Stop Explaining to People Who Already Convicted Us
For decades, Israel and the Jewish people have run the same failed play. We explained ourselves to people who had already decided we were guilty. We produced the documents, the maps, the timelines, the legal opinions, the carefully worded statements, and we delivered them to audiences that had reached their verdict before we opened our mouths. In business, when a strategy fails year after year, you change it. You study why it failed, you accept the loss, and you build something different. We kept the strategy and hoped the audience would change. Hope is not a strategy. It never was.
The deeper habit behind this failure is older than the State of Israel. Jews learned to treat antisemitism like weather. You cannot argue with a storm, so you build shelters. Legal teams formed to fight discrimination after it happened. Security departments hardened buildings once the threats arrived, and monitoring organizations counted incidents that had already occurred. I respect that work and I will never dismiss it. Some of it keeps children alive on Saturday mornings. But every one of those systems activates after the hatred is already visible. They manage the symptom. The disease keeps producing new symptoms faster than we can respond to them, because the disease lives somewhere our systems never reach.
It lives in education and culture. It lives in the old habit of blaming Jews for everything wrong in the world. The accusation changes its costume every century and keeps its skeleton. Jews poisoned the wells. Jews control the banks. Jews run the media. Today the same skeleton wears academic clothing: the Jew is a colonizer, the Jewish state is an apartheid regime, Jewish self-defense is genocide. A student can absorb this framework for four years, graduate, and sincerely believe he has never had an antisemitic thought in his life. He was simply taught a........
