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Here’s how Jewish life changed (for now) after Oct. 7
(JTA) — “Everything changed after Oct. 7.” It’s an axiom being heard around Shabbat tables, in rabbis’ sermons and in countless opinion pieces after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel plunged the country into war. At an emotional level, it refers to the despair and shock felt among people in mourning – for the 1,200 victims of the initial attack, for the soldiers lost in battle and perhaps for a vision of Israel as a country that could at least “manage” its conflict with the Palestinians and continue to flourish.
But for many observers, it refers to a series of ruptures in Jewish life whose effects are only just beginning to be felt. They include seismic shifts in their relationship to Israel, how they form political alliances and their way of being Jewish in a world that feels scarier, lonelier and, in some surprising ways, more Jewish than ever.
Below are some of the major themes of change, culled from the writings of analysts, activists, rabbis and pundits. Because it has only been two months since the war began, some of their insights and predictions are provisional and perhaps premature. Some contradict each other. But together they capture a moment when old assumptions appeared to have died in the kibbutzim, villages and fields of the “Gaza envelope,” and new ones are taking their place.
“We are alone”
In the days immediately after the Hamas attacks, President Joe Biden pledged America’s support for Israel and its right to defend itself and root out Hamas. That promise has mostly held, even as the deaths of as many as 15,000 Palestinians has caused growing unease among some in his administration, and within factions of the Democratic Party.
Yet the backing of superpower didn’t alleviate a sense of betrayal for many Israelis and their supporters in the west.
“In my conversations with college students, rabbis, business leaders, Jewish professionals, and others, the sentence that everyone seems to circle around, spoken or unspoken, is ‘We are alone,’” wrote Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist, in an Oct. 10 column for Sapir, the Jewish thought journal he edits. “That’s despite clarion statements of solidarity from President Biden, Republican leaders in Congress, prominent TV anchors, and millions of ordinary Americans. Because beneath that, we sense that something is badly amiss,” including inadequate statements from university leaders and the support for Hamas among college students and the left.
The historian Sara Yael Hirschhorn also predicted that by the time the war ends, “Israel will have lost the war for world opinion. What happens on college campuses, media desks, or street protests won’t stay there — it has already eroded support for Israel within the Democratic Party, the US State Department is in revolt, the military brass are frightened of a regional war, while the chattering class [is] demanding absolute condemnation of Israel. Most Western governments are watching restive populations marching through their streets (occasionally stopping to smash glass and beat Jews on the street in a 21st century Kristallnacht) while its legislators choose their jobs over moral clarity and their representatives can’t even pass UN resolutions that use the words ‘Hamas,’ ‘Israel’ or ‘hostages.’”
Betrayal by the left
Numerous liberal Jewish activists have written about being “abandoned” by social justice allies who embraced the Hamas narrative or saw Israel as solely responsible for the attacks and criminally culpable for its response. As Gal Beckerman wrote in The Atlantic, “many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian — templates made of concrete.”
Haviva Ner-David, an Israeli-American peace living in northern Israel, wrote in a JTA essay that “the hailing of that massacre by much of the world, including the progressive (even Jewish) left … triggered a deep fear for our survival as Jews.” Watching pro-Palestinian protests by progressives, she saw “activists crossing a line from struggling for peace and Palestinian rights into promoting a hateful, terrifying, dangerous anti-Jewish agenda.”
Orthodox Jewish feminist Daphne Lazar Price wrote in JTA that she was shocked by putative feminist allies who refused to show outrage over Hamas’ sexual crimes against Israeli women on Oct. 7.
“I can’t continue to work with those who don’t see me in the same light, as someone deserving of love and respect, no matter how they feel about my Judaism or Israel,” she writes. “My attempts to engage former colleagues have been hurtful and fruitless because of their unwillingness derived from ideological differences or a defensiveness of long-held views. Those groups’ attempted mind games to decide who is worthy of care and who is entitled to protections need to end — or they will become irrelevant.”
A realignment among liberals
This fracture in the left has also led to predictions that the liberal American Jewish majority will modify its embrace of aspects of the social justice agenda it has traditionally supported.
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, writes that for some liberal Jews, a re-engagement with their Jewish selves “may reflect a real existential transformation away from those exact liberal values and commitments they held dear for a long time. It is something of a replay of the prior generation’s anti-Communist turn in the 1960s and 1970s, a journey inward from the universal to the particular.”
Stephens had his doubts: “My guess is that a few will make a clean break, like the brave ex-Communists of ‘The God That Failed,’ who made public their disillusionment with the Soviet Union in the famous 1949 book of that name,” he writes in the same Sapir essay. “Most others will use the pretext of Israel’s retaliation to return to their delusional sleep. People who adopt the politics of the extreme tend to double down: Rationalizations and moral equivalences come easy, and notoriety is easier than contrition.”
