Yael Bar Tur Activists Say the Anti-Israel Cause Is Mainstream. New York Proves It’s Not Despite the rise in hate crimes, not everyone wants to “normalize the Intifada.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-jews-israel-hamas-anti-semitic

You knew something was off when Kylie Jenner deleted her Instagram story. On October 7, 2023, as terrorists dragged hostages into Gaza and roamed the streets of Israel, the reality star posted that she “stand[s] with” the Jewish state, a familiar “thoughts and prayers” gesture, typical of celebrities after tragedies.

But faced with a backlash from her millions of followers, Jenner deleted the post. Others followed suit, removing their own expressions of solidarity. The message was clear: acknowledging Israel’s suffering had become, at best, “problematic”—and, at worst, unwelcome in polite society.

Silence has become all too familiar to American Jews. They’ve experienced it from international organizations and women’s advocates in the face of the devastating evidence of Hamas’s sex crimes; from academic institutions as Jewish students were harassed on elite university campuses; and from fellow New Yorkers amid rising anti-Semitic hate crimes, particularly in New York City.

That silence has been broken—not by Jewish defenders, but by voices that accept or even condone violence against Jews, Zionists, and the people of Israel. Arguments once unthinkable are now aired openly: that the atrocities of October 7 were justified resistance; that Israel should be abolished; that terrorists held in Israeli prisons are morally equivalent with Jewish civilians held hostage in Gaza.

These views have proliferated in part because of our academic institutions. Schools offer students a distorted, one-dimensional portrait of the Middle East. They depict the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a simplistic struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Young users on social media, where many Americans get their news, see these views reinforced in short, viral videos.