For the past three years, diaspora Jews in the United States have been the target of a propaganda war intended to drive them cowering into the dark corners of American civil society. Within days of the October 7 massacre, during which Hamas murdered, kidnapped, and raped its way across southern Israel, protesters took to train stations, campus quads, dining halls, libraries, and student centers to falsely accuse Israel of “genocide” and portray American Jews and their allies as complicit in this crime—never mind that the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from roughly one million in 1950 to more than 5.5 million today.
The notion that Israel is guilty of “genocide” rests in part on wildly inaccurate claims from people such as UN Special Reporter Francesca’s Albanese, who, on September 15, 2025, declared that people should start “thinking of 680,000” as the actual number of people killed in Gaza since Hamas’s October massacre. (Albanese later admitted to a Turkish CNN reporter that she made the statement to be provocative.) Even the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza—which has every reason to exaggerate the number killed—recently reported that the death toll in Gaza is over 74,000.)
The genocide accusation is more than an exaggeration of the numbers killed. It is an obvious mischaracterization of Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas as, absurdly, an attempt to destroy the Palestinians as a people. It was Hamas’s Oct 7 attack that qualified as an act of genocide, with one scholar arguing that “claims of Israeli genocide are used, intentionally or incidentally, as a rhetorical shield to blunt recognition of the Hamas genocide.”
Nevertheless, the genocide libel has taken root in American society with a tremendous impact on the Jewish condition in the United States. In 2025, the American Jewish Committee reported that 78 percent of American Jews report that “they feel less safe as a Jewish person in the U.S. because of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks” and that fifty-five percent of American Jews “changed their behavior in the past year out of fear of antisemitism.”
Jews in the U.S. have every reason to be afraid given the violence directed at them in the years since October 7. To wit:
- On November 5, 2023, Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji struck pro-Israel activist Paul Kessler, 69, on the head with a megaphone in an attack in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Kessler subsequently died from injuries sustained during the incident, and Alnaji was sentenced to one year in jail after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
- On May 21, 2025, two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot dead outside an event taking place at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.. According to the Department of Justice, the accused, Elias Rodriguez, made numerous hostile statements on social media about Israel, all of which were part of the unhinged discourse that erupted in fury after the October 7 massacre.
On January 1, 2024, he declared, “Happy New Year, Death To Israel.” On May 17, 2024, he sent a direct message to one of his friends that read, “please please please god please vaporize every Israeli 18 and above so these kids have some chance at becoming human,” the DOJ reports. And on October 14, 2024, he posted a video of Israelis discussing Gaza and characterized it as “Zionist incitement to genocide.” He also asked “what more evidence is needed that the colony and its recalcitrants will have to be totally extirpated by the end of all this[?].”
During the shooting, Rodriquez yelled, “Free Palestine” and, after the murders, displayed a red keffiyeh while declaring, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”
The indictment against Rodriquez further reports that when police removed him from the scene, he “made statements about ‘intifada,’ ‘revolution,’ and ‘free Gaza'” and yelled at attendees still inside: “shame on you” and “shame on Zio-nazi terror.” Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Israel have been targets of rhetoric like this for years, but in the aftermath of October 7, such statements have been made with increased stridency and hostility.
- Less than two weeks later, on June 1, 2025 in Boulder, Colo., Mohamed Soliman threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Karen Diamond, 82, later died of her injuries. Soliman, an Egyptian national who came to the United States from Kuwait in 2022 and had applied for asylum, pleaded guilty on May 7, 2026, to more than 100 state charges, including first-degree murder, and was sentenced that day to life in prison without parole. The Associated Press reported that Soliman “was driven by a desire ‘to kill all Zionist people.’”
The AP also reported that “Investigators allege Soliman told them he intended to kill the roughly 20 participants at [a] weekly demonstration at Boulder’s Pearl Street pedestrian mall. He threw two of more than two dozen Molotov cocktails he had with him while yelling, ‘Free Palestine!’” and that “Federal prosecutors allege the victims were targeted because of their perceived or actual connection to Israel.”
