The past several days have seen a spate of violent attacks on Jews across the United States, conducted in the name of the Palestinian cause. Among the most shocking were the brutal of beating of Joseph Borgen and the explosion of an incendiary device by gangs yelling anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans. The week before, Representatives Rashida Tlaib and André Carson appeared at an anti-Israel protest outside the State Department—organized by the Hamas-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations—where the latter accused the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing.” While such rhetoric was echoed by other members of the progressive left, not to mention various celebrities, there has been little outrage, or even media coverage, of the violence to which it gives sanction. Seffi Kogan writes:

While anti-Zionist gangs beat up Jews in her city, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was providing a quasi-intellectual basis for their actions, defaming Israel as an apartheid state employing indiscriminate force in what she seems to think is a capricious quest to murder as many Palestinian children as possible, instead of a highly restrained military operation tightly targeted on terrorists. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t call for violence, but she carved out an area of respectability for a certain type of anti-Semitism, and others were only too happy to rush in, fists flying.

It turns out, if you ignore all evidence, turn Israel into the villain in your morality play, and insist that Americans have a “responsibility” to do something about Israel, the thing that they will do is beat up American Jews, throw rocks through the windows of American synagogues, and harass Jews who try to speak up on social media.

Senator Bernie Sanders published his own dangerous anti-Israel harangue, . . . which began, “No one is arguing that Israel . . . does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people,” even as his own supporters were arguing just that on social media. The comedians John Oliver and Trevor Noah made the same case into their media megaphones, arguing that Israel was wrong to attack the terrorists aiming at Israeli civilians because Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system can prevent most (but not all) civilian deaths from Hamas rockets.

People like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders (and too many other progressive members of Congress, unfortunately) are greatly concerned about whether Israel’s response to Palestinian terror meets a standard of acceptable “proportionality.” But what are the acceptable numbers in America of Jews assaulted and synagogues vandalized?

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.