Jewish nonprofit director explains lasting trauma in Israeli life one year after Oct. 7
Dr. David Fox, a director at Chai Lifeline International, spoke to the lasting "traumatization" of Oct. 7 survivors and the families of victims, as well as the lingering impact on civilian life, one year after the attacks.
October 7th was the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas invaded Israel, murdering people at random, raping, destroying homes and kidnapping people back to Gaza. There are more than 100 still held hostage, including four Americans.
Raw and hurting, American Jews watched the streets of U.S. cities fill up with crowds. The people in the streets weren’t marching to stand with the slaughtered and the raped. They were gleeful, exuberant and there were many of them.
In New York’s Times Square, hundreds of people gathered on October 8, while Israel was still sorting through their dead, and counting how many children and elderly had been kidnapped, to flash swastikas and chant "death to Israel" as well as "700," the number of Israeli dead counted at the time. That number was later revised to 1,195.
AS OCTOBER 7TH ANNIVERSARY APPROACHES, JEWISH STUDENTS BRACE FOR PROTESTS, VOW TO ‘WALK PROUDLY’
In Los Angeles, it’s been nearly a year of violent protests outside synagogues and in Jewish neighborhoods. One Jewish man was killed after a confrontation in November.
Harvard University is one of several institutions facing on-campus antisemitism. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
It seemed like antisemitism was festering all over the country.
But a closer look showed that it wasn’t, actually, happening everywhere, it was very specifically happening in places primarily run by Democrats. It’s not that antisemitism can’t exist in red areas. It can, it does. Vandalism, verbal harassment, even physical assault can happen in Republican-led places. But the occurrence is far rarer and the real difference is the consequences.
According to the Anti Defamation League (ADL) "The states with the highest number of incidents were California (1,266), New York (1,218), New Jersey (830), Florida (463) and Massachusetts (440)." Four of those states are blue states. In my red home state of Florida, we had approximately the same number of incidents as Massachusetts while having about three times the population and a third of the incidents of New York despite having over 2 million more people.
The ADL is a left-leaning Jewish organization, and yet they admit, "On a per capita basis, the states with the highest concentration of antisemitic incidents were New Jersey – with 8.93 incidents per 100,000 residents – followed by Vermont (6.64), Massachusetts (6.28), New York (6.23), Maryland (5.49) and Connecticut (5.09). On the city level, two cities – Manhattan (26.84 per 100,000) and Washington, D.C. (25.75 per 100,000) – stood out with far and away the highest levels of incidents per capita. Brookyln [sic], NY, stood out specifically in terms of physical assault incidents, with 1.16 assaults per 100,000 residents." Again, all deep blue states and cities.
The argument to defend the blue states, and their rampant antisemitism, is that Jews primarily live in those blue states, so of course, antisemitism will be higher. But that doesn’t explain Florida’s low count. It’s also hard not to notice that Mississippi had 19 incidents of vandalism and harassment while New Hampshire had 35 when they each have under 1% of their population being Jewish and Mississippi is nearly double New Hampshire’s population. There is a pattern, and it’s related to whom the population elects.
Antisemitism simply does not thrive in red areas the same way as it does in areas dominated by Democrats. Jew-hatred, and the chaos that accompanies it onto our streets is put down as quickly as it surfaces in places like Florida.
Last October, Dr. Ahmed ElKoussa was fired from his job as a Miami dentist after ripping down posters of kidnapped hostages being held by Hamas. Anti-Israel agitators protested outside Real-Time Laboratories, an American company which is a subsidiary of an Israeli weapons manufacturer, in Boca Raton, but were met with even more pro-Israel protesters. When the anti-Israel protesters got violent, Boca Raton Police immediately took action and made arrests.
University of California, Santa Cruz graduate students and other academic workers in the UAW 4811 union begin a strike and are joined by UCSC students for Justice in Palestine as they picket the main entrance to campus on Monday, May 20, 2024, in Santa Cruz, Calif. The pickets are calling for divestment in Israel and claiming Israel is committing ‘genocide.’ (Shmuel Thaler/The Santa Cruz Sentinel via AP)
And in May, when anti-Israel protesters pulled their usual move of attempting to block a highway in Orlando, they lasted a total of 11 minutes before Florida Highway Patrol arrested them. Governor Ron DeSantis boasted, "I think that's the world record."
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Meanwhile, in New York, the Manhattan district attorney has dropped all charges against the violent anti-Israel protesters who occupied Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall. In California, protesters have spent the last year blocking traffic for the Palestinian cause. Only some incidents yielded arrests. In March, protesters stopped traffic outside San Francisco International Airport and blocked security lines inside for four hours. No one was arrested. This simply does not happen in red states.
School campuses in red states were relatively quiet, while Ivy League campuses in the northeast featured Jewish students being told to "go back to Poland" and assaulted. The protests that did spring up on red state campuses were quickly brought under control.
Antisemitism simply does not thrive in red areas the same way as it does in areas dominated by Democrats. Jew-hatred, and the chaos that accompanies it onto our streets is put down as quickly as it surfaces in places like Florida.
It was obvious to the students at some of the red-state universities that the protests were about Israel, yes, but they were about America too. U.S. flags were often torn down and replaced with Palestinian flags. At the University of North Carolina, fraternity brothers protected an American flag from being defaced, while at Princeton University, protesting students halted a Memorial Day parade because it featured an American flag.
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Open antisemitism exposes a deep rot in societies and the hatred of Jews for the last year has caused many to notice that the same people hate America too. History is filled with examples of governments and societies that no longer exist because succumbing to the world’s oldest hatred was a clear sign that their civilization was on a downhill trajectory. What is happening in blue cities is exposing their own decay.
Cities, like New York, that had been prospering not so long ago have had a hard time bouncing back from the bad policies enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the rolling back of crime policies during the Bill de Blasio administration. Antisemitism is a symptom of a larger problem and places that control antisemitic activity can count on flourishing in a way that places that don’t won’t. Jew-hatred can happen anywhere, the acceptance of it does not.
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