Americans must join the battle against the demonization of Israel

Israel and the Jewish people have been in a state of war since October 7, when the Hamas terrorist army launched a barbarous assault on two dozen communities in southern Israel. The terrorists, who murdered 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, demonstrated a violence and cruelty whose parallels in Jewish history are the Inquisition, the Pogroms, and the Holocaust.

Committing rape, torture, murder, and mutilation while abducting more than 200 hostages, Hamas declared itself once and forevermore outside the realm of the civilized. This massacre will long haunt the Jewish people.Israel and the Jewish people are not alone in the war. The United States of America, under President Joe Biden, has continued a long and proud heritage of standing with the Jewish state. President Biden has pledged and demonstrated his deep solidarity with Israel, giving two impassioned speeches on the terror attack, visiting Israel to show his support, and proposing a blockbuster $14 billion in funding to help the country eliminate Hamas.

Jewish organizations, the Conference of Presidents among them, deserve some of the credit for helping the administration understand the situation and formulate a response. In the past few weeks, we have been in constant contact with officials both in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Once again, we see the need for the Jewish people to have effective institutions to represent our interests in the halls of power. The Conference was founded exactly for this reason, born in 1956 in response to the Suez Crisis, when President Eisenhower wanted to take the pulse of American Jewish opinion. Drawing more than 50 Jewish organizations under our umbrella, we have managed to communicate the vital needs of our community to local, state, and federal authorities – from securing funds to protect communal institutions from antisemitic hate crimes to bolstering support for the Jewish state’s right to exist and defend itself.

Having just last week convened the national leadership of the American Jewish community to a Washington fly-in to demonstrate our resolute and ironclad commitment to Israel and her security, we heard from all the top leaders of both houses of Congress and from both parties. We shared our belief that at this moment of unparalleled crisis for Israel, demonstrating the cohesion between the American Jewish community and the country’s political leaders is of vital consequence. All speakers expressed a strong moral stance in support of Israel’s right to defend itself and our government’s ongoing commitment to Israel’s security.

Immediately after the event, a delegation of 50 of us flew to Israel on an Emergency Solidarity Mission, demonstrating that America stands firmly behind the people of Israel and will continue to support them. We met with political and IDF leaders, families of the American hostages, wounded Americans and Israelis, and families evacuated from the Gaza envelope. We spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, government figures, victims of the October 7 attacks, and so many others. We presented a united front of support for Israel from the US Jewish community.

The conference's existence is ever more essential when fringe groups attempt to speak for American Jewry – very much to the detriment of both Israel’s and the Diaspora’s safety. Extremist organizations such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, entities that purport to speak for left-wing millennial Jews, ally themselves with avowed enemies of the Jewish people that seek the elimination of the Jewish state. INN, JVP, and their ilk serve the interests of antisemites, who use these fellow travelers and useful idiots to launder their own hatred of the Jewish people.

Such organizations do not represent the Jewish people, and one suspects their Jewishness primarily exists to be wielded against other Jews. Their charges of that Israel commits “genocide” are, in particular, inflammatory and liable to inflame the lethal passion of antisemites. The signs at their protests are also very telling – so many mention the suffering of Gaza’s civilians, while very few evoke the ordeal of the hostages or Hamas’s barbaric murder of Israelis.

A war on many fronts

There are many fronts now to the war of the Jewish people against the forces of terror and destruction. The main front right now is in Israel, where the IDF is preparing to move into the Gaza Strip and extirpate Hamas at long last. But as we have seen in the past few weeks – as so-called “pro-Palestine” protests break out, where overheated denunciations of Israel are mixed with overt antisemitism – another front, leftists in America and Europe, sides with the terrorists.

Our role in the US is to battle this apologism for terror and “respectable antisemitism” wherever it appears, showing particular concern for our young people who must face it on campus. Our task is also to ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself, which we will do both through our private fundraising and our public affairs advocacy. The Jewish people are at war, one that we pray will soon end. But no mistake, we will triumph. As President Biden often quotes Golda Meir of old, we have no other choice.

The writer is CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (COP), the recognized central coordinating body representing 50 diverse national Jewish organizations on issues of national and international concern.