory board on Sunday, when he resigned from the position over what he described in a letter notifying the administration of his decision as an “escalating pattern of hostility toward Jewish students, faculty, and alumni.”
The immediate cause, wrote Jonathan Amiel, was the Law Students Association’s passing an academic boycott of Israel through a student referendum held on Saturday. If adopted as university policy, the measure would shutter partnerships with Israeli institutions, bar individual Israelis or known Zionists from holding teaching positions, and allow professors to refuse writing letters of recommendation for students applying to study abroad in Israel.
A majority, 57 percent, of students who participated in the referendum voted to approve it, with 67 percent of the student body casting ballots, indicating high turnout. It accused Israel of being an “apartheid” state and of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, despite that the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics reports that the Palestinian population has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
While a Jewish student is challenging the vote in court, as reported by the Montreal Gazette, its approval by the student body has, according to activists, left an impression on the Jewish community there while achieving a reverberant political victory for the student anti-Zionist movement.
“We are deeply concerned by the ongoing developments within student governance at McGill University Faculty of Law,” the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Canadian Jewish advocacy group, said in a statement.
According to Amiel, last week’s endorsement of a boycott of the world’s lone Jewish state was part of a broader, troubling trend.
“The referendum is not an isolated event,” Amiel wrote in his resignation letter, which he since made available for public viewing. “An institution once defined by intellectual rigor and principled debate has, in too many instances, become an environment where being Jewish, identifying as a Zionist, or maintaining any association with the State of Israel carries professional and personal risk.”
He added, “This includes the normalization and, at times, glorification, of events marking acts of mass violence, the obstruction of students’ access to classrooms and university facilities, and the use of academic platforms to legitimize or advance extremist ideologies.”
Amiel also charged that the institution failed to discipline “conduct involving harassment or intimidation.”
McGill University was one of hundreds of schools where anti-Zionists organized to celebrate Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which the terrorist group’s fighters slaughtered, kidnapped, and raped Israeli civilians during their invasion of the Jewish state.
Their activities culminated in an anti-Israel encampment which spanned across four months and did not disband until long after the end of the 2023-2024 academic year. While McGill officials took steps to limit the freedom of action of the group which staged the demonstration, such as bringing the issue before a court and denouncing the “obvious antisemitism” of its members, Amiel’s letter suggests that the university has not done nearly enough to combat anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination on campus.
“The defining feature of this period has been an absence of decisive leadership at moments when clarity and resolve were required,” Amiel continued. “In that absence, direction has effectively been ceded to actors whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with the university’s core academic mission.”
McGill University has denounced the outcome of the referendum, with president Deep Saini saying, “The effects here are antisemitic, and that plain fact must guide McGill’s response.”
Amiel’s resignation comes amid an ongoing crisis of pervasive antisemitism on campuses across the Western world.
Earlier this month, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) released survey results showing that Jewish campus life in Great Britain is rapidly deteriorating. The group found that 47 percent of Jewish students report having heard their classmates justify the Oct. 7 massacre in which Hamas slaughtered civilians and committed mass rape; 23 percent have witnessed Jewish students persecuted over their identity; as many as 36 percent have either lost friends in this new milieu or know someone who has; and a shocking 40 percent report “having changed their journey through campus” to avoid anti-Zionist protests occurring every week at some universities.
Some of the report’s most concerning findings focused on anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by non-Jewish students. Twenty percent said they prefer not be roommates with a Jewish person, while a quarter of students surveyed believe that arguing that “Zionists control the media/government” does not constitute antisemitism. Responding to a separate question, 16 percent expressed approval of saying outright that “Jews control the media/government.”
“This report demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is not isolated but normalized,” Union of Jewish Students president Louis Danker said in a statement. “No Jewish student should have to face social ostracism, abusive language, or physical violence — there is a right to protest but not harass. If we are serious about combating extremism in Britain, we have to start on campus, where half of students have seen glorification of Hamas or Hezbollah. Concerned sentiments and piecemeal progress are not enough.”
The issue is no less severe in the US.
In February, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International reported that a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus. Of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. Meanwhile, 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
According to the data, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
“No Jewish student should have to hide their identity out of fear of antisemitism, yet that’s the reality for too many students today,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement released with the survey results. “Our work on the ground every day is focused on changing that reality by creating environments where all Jewish students can find welcoming communities and can fully and proudly express their Jewish identities without fear or concern.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Eden Golan, Israel’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest, reacts during a press conference following the official unveiling of Israel’s song submission, in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
Eden Golan, who represented Israel in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, talked in a new interview about still experiencing anxiety, fear, and nightmares of threats against her life two years after the competition ended.
