In the public relations war against Israel that is being waged alongside the war on the ground, the terrorists of Hamas have employed some of the same manipulative strategies that are commonly used by abusive individuals.

DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." This is a method used by perpetrators "to confuse and silence their victims," psychologists Sarah Harsey, Eileen Zurbriggen, and Jennifer Freyd explained in 2017. While DARVO is often associated with interpersonal violence, Hamas and its supporters have weaponized this tactic on a global scale. They have denied the atrocities that Hamas members themselves captured on video, denied that the October 7, 2023, attack targeted civilians, and sought to cast themselves as the victims of the war they started.

Disturbingly, some in the media have been willing participants in this reversal of reality. As with other similar ploys such as the Livingstone formulation or Holocaust inversion, it's important to be able to recognize and name this rhetorical device in order to be able to fight it effectively.

For example, a March 5 headline in the Forward read, "Israel's brutal assault on Gaza demands a new reading of the Purim story's final chapter," and, similarly, on March 9, Rolling Stone called the illegal encampments at Columbia University, "First Amendment-protected rallies against a brutal assault on Gaza." Israel, of course, is not "assaulting" Gaza. It was Hamas – that is, the government of Gaza – that assaulted Israel on October 7 and that continues to hold 59 hostages, including 24 that are believed to be alive and in extremely inhumane conditions. Hamas has refused to end the war it started, which it could do immediately by surrendering and releasing the hostages unconditionally, and it pledges to repeat its violent actions if allowed to survive. The claim that Israel is the aggressor is a distortion of reality – a reversal of victim and offender.

Some news outlets have at times used language that carelessly implied that Israel started the war or even omitted the way that the war started. It was especially shocking, even in a pseudo-news publication like Hollywood Reporter, to read explicitly on March 26 that Israel started the war: "Israel's response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks sparked the ongoing Israeli-Gaza conflict." Obviously, as the entertainment magazine's correction a week later made clear, the war began when Hamas attacked Israel. The claim that Israel's response to an act of war is what started the war is illogical on its face – another example of a reversal of victim and offender.

Throughout the war, we have heard from Hamas partisans such as Al Jazeera that Israel is responsible for the deaths of its own citizens on October 7 through an alleged "Hannibal Directive." This is a brazen attempt to shift the blame for deaths that occurred during an attack from the attackers onto those who defended against the attack. And on February 22, the day after the return of the bodies of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, Ryan Grim of Drop Site News posted on X, "it was announced 15 months ago they were killed in an Israeli air strike." When the bodies were returned, forensic evidence showed the two children were murdered by their captors, and there was never any evidence beyond Hamas's say-so that they were killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Ironically, though, Grim continued, "this attempt to just keep repeating a claim as fact and turn it into truth without evidence is quite striking." Again, any deaths that occurred on October 7, as well as any deaths of hostages that occurred in captivity, are the fault of the party that initiated the attack and no one else. This is a cynical and manipulative tactic, worthy of the worst abusers, by which Hamas attempts to absolve itself of guilt.

The most pervasive form of this victim-offender reversal is the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. When Hamas broke through the border fence on October 7, 2023, it was acting on the genocidal sentiment expressed in its charter, "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews."

On the other hand, military experts like Retired Major John Spencer and Colonel Richard Kemp have attested that Israel is taking all possible precautions to avoid civilian deaths. A report by the Henry Jackson Society demonstrated that Hamas' casualty figures are inflated. Seven former prosecutors of Nazis called the accusation against Israel "outrageous." Hamas started a war, and all wars involve some civilian casualties. But Hamas – which, again, is the government of Gaza – can end the war at any time by releasing the remaining hostages unconditionally and surrendering. If this were actually a genocide, it would be the first genocide in history in which the government of the people being genocided had the power to stop it and somehow chose not to.

And yet, on December 17, 2024, in a review of Michael Moore's film "From Ground Zero," Variety called the pseudo-documentary "a defiant act of creativity in the face of genocide." On January 15, reporting on the ceasefire negotiations, Rolling Stone wrote, "the brutality of the war has spurred accusations of engineered famine, war crimes, and genocide against Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip." Even CNN broadcast this libel: "What happened to Gaza will have to be recorded in human conscience as the first ever live-streamed genocide," Palestinian Authority diplomat Husam Zomlot falsely claimed on the Amanpour Hour on January 22.

