J. J. Kimche is a doctoral student in Jewish history at Harvard University and author of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal I hope you’ll read in its entirety. It begins: “Hamas’s attack on Israel was a small-scale Holocaust, a moment no Jew alive with the tiniest speck of communal feeling will ever forget. As a Jewish student, I was similarly chilled by the reactions at Harvard.”

He then describes the now-infamous response by more than thirty Harvard student groups to Hamas’s invasion of Israel, a statement that supported the terrorists while blaming their actions entirely on Israel. Kimche asks, “How can we share dormitories, classrooms, and ideas with students who would make excuses or even celebrate if we and our families were hacked to death by a Hamas terrorist tomorrow?”

He closes: “As a grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and a student of German-Jewish history, I was always incredulous that highly cultured Germans, the people of Goethe and Beethoven, could have displayed sympathy and even enthusiasm for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. Now I believe it. I have seen it happen here.”

“Using their civilians to protect their missiles”

I understand that Palestinians and Israelis have a fundamental conflict over who should own the same land. I believe strongly that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in peace and autonomy. I have dear and trusted friends of many years—both Jews and Arabs—who live in the Holy Land, some in Israel and others in Bethlehem and other areas of the West Bank. And I know beyond question that God loves Israelis and Palestinians equally (Galatians 3:28) and that he is grieving for the victims on both sides of this conflict.

However, I am writing today to voice my vehement opposition to a sentiment I am seeing after Hamas’s horrific invasion last Saturday: the claim that the two sides are morally equivalent to each other and that both commit similar atrocities against each other.

It is a tragic fact that some Israeli settlers have acted with indefensible violence against some Palestinians in the West Bank. And it is a fact that when Israel targets Hamas’s military installations in Gaza, since Hamas hides them behind human shields in schools, homes, and hospitals, Palestinian civilians are sometimes injured or killed.

But consider:

Hamas terrorists decapitated babies and slaughtered children when they raided Israel last Saturday morning. According to Israeli soldiers who discovered one massacre, “They have butchered women and children in worse ways than ISIS.” They kidnapped and killed elderly civilians as well, some of them Holocaust survivors, leaving what the New York Times calls a “trail of terror.”

By contrast, when Israel last had to go into Gaza to stop Hamas, it first warned residents by cellphone and leaflets. It also used small “warning rockets,” usually sent from drones, to identify buildings it was targeting so people had time to evacuate.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summarized the difference between the two this way: “We are using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

How Hamas dehumanizes the Jews

History records a long strategy of dehumanizing the Jews as the first step toward their genocidal eradication. The Egyptians of Moses’ day did this by enslaving them and treating them “ruthlessly” (Exodus 1:14). The Qur’an does this by describing them as “apes and swine” (5:60; 2:65; 7:166). Hitler did this by calling them a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples.”

Hamas does this when it claims that Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” They blame Jews for “the French Revolution, the Communist revolution, and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about.” And they claim that the Jews were behind World War I And World War II. In short, they state, “There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”

The plague of antisemitism has grown in the US and especially on college campuses in recent years. As I noted yesterday, many are deluded by Critical Theory that sees the state of Israel as the majority persecutor and Palestinians as its minority victims who must then oppress their oppressor. In so doing, these antisemites take a significant step toward dehumanizing the people of Israel as oppressors worthy of oppression.

Such defamation threatens Jews not just in Israel but around the world. Violent antisemitism surged in the US during the last Israel–Hamas war in 2014. Now we’re seeing:

• A local kosher restaurant in London was vandalized on Monday; graffiti that read “Free Palestine” appeared on a bridge.
• Antisemitic incidents tripled in Britain after the invasion.
• Police in France have opened forty-four investigations into antisemitic hate speech and glorification of terrorism.
• A synagogue in Spain was defaced with graffiti that read “Free Palestine.”
• Security for synagogues and other Jewish institutions has been heightened across Europe.
• Anti-Israel rallies have been held this week across the US, some displaying swastikas.

As Israel heightens its military response in Gaza, we should expect such antagonism against Jews to escalate.

“The foundation for the whole American political experiment”

Our nation was founded on the declaration that “all men are created equal.” Ronald Reagan was right: “Faith in the dignity of the individual under God is the foundation for the whole American political experiment.” Dehumanizing others threatens this foundation and our very future.

What is the solution? Mr. Reagan also warned: “When men try to live in a world without God, it’s only too easy for them to forget the rights that God bestows.”

