By Daniel S. Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International CEO

As I write this, I have just returned from Israel. I arrived in Israel filled with mixed thoughts about the shadow of Oct. 7, 2023, still hanging over the country, the internal debate over how to secure the release of the hostages and how to prosecute the war against Hamas. I experienced the sirens warning of incoming missiles from the Houthis in Yemen and raced the usual one-half-minute dash for the shelter at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.

But I also came back with renewed admiration for Israeli resilience. Israel’s cafes are full; children carrying oversized backpacks congregate outside toy stores and gather at tiny restaurants serving schnitzel and cold drinks after school, and the traffic jams in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem remain frustratingly immovable.

I spoke at a conference focused on the range of challenges to the Jewish people. I met with the president of B’nai B’rith Israel, Emanuel (Mano) Cohen, which is attracting a significant number of new members. I toured Wix, an Israeli company that builds websites. I met with Israel’s minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating anti-Semitism to discuss the frightening spike in Jew hatred and best practices to confront it. I visited family and sat in my sister’s garden outside Beersheva and went to a Bat Mitzvah celebration for one niece and a L’Chaim party for another niece, recently engaged.

What other people live like this? With apologies to Tevye, life there is as precarious as a Fiddler on the Roof.

That was Israel.

The night after I returned, we learned of the brutal murders of two Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. By now, almost everyone knows of this tragic act, the gunning down of two proud young people who shared a love of Israel. They were about to become engaged in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.

I have worked professionally in our community for over 50 years. But my heart and mind have been attached to Israel and our people for much longer than that. My mother, who as an ardent Zionist, when she became pregnant with me, is said to have wished “that if it is a boy, he should be like David Ben-Gurion, and if it is a girl, she should be like Henrietta Szold.”

Well, she aimed high.

The seeds of devotion to the Jewish people were there from the outset. Both my parents were immigrants, and they loved our country, and they loved the State of Israel. They were not ideologues. I don’t remember either of them calling themselves Democrat or Republican…and on the Israeli political spectrum, I’m not sure if they ever followed the fractious continuum of Israeli politics. They were both near 50 when Israel declared independence, so they knew a world without it, one of anti-Semitism and discrimination at home and abroad, and of personal loss in the Holocaust.

My mother had exceptional antennae for anti-Semitism. She would often make reference to the lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager in Atlanta; the rabid radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin; and both the German American Bund and George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. Hers was not an alarmist “it can happen here” worldview, but it was one that led me to believe that anti-Semitism could lurk around the corner, and that I should be wary of it.

My father and mother would have been sickened by the murders of Yaron and Sarah. But they would probably have said, “I’m not surprised.” For the past 15 years or so, the pot has been boiling: The campus BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, initially dismissed by some, was the seed of the assault on Israel and its student and faculty supporters on American campuses, which later grew into the all-out tsunami of hate we are experiencing today in so many other quarters.

Social media demonization of Israel has grown apace, stoked by “influencers” parroting lies and misinformation. A steady drumbeat of bias against Israel emanating from the United Nations and a host of nations abroad, constantly flogging the Jewish state for one alleged human rights abuse or another gave additional fuel to the influencers. First, it was Israel “the apartheid state,” and then it was “the genocide of the Palestinian people.” Only a few weeks ago, Tom Fletcher, the U.N. undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, announced that in Gaza, 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours from starvation. A few days later, the U.N. pulled back on this lie, but the damage was done. It is now in the internet ether and will surely live on.

Foreign funders and domestic foundations here in the U.S. aided and abetted the ganging up on Israel and those of us in our community who stand by it. The American campus has been a major beneficiary of this support but so were doctrinaire and loud “liberation” groups, like the one to which the assassin of the Israeli embassy staffers was associated, which exist to work for the demise of Israel.

Even before Oct. 7, a shift on the American political spectrum against Israel was occurring. It skyrocketed after the Hamas attacks, into resolutions in Congress aimed at cutting off needed military assistance. Instead of galvanizing around our friend and ally  Israel and calling out Hamas for its genocidal attacks, some members of Congress—who know how to attract a TV camera or microphone—have done their best to publicly sully Israel.

The brazenness of the representatives was on full display when Rep. Ilhan Omar, she of the “it’s all about the Benjamins,” who accused supporters of Israel of dual loyalty, was asked if she had any initial comment on the murder of Yaron and Sarah. “I’m going to go now,” she said to a reporter who approached her, as she ran off to a waiting car.

The drip, drip, drip of hatred in this country toward Israel and Jews should have been stemmed long ago. Where were university administrators when the BDS pot was boiling and Jewish students were intimidated on “Anti-Apartheid Day” on their campuses? Why didn’t Title VI of the Civil Rights Act originally cover Jewish students who were victims of campus hate and intimidation? Why have professional agitators leading campus demonstrations resulting in bullying, harassment or worse against Jewish students been coddled by indulgent university presidents? Where have the voices been raised against the dis-invitations to pro-Israel academics to scholarly conferences? Why have the major internet platforms been foot-dragging regarding hate speech targeting Jews? Why is it that with a very few exceptions, the major media in this country line up at attention to criticize Israel on a near-daily basis? And why have so many public figures who should know better adopted a “don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude about the conduct of the war in Gaza?

We deserve far better. Since we arrived on these shores in 1654, American Jews have done nothing but give back to the land that offered freedom from persecution, and freedom of religion, which raged, or was denied elsewhere. We have contributed in so many ways to the building of American civilization. We’ve been an exemplary community, contributing far beyond our numbers (even in the face of restrictions and quotas, which existed for decades). For Jews, defending this country goes back to the Revolutionary War. In World War II, Jewish GIs fought in numbers far above our percentage of the nation’s population.

And in higher education, where so much of the current crisis was born and continues to burn, we have more than made our mark. Denied admission to or subject to quotas at many universities for years, we overcame that barrier, producing outstanding figures in every possible field of endeavor. And many gave back: take a look at endowed scholarly and research programs at so many colleges and universities named for their Jewish benefactors.

Doesn’t all this count for something?

The repeated lies and blood libels about Israel surely led to the tragedy that killed Yaron and Sarah. The dots were all connected. As in earlier eras in our long history, with so many inculcated with that kind of hatred, the worst is bound to happen. And it did, on that evening in May, outside a Jewish Museum in Washington.

It is not too late to reverse course, but for that to happen, American Jewry needs, at this crucial juncture in history, to put aside whatever differences amongst us we may harbor and realize that we are all in the same boat. Israel is a blessing to each of us; for 2,000 years, our forbearers were without the anchor that gives us the pride and standing we enjoy of an ancient—and modern—people. Let’s not squander the opportunity to work with our friends and allies to turn back the tide of opprobrium, and worse, directed against us.

History will surely judge us on how we navigate this moment.