College and university campuses have been the scene of violence as well.
- Yoav Segev, an Israeli student at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Mass., was surrounded by protesters at a “die-in” on campus on October 18, 2023. Video shows him repeatedly saying “don’t touch me” and “don’t grab me” as he is hemmed in and pushed away. Two Harvard graduate students, Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, were charged with assault and battery. A civil rights charge was dropped, and in July 2025 a judge dismissed the assault charges after the two completed a pretrial diversion program that included anger management and 80 hours of community service. Harvard later hired Tettey-Tamaklo as a “Graduate Teaching Fellow” at the school.
- During the spring semester of 2024, agitators at the pro-Palestinian encampment on UCLA’s campus blocked Jewish students from walkways and buildings, letting through only those who would denounce their faith. A federal judge ruled that Jewish students had been excluded from parts of the campus because of their faith and ordered the university to stop facilitating it. In July 2025, UCLA agreed to a permanent injunction and paid more than $6 million in damages and fees.
- Even non-Jews have suffered as a result of the chaos. Two working-class custodians paid the price for anti-Israel violence on campus in late April 2024, when more than 100 students and outside activists stormed and barricaded Hamilton Hall, at New York’s Columbia University. The two custodians, Mario Torres and Lester Wilson, filed a federal lawsuit in April 2025, alleging that they were “violently attacked and held against their will.”
The complaint names individual occupiers and The People’s Forum, a Manhattan activist group, as defendants and claims the takeover was planned in advance, with hand-drawn maps of barricade points and plans for “confronting and, if necessary, harassing, bribing, or assaulting Columbia staff,” The Free Press, reported.
“I could have been killed in there,” Wilson declared. According to the complaint, neither man has been able to return to work, and both report physical injuries and PTSD.
The upshot is this: As Israel fought back against Hamas with great loss of life for Palestinian civilians—which is exactly what Hamas wanted—anti-Israel protests became more aggressive, intimidating, and violent, with a terrible impact on Jewish safety and American civil society in general. The chaos generated by anti-Israel activists prompted Hamas leader Khelad Meshal to express thanks in May 2024 for the “great student flood” that took place at American universities after the massacre. One of the main goals of the October 7 massacre was to incite the protests that have taken place in the years since.
Courtesy: Shatishira via Pixabay
Members of Congress have taken notice. At a June 11, 2025, hearing held less than two weeks after the Boulder attack and three weeks after the murders in Washington, Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, declared that the threat to American Jews cannot be addressed without confronting the policies that allowed it to grow.
Anti-Jewish hatred, Pfluger said, is not only rising but is being exploited by foreign terrorist organizations to inspire violence inside the United States. “These incidents are not isolated; they reflect a broader and deeply troubling surge in antisemitic rhetoric and violence, both online and in our neighborhoods,” he said. “As the numbers continue to rise, fear has taken hold in many Jewish communities nationwide.”
Noting that antisemitic incidents had increased in all 50 states for the fourth consecutive year, Pfluger warned: “This is not a localized problem. It is a national crisis.”
Problem in Newton, Mass.
The national crisis has even played itself out in Newton, Mass., a city of about 90,000 with a large Jewish community, often estimated at 20 to 30 percent.
On September 12, 2024, Newton resident Caleb Gannon attacked a group of pro-Israel protesters in broad daylight after accusing them of defending Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. As previously reported, “Gannon ran across the street through heavy traffic, punched a 47-year-old Iraqi war veteran [Scott Hayes] in the face, and then tackled him to the ground, smashing his victim’s head on the sidewalk. Gannon then put his arm around his victim’s neck in an apparent effort to choke him unconscious.” As it turned out, this attack, which ended in disaster for Gannon (who is himself Jewish), was prompted by beliefs stoked by anti-Israel propagandists on college campuses throughout the United States:
On his now-deleted X account, Gannon … called his family “ghouls” for not hating Israel as much as he did and reposted a comment that Zionists should feel unsafe. He also declared on X that “The United States government is a rogue terrorist organization that does not represent its population. It must end. All police precincts, military bases, and government offices must be liquidated immediately, and all resources from them redirected back into their com
munities.” He also retweeted a post falsely declaring that Israel killed 200,000 people in Gaza since October 7 and another post stating that “it’s ok to be an enemy of the state when your state is run by fascists.”
