The blood on the hands of anti-Zionism
Dear Editor,
The horrific news arising this week — the massacre of celebrants at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, and the senseless murders of two students at Brown University — are not isolated tragedies. They are the inevitable, bloody continuation of a two-year global campaign to rebrand Jew hatred as anti-Zionism. We must not forget the murders of Yaron Lichensky and Sarah Milgrim, Israeli Embassy staffers who were shot in Washington, DC, whose deaths were early warnings that the world chose to ignore.
Since the October 7, 2023 massacre, the world has watched a sinister hysteria take root. Under the guise of political critique we have seen the normalisation of calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State turn into open warfare on Jewish lives everywhere. We were told that chanting to “globalise the intifada” in Los Angeles or London was merely a cry for human rights. However, the evidence is overwhelming: synagogue burnings, the Yom Kippur terror attacks in London, and a global wave of assaults and terror. Jewish communities face relentless vandalism, and businesses are targeted by boycotts designed not to protest policy, but to destroy Jewish livelihoods.
The media bears a heavy responsibility for this bloodshed. By uncritically amplifying Islamist propaganda and framing the existence of Israel as a colonial crime rather than the indigenous existence in one’s homeland, outlets have fuelled a fire that is now consuming innocent lives globally. They have painted a target on the back of every Jew, from the diaspora in California to the beaches of Sydney.
These attacks prove a painful truth: Israel is far from being just a State; it is a necessity. The Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel — a history written in the soil long before modern borders were drawn. But whether in their ancestral homeland or in the diaspora, Jews have a right to safety. The fiction that one can separate Zionists from Jews to justify violence has been shattered.
Anti-Zionism is simply anti-Semitism with a political licence to kill. It must be stopped.
Francesca Tavares
francescatavares@yahoo.com
