On Monday, the Israeli government screened footage—much of which was recorded by the perpetrators—of the atrocities of October 7 to members of the foreign press. The week before, it shared hard forensic evidence as well. The purpose of these unprecedented steps was to counteract the claims, which still persist, that the horrors of that day were fabricated or exaggerated. David Schraub, writing just a few days after the attacks, labels these claims of Israeli perfidy “epistemic anti-Semitism.” He explains:

When Jews say they see anti-Semitism, epistemic anti-Semites immediately see the real issue as those victimized by an undoubtedly false allegation.

[Thus] some social-media commentators raced as fast as possible to the position that any reports of “beheadings” were pure propaganda, an intentional trick to discredit Hamas (as if they needed the help!), and those who shared them were either unwitting pawns or willing participants in a Zionist conspiracy.

That move—not, to reiterate, any professional insistence on needing more confirmation before resharing the allegations—seems to me directly linked to holding a default position of skepticism if not antipathy towards Jewish claim-makers (which is why, even though now we are seeing multiple direct, eyewitness accounts confirming the story, plenty still are holding fast to the notion that they can’t be trusted).

The goal is to present Jewish testimony as presumptively suspect—not just the baseline “skepticism” that might greet any claim before proof is supplied, but a specific insistence that Jewish testimony in particular is probably part of a plot.

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?