Please join me in rejecting the rising antisemitism of our secularized culture. “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” with fervency (Psalm 122:6). Tell your Jewish friends and the leaders of your local synagogue that you are standing with and praying for them. Use your personal and social media influence to support the Jewish people in this hour of great crisis. Pray for God to redeem this tragedy in ways that bring peace to the Middle East and many to himself.

And pray for a moral and spiritual awakening in our land that restores the “foundation for the whole American political experiment” before it is too late.

Denison Forum

One of my dearest friends was born in a kibbutz two miles from Gaza. His village was able to evacuate when Hamas launched its murderous assault last Saturday. However, a neighboring kibbutz called Kfar Aza was targeted by the terrorists.

Yesterday, my friend forwarded to me a survivor’s description of what happened:

A thriving community of one thousand people, men and women, was brutally crushed within forty-eight hours. Whole families, parents, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers were murdered in cold blood. Their houses were turned into piles of earth and ashes, and their lives as they knew them—destroyed. They lost their homes, their livelihoods, and all their property. They lost neighbors, both relatives and beloved friends, in one of the greatest terrorist attacks in history. Those saved from the slaughter were trapped for two days under fire until they were rescued with only the clothes on their backs.

An Associated Press reporter quotes an Israeli army general who stood amid the wreckage of the village: “You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms and how the terrorists killed. It’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.”

Harvard students blame Israel

The Israeli death toll has passed 1,100 at this writing. President Biden confirmed yesterday in his address to the nation that fourteen US citizens were killed in the conflict and that Americans are known to be among the hostages held by Hamas.

And yet . . .

• A coalition of thirty-four Harvard University student organizations signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and added that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” A Columbia University student group also celebrated Hamas’s “historic” massacre of Israeli civilians.
• A pro-Hamas rally held Sunday in Manhattan’s Times Square praised the slaughter of Israeli civilians.
• Demonstrators in London launched fireworks in the direction of the Israeli embassy and British student groups praised the attacks as mobs around the UK cheered One demonstrator called the attacks “beautiful and inspiring.”
• Crowds in Germany celebrated the terrorist raids.
• The United Nations Human Rights Council held a moment of silence for the “loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere,” nowhere mentioning the Israeli victims who were slaughtered.
• Horrifically, a group gathered in Sydney, Australia, to celebrate the attacks chanted, “Gas the Jews.”

From Egypt’s genocide in the time of Moses to the devastation by ancient Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, to Hitler’s “Final Solution” and its slaughter of six million Jews, the scourge of antisemitism has persisted for millennia.

Why do so many people hate the Jews today?

“Bad ideas have victims”

With regard to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel, three explanations are relevant.

First, as I explained in my book, Radical Islam: What You Need to Know and in my latest website paper, Hamas and their fellow jihadists would answer by claiming that the State of Israel stole its land from the rightful Palestinian owners and that its citizens are complicit in this “theft” by participating in their democracy. They believe they are required by the Qur’an (2:190, 192) to defend Islam by attacking Israelis and destroying Israel. Many have become convinced that Jews are in fact hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind itself.

Second, those influenced by Critical Theory (which includes the Harvard and Columbia students and many of the West’s intellectual, academic, and cultural elites) would answer that Israel is a majority oppressor of the Palestinian persecuted minority. They claim that the only answer is for the oppressed to reverse the equation by oppressing their oppressor.

Third, many of Iran’s leaders believe the existence of Israel constitutes the “greatest barrier” to the reappearance of the Mahdi (a messiah-like figure). They therefore seek the eradication of the Jewish nation to hasten his arrival.

These are three tragic examples of a statement by my friend John Stonestreet that I quote often: “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.” In this case, the victim is Israel.

“There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness”

In this battle for the future of Israel, we are called by Scripture to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6) and to “seek [her] good” (v. 9).

This means that we repudiate the sin of antisemitism, a plague that is rising in the US and Europe today. It means that we pray for Israel’s leaders and people to be safe from their enemies and resolute in defending their country. It means that we seek practical ways to support those in Israel and around the world devastated by these atrocities, knowing that our God “comforts the downcast” (2 Corinthians 7:6) and calls us to do the same (2 Corinthians 1:3–4).

And it means that we do all we can to lead everyone we can to the only One who can truly heal our broken world.

When Christ is our Lord, we serve only one master. We serve him and not ourselves, whatever the cost to ourselves. We serve him by serving others whether they serve us or not. And we serve out of love for the One who first loved us (1 John 4:19).

John Piper was right: “Faith in Jesus Christ frees you from the slavery of sin for the sacrifices of love.”

How strong is your “faith in Jesus Christ” today?

Denison Forum