In 2018, I was at the United Nations when then-CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill proclaimed to thunderous applause that supporters of the Palestinian Arab cause cannot “fetishize" peace and non-violence.
As the recent reports that Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, "liked" dozens of posts celebrating October 7 have demonstrated, Lamont Hill needn’t have worried. The pro-Palestinian cause has always fetishized violence rather than non-violence.
Duwaji’s celebration of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was typical of the movement she and her husband represent. Mamdani’s own Democratic Socialists of America held a demonstration in Manhattan the day after the massacre openly celebrating the butchering of Jews, shouting in ecstasy the number “700," which was the confirmed death toll at the time.
Similar celebrations of joy at the slaughter of Jewish children and the rape of Jewish women erupted around the world, in the streets of London, where people literally set off fireworks to celebrate the slaughter, and Sydney, where October 7 was called “the day we’ve been waiting for" and calls for violence against Australian Jews were made.
The fetishistic glee in which “anti-Zionists" react to dead Jews has always been on full display. It is an addiction that needs a constant fix. Social media is currently flooded with AI videos and fake claims of Tel Aviv being leveled, Israelis fleeing en masse, and widespread death in Israel. These posts give the antisemites something to celebrate as the IslamoNazis who have ruled Tehran for 46 years fall one by one, and their dreams of a second Holocaust die with them.
This wishcasting of Iran defeating America and Israel and the mass deaths of Israelis allows the pro-"Palestine" movement to keep fulfilling the blood-fetish of its adherents even as reality crashes down around them. But detachment from reality has never made antisemitism less dangerous. The “protesters" who forced Jewish students to barricade themselves in the Cooper Union library were just as divorced from reality as those who spread fake claims about dead Israeli ministers, but their hate had dangerous real-world consequences.
The hate of those celebrated October 7 and now celebrate fake news about Tel Aviv’s destruction is the same hate of the terrorists who murdered 15 people at the Bondi Beach Hanukkah event three months ago. It is the same hate behind the targeting of synagogues, the harassment of Jewish schoolchildren, and all of the pogroms that have been committed throughout the centuries.
The logic of anti-Zionism is that violence is always justified when it is done against Jews, that the way to rove one’s morality is to rejoice in the shedding of Jewish blood, that Jews are so evil that the murder of Jewish babies and children is something to be celebrated. Peace is to be avoided at all costs if it means Jewish children get to live, according to the typical anti-Zionist.
Marc Lamont Hill once lamented the existence of Iron Dome, a purely defensive system that saves lives, because in his view, Hamas should have been free to kill more Israeli civilians to gain “leverage." He got his wish on October 7, as did all Jew-haters. Their fetish for violence and blood was never more fulfilled than on that dark day, but unfortunately for them, it is not 1939 anymore.
Thanks to the State of Israel, Jews are no longer subject to the nonexistent mercies of their haters. Those who seek to fill Hitler’s shoes, the Sinwars, Nasrallahs, and Khameneis of the world, are meeting the same violent end they hoped to inflict on our children. This is not because we share their bloodlust, but because we are done dying to satisfy their fetish for violence, their love of blood, their need for death.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.