Before the first rocket of the operation was fired, the anti-Israel rumors were running wild on social media over the Sheikh Jarrah case. In Arabic and English, Palestinian advocates made a concerted effort to evade the facts that this was an ongoing legal case that had not yet reached a final decision. Instead of investigating, the international press slammed Israel, latching on to the narrative of Israel “stealing land” and “expelling Palestinians,” of course with allusions to the “Nakba.” This was an intentional misrepresentation of the truth – the truth being that Jews owned the land and in fact were dispossessed of it in a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Jordanians in 1948. This obsession with presenting Palestinians as perpetual victims and Israelis or Jews as the aggressors completely whitewashes the history of ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East and the property that was forcibly taken from them.
Following the controversy over Sheikh Jarrah, riots erupted at the Temple Mount with Hamas supporters gathering en masse and openly calling for violence. Additionally, footage showed rioters attacking police with rocks and Molotov cocktails and shooting fireworks in order to disrupt and prevent Jerusalem Day celebrations. Instead of reporting on these events accurately, the international media reported that Israel was “storming the Temple Mount,” which was then repeated and exaggerated an infinite number of times on social media to cement a narrative of Israeli police attacking innocent peaceful Palestinians who were simply trying to pray during Ramadan. The reality, of course, was completely different.
Once Palestinian factions like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with the backing of Iran, realized they could leverage the situation to their political advantage, they did not waste time. Hamas began hostilities by firing rockets at Jerusalem, and kicked off an 11-day campaign of 4,500 rockets aimed at Israeli civilian targets from the Gaza border communities to northern Israel. Even though dozens of Palestinians and several Israelis died due to this political maneuvering by Hamas, the international media and anti-Israel groups continued painting an entirely inaccurate picture of what was occurring on the ground.
While the IDF focused on military targets and took care to evacuate buildings with civilians, the media continued to report that Israel was attacking Palestinians, despite the fact Israel’s war was not against Palestinians, but against Hamas. This intentional misrepresentation aids the narrative that Israel is a barbarous war criminal regime attempting to genocide the Palestinians – never mind the fact that several hundred casualties in a population of two million is a statistically small number for warfare. Due to this inaccurate reporting, anti-Israel actors from all manner of organizations, including the media and extremist members of the US Congress, were able to successfully propagate the smear of Israel committing “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.”
The byproducts of this incitement have been catastrophic – a tremendous spike in global antisemitism. And the “pro-Palestinian” voices who were so quick to jump on the bash-Israel bandwagon without any regard for the facts are not taking responsibility for their role in the violent antisemitism we see today.
Synagogues have been defaced; Jews have been spit on, cursed at, assaulted and beaten; Jewish neighborhoods have been targeted with harassment and violence – all in the name of “anti-Zionism.” This isn’t just occurring in Israel, where Jews were attacked in a slew of antisemitic incidents related to riots. It’s occurring in the UK and France and Germany and the US. Perhaps in the most sharp rise in antisemitism since the Nazis, Jews are terrified to leave their homes, or to show their identity publicly.
In the UK, there was a reported 250% rise in antisemitism in one week alone. In New York, videos emerged of firecrackers being thrown at Jews on the streets by violent pro-Palestinians. Online, the situation is no better: Jews, or those defending them, have been brutally targeted by bots and anti-Israel trolls harassing pro-Israel and Jewish voices and sending hundreds of thousands of hateful antisemitic messages. In one week, I myself received over 90,000 mentions on Twitter, the vast majority of which were hateful antisemitic insults, and several of which included violent death threats.
All these events are proof of what the Jewish community has known for years already, that far too often, the modern manifestations of anti-Zionism are, in fact, antisemitism. The international press has failed the Jewish community, as have social media networks, international bodies like the UN and human rights groups and activists. They must be held accountable for their role in incitement and attacks against Jews through their intentional misrepresentation of the facts on the ground in Israel. How many more Jews have to die before the world will listen?
The writer is the CEO of Social Lite Creative LLC.