We are grieving.
There are no words in the English language with which I can sufficiently encapsulate the terror, the shock, or the sorrow that have haunted my bones since Saturday. We’ve all seen the horrific images broadcast to the world, the demonic glee with which Hamas terrorists live-streamed their unspeakable crimes with pride. The assassinations recorded with the victims’ personal phones. The beheaded infants, the bloodied car seats and cribs. The charred bodies in torched cars. The blood-stained sweatpants of zip-tied female hostages led into Gaza. The absolutely indiscriminate, bloodthirsty carnage so clearly methodically and meticulously planned.
When we made Covenant and Controversy Part I: The Great Rage in 2015, we were careful and deliberate to address past, present, and future continuums of anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism as distinct ideologies that often intersect. As young filmmakers striving to engage in an important conversation in a meaningful way, we felt that was the important and fair road to take. Not every anti-Zionist is an antisemite, we said, though you’d be hard-pressed to find an antisemite who is not also an anti-Zionist.
Nearly a decade after the film’s release, it’s the only language in the final edit that I would change. The crises and controversies afflicting the State of Israel over the last eight years have made it clear to me that anti-Zionism is just modern smoke and mirrors for antisemitism. The charge that fueled pogroms, inquisitions, and the Holocaust began with: “You can’t live in our midst.” It escalated to “You can’t live nearby either,” before finally rearing in honesty: “You can’t live at all.” And so the Nazi’s Final Solution wrote a new worst-case-scenario that the world has hoped for a generation would be relegated to the history books. An increase in antisemitic violence throughout the West has led many to believe otherwise, but those concerns are often dismissed. Alarmingly, it has cycled back again to irrefutably terrorize the Jewish State established as a safe haven following Hitler’s atrocities. Now the nations have the audacity to tell the Jewish people: “You can’t live there either.”
On 7 October 2023, Hamas has made the Nazis look like amateurs.
This should be an easy thing to condemn, but too many have not. The phone in your hand has made activism—even slack-tivism—both effortless and acceptable. Remember just in recent years the black boxes posted in solidarity with the Black community lamenting reprehensible brutality. Remember how many Ukrainian flags hit your news feed when the news began to break and expose Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians. Remember how quickly Israel was condemned in the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah-sparked conflict. My own social feeds were full of people speaking into the issue, like a mountain of misinformed condemnations made standing on only a fraction of the facts, distorted and turned backwards and upside down.
If you publicly opposed police brutality but have not publicly opposed Hamas’ satanic scourge, your antisemitism is showing.
If you committed to being an #antiracist in 2020 but are silent now, your antisemitism is showing.
If you posted blue and yellow flags in your profile picture and name but have not shown sympathy or solidarity for Israel in the wake of this demonic attack, your antisemitism is showing.
If you threw in on a Twitter-twisted narrative of Sheikh Jarrah but have not spoken against the unspeakable crimes Hamas broadcasted live online as they killed their victims, your antisemitism is showing.
And if you’re watching these events unfold thinking, “Well, Arabs are gonna Arab. Palestinians are gonna Palestinian. This is just what they do, but Israel is held to a higher standard of humanity,” your xenophobia is showing. And that also makes you a racist.
At the end of the day, social media doesn’t matter. It is here today and gone tomorrow. But “out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks,”[1] and our feeds have become a proverbial reflection of our priorities. I wish I could say I am surprised to see the “social justice warriors” online silent in the aftermath of this terrorist attack. I wish I could say I am surprised that very few news outlets are willing to use appropriate language to call it what it is. I wish I could say I am surprised that any show of support or sympathy for Israel in these days is partitioned with qualifying caveats because “the Israel-Palestine situation is complex.”
Unfortunately, I am not surprised. As Joel Richardson quoted historian Robert Wistrich in The Great Rage, looking into the obscenity that is the Holocaust is like “staring into a black abyss, and hoping it doesn’t stare back.” But to our horror, that black abyss is not simply staring back. It is crawling out from the depths and coming to life through the hands and feet of entities like Hamas. Like Hezbollah. Like the Iranian regime. And in the same way the Nazis were opposed by too few, these monsters in our day are not facing even a fraction of the opposition they deserve.
Everyone wants to believe that if they’d lived through the Second World War, they’d have been a Bonhoeffer. They’d have been a Corrie Ten Boom. They’d have had enough of a backbone to take any stand possible against the genocidal ambitions of the Third Reich.
But if you are not willing to condemn terrorists, you might just be the kind of spineless antisemitic racist that allowed the Nazi regime to rise to begin with.
It is not difficult to be a decent human being. The bar is getting lower and lower. This week is a golden opportunity to meet it.
Weep with those who weep. Mourn with those who mourn.[2]
We are grieving.
Maranatha.
Stephanie Quick is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.