In truth, Hamas, not Israel, has acted with genocidal intent. But in a massive reversal of victim and perpetrator, NGOs like Amnesty and governments such as that of South Africa assert that it is Israel, the party that fought off an attempt at genocide, that is committing genocide, and misguided allies in the media give credence to the claim.

Hamas named the October 7 attack "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood," and it's been accompanied by a flood of false narratives in the media, including those that rely on this manipulative reversal of victim and offender. The authors of the 2017 paper cited above documented "evidence for the existence of DARVO as a perpetrator strategy." And the terrorists of Hamas have used it effectively. The goal is to deflect blame off of the perpetrator, Hamas, and onto its target, Israel. Responsible journalists must not allow themselves to be exploited towards this end, and we must call out this tactic when we see it.

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"Ireland's position has been clear on this from day one. We want to see the release of all hostages, absolutely. We condemned the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel, a hundred percent, absolutely. A horrific terrorist attack," Simon Harris, the prime minister of Ireland, said last week.

A welcome remark, no?

But wait. In the very same press conference, he completely undercut this sentiment when he asked, "What about what Netanyahu is doing to the innocent children of Gaza?"

Of course, it is not Prime Minister Netanyahu who is harming the children of Gaza. Hamas started a war not only with the full knowledge that any war involves civilian casualties but also with the specific intent of exacerbating any such harm. As even the New York Times eventually reported, the Qassam Brigades "hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons in miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas – even a child's bedroom – blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants." Netanyahu is not responsible for this.

To portray this war as though it is Netanyahu's actions, and not those of Hamas, that are hurting the children of Gaza is functionally, if not explicitly, to claim that Israel has no right to prosecute this war.

Harris' condemnation of the October 7, 2023 attack is not going to dissuade Hamas from attempting to make good on its promise to repeat it. Nor is his call for releasing the hostages likely to have any effect. Hamas is an international outlaw organization whose leaders are jihadists motivated by a fundamentalist, eliminationist religious fervor. Calls for them to change their course of action coming from the Irish Taoiseach, therefore, aren't going to have any effect on them.

Harris' comments came in response to the news that Israel plans to close its embassy in Ireland. The closure is a result of the Irish cabinet voting to join South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which puts forward the fabricated claim that Israel is committing genocide against the people of Gaza.

Ireland's Foreign Affairs Department is reported to have said, "By legally intervening in South Africa's case, Ireland will be asking the ICJ to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state." Just as Amnesty did, Ireland has implicitly admitted that the traditional definition of "genocide," does not apply, but seeks to change the definition in order to apply the label to Israel.

The intended result is to prevent Israel from completing its mission of eliminating the terror organization that wants to repeat the 10/7 attack. Ireland is condemning that attack, while simultaneously taking action to enable the next one. Its condemnation, therefore, is meaningless and hypocritical.

Prime Minister Harris' empty condemnation echoes that of international policy heavyweights Cynthia Nixon and Dua Lipa. In December of last year, Nixon, an actress and self-styled political activist, told The View, "Every time I speak on this, I say really loudly that the atrocities committed by Hamas, they're brutal, they're devastating, they're unforgivable, all people of conscience must condemn them," even as she demanded that Israel "cease fire." And in January, the singer Dua Lipa told Rolling Stone, "I feel so bad for every Israeli life lost and what happened on Oct. 7," just before signing an open letter demanding an immediate ceasefire.

It seems as though Taoiseach Harris was attempting to emulate these celebrities' crocodile tears. But those who oppose Israel's taking action to ensure that Hamas can't rebuild and attack again are merely being performative in their condemnations.

Karen Bekker is the assistant director of the Media Response Team at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a media-monitoring, research, and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East.

