On the third morning of the war, I awoke to the sound of drilling outside my window on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. With one of the highest birth rates in the world (3.13 children per Jewish woman), Israel is always building. The noise ceased some hours later amid the rocket sirens and distant percussion. Moments later, the drilling resumed. As I walked toward Mahane Yehuda, the Middle Eastern market built by Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman era, it occurred to me that Israel may be an exception to the aphorism that it’s easier to destroy than to build.
As images of unspeakable evil emerged on Saturday, I urged family and friends not to look at the ‘war porn,’ for we have no right to share in that intimate moment of horror unless we ourselves are intimates or in public service that requires it. But that very day came responses that varied from ambivalent to antisocial. It suddenly became necessary to ask: Did you not see what Hamas did? Or did you see and approve?
By now, we all know someone who went from thinking that it was just another day in the Middle East, to expressing horror, compassion, and indignation. Sometimes we need to see to believe. To be fair, we’re inundated with shocking news all the time, much of it exaggerated or false. But reports of beheaded toddlers and crowds cheering for rape and murder are something altogether different.
The monstrosities in Israel crowd out moral ambivalence. Yet some remain unmoved; some rationalize and equivocate. And there are even those who want more of October 7th, those whose bloodlust was merely whetted. We saw them not only on the streets of Gaza, but also in Western cities and on American campuses. The term ‘antisocial’ is too clinical to describe what seems like a group of people who are consumed by a spiritual rage. What kind of people want the slaughter of infants, mothers, and the elderly? The Hebrew tradition gives them a name and says that they will rise in every generation: Amalek.
As the Israelites fled Egypt, the Amalekites slaughtered the most vulnerable and the stragglers: women, children, the elderly, the infirm, and the wounded. The Israelite army confronted and defeated the Amalekites, but that victory wasn’t the end. “The Lord will fight against Amalek forever,” Moses warned in Exodus, “Do not forget Amalek.” The admonition, “Do not forget,” recurs throughout Jewish scripture and liturgy.
The Amalekites stepped back into history on October 7. For one day, Israel rested, pausing to celebrate Shabbat and the end of Sukkot. For one morning, Israel took its eye off Amalek.
Almost immediately, Amalek supporters took to social media and the streets to voice their approval. There have been swastika displays and calls to exterminate global Jewry, even in the historically philosemitic Anglosphere. Many have also taken to the streets, in support of Israel and the Jewish people in the West. Indeed, many Muslims in the Middle East (including Israel) and around the world have condemned the massacre. They know something that terror enthusiasts around the world do not know, something that many Palestinians in Gaza dare not say aloud: that Palestinians are indeed oppressed not by Israel, but by other Palestinians.
Some Christians, however, continue to respond with ambiguity or apparent indifference. Even the term “peace,” mindlessly invoked by Christians, bears a moral repugnance. It implies that there are two legitimate sides who might negotiate a just peace, and that Israel is no better than its enemy. There will be peace if Hamas surrenders their arms and releases the hostages. (Is that what Christians envisage when they pray for peace?) Otherwise the terms will necessarily be dictated by the Israeli military, and the moral burden of this falls on those whom the Palestinian people elected. One can negotiate with Pharaoh but not with Amalek.
Amalek sympathizers can be found on the political right and left, among the secular and the religious, and in every corner of the public culture. But they are most prevalent in elite institutions, especially in higher education, where a long-building wave of ideological extremism and Jew-hatred crashed on October 7. It has yet to recede.
The “Do not forget” of the Torah is the “Don’t look away” of today. Many young Americans were visiting Israel for the holy days. On the Sunday before, I watched American football in a room filled with kippah-wearing youth from across the United States Many now return to U.S. campuses where the butchery of Jews on October 7 has been lauded. The images from American campuses aren’t as horrific as those of the slaughter that took place here, but they compound the trauma of Jews around the world. After telling people not to look at images of October 7, I’ve since found myself telling Jewish friends not to look at the videos coming from American campuses.
At the Michael Levin Base in Jerusalem, a nonprofit that serves ‘lone soldiers’ (IDF soldiers who have no family in Israel with whom to celebrate Shabbat or from whom they can receive care packages), young Israeli men and women gathered supplies for the hundreds of thousands of reservists who had reported for duty from wherever they were—many without packing. The young volunteers debated whether or not to look at the videos circulating, including one of Gazans cheering as the corpse of a teenage girl was paraded past. “Watch it,” said one young woman to another, “Remember their faces.” Don’t look away. Do not forget.
The contours of a protracted conflict have come into focus since October 7. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observed, “The hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.” It should be no surprise that the birthplace of monotheism is the locus of a struggle for civilization against barbarism, nor that Western academia is a locus of antisemitism, moral cowardice, and hate. After all, it was universities that terminated their Jewish professors without even needing a prompting from the Nazi state—the only such institution in Nazi Germany.
The hatred woven into ideologies on campuses exists far from the consequences of those ideas in Israel. I joined a retired IDF soldier as he delivered supplies to his former unit, the Jerusalem Brigade, near Gaza. Old reservists, veterans of other wars, were mixed with young soldiers. I saw Israelis deliver packages, fathers embrace sons, smiles and bravado—but all of it concealed a deep sorrow in the knowledge that not everyone here will still be alive in a few months.
In Israel, it’s a time of mourning and war, but also of apprehension. Although the IDF controls all of Israel and a massive army is now mobilized, the urban warfare in Gaza will be terrible and Hezbollah poses a still greater threat in the north. On the home front, it remains to be seen if the present good will of Arab-Israelis survives images of dead civilians in Gaza. That vulnerability is evidence of Israel’s commitment to pluralism.
One in five Israeli citizens today is Palestinian—descendants of those who remained in Israel in 1948, many of whom are deeply patriotic. Conversely, there are no Jews in Gaza or the West Bank, and few across the Arab world where they once flourished. In fact, the majority of Israel’s Jewish population today is of Sephardi or Mizrahi extraction, not European. Their ancestors fled or were expelled from places like Egypt, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen after 1948, and many knew nothing about European Zionism.
Implicit in anti-Zionist, decolonialist ideologies is that the Sephardi Jews should return to the countries of their ancestors, because Israel is ‘illegitimate’ (although the number of displaced Sephardi Jews is greater than the number of displaced Palestinians). If Israel is illegitimate for the expulsion of some Palestinians in 1948, what of the legitimacy of Arab states for expelling Jews after 1948? And where are the campus voices demanding the right of return for Sephardi Jews? Such questions aren’t contemplated by the Amalek-adjacent. Israel—or rather “the Jews”—will be blamed for every evil, even those manifestly not of their doing. Such are the burdens of the scapegoat.
As Israel prepares for war, there is a conspicuous absence of men on the street. Over 300,000 reservists have been called up. Planes arrive each day with young men and women from Latin and North America, Europe, and beyond. Yet in the IDF, much like an Israeli street—or bomb shelter—one finds not only Jews but Muslims and Christians, among others.
In northern Israel, within sight of the Lebanese border, a Lebanese Maronite Catholic woman, herself an IDF volunteer, texts me photos of her son, a soldier deployed near Gaza. Bedouin and other Muslim and Druze soldiers are preparing for war alongside Jewish Israelis in order to fight Amalek together. This is the story of Israel: a young state but an ancient nation, at war with an equally ancient but also generational evil. The outcome is always the same.
One hears in Israel the sounds of war and prayer, sorrow and music; of a people who pause to grieve, then carry on. And Jaffa Street is filled with all the vexatious sounds that accompany construction. Israel is at war, yet Israel is building.
