This July 19, 2026, article by CAMERA’s Adam Levick appeared in JNS.
In late October 2023, Israeli writer and analyst Shany Mor wrote that “many would think that an atrocity like Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel would lead opponents of the Jewish state to temper their attacks.” Instead, he observed, “from college campuses to mainstream media outlets, elite left-wing circles responded to the terror group’s barbarism by intensifying their denunciations of Israel.”
Mor argued that this behavior is “an example of cognitive dissonance reduction, the process by which people reconcile new information that contradicts their firmly held priors.”
“Western activists for Palestinians,” he added, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome.”
Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “posed a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it was by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities didn’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they led to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”
However, in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, one would have at least hoped that there would be some soul-searching among supporters of the Palestinian cause and a reaction along the lines of “this is not how we imagined Palestinian resistance” or a “not in my name” campaign.
Neither distancing nor clarity was to be.
Indeed, the first pro-Palestinian march in London and other British cities took place on Oct. 9, two days after the massacre—a march that was organized on Oct. 7 while the massacre was taking place. Further, as Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust (CST) clarified, the crowd in London on that Monday was jubilant and joyful. They weren’t there to protest Israel but to celebrate the mass murder of Jews.
(Read the rest of CAMERA’s July 19, 2026, JNS article here.)