On their respective websites, both the president and Senator Ted Cruz issued official statements in honor of Hanukkah. David Bernstein suggests the two statements reveal much about their senders:

President Obama’s Hanukkah is universalist, about a “struggle for justice.” There is no mention of God. Cruz’s Hanukkah . . . is about the Jewish people, with God’s help, winning the right to worship against an oppressive dictatorship. . . .

The lesson from Obama’s Hanukkah is that Americans should advocate “the fundamental dignity of every human being.” Jews as such are incidental to the holiday, as is religious freedom. Cruz’s Hanukkah lesson is that Jews must be protected from their modern enemies.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.