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Israel has sown the wind of hatred. It will reap the whirlwind of generational vengeance. [1]
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Date: 2025-07-29
As a Jewish person who’s in pro-Palestinian spaces, you do see true antisemites from time to time, and it’s a serious problem. A bigger problem is the target that the state of Israel, and specifically the Netanyahu administration has painted on us through their hate, violence, state sanctioned racism and mass acceptance of ethnic cleansing. You’d still have people who hate Jews without it but when you easily and truthfully can point to heinous actions that are being carried out in Jewish people’s names, it makes it a lot easier for those people to go past a point of no return.
Brian Levy, Queens, NY, commenting on the NY Times editorial “Antisemitism is an Urgent Problem”
“The only good German is a dead German.”
So said my stepfather on many occasions — sometimes seriously, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. Adopted, he was raised in a Jewish household and, as a young man fought the Germans as a foot soldier in France and Germany in WWII. He regaled my teenage self with dozens of stories about his experiences.
Of course, I knew that the philosophical and psychological connection between his Nazi enemies of Germany’s past and her succeeding generations was tenuous at best. A German exchange student attending my high school in the 1960s was cultured and broadly educated, spoke impeccable English and was warm, friendly, humble and one of our most popular students. Years later, I visited Germany itself, and learned that the exchange student was not the exception, but a proper representative of his people.
Three decades after leaving high school I was chatting with my stepfather and he began to tell me one of his war stories. He mentioned a wounded German soldier his platoon had captured.
“This poor bastard,” he started. Then he stopped himself, shook his head and snickered. “After fifty years,” he said, “I can finally see that he was a ‘poor bastard.’”
So now the question arises, how long will it take today’s Palestinian children to see Jewish people as people, and not as “Zionist monsters,” the perpetrators of the prolonged traumatic nightmare they are living through? A couple of years after the Gaza “war” concludes? A decade later? A lifetime spent hating and passing that hate on to their progeny?
Sophisticated, educated people in the West, including many Jewish people, can of course distinguish between “Jews” as a self-identified ethnic/religious group, and Zionists who believe the Jewish people have a “God given” right to live in their historic homeland from which the Romans ousted them some 2,000 years ago.
They can even distinguish between “good Zionists,” and “bad Zionists” — those who believe in the Jewish people’s “right of return,” but also recognize the rights of other people who have occupied the same land for hundreds of years — and those who believe Israel is entitled to expand beyond the boundaries granted to it by the United Nations in 1947 and to subjugate or ethnically cleanse the people who live there, while creating an apartheid state within its borders.
…will today’s Palestinian children…make the distinction between aggressive, expansionist Zionists and other Jews, wherever those Jews might be found…?
But will today’s Palestinian children, whether they end up living in Gaza or a nearby Muslim country, make the distinction between aggressive, expansionist Zionists, as currently exemplified by Israel’s right-wing government, and other Jews, wherever those Jews might be found in the world? It seems doubtful that a boy who has watched his little sister blown to pieces by an Israeli bomb, or his parents gunned down while waiting in line for food, will entertain such nuance.
To him, most likely, a Zionist is a Zionist, all Zionists are Jews, and, probably, all Jews are Zionists. (Although there are also many fundamentalist “Christian Zionists” in the U.S.) In much of the world, certainly much of the Muslim world, the distinction between Zionists and Jews was largely nil even before the current slaughter in Gaza began. Just as many Westerners, especially Americans, view Muslims through a superficial lens that renders them as uniformly anti-Western — especially anti-Christian — fundamentalist and Jihadist, at least a significant portion of Muslims view America as the “Great Satan,” and are willing to die fighting it.
Pretexts such as “Israel has a right to defend itself,” will not dissuade children subjected to terror from becoming zealous terrorists themselves.
What could possibly have better confirmed their prejudicial beliefs than what is happening in Gaza — and to a lesser extent in the West Bank, Lebanon and now Syria and Iran — the aggressive slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents with the direct support of America? Pretexts such as “Israel has a right to defend itself,” will not dissuade children subjected to terror from becoming zealous terrorists themselves. Nor does splitting hairs over whether Israel’s actions rise to the level of genocide or are merely ethnic cleansing make them any less excusable in the eyes of the world, and especially those of the Palestinian victims.
And of course as Mr. Levy says in the quote above, this is painting a target on Jews everywhere, including, or perhaps especially in the U.S. Violent antisemitism from the Right is now being supplemented by violence from what the Mainstream Media lazily calls “the Left,” meaning people who have taken up the Palestinian cause or are simply appalled by what’s happening in Gaza. Two staffers killed outside the Israeli embassy in Washington; Jewish demonstrators protesting the ongoing captivity of the Oct. 7 hostages burned by a man shouting “Free Palestine,” and “You burned our people. How many children have you killed?”
Before the current conflict in Gaza, there were about 2.2 million Palestinians living there. The number is now thought to be around 2.1 million — with 60,000 people killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and about 40, 000 dying from related causes such as starvation and preventable disease. It is impossible to know how many Palestinians will remain alive after the slaughter stops but, given the rate of attrition since the conflict began in October of 2023, and projecting that forward for, in the worst case scenario, say another two years, there would be at least two million Palestinians remaining in the strip or settled in nearby countries.
Let’s say just half those people carry a deep-seated, lifelong grudge against Jews and Israel, and many of those, having lost their family in the current slaughter, feel they have nothing else to lose. That’s a lot of potential terrorists — lone wolf or otherwise — and a lot of potential Israeli and Jewish victims — many of them as yet unborn.
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[1] Url:
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