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Cynthia Nixon, John Oliver, Chef José Andrés. An award-winning writer with an essay in the London Review of Books. Protesters outside the Nova exhibit in Manhattan. Celebrities, faux-academics, and activists - these are some of the people who have been engaging in a particularly noxious form of antisemitism since the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel.

Lesley Klaff explained this particular phenomenon in 2014. "What has been called 'Holocaust Inversion,'" she wrote in Fathom, "involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the 'new' Nazis and the Palestinians as the 'new' Jews), and an inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of 'the Jews'). ... The Holocaust ... is now being used, instrumentally, as a means to express animosity towards the homeland of the Jews."

While this phenomenon has been at play for at least a decade, it is now, disturbingly, going mainstream. When Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon appeared on The View in December, she told her hosts, to much applause, that her oldest child, "has been reaching out to my wife and I and asking us, imploring us really to say, use your voice to affirm as loudly as you can that never again means never again for anyone." Never again, obviously, is a reference to the Holocaust, and Nixon's analogy constructs Jews as the new Nazis. That the analogy was based on claims that were categorically false didn't seem to register, to her or to anyone on The View.

In March, in a 7,500 word piece in the London Review of Books pretentiously posturing as thoughtful and compassionate, Pankaj Mishra wrote, "That yesterday's victims are very likely to become today's victimisers is the lesson of organised violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places. I was still shocked by the dark meaning the Israeli state had drawn from the Shoah, and then institutionalised in a machinery of repression."

Mishra disingenuously feigns concern for the memory of the Holocaust, even as he falsely asserts that the Israeli war in Gaza is in danger of eclipsing it. He writes, "universalist reference points – the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians...."

Similarly, he puts up a pretense that he has studied the issue and only reluctantly reached a conclusion of Israeli guilt. But what the many falsifications and distortions in his article show, is that Israel's guilt was a foregone conclusion for him, and he went out in search of evidence to support it, while disregarding evidence to the contrary. For Mishra and others who engage in Holocaust inversion, Israel's guilt has already been established by the Holocaust.

Holocaust inversion transposes the guilt of the abusers, the Nazis, onto the abused, the Jews, and leaves no room for any other possibility. It plays on a widespread societal belief about abused children: they can grow up to become abusers themselves – though of course most do not. But Holocaust inversion takes it a step further. Projecting this archetype about individuals onto a nation, it does not merely take the possibility that the abused can become abusers, it assumes, as Mishra did, that it is inevitable that the abused become abusers, and leaves no room even for the possibility that the abused is actually innocent.

This troubling trend continued. In April, after claiming that the Jewish state is conducting "a war against humanity itself," Chef José Andrés told Martha Raddatz on ABC's This Week, "if somebody knows suffering, that's the people of Israel. If somebody really understands the meaning of suffering, if somebody should be holding the highest standards of humanity, I will say that's also the people of Israel." His obvious implication is that what the Jews are now doing to the Palestinians, is the same as what the Nazis did to the Jews. Andrés, the founder of the World Central Kitchen relief agency, invoked Jewish suffering during the Holocaust in order to imply an analogy to what Gazans were experiencing, even as he parroted Nazi-esque language himself. Raddatz offered no push-back, and his statements aired on a major network.

The point of Holocaust inversion, of course, is to legitimize violence against Jews. After all, if they are Nazis, they must deserve it. This was made clear in June, when Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani led those who gathered to protest an exhibit about the Nova music festival in a chant claiming the festival was "like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust." Gaza, in her absurd analogy, was like the gas chambers. And the Israeli ravegoers, according to her logic, deserved what they got.

And then last month, John Oliver brought Holocaust inversion to HBO using language almost identical to that of Cynthia Nixon. "A phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is 'never again,' an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it's always been open to two interpretations. There's the one that means, this must never again happen to the Jewish people and the one that means, this must never again happen to any people anywhere, and in the West Bank as in Gaza right now it's pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored."

This is an overt accusation that Israel is committing a Holocaust in Gaza, a claim that is as baseless today as it was when Nixon said it in December, and all the times it was said prior to October 7, 2023 as well. Genocide is defined by an "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." There is no such thing as a war with no civilian casualties, but Israel "has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war," according to John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point.

