There is nothing that irritates me more than token Jewish celebrities who only invoke their Judaism when it is time to slander Israel.
We have seen plenty of that throughout Israel's war in Gaza, but the comments I saw from Jewish actress Miriam Margolyes this week were especially disgraceful. "Hitler won. He changed us. He made us like him."
How dare she compare Jews to the Nazis.
Her comments were some of the most vile things I have seen in a while, and that is saying something. She mentions that she was born at the height of the Holocaust, and then says, "my people are doing exactly the same thing to another nation," and "the Palestinian nation was not responsible for the Holocaust."
The level of idiocy in her statement goes far beyond ignorance. It is a flat-out blood libel.
I have written about this several times. The war in Gaza is devastating, and civilians have suffered tremendously. Especially now, flooding Gazans with food and humanitarian aid must be a priority. But nothing about this conflict is comparable to the Holocaust. Nothing.
Gaza is not a concentration camp. Israel is not Nazi Germany. Jewish people are not Hitler.
Hamas is currently holding 50 hostages in inhumane conditions. It brought this misery upon its own people, has been stealing and profiting from humanitarian aid, while its leadership lives in luxury in Doha, Qatar. Just this week, Hamas added new, unacceptable demands to the ceasefire proposal, knowing full well it would cause the talks to collapse.
I have plenty to say about the bad decision-making of Israeli leadership. But the bottom line is that this is a war against a terrorist organization. And the fact that Miriam Margolyes was born Jewish does not give her license to use her immense platform to spread anti-Jewish venom and compare us to Nazis.
This comes right after Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin went on the New York Times and also compared Jews to Nazis, addressing Jews globally and asking, "How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and do it to someone else?" He went on to say, "Netanyahu is the most dangerous thing for Jews, not just since October 7."
Blaming Jews for the rise in antisemitism and comparing us to Nazis does nothing to fight hatred. It enables it. It gives cover to those who incite and excuse antisemitism.
Yes, this war is terrible. But those who are lying about Israel's actions, and who are distorting the definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing without acknowledging the reality of fighting a terror group in an urban warzone, are not objecting to policy. They are objecting to Israel's existence.
You are naive if you believe that antisemitism would disappear if Israel acted differently or if Netanyahu were no longer in power.
Did anyone question Germany's right to exist after the Holocaust? Or the United States after Vietnam? Should all Americans be vilified because of Trump or the statements of his administration?
No. Of course not. This logic is only ever applied to the Jewish state.
To the Jews who do not live in Israel — who were not here hiding in stairwells while rockets rained down at 6:30 in the morning, who did not watch in real time as Hamas livestreamed their crimes and paraded the dead bodies of Jews through Gaza as thousands cheered — if you still feel comfortable portraying this war as if Jews are behaving like Nazis instead of trying to prevent another October 7, you have some nerve. And you have no business pretending you care about the Jewish people.
This war began after Jews were burned alive, beheaded, raped, and tied to trees, and after Jewish babies were strangled to death with bare hands.
One of the main arguments we hear is, "Yes, October 7 was horrific, but it does not justify what Israel is doing now." I can accept that argument when it comes to how this war is being conducted. But it is much easier to say that when you do not live half an hour away from the people who committed those crimes.
Some say the whole world stood with Israel after October 7, and it was only the decisions of our government that turned us into a global pariah. To that, I say, it is easy to defend Jews when they are dead. It is much harder to defend us when we fight back and refuse to die.
That does not mean I am okay with civilians in Gaza dying. I am not. I want this bloodshed to end. But we must be honest about the scale and nature of urban warfare. The United States spent four and a half years in active military operations to fight ISIS, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 55,000 to over 100,000 civilians. In every war, it is civilians who suffer the most, often because they are held hostage by the very terrorists who claim to defend them.
As an Israeli citizen, I believe it is my patriotic duty not just to fight against those who want to harm Israel, but also to fight for Israel to be the best and most moral version of itself.
I know what is wrong with this government. I cannot wait for new elections. But I also know that we are not one new prime minister away from peace, and certainly not one policy shift away from ending antisemitism.
What actors like Margolyes and Patinkin, and those who think like them, fail to grasp is that in Israel, we do not have the luxury of asking permission to live. As Israeli-American journalist Haviv Rettig Gur once put it, "If you ask permission, you will eventually find someone who is going to say no."
When you are a Jew with an ocean between you and Hamas, you have the luxury of believing that antisemitism is somehow our fault.
But in Israel, we know better. We have seen what happens when Jews put their trust in the goodwill of the world. We have buried the bodies. We have comforted the orphans. We have watched the footage that can never be unseen.
And we understand something that those speaking from studios in London or New York will never fully grasp: Hamas did not attack us because of settlements, or Netanyahu, or Gaza.
They attacked us because we exist.
