On Oct. 7, 2023, the modest community of the Nir Oz kibbutz was decimated — with over a quarter of its population slaughtered or kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. Seventy-four-year-old Bracha Levinson, a child of Holocaust survivors, was alone in her home and in her safe room where she did not have the physical capacity to hold the door. The terrorists took her phone and posted a video of her on her Facebook page as she was lying in a pool of her own blood with the killers standing over her. All of her family and friends saw it.
Witnesses near the Nova festival saw Hamas rapists and killers playing with a dead or dying woman’s breast they cut off. Believe it or not, this is not a new horror. In 1941, the Iraqi regime allied with Nazis and massacred hundreds of Jews who had been living in Baghdad for generations as far back as the Babylonian empire. One survivor was a nine-year-old boy who later told his story to the BBC. He hid in a tree and watched as they tortured his mother’s best friend and cut off her breast while joyfully shouting “Allah” and “Slaughter the Jews.”
To this day, the antisemitic texts “MeinKampf” and “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” translated into Arabic are popular in the countries surrounding Israel.
When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 handing it over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Jews who had lived in the Gaza Strip their entire lives were forced to leave. The PA made it clear that no Palestinian state could have Jews in it. Conversely, the non-Jewish population in Israel in 1948 was 156,000. Today it is 2.6 million. Ethnic cleansing? Arab Israelis have full legal equality and more rights in Israel than they do in surrounding Arab countries. Apartheid?
The moral inversion by so-called progressives treats Hamas and Hezbollah as revolutionary heroes rather than the torture and death-loving sociopaths they are. When will the apologists realize they are the useful idiots? In “People Love Dead Jews,” Dara Horn wrote, “To perceive the blinding vastness of absolute evil, one almost needs to be mad.” The relentless propaganda that packages radical Islamism as anti-colonialism and anti-racism is indeed maddening. Moderate Muslims throughout the world understand the distinction between their faith and this fabricated radical Islamist agenda that has nothing to do with spiritual practice and everything to do with pure hatred.
Jake Wallis Simons’ book, “Israelophobia,” was published shortly before the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. He wrote, “One of the greatest achievements of the Israelophobic movement has been to give the term ‘Zionist’ negative connotations, grouping it with ‘white supremacy’ or ‘colonialism’. In reality, it refers simply to the desire of the Jewish people for self-determination in their homeland after centuries of persecution in the diaspora.”
When the UN offered a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish country, Arab countries rejected the plan vowing to destroy Israel and to expel all Jews. The “Nakba” was a term first used in 1948 by Syrian professor Constantin Zureiq to assign blame to Arabs for inflicting wounds and humiliation onto themselves during negotiations and chaos. In today’s world, it has morphed into a term to describe a disaster somehow inflicted onto Palestinians. The perennial victim status is a roadblock that absolves Palestinians of responsibility for their actions.
Zionism was developed and implemented with progressive ideals including economic egalitarianism (kibbutzim) and gender equality. It is not the extreme religious right in Israel. Think of it as patriotism versus nationalism. One can be patriotic about being American and being of this country without being a white Christian nationalist. Many Zionists in Israel are politically left. I know a few of them. Noa Tishby is a feminist, progressive and Zionist who supports Palestinian rights. She clearly speaks to the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah are the primary ruling forces obstructing Palestinians from the ability to live free and thriving lives.
Hamas uses schools and hospitals for military cover. Since Oct. 7, they have stolen food aid selling it at inflated prices to people who cannot afford it while claiming that Israel is causing starvation. This is why organizations such as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are working to deliver food directly to people in Gaza. All the while, Hamas threatens the recipients that they are collaborating with Jews and will be punished.
We now know that “Free Palestine” is not a benign or progressive slogan. When Elias Rodriguez murdered Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in DC at the Jewish Museum on May 21, 2025, he did not know they worked for the Israeli embassy. He simply perceived they were Jewish because of the museum site. He drank the anti-Zionist Kool-Aid to believe he was doing something to benefit Palestinians with his horrific act. Antisemitism is often disguised as a “justice” move. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is busy debating about condemning the murders versus seeing it as a “legitimate act of resistance against the Zionist state.” Meanwhile in reality, Milgrim worked with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.
In recent days, “justice” was delivered by a flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado. People were gathered to support the remaining hostages in Gaza, and the attacker felt, what, a duty to burn and traumatize the peace-seeking event participants?!
When Jews were accused of poisoning wells in medieval Europe, killing them was justice. When they were deemed an inferior and dangerous race, Nazis convinced everyday people to dehumanize and kill them in the name of justice. Today’s “justice” is an insidious social disease reinforced by lies and distortions about Israel. Not everyone has to be a Zionist, but you also do not have to proclaim being anti-Zionist. To Israelis — Jews, Muslims, Druze, Christians, and secular citizens who live in a democracy — anti-Zionism is an expression of hatred towards their country. Language matters. Those signs at campus and street protests incite emotional and physical violence in the name of justice. Yes, I could go mad.
J.M. Sorrell is a feminist and activist combatting antisemitism.