“It is undeniable,” writes Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, “that hatred of Israel foments hatred of Jews,” and that “attacks on Israel lead to attacks on Jews.” Yet, he laments, many Jews are unwilling to recognize these causal connections:

I spend so much time emphasizing the anti-Semitism of the hard left not because I believe that the anti-Semitism of the extreme right is any less pervasive or dangerous. But I am a liberal rabbi leading a Reform synagogue composed of mostly liberal Jews. And in my view, many liberal Jews are misled by the high-sounding rhetoric of anti-Zionist students, liberal professors, thought leaders, influencers, and media and social-media personalities.

For some, the term “social justice” now means that Israel is somehow to blame for racism in American police departments. Even our own Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—has been co-opted and distorted by some Jews to virtue-signal their moral purity. Twenty-two percent of American Jews—one in five—believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, according to a recent study by the Jewish Electorate Institute.

Threats to destroy the Jewish state are threats to destroy the Jewish people. When they shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they mean “destroy Israel.” “Free Palestine” for them does not mean coexistence with Israel. It means Palestinian existence without Israel. Ask them. They don’t hide it. They simply rely on your ignorance and naïveté because they spout words that sound progressive to you: human rights, civil rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism, anti-apartheid, anti-colonialism. For them, it is nefarious Jewish power centrally organized by Israel and supported by world Jewry, standing in the way of peace, prosperity, liberation, and justice.

We should reflect deeply on our withdrawal from Afghanistan. The lesson of Afghanistan for the Jews—a lesson we should have learned a thousand times—is that if you want to survive, you need to rely on yourself. You cannot subcontract your defense and protection to anyone, least of all to faux human-rights activists and their deluded supporters who sit in ivory towers: intellectuals who write and think all day, who preen with academic arrogance, but are incapable of understanding what is really going on in people’s hearts. Preoccupied with their shallow self-righteousness, they ignore even basic human emotions, motivations, and drives; bleeding hearts who have no heart for bleeding Jews.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.