An embrace of the right
While some Jewish liberals complained of abandonment, others worried about Jews and Israelis embracing a hawkish, militaristic response to the Hamas attacks that makes no room for disagreement, dissent or eventual compromise. “This is leaving those of us who are committed to shared spaces, shared resistance, and a shared future grounded in equality very much alone,” writes Haggai Matar, in the leftist Israeli magazine +972. “It is, in many ways, a condensed microcosm of the rifts that have emerged within the left globally over the past month as well.”
In an essay for The Cut, a left-leaning American Orthodox Jew identified as “R.B.” writes that in their community, “Everyone is a haunted mess, and jingoism appears to be the defense mechanism of choice.”
“It is painful to watch people around me whom I have known for their inquiring minds and strong sense of morality become uncritical flag-wavers, watch them dismiss massacres as disinformation, watch them advocate more and more violence. They treat cease-fire as a dirty word,” writes R.B.
In Jewish Currents, the left-wing journal, Raz Segal criticized fellow Holocaust and genocide scholars in Israel, North America and beyond for signing a statement condemning Hamas terror and denouncing the rise of global antisemitism that he said “completely dehumanized Palestinians and made no mention whatsoever of any form of Israeli mass violence.”
The (further) poisoning of the discourse
Social media has become a toxic battleground in the war of ideas — “Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech has surged across the internet since the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 15. Rarely a safe space for enlightened discourse, the vitriol on X and Instagram since Oct. 7 has forced many longtime users to weigh the necessity of engaging on social media against their mental wellbeing.
Lior Zaltzman, the deputy managing editor of Kveller, has worked in Jewish social media since 2014, and writes that “I’ve also never seen it this awful, this polarizing, this … honestly, unhinged.”
She adds: “People are so stuck in their ‘side’ and binary that they’re willing to share anything — without fact-checking, without making sure they’re not getting in bed with people whose worldview is dangerous, without asking themselves for a small second, wait, is this Islamophobic? Antisemitic? Completely detached from reality? Wondering if they sound like a conspiracy theorist, or if they’re just being cruel for cruelty’s sake?”
Reengaging as Jews
Kurtzer and others also see Jews reclaiming a sense of Jewish belonging — or having that sense of belonging forced upon them. Prior to Oct. 7, the perennial concern among the Jewish mainstream was that the politically and religiously liberal majority of American Jews “was at risk of exiting from the Jewish community,” he writes. “Now I see signs of reengagement, reflected in higher turnout at synagogue, Hillel and Chabad events, and expressed on social media as a response to a sense of alienation from a gentile world that does not take Jewish pain and trauma seriously. This is happening at all ages.”
Boutique store owner Susan Korn and jewelry designer Stephanie Gottlieb both told the New York Times that sales of Star of David necklaces spiked after Oct. 7. In November, a Chabad poll found that the vast majority of of its U.S. emissaries were reporting increased attendance at their events.
Steven Windmueller, who researches Jewish communal trends, sees signs of both retreat and engagement. “[W]e wonder about our status, even our safety,” he wrote in the Jewish Exponent. “Some of us are withdrawing from public Jewish places, uncomfortable being in those spaces where Jews gather. Others are removing the physical symbols of Jewishness, both personal and communal.
“At the same time, for instance, at the grade-school level, we are seeing a transformational moment. Now we have reports of parents moving kids from public educational settings into Jewish parochial schools.”
Solidarity around an Israel at war
In the year leading up to the war, Israel was torn apart over the government’s plan to overhaul its judicial system and, its critics said, undermine its democracy. The weekly mass protests were taken up by Jews in New York and beyond. The era of street protests ended on Oct. 7. “The judicial reform and protests of the past year had led many Israelis to start asking whether the country even had a future,” David Hazony, the Israeli-American writer and editor wrote on Nov. 1. “In the last three weeks, however, Israelis have come together with a strength and focus far beyond what anyone thought possible. When a true crisis came, politics fell away and the nation united.” One of the groups organizing the North American protests, UnXeptable, changed its motto from “Saving Israeli Democracy” to “Saving Israel.”
That solidarity is also being seen in the Diaspora, perhaps most notably at a pro-Israel rally in Washington that drew an estimated 290,000 people. Federations are seeing a surge in donations, groups are planning solidarity trips to Israel both to volunteer where needed and to bear witness, and even the North American haredi Orthodox sector — many of whose leaders and followers keep an arm’s distance from the secular Jewish state as a matter of theology — are demonstrating what JTA called an “outpouring of support for Israel and its military at a level not seen in decades.”
