NEW YORK — About 1,000 protesters rallied against Jew-hatred near the United Nations headquarters here Sept. 23, in an action called by a broad coalition of Jewish organizations. The next day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting, with a powerful defense of Israel’s fight for its existence as a refuge for Jews, at a time when antisemitism is on the rise worldwide.
Other demonstrations converged on the U.N. Sept. 24 to protest Netanyahu’s presence, denouncing him as a “war criminal” and advancing false claims that Israel supports “genocide” in Gaza. These actions involved hundreds of middle-class radicals and liberals, including a few Hollywood celebrities and local Democratic Party politicians. Hundreds of protesters gathered at Bryant Park and marched across Manhattan to the U.N.
“Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century,” Netanyahu told the U.N., saying this was “inverting victim and aggressor.” The most glaring case of genocide — the deliberate, systematic effort to exterminate an entire people — was the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Six million were brutally murdered, 40% of the world’s Jewish population during World War II.
Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel was “the darkest day in Israel’s history,” Netanyahu said, as “Hamas terrorists committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.” Some 1,200 Jews and others were killed, thousands more wounded, dozens of women raped, and 251 hostages seized. Hamas leaders had hoped to drive deeper into Israel, killing more Jews, but were beaten back. They are the ones with genocidal intent, backed by the Iranian rulers and their proxy forces — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and others.
“Lies about Israel have become the newest disguise for the oldest hatred,” Darius Jones, president of the National Black Empowerment Council, told the Sept. 23 rally.
“When criticism becomes collective blame, when it becomes demonization, when it denies an entire people legitimacy and the right to exist, that’s not criticism,” Jones said. “That is that ancient hatred resurrected and weaponized.”
‘The worst and best of humanity’
Several speakers gave moving presentations of how they had stepped forward to stop murderous attacks on Jews during the Hamas pogrom and afterward in the U.S. and elsewhere. Participants listened raptly to the testimony of Shalev Biton and Younes Alkarnawi. Biton, a 27-year-old Jewish survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, whose family is of Moroccan descent, stood beside Alkarnawi, 52, the Bedouin Muslim farmworker who saved his life and that of other Jews.
“In a few hours that morning, I saw the worst of humanity and the best,” Biton said. “The best is standing right here next to me.”
The two men told their story, with Alkarnawi speaking in Hebrew and Biton translating. They are speaking together wherever possible around the world.
That fateful day, eight fleeing Jewish festivalgoers reached the farm where Alkarnawi worked. He confronted Biton, fearing he was Hamas, until he saw he wore an earring. “So I told myself, there is no chance that Hamas terrorists wear earrings. This guy is one of us,” he said, drawing laughter from the rally.
Alkarnawi provided them shelter for many tense hours. When armed Hamas members arrived on motorbikes at the locked farm gates, he told them in Arabic, “I’m a Bedouin from Rahat, I work here.” They demanded to know, “Where are the Jews?” Alkarnawi told them, “There are no Jews here.” The Hamas goons believed him and rode away.
This act of courage saved 33 lives — those of the Nova survivors, 24 Thai migrant farmworkers who had also hid there, and his own.
“Be the thing that hate crimes cannot operate around,” George Zamot, a United Parcel Service driver from the Bronx, told rally participants. He had courageously stepped forward to help counter a brutal antisemitic assault in Manhattan July 23. Moshe Grunhaus, who had been stabbed after coming out of a synagogue, sent a message to Zamot, which was read to the rally: “The world is a better place because of you.”
Arsen Ostrovsky, who was wounded by a bullet that grazed his head during the antisemitic terror attack at Bondi Beach in Australia last December, described the horror of the shooting of Jews there. A human rights lawyer, he too now tours the world speaking out against the danger of Jew-hatred.
Netanyahu: ‘Israel has no choice’
Israel has had “no other choice,” Netanyahu told the U.N., but to wage a defensive “seven-front war” for the past three years. “Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq, militias in Syria” and others have “all ganged up” to try to wipe Israel — and the Jews and others there — “off the face of the earth,” he said. But instead of collapsing, Israel is waging a war to defend its very existence, delivering “crippling blows to all of them.”
“The days when Jews were defenseless victims, marched to the slaughter, those days are over,” Netanyahu said. “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.” The fact is, he said, Israel’s forces have sent millions of messages to Palestinian civilians in Gaza urging them to get out of harm’s way, when they were targeting Hamas for attack. And Hamas forces held Palestinians at gunpoint to use as human shields. Israel is going to win, he said, “we have no other choice.”
In this world of rising Jew-hating violence, the conflict in the Middle East is not about territory, the Israeli prime minister said, but about “the existence of a Jewish state.”
Israel’s existence is a result of political developments before, during and after World War II. Stalinist parties headed by Moscow betrayed promising revolutionary situations, in Germany, Spain and elsewhere in Europe. This opened the door to the rise of Hitler and his “Final Solution” for the Jews. Imperialist “democracies” in the U.S., United Kingdom and elsewhere shut their doors to all but a few Jews fleeing from the Holocaust. Where else were they to go? This made the creation of Israel inevitable.
The Israeli prime minister pointed to some of the escalating attacks on Jews worldwide today. “Jews have been murdered in Sydney, Manchester, Montreal, Boulder, Colorado. They’ve been attacked in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, D.C.,” he said.
At its founding convention in 1938, the Socialist Workers Party adopted a resolution pledging that the party has “the special task of mobilizing the real defense of persecuted Jews, a defense of necessity based on the might of the organized working class.”