Mark Sabah

Every day, for years now, someone asks me the same question: "How much are the Israelis paying you?" As if the only explanation for defending Jews and Israel is a paycheck. The idea that I might simply see this conflict differently doesn't compute for them. What I do is, to me, entirely normal. It only looks strange in a world where hating Jews has become the default setting of the crowd, and staying silent, or joining in, is what passes for sanity. Many are familiar with this photograph from the Lviv pogrom, 1941. Locals — including a child and an adolescent — chase a woman stripped of her clothes, bleeding, terrified, humiliated. The Nazis had spent years demonizing the Jews before this moment. They didn't need to pull the trigger themselves. They just needed to make the target "legitimate," and ordinary people did the rest, voluntarily. Something otherwise suppressed in them came out, and they let it. On October 7, I woke up to the videos. One of them was of Naama Levy, arms zip-tied behind her back, dragged by her dusty hair out of a black jeep. As she was moved to the front of the car, she looked straight into the camera of the man filming her. The back of her trousers was soaked in blood. I saw the cuts on her arms, her bare feet, and I watched a crowd film her while cursing her, spitting on her, hitting her. I wished I did not have an imagination. I wished I could delete what I'd seen before her mother saw it. Weeks later, I flew to Israel for the first time, burning every bridge to a world that was celebrating what I'd watched. I went to Ra'anana and met Naama's mother, Ayelet. We made the first post from Israel asking the world to listen, asking the universe to bring her back alive. I promised her that what Hamas did would haunt them in their graves. Arendt called it the banality of evil, and people needed mental gymnastics to accept what she meant. It's easier to believe monsters do monstrous things than to believe your neighbor might. But human beings are built for both good and evil. What we become is a choice, shaped by the moral compass we build or fail to build. Just like an ordinary person joins a mob to taunt a scapegoat, an ordinary person is capable of standing against it. For some of us, peer pressure is minuscule in comparison with a nagging conscience. That's why the photo above matters, still, 85 years later. The Nazis were defeated in Europe but their legacy is rampant in large parts of the Arab world, especially in Palestinian culture. Fused with a dash of communism and a splash of Jihadism, that legacy morphed into global Antizionism. #October7