“I’m always afraid. I look in every direction like a security guard,” the 22-year-old Israeli singer said in an interview published on Friday in the “7 Nights” supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth. “I’ve had recurring anxiety since Eurovision: I walk into a place, a restaurant, or a show, and someone shoots me from behind. I have recurring nightmares of people chasing me and killing me. But I’m learning to live with it. No one will silence me anymore.”
Golan told Yedioth Ahronoth that she also still faces antisemitism almost everywhere she goes.
“Quite a few of my performances abroad had protests,” she explained. “In Switzerland they threw red paint at the entrance to the venue, supposedly to say the blood is on our hands. There was one protest with signs against [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi [Netanyahu] and against me. After all the threats I received, there’s definitely fear for my life, but what could be worse than what I went through at Eurovision?”
Golan participated in the 2024 Eurovision in Malmo, Sweden, with the song “Hurricane” and finished in fifth place. The song was originally titled “October Rain,” but the name and its original lyrics were disqualified by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the Eurovision competition, for being too political since it referenced the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel.
Golan made it to the top five of the competition even after being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Golan has also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo during the Eurovision contest because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists, who were angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the international competition. At the time, the deputy director general of the EBU condemned the harassment that participating singers had experienced.
Noam Bettan is Israel’s representative in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, which will take place in Vienna, Austria, in May. He is competing with a trilingual song titled “Michelle.”
A map showing the Strait of Hormuz is seen in this illustration taken June 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
In the war between Iran and the joint force of the US and Israel, the Islamic Republic’s strongest tactic is to obstruct shipping in its coastal Strait of Hormuz.
The regime has strangled the world’s supply of oil and natural gas by attacking several commercial vessels as they transited the Persian Gulf channel. Some of Iran’s naval weapons have killed members of the ships’ crews.
As a political matter, Iran hopes that creating a global energy crisis will generate opposition to the US-Israeli military campaign. But as a legal matter, Iran’s targeting of civilian ships is a flagrant violation of international law.
Article 16(4) of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea prohibits “the suspension of the innocent passage of foreign ships through straits” such as the Strait of Hormuz. Iran signed the 1958 document, as well as an updated version of the treaty, the 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.
The regime never “ratified” either treaty because it did not incorporate the international laws into its domestic law. That means Iran never became a formal party to the two pacts. However, the “innocent passage” framework of at least the 1958 convention is considered legally binding on Iran through customary international law, a consequence of widespread maritime practice.
The United Nations Security Council applied the principle of innocent passage during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The council rebuked both combatants for firing on commercial oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
In the current war, the UN Security Council likewise chided Iran’s lethal interference with civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. A coalition of 22 countries including two Arab Gulf states recently signed a joint statement that condemned Iran’s violent closure of the strait and warned of “appropriate efforts” to reopen it. A US military contingent is now headed to the strait, presumably to clear the key coastal terrain.
Iran attempts to evade its maritime obligations with two legal arguments.
First, it asserts self-styled “maritime claims,” in which every commercial ship’s right of innocent passage through the Strait of Hormuz is subject to the regime’s “prior approval.” Iran accordingly grants safe passage to vessels from “friendly” states like China and Pakistan but not ships that could “benefit the aggressors.”
Assuming an additional power of prior approval, Iran has threatened to impose toll charges on ships passing through the waterway. International maritime organizations such as the United Kingdom Maritime Operations Center have confirmed that Iran’s self-serving legal concoction is unfounded. In fact, most of the shipping lanes in the strait run through the territorial waters of Oman, which lie beyond Iran’s legal reach.
Iran alternately contends that its anti-shipping terrorism in the strait is a “tool of pressure” to combat the US and Israel, implying a right of military self-defense. But the laws of naval warfare do not permit attacks on ordinary civilian vessels as a means of self-defense.
Finding Iran in breach of maritime law is easy. Enforcing the law is another matter.
The International Court of Justice cannot assert jurisdiction over a state without that state’s consent. The International Criminal Court lacks authority over Iran because the state never signed the court’s enabling treaty. The Security Council could vote on Bahrain’s proposed March 23, 2026, resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But the measure would probably be vetoed by Russia and/or China, states that oppose the use of force against Iran.
At stake is nothing less than freedom of navigation, which is vital to global trade and security. If Iran can paralyze the Strait of Hormuz, other nations may block similar chokepoints such as the Strait of Taiwan, the Turkish Straits, the Panama Canal, or the Suez Canal. The resulting chaos could render maritime law a dead letter.
It may be difficult for American-Israeli warfare to release Iran’s illegal grip on the Strait of Hormuz. Nevertheless, military action may be the only way to restore the rule of law in the waterway and deter future maritime aggressions.
Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, US Affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. He is the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Legal War.