Rabba Sarah Hurwitz, president of the feminist Orthodox yeshivah Maharat, says that kind of solidarity offers a glimmer of a brighter future.
“This is what we do. In times of tragedy, we rally,” she writes. We find ways to support one another with comfort, food and supplies. These acts of chesed, kindness, cannot undo the tragic loss of life. They cannot bring home the hundreds who are held hostage. They cannot heal the thousands of wounded. But digging into our humanity reminds us that there is light in darkness….
“Then, because we don’t have a choice, we will get back to the work of learning, teaching, and serving. It’s the Jewish way.”
—
The post Here’s how Jewish life changed (for now) after Oct. 7 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks
Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While US President Joe Biden hailed the new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on Tuesday as a “courageous” step toward peace, security experts and residents of northern Israel voiced starkly contrasting sentiments, criticizing the agreement as falling far short of addressing the ongoing threats posed by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group.
“I applaud the courageous decision made by the leaders of Lebanon and Israel to end the violence. It reminds us that peace is possible,” Biden said one day before the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday.
He added that it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” vowing that Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”
But according to Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — the ceasefire deal, the details of which have not been made public, is nowhere close to establishing peace.
“Let’s not be mistaken. Ceasefire is not peace,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “There is a gap between the two and in order to bridge the gap, we need a thorough change in Lebanon and in the Iranian involvement in the region.”
According to Zehavi, the deal was problematic at the outset because it was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and has been criticized for its historical ineffectiveness. Zehavi highlighted the failures of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] troops in enforcing the resolution in the past, warning that the same could happen again.
As part of the deal, Israel has insisted on retaining the ability to enforce the resolution independently, but this approach carries risks, Zehavi said. “If we enforce the resolution, it means that there won’t be a ceasefire. If there isn’t a ceasefire, it means that Hezbollah will retaliate, and we will continue the ongoing fighting.”
Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the deal within hours of its signing, with operatives disguised as civilians entering restricted zones in southern Lebanon, including the villages of Kila, Mais a-Jabal, and Markaba, despite warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Another sticking point is the lack of safeguards preventing Hezbollah from rearming, leaving Israel reliant on Lebanese assurances. “After what happened on [last] Oct. 7, Israelis are not willing to enable Hezbollah to recover,” Zehavi asserted. “We cannot rely on just promises; we need to make sure that Hezbollah is not capable of threatening us and our families over here in the north.”
The international community, Zehavi argued, has a crucial role to play in pressuring Lebanon to sever its ties with Hezbollah. So long as Lebanon does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, she said, the Shi’ite Muslim group will continue to exert influence over the country and therefore pose a threat to neighboring Israel. Members of the group hold influential positions in the Lebanese government, including ministers who control border crossings and airports, facilitating the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon.
Zehavi also pointed to Iran’s declaration that it will help rebuild both Lebanon and Hezbollah, even while continuing to funnel weapons and financial aid into the terrorist group through smuggling routes.
“As long as the ayatollahs of Iran continue to nourish proxy militias in the Middle East against Israel, we are not going to see peace,” she said.
Other northern residents similarly argued that halting the fight against Hezbollah now would give the terrorist group an opportunity to rebuild its arsenal, strengthen its forces, and potentially replicate the scale of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel’s northern region.
“We never learn. Just like in 2006, and many other times, we stop at the brink of total victory, handing our enemies the opportunity to rebuild and return years later, stronger and deadlier than before,” said Moti Vanunu, a resident who was evacuated from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
Gabi Naaman, mayor of the battered northern city of Shlomi, expressed skepticism that the ceasefire would bring lasting security to Israel’s northern residents.
“Everything we’ve seen indicates that the next round is inevitable, whether it’s in a month, two months, or ten years,” he said.
Despite her reservations, Zehavi explained that Israel had no real alternative but to accept the ceasefire, citing the need to provide northern residents with a return to normalcy and to provide the opportunity to the IDF to resupply ammunition and allow soldiers time to recover. “We had to choose between two bad options,” she said.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in the north were forced to evacuate their homes amid unrelenting rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah, which began firing on Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre southern Israel from Gaza. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah across the Lebanon border until it ramped up its military efforts over the last two months, moving ground forces into southern Lebanon and destroying much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes.
While Zehavi viewed the timing of the campaign’s start in September — ahead of the challenges of fighting during the winter months — and not in May as a strategic error, she applauded the army’s achievements of the past two months.
In a poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Tuesday night, half of those surveyed felt there was no clear winner in the war against Hezbollah. Twenty percent of respondents believed the IDF emerged victorious in the war, while 19 percent thought Hezbollah prevailed. A further 11 percent were unsure who had the upper hand.
The post Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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