Dominating the headlines in Israeli newspapers last week, amid reports of COVID-19 variants and the usual spats at the Knesset, was the wedding of Gilad Shalit—who, while serving in the IDF in 2006, was captured by Hamas and held hostage for five years. He was released in exchange for 1,027 imprisoned terrorists, many of whom had murdered Israelis, and some of whom went on to do so again. Daniel Gordis writes:

The headline about Shalit’s having gotten married was classic Israeli. Ha-yeled shel kulanu, it read, “He’s the son of all of us” (bad English, but there’s no good way to render the Hebrew). Then it continues: “Gilad Shalit married Nitzan Shabbat.” . . . [T]his is a place where you actually have kids you’ve never met.

Zechariah Baumel was one of several soldiers taken prisoner when their unit was attacked in the battle of Sultan Yakub in June 1982. For years, Israel knew virtually nothing about his fate. Baumel’s father, Yona, devoted the rest of his life to pressing Israel to do more to get information, and as part of this many-years-long campaign, he ended up speaking to the middle-school class of one of our sons.

Our son came home, and over dinner, told us about Baumel’s presentation. During the question-and-answer portion, he told us, one of his classmates asked Baumel if he worried that Zechariah was still being tortured. I grimaced; middle-school kids don’t yet know what you don’t ask. But I didn’t say anything, and our son continued. “No,” Yona Baumel told the kids, “I don’t worry that they’re torturing him. I just worry that he’s cold at night.”

What makes Israeli society what it is, is that there was no one in Israel who did not know who Gilad Shalit was. There was no one who did not think about him. That’s not only who we are, it’s why we are.

The joy felt in the Jewish state at the news of Shalit’s wedding calls to mind the prophecy of a forlorn and imprisoned Jeremiah, whom God told to bring a message of hope to a Judean people facing destruction: “Again there shall be heard in this place, . . . even in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are desolate, without man, and without inhabitant, and without beast, the voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride.”

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”