Hope Discovered on Facebook
Two Very Different Voices cut through the Noise
We are a frequent poster on Facebook and spend part of each day reading what others there have to say. Many people have given up on the platform, either finding it inappropriate for serious discussion, or daunted by a sense that the same nonsense comes up again and again with no prospect for respite or repair.
In spite of these challenges, we’ve found over time that Facebook can be a useful place to meet likeminded people or to mobilize around an issue. For example, when we became aware in 2021, of a campaign (led by Canadian Jewish faculty!) to advocate against the adoption of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, at Canadian universities, we were moved to start a Facebook Group called Canadians Supporting IHRA. Today the group has 381 members and remains an active venue for addressing antisemitism in Canada. If you agree that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is a realistic, useful, good faith endeavor, supported by Jewish allies from around the world, to make non-Jews aware of the Jewish experience of antisemitism in our era, please join the group.
Over the course of our many years on the platform we’ve connected to over 1400 friends, living all over the planet, and often have occasion for meaningful exchanges, on lighter matters as well. Daily interaction with these people is a regular and enjoyable part of our routine.
Still, after 19 months of war, we have become accustomed to a depressing new normal in our Facebook feed. We regularly read posts (some by Jewish faculty at Canadian universities) treating the blood libel of Israeli genocide in Gaza as established fact. These posts inevitably draw horrific comments comparing Jews to Nazis and offering praise for the “courage” of the poster for writing defamatory statements that are treated as common knowledge (presumably the courage is for standing up to shadowy Jewish/Zionist power).
After commenting on one such post this week, we were “schooled” by an (apparently Jewish) individual on the “truth” about the Israeli government:
Today’s Israeli government is a regime that is ideologically committed to torturing and killing every Palestinian so they can take over all the land from the river to the sea. You cannot deny that and expect to be credible. Netanyahu and his evil sidekicks have made their plans quite clear. They are driving the wave of antisemitism on “the left.” They wanted this war. That’s why Netanyahu was allied with Hamas; that why he was criminally negligent in his lack of effort to stop the attack on October 7th.
Perhaps you are unaware that this war didn’t start on October 7th. You are either unaware of the inhumanity of the occupation or you think supporting such a morally depraved effort is just fine. Well, many Jews are horrified by such indifference to human life. I thought Jews understood the importance of equality and social justice. They never should have become cruel occupiers. Whatever happened to Tikkun Olam?
We challenged the poster’s claims:
<Name Redacted> you state a series of lies and half truths and use them as a pretext to shame me for supporting Israeli self-defence.
That seems to be the best Jewish antizionists can do in the face of the worst attack on Jews since the Shoah.
I’m no longer moved by this kind of posturing. They came to kill us and we are fighting back. There is no alternative.
Tikkun Olam begins with defeating our enemies. When we are safe in our homeland we can fix the rest of the world.
To this we received the following response, which has sadly become familiar
David Roytenberg I feel sorry for you. Just like Trump supporters, your fear and need for retribution have caused you to lose your humanity.
The atmosphere in which it is possible for a Jewish woman living in North America to believe that the Israeli government “is ideologically committed to torturing and killing every Palestinian” is analyzed in a particularly compelling way by an author we recently discovered. This is discussed in the next section.
Important New Voices on Facebook
In spite of the sheer volume of hostile propaganda that can be found even within my circle of Facebook friends, I’ve been pleased in the past couple of weeks to encounter two people who are addressing the upheavals and violence we are facing both in Israel and here in Canada, in ways that seem refreshing and new.
The first of them is a doctoral student in Anthropology, studying at McGill. His name is Adam Louis-Klein. Adam is bringing the perspective of his studies of indigenous peoples in the Amazon to bear on the Jewish experience. The result is a remarkably compelling analysis of the many issues that we have been struggling with in the 19 months since the beginning of the war, as well as in the years before it.
I will quote just one post here, but Adam has been pouring out his thoughts daily on Facebook. Every one of them seems to shine new light on familiar problems. Here is an extraordinarily lucid analysis of why contemporary antizionism is in fact a potent form of antisemitism:
The recent congressional hearing with college presidents revealed how far our institutions have drifted from moral clarity. When asked directly whether antizionism is antisemitism, the president of Haverford could not simply say yes. That hesitation is not neutral—it reflects a refusal to name the ideology that now most endangers Jews globally.
Antizionism is not a form of policy critique. It is a holistic ideology—rooted in Nazi, Soviet, and Islamist genealogies—that targets the legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty. Its logic is circular: it begins with the presumption that Israel is uniquely evil, and uses that presumption to render even the most implausible accusations believable. Those accusations are then used to reaffirm the original premise. Israel must be evil—look at what it's accused of.
But when pressed on this structure—on how such accusations function rhetorically, on how they erase Jewish subjectivity—antizionists retreat into a bait-and-switch. They claim it’s only about policy, only about Netanyahu, only about the right-wing. That’s the sleight of hand: the bait is the essential delegitimization of Jewish nationhood; the switch is the pretended moderation of mere critique.
And so, the question of where to draw the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism becomes itself a circular argument—because antizionists, as such, are always shifting the line. The boundary can never be clearly marked, because its instability is the mechanism of the ideology. The issue is not simply the content of specific accusations—which change constantly—but the structure of the discourse itself. What renders antizionism an irrational and illegitimate form of “critique” is that it systematically excludes Jewish voices, denies Jews the right to define themselves, and converts Jewish peoplehood into a symbol of global wrong. It does not engage Jews as interlocutors—it turns them into targets.
