Years ago we held vigils after mass shootings and rare attacks on Jews, but they happened too frequently, and then they became useless ways to assuage our pain and disbelief. What do we do now when Jews are murdered in our nation’s capital or walking down New York City’s streets, and peaceful protesters are torched alive in Boulder by a Jew-hating jihadi terrorist? It’s time to call it what it is. We can’t have illusions about what’s happening in America.

The global intifada has arrived. It wasn’t just imported; it was also home-grown. It was fomented by years of Arab and Palestinian unhappiness about nothing more than Israel’s existence! Now we know that it never was about what Israel did or didn’t do, because nothing’s been enough for terrorists and jihadists except the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.

Remember that Arafat walked away from every peace deal that was ever offered him and his people, including President Clinton’s generous peace agreement. Arafat couldn’t return to his people as a peacemaker with the Jews in Israel. And when then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government physically removed all Israelis from Gaza in 2005, to give Palestinians their own land in the Strip, that opportunity for peace was paved in cement tunnels by Hamas terrorists, which became their launching pads for October 7th. Abba Eban famously said, “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” But today it’s glib to say it again, because the fight has come to us in America.

I learned from Israelis that the question, “What if?” is a waste of time. There’s no time for “What if?” There’s only time to save this day for life and strength. So Israelis live with gratitude for each day because nothing is guaranteed except what the Jewish people can defend. Nothing is more important than life and “there’s no other land,” ein eretz acheret.

It’s time to take a page from Daniel Gordis’s book, Impossible Takes Longer, in which he writes about the “New Jew,” who is strong and able to defend oneself, instead of the passive Jew of the past, which is what everyone expects of us. He was writing about Israeli Jews, but American Jews have to step up and speak up and do more now. And a page from the Israeli playbook teaches us to see these times as existential. None of what we have just experienced in recent weeks will change unless we’re prepared to acknowledge the root of it and the result of it. And I’m concerned that the only “arsenal” we’ve built against it are interfaith alliances that have remained stubbornly quiet in the aftermath.

The only thing worse are generations of Jews who don’t know Israel or Jewish history well enough to understand the inconvenient truth about centuries-old persistent antisemitism, Jew-hatred, and a global intifada. While they’ve been protesting against Israel, and not just its politics or war strategy, they didn’t see the approaching murderer who killed two young peace advocates at an AJC program in D.C., attended by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, or a jihadist who nearly killed a Holocaust survivor with a homemade flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado.

So let’s not ask, “What if?” or wonder if it will end now, because it won’t; not until we become a more unified Jewish community that tolerates mixed opinions but not mixed expectations that we will not be slaughtered, moved out, or exiled, again. Never again! We should all care about the future of Israel, and the Palestinian people, too, about which I spoke on May 30, 2025, but, as our Sages taught, “Do not separate yourself from the community.” Our Jewish community in Houston and in other great cities are models of how to be a source of strength to ourselves and a model of resilience to others. Am Yisrael Chai!

L’Shalom,