Holocaust inversion doesn't merely project Nazi guilt onto the Jews. By creating a fictional new Holocaust, it absolves the actual Nazis of the guilt of a unique evil, making it a form of Holocaust denial. Uninformed and ignorant people like John Oliver and Cynthia Nixon are not likely to stop doing it, but those who platform them must respond responsibly.

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More and more, we starting to hear from influential people in America, even Jews, that Israel's time in Gaza is effectively expired. This has started to go beyond the usual anti-Zionist Jews to some like the Forward's Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren, who recently made the clueless claim that a unilateral ceasefire, without victory over Hamas, is a "moral imperative." Abhorrently, Rudoren even advocates for leaving some of the hostages behind. "Israel must immediately end the fighting in Gaza," she writes, "committing to a ceasefire in exchange for the release of as many hostages as possible." (Emphasis added.)

But Rudoren and others that hold this position have it totally backwards. It is victory over Hamas – the terror organization that Mosab Hassan Yousef recently called "the devil who uses Palestinian children as human shields" – that is the moral imperative.

As is well known by now, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists broke through the barrier between Israel and Gaza to torture, rape, and kill 1200 men, women, and children, and take another 240 back to Gaza as hostages. Much has been made about the fact that by October 8, before Israel had even completely repelled this barbaric attack, anti-Israel protesters were marching by the hundreds in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, and elsewhere. But few have articulated the real reason behind these protests. The immediate increase in security presence at Jewish institutions, beginning at the Simchat Torah observances on the night of October 7 in the US, demonstrated what we all understood instinctively – that the Hamas attack on Israel was a signal to antisemites everywhere: It's open season on the Jews.

This played out in the weeks that followed: In October New York's Second Avenue Deli was vandalized, as were, in November, Jewish-owned shops in San Francisco and Philadelphia. Also in November, the president of AIPAC had his home smoke-bombed and vandalized, a synagogue and a JCC in Montreal were attacked with firebombs, two Jewish schools in Montreal were attacked with gunshots, and a school in Indiana was attacked in the mistaken belief that it was Jewish. That same month a teacher in a New York City high school had to hide from a mob of antisemitic students in her own school.

Israeli and diaspora Jews are inextricably connected, one corporeal being. When Israel is weak, Jews around the world are more vulnerable. When Israel is secure, Jews around the world are secure as well, not only because Israel projects Jewish strength, but even if for no other reason than they know they have a place to go. In France, in the aftermath of the 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of 23-year old Ilan Halimi, the 2012 murders of three Jewish children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, and the 2015 shooting at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, French Jews departed for Israel in record numbers. Watching Hamas sympathizers take over American universities, while rhetoric worthy of actual Nazis find its way to This Week with George Stephanopoulos and USA Today, it no longer seems inconceivable that one day American Jews will follow a similar path.

The fate of Jews in Israel and Jews in the diaspora are intertwined. We need each other, and we depend on each other. And if Israel does not destroy Hamas, all Jews around the world will be less safe.

In Gaza, as of this writing, there is functionally a unilateral ceasefire. But last weekend students at Columbia University chanted "Israel go to hell," and "the martyr is Allah's beloved." A nighttime mob was dancing and drumming while ecstatically yelling, "we don't want no Zionists here." Another protester screamed, "Remember the 7th of October. That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not ten more times, not 100 more times, not 1000 more times, but 10,000 times." The lull in fighting in Gaza has not placated the mob. Rather, it has further emboldened them. Sunday morning, the Rabbi on Columbia's campus was advising Jewish students to leave for their own safety. While tent encampments similar to the one at Columbia are growing on other campuses around the country, by Tuesday night, Within Our Lifetime co-founder Nerdeen Kiswani was at Columbia leading a new chant: "From the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free."

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to pledge to destroy Hamas, and Wednesday, the IDF said that it is ready to go into Rafah. Whether Israel has the military power to do so is not a serious question. Whether political leaders around the world, whose support is waning as the chorus of antisemitic protests grows, will ever allow the Jews to win another war, is.