The day before Gannon’s violent, and self-destructive act, another anti-Israel protester, Matt Nelson, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Consulate in Boston to protest the war in Gaza. Both Gannon and Nelson were subsequently lionized at a September 24, 2024, vigil at the Public Garden in Boston, Mass. At this vigil, organized by the Muslim Justice Leage, protesters surrounded and attempted to intimidate this writer to prevent this him from filming the event.
Despite all this, anti-Israel protesters who have regularly demonized Israel and infringed on the rights of others in American society—for years—portray themselves as victims of oppression at the hands of evil public officials intent on depriving them of their right to free speech.
Newton’s New Hire
One person who has taken up the cudgel on behalf of these protesters is Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, who recently started teaching social studies at the Charles E. Brown Middle School in Newton, Mass. She graduated cum laude from the University of Connecticut in May 2025. Her undergraduate honors thesis described an alleged campaign to silence pro-Palestinian activism on UConn’s main campus. Her undergraduate honors thesis is archived by the school here. The problems with her thesis raise questions about the quality of instruction at UConn, the due diligence exercised by her new employer, the Newton School Department. It is also a great source of alarm to Jews living in Newton.
Here are a few problems with Abu-Hasaballah’s thesis.
- The word Hamas appears only twice in the main text. The author describes the organization— which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization—as “a militant Palestinian nationalist group.” At no point does she acknowledge Hamas’s stated desire to destroy the Jewish state. Moreover, she fails to acknowledge the horrors of the October 7 massacre, the roughly 1,200 people killed, or the 251 people who were taken as hostages during the attack. In fact, the phrase “October 7” appears nowhere in the text. In sum, readers are never told why the war against which activists protested started. (Abu-Hasaballah’s thesis advisor did not respond to a request for comment from this writer.)
- She describes Israel as guilty of “collective punishment,” and as having killed “over 50,000 innocent men, women, and children.” For this claim, she relies on Al Jazeera a Qatari-funded and owned news outlet, which in turn relies on Gaza Health Ministry figures that don’t separate combatants from civilians. By calling every Palestinian death at the time, “innocent” she is passing off false propaganda as fact.
- She endorses the “genocide” libel, claiming that the war led “to the genocide of Palestinians.”
- In her treatment of the Trump administration’s March 2025 warning to colleges and universities to put a stop to illegal protests on campus, the author complains that these threats were “aimed at Pro-Palestinian protest under the guise of scapegoating activists as antisemitic, aggressive or threatening.” What Abu-Hasaballah fails to acknowledge is that UConn protesters did, in fact, engage in vicious antisemitism. As one article she cited reports, protesters depicted UConn’s president, Radenka Maric, who is Jewish” as “having protruding ‘horns’ on her head, and as a swine.”
- In the narrative she offers, student protesters invariably and unquestioningly serve the interests of progress.
At no point does Abu-Hasaballah’s thesis acknowledge the possibility that student protests can equally serve the interests of violent, oppressive, and authoritarian movements, as they did in China during the 1960s and 70s and in Iran in 1979. If Abu-Hasaballah were to acknowledge this history, she would have to consider the possibility that the protesters she lionizes at UConn had done the same thing with their effective support for Hamas, a jihadist organization that has murdered its political opponents, stolen food and medicine intended for women and children, and put the Palestinians in Gaza in harm’s way—all in support of a disastrous campaign to deprive the Jewish people of their sovereign state.