This ever-shifting line also fuels a false public debate: academic freedom versus antisemitism. But this is a pseudo-conversation. Academic freedom is already violated when Jewish students are defamed, harassed, and structurally excluded—when they are denied the basic right to participate in pluralistic dialogue without being told that their people, alone, must justify their existence. True academic freedom does not mean shielding antisemitism behind the mask of critique; it means protecting the rights of all communities, including Jews, to speak, study, and live without ideological and physical coercion.
Until we expose this pattern—its rhetorical tricks, its shifting boundaries, its abuse of liberal principles—the defamation will continue: masked as debate, legitimized as conscience, and defended as freedom. We must be able to state clearly and unequivocally that antizionism is antisemitism.
We encourage all of our readers who are on the Facebook platform to follow Adam’s many public posts.
Image: Antizionists disrupt access to the library at Colombia University last week Source: Fox News
A Palestinian Who Insists on Telling the Truth about Hamas
(Editor’s Note: We consider Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib to be a refreshing new voice coming from the Palestinian side of the divide. This article should not be taken as an endorsement, by him, of our views, nor a blanket endorsement, by us, of everything he has to say)
The other voice we discovered this past week is Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. Ahmed is from Gaza and currently lives in Washington DC. He is described in his Facebook profile as Director at RFP, which is Realign for Palestine. He is harsh in his criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza, as one might expect from a person who hails from Gaza City and has lost numerous family members during the current conflict. However, he is, if anything, even more harsh in his criticism of Hamas. His posts are also public on Facebook and we are reading them with interest and great respect.
Ahmed also has no time for the lawless left wing mobs on North American campuses, who have appropriated the Palestinian cause for their own purposes. Here is what he wrote about a protester’s comment that pictures of dead and maimed Gazans on social media were good for the cause:
Please die, it's great for us! In a conversation with a “pro-Palestine” individual that I hope one day soon will be available for the whole world to see, the person said the quiet part out loud: dead & maimed Palestinians in Gaza are excellent content on social media to help delegitimize Israel and make this cause popular.
When I pushed back and said that this is just what Sinwar & Hamas wanted and have long promoted, the individual said well, it’s tragic and sad, but they’re going to die anyway, so why not make their sacrifices count. I pleaded that we’re talking about my 12-year-old niece Farah, my dad’s youngest brother uncle Riyad, my aunts Zeinab, my khalo Abdullah, cousins Yahya and Heba, who didn’t want to be sacrificed for your protests and anti-Israel activism on college campuses, but to no avail.
This individual is not alone; for many alleged “pro-Palestine” activists, this is a spectator sport that has little to no impact on their lives and is a means through which to vector far-left cultist ideology and beliefs about resistance, post-colonialism, anti-Westernism, and faux theories of intersectionality.
I’ll say it again: the “pro-Palestine” movement outside of Gaza in general, and especially in the Western world, has devolved into one of the most anti-Palestinian groups of people I have ever encountered; their speech, actions, intentions, and views have consistently demonstrated this fact.
Please stay away from our cause and stop sucking the oxygen out of the room – my family and 50,000+ dead Palestinians are not sexy content for your Instagram and social feeds to fuel your ineffective, harmful, divisive, and harmful activism.
Image: Screenshot from the web site of Realign for Palestine
In the midst of the grief and trauma stemming from the atrocities of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent nineteen months of war, as well as the increasingly menacing propaganda Canadian Jews are living with, it is heartening to see that there are people who are working tirelessly to get at the truth of what is happening and to advocate change that will make a difference. We are not helpless victims of social forces. The words and actions of engaged people matter, including actions taken by each of us.
Today our thoughts are with a close family member who is beginning his third tour of duty in Gaza since the beginning of the war. May we see a speedy victory in Gaza, the return of our captives and the end of the Hamas reign of terror in that territory. May our soldiers succeed in their missions and return safely to their loved ones.
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Our task as you and your friend Adam describe here is the equivalent of tearing down a brick wall with our bare hands. We have allowed genuinely evil forces to entirely take over the higher education system in the Western world. They are entrenched and will continue to spew these bllod libels until they are stopped and I don't know how they can be stopped. I would bet that around 75 percent of the left wing young Americans who support "Palestine" genuinely believe the lie that Israel is deliberately committing atrocities and murder, that Israel occupies "Palestine: in a way no different than the oppression of South Aftica in aphartheid days and believe that Netanyahu is a murderous dictator on the level of Putin or Assad. They really believe this because it is what they have been taught by college professors and also by mainstream media which parrots the Palestinian lies and even at the lowe educational levels where teachers who have been trained by the evil professors are teaching children. It is an awful mess and I honestly don't know what is to be done.
Lovely piece! I did hear a You Tube piece by the Palestinian young man you quoted... I was most impressed by what he said and how he said it. He was heckled and then told he was too lengthy... He just countered that he would not be interrupted and allowed to finish what he had to say, things would go much smoother... I am paraphrasing. Unfortunately that did not deter his hecklers much, although the interruptions were a few less and a bit toned down... My wish is that all Palestinians could talk and be allowed to talk like he does...