But if Hamas is allowed to live another day, it will mean that Hamas is able and allowed to cross the border and attack Jews with functional impunity. Functional impunity, because the destruction in Gaza, the civilian deaths, and even their own "martyrs" are not a punishment for the jihadists of Hamas. Existentially, this will bring the Jews both in Israel and worldwide back to the pre-Israel condition of being essentially defenseless, as they were in Europe as well as the Middle East from the beginning of the diaspora until the reestablishment of the Jewish state in 1948. The fact of Jews having a refuge in Israel will become meaningless, as it won't be a true refuge, but just another place where Jews can be attacked by their enemies at will.

Jews in the diaspora need Israel, and need Israel to be secure. It is imperative, therefore, that American Jews insist to all of our political leaders that Israel has the right to proceed into Rafah, that we articulate the necessity of finishing the job that was started. And Israel needs Jews in the diaspora to make clear to all, the necessity of Israeli victory.

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Bella Hadid is an American model of Palestinian and Dutch descent. She is known for her beauty, her many magazine covers and her pro-Palestinian activism.

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Hadid is, of course, entitled to hold and voice her own opinions. But she seems to have crossed a line in May of 2021, when she posted a video of herself on Instagram chanting, along with others, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."This is unambiguously a call for the destruction of Israel. Most Jews understand it as an endorsement of ethnic cleansing or worse.

As CAMERA has reported before, even under the most generous interpretation of the phrase, one that allows Jews to remain, a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea" would result in the loss of Jewish self-determination – a right that Arabs currently exercise in 21 countries and Muslims in 56 countries. It would also result in the loss of the only Jewish homeland and a refuge for persecuted Jews in the Diaspora. It would be the loss of the only place on Earth where Jews can go and find their holidays marked by school and government closures, their calendar in use and Hebrew spoken as the primary language of society.

Hadid is influential. Journalist Lahav Harkov has pointed out that Bella and her sister, model Gigi Hadid, have more social media followers than the entire population of Israel. So, when Bella Hadid calls for the destruction of Israel, people take note. That's why the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs stepped in to respond to her at the time.

Of course, you wouldn't know anything about this controversy from Glamour's recent article about Hadid and her supposed troubles. According to Glamour, Hadid's "outspoken advocacy for Palestine" – rather than her call for ethnic cleansing – has cost her jobs and friends. The magazine also covers up the model's call for the destruction of the world's only Jewish state, writing:

After attending a pro-Palestine march in New York City in 2021 and posting about the march on Instagram, Hadid was lambasted by the official Israel Twitter account, which called her an "advocate for throwing Jews into the sea." She, along with sister Gigi Hadid and singer Dua Lipa, were also the targets of a full-page ad in The New York Times … that called their pro-Palestine advocacy akin to "anti-Semitism."

Glamour does not appear to have challenged or investigated any of Hadid's assertions. It even embedded an Instagram post in which Hadid repeats a quote she attributes to Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Glamour could have learned in less than five minutes that even the ferociously anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada admits the quote is not accurate.

More to the point, Glamour does not seem to have taken the trouble to find out from any of the businesses or friends who dissociated themselves from Hadid what, specifically, they found so objectionable.

The fashion magazine that once gave an award to virulently anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour not only failed to determine the particulars of Hadid's advocacy but also seems to have failed to ask basic questions such as: What are the borders of this "Palestine" for which Hadid advocates? When was its sovereignty established? What is its history? And perhaps most importantly, what, specifically, would it mean to Hadid to "free" it "from the river to the sea"?

With such shoddy work, it's no surprise that Glamour's fellow Condé Nast publication Teen Vogue, which has a record of hostility towards Israel, picked up the piece and published it as well.

Of course, neither publication covered, for example, Regina Spektor's recent comments about the double standard that is applied when the media covers Israel – in effect proving Spektor's point. While the media is rife with such double standards, in the case of Condé Nast's fashion publications, there is not even the pretense of even-handedness or any attempt at actual journalism.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The ceasefire that ended Israel's Operation Guardian of the Walls seems to be holding, thankfully, and it begins to recede from view. Yet, it's still necessary to review some of the commentary we saw on this defensive operation.