Interestingly enough, in her thesis, Abu-Hasaballah argues that UConn officials oppressed anti-Israel protesters at the school and did so because they were motivated by “personal pro-Israeli interests” and “the bias of donors and close partners” who supported the school. In particular, Abu-Hasaballah accused UConn President Radenka Maric of using campus police to deprive the post-Oct. 7 protesters of their right to free speech because of a pro-Israel bias. Maric, Abu-Hasaballah wrote, did “nothing to accommodate, collaborate or work with [protesters] in the slightest,” adding that Maric’s “silence, personal ties to Israel and endorsement of police action only proved to the students that their fight was necessary at UConn.”
Abu-Hasaballah’s suggestion that Maric acted out of personal bias is ironic, given that Abu-Hasaballah’s own family apparently has familial ties to a member of Hamas’s military wing, as documented in previous reporting here.
“The family relationship is not evidence of Ms. Abu-Hasaballah’s own beliefs or conduct and should not be used to impute a relative’s actions to her,” wrote Lisa Shatz, a resident of nearby Brookline, Mass., who has written a memorandum on behalf of Newton parents worried about Abu-Hasaballah’s hiring. “It may nevertheless be relevant context for counsel when evaluating the thesis’s framing and treatment of Oct. 7 and the Gaza war,” she wrote.
Despite multiple inquiries from this writer, the newly hired teacher has not responded publicly to these concerns. Newton Mayor Marc Laredo has reportedly come to her defense, however. According to a local newspaper report, Laredo declared at a September 15, 2026 “listening session” that, “We have a new teacher. We are going to support that teacher. We expect, like every other teacher in the system, that the teacher is going to follow the curriculum.”
Laredo and Abu-Hasaballah’s other defenders ignore that her thesis promotes the very same propagandistic narrative about events in Gaza that has been used to incite hostility and violence against Jews in the United States—and to destabilize American civil society writ large since the October 7 massacre. Newton parents—Jewish and non-Jewish—have every reason to wonder what Abu-Hasaballah will do in the classroom given the content of her thesis.
Parents Make Themselves Heard
Parents expressed these concerns during the public testimony period at the September 14, 2026, meeting of the Newton School Committee. At the meeting, Shatz asked whether Newton’s hiring process “adequately consider[ed] whether candidates can teach controversial subjects fairly” and what safeguards ensure “that a teacher’s political worldview does not become the worldview students are expected to adopt.” Sagit Sade Attia, national senior director at the Israeli-American Council, asked how an eighth-grade history teacher can teach students to think critically about historical conflicts “if her own academic work does not demonstrate engagement with essential context and competing perspectives.” Newton parent Josh Krefetz said that officials reassured parents that a Jew was involved in the decision to hire Abu-Hasaballah hiring, and argued that this was like “telling a black person, ‘Don’t worry, there’s a black man on the Supreme Court.’”
And parent Phoebe Olhava warned, “If we let this libel into our schools, where Jews are viewed as genociders, they are being demonized. And the next step is violence—violence against the Jews.”
Anti-Israel Pushback
Sadly—and predictably—the destructive narrative broadcast by Abu-Hasaballah in her thesis was also promoted at the committee’s next meeting which took place on September 28, 2026. The meeting was attended by Newton resident Hani Murad, who, during his testimony, accused Israel of committing mass murder in Gaza. In response to a parent who complained about Abu-Hasaballah’s failure to acknowledge the deaths of 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7 in her thesis, Murad declared, “I’ll tell you 74,000 people have been murdered in Gaza since October 7.” Murad’s dishonest allegation that Israel “murdered” 74,000 people in Gaza is exactly the type of propaganda that has incited violence against Jews throughout the United States.
Murad, who works as a school psychologist for Boston Public Schools, promoted the genocide libel in a 2024 interview with his wife, Nora Lester Murad (who posted a video of herself tearing down posters of the October 7 kidnapping victims on Instagram). Without meaning to, Murad demonstrated just how pervasive anti-Zionist libels have become in American society, provided an example of the problem Josh Krefetz described later during his public testimony:.
“The genocide claim is a libel,” he said. “It’s just something people repeat over and over, and over … to libel Jews and badmouth Jews, and incite violence against Jews, which is happening all over the world, Europe, and unfortunately, now, in America, and in Boston.”
And now, in Newton.