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As a Conservative Jew for my entire adult life, I was glad to see the Rabbinical Assembly's statement two weeks ago, expressing solidarity with "our siblings in Israel" and pain at "the violence, fear, and loss of innocent life in the region." The statement was endorsed by the major bodies of the Conservative movement, including the Jewish Theological Seminary.

At the same time, I was dismayed to see that 10 of Jewish Theological Seminary's rabbinical students had signed on to a very different statement. This statement read, in part, "As American Jews, our institutions tell stories of Israel rooted in hope for what could be, but oblivious to what is. Our tzedakah money funds a story we wish were true, but perpetuates a reality that is untenable and dangerous. Our political advocacy too often puts forth a narrative of victimization, but supports violent suppression of human rights and enables apartheid in the Palestinian territories, and the threat of annexation. ...

"What will it take for us to see that our Israel has the military and controls the borders? How many Palestinians must lose their homes, their schools, their lives, for us to understand that today, in 2021, Israel's choices come from a place of power and that Israel's actions constitute an intentional removal of Palestinians?" (Emphasis in original).

"When we vote, we can vote for leaders who won't continue paying lip service to peace while funding violence. We can use our position as citizens of Israel's biggest benefactor to push to regulate and redirect funds in equitable ways that promote a peaceful and just future. "

Sympathy for the Palestinian people's plight is well-deserved. They surely find themselves in an impossible situation given successive Palestinian Authority leaders who rejected multiple opportunities for independence, as well as the murderous ideology of Hamas. Our rabbis and rabbinical students are well-situated to ensure that this dimension of the conflict doesn't get overlooked. But the letter goes far beyond sympathy, or a plea for peace. This letter spreads antisemitic libel and calls to hinder fellow Jews in their ability to defend themselves.

The letter calls on American Jews to, "vote for leaders who won't continue paying lip service to peace while funding violence." I wish I could say they meant leaders who won't funnel money into the Palestinian pay-for-slay program. But from the context, it is obvious they are referring to Israel's self-defense. In other words, these individuals want American Jews to advocate that our Israeli brothers and sisters are left without American assistance in defending themselves, exposed to the very Hamas rocket fire that rained down for nearly two weeks on almost every part of Israel, and vote for politicians who also support the goal of leaving Israel defenseless. This is a position that is beyond the pale.

If that were not sufficient, the letter goes on to further an antisemitic libel – that Israel practices apartheid. CAMERA has explained at great length the mendacity and depravity of this allegation. In the Wall Street Journal, Warren Goldstein, the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, wrote recently: "No one who truly understands the systematic racism and denial of basic human rights that made apartheid infamous could, with any integrity, apply the term to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a complex political, religious and cultural dispute concerning national identities."

"So why the lie? Because Human Rights Watch seeks to delegitimize Israel, to portray it falsely as a state founded on the cardinal sin of racism, thereby denying it the moral right to exist."

The JTS students (as well as the others) who signed this letter have advanced a slander that is used to undermine the only guaranteed Jewish sanctuary in the world. CAMERA's student leaders have worked hard around the country debunking this myth, and it is especially disturbing to see it promoted from within this storied Jewish institution.

That 10 students at the JTS rabbinical school – who proudly proclaim, "We are future leaders of the Jewish community" – are so poorly equipped to distinguish fact from fictions promoted by agenda-driven, EU-funded NGOs, that they understand so little about Israel's purpose and history and its enemies that they would willingly see it disarmed, raises many troubling questions about what is being taught at the Conservative movement's flagship institution.

How, exactly, is JTS screening and preparing these "future leaders," who are easily hoodwinked into believing falsehoods put forth by a group whose own founder decried that it had "lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah"? What are they learning about morality, if they are not learning that Jews, too, have a right to self-defense? What are they being taught about Israel, if they are unaware of the great lengths to which the IDF goes to avoid civilian casualties?

Finally, one must ask, whether JTS indeed believes that individuals with such gaps in their learning and understanding are, indeed, fit to be the "future leaders" of the Conservative movement.

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