A predator attacks a porcupine expecting an easy meal. Instead, it gets a face full of quills.

Photograph the predator afterward and it may look like the victim. Its wounds are real. Its suffering is real. But the photograph is missing the most important fact: it attacked the porcupine.

That injured predator Nakba’d itself.

Consider Argentina in 1982. It invaded the Falkland Islands expecting Britain to accept the conquest. Britain sailed across the Atlantic, fought back and retook them. Hundreds of Argentine servicemen died, including 323 when a British submarine sank the General Belgrano.

Begin the story with the sinking and Britain looks like the aggressor. Begin it with Argentina’s invasion and you understand why British forces were there.
Chronology changes the story.

Which is core of the word Nakba.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed Jewish and Arab states for two people with long ties to the area of Palestine, one for Jews who had ruled for hundreds of years in the land, and one for local Arabs who aspired to their own country. Jewish leaders accepted partition while Arab leaders rejected it. After Israel declared independence in May 1948, armies of five neighboring Arab states entered the war against the reborn Jewish state.

The Arab calculation was breathtaking.

Only three years after the Holocaust, a tiny Jewish state was filled in part with survivors and refugees. Six million Jews had just been murdered. Its enemies looked at a shattered people surrounded by a much larger Arab world and saw weakness.

They mistook vulnerability for helplessness.

They attacked the porcupine. And they lost.

Israel survived. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled the battlefield as they waited for their Arab brothers to wipe out the Jews. And they lost the war they launched. In the end, Israel ended the fighting with more territory than the UN partition plan had allocated it.

Palestinian Arabs named their defeat “al-Nakba” — the Catastrophe. But over time, their catastrophe became a romanticized socialist-jihadi word stripped of its rejection of coexistence and fervor for extermination of Jews, even as the sentiments remained deeply embedded in Arab culture.

Still, the photojournalists showed the wounds as evidence of who must have been the victim.

So the Nakba lives on.

Hamas demonstrated that Israel was vulnerable, murdering 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 250 hostages. When Israel fought back Gaza suffered terrible destruction. Once again, the world’s camera focused on the wounded predator rather than the beginning of the encounter.

The Gazans Nakba’d themselves again. They attacked, suffered, and then pointed to their injuries in a plee.

The animal kingdom does it. The quills can be devastating. But the story is clear.

Stop the hatred. Stop the attacks. Stop the complaining after losing the fight you sought and launched.

I have a somewhat different view of cemeteries from many people in Orthodox Jewish circles.

Many Jews visit the graves of famous rabbis and holy figures to pray. Friends travel to the Ohel in Queens, where the last Lubavitcher Rebbe is buried, or to the graves of Maimonides and other celebrated rabbis in Israel. I have never felt comfortable doing so.

My inclination begins with the Bible’s account of Moses. He died alone, outside the Land of Israel, and his burial place remains unknown. That detail does not appear incidental. In the Torah’s final lines, it seems almost deliberate: Moses was the greatest prophet, yet his grave was not to become a shrine. His teachings were to remain sacred, but his physical remains were not to become a destination or an intermediary.

When I asked friends why they visit the graves of holy people, they offered several explanations.

The first was that a righteous person enjoyed a special relationship with God, and that the place where such a person is buried therefore offers a closer portal to the divine.

The second was that a place where people have gathered in prayer for generations acquires a special spiritual character.

The third was that traveling deliberately to a particular place changes the visitor. The journey creates focus, humility and a frame of mind that may be difficult to achieve in ordinary surroundings.

The first explanation, I believe, is both the most common and the most troubling. The suggestion that the physical remains of a holy person can function as a medium to God comes dangerously close to the very impulse the Torah appears to guard against by concealing Moses’s grave. It risks replacing the person’s teachings with the person’s body.

A better way to preserve a righteous person’s connection to God is to study that person’s work, absorb his ideas and live according to his example. His thoughts, not his remains, should serve as the conduit. A grave contains the body he left behind. His Torah contains what he gave the world.

The second and third explanations are different. They do not necessarily treat the deceased as an intermediary. Instead, they recognize the power of place.

A site shaped by centuries of prayer may carry historical and emotional meaning. A family grave may help a child remember a parent, confront loss, express gratitude or recover a sense of continuity. Some people can reach that state of reflection anywhere. Others need a physical place that separates the moment from ordinary life.

And here is where the role of rabbis becomes interesting. How to handle a common situation and desire whose motivation is the dividing line between something permissible and not?

Orthodox Judaism frequently erects legal fences around conduct that may lead toward something prohibited. The belief that a deceased holy person can provide privileged access to God would seem to warrant precisely such caution. The practice risks sliding from remembrance into mediation, and from reverence into something uncomfortably close to worship.

But visiting a grave for memory, history, mourning or personal reflection does not necessarily carry the same danger. The distinction lies in what the visitor believes is happening there. Is the dead person being asked to act, or is the living person being moved to remember, think and pray?

That distinction deserves serious consideration as the Jewish community buries soldiers and victims of terror, cares for those carrying lasting injuries, remembers those who uplifted and supported the community, and confronts antisemitism on a scale not experienced in decades. Cemeteries will inevitably become increasingly powerful places of collective visitation and reflection.

They can remind us of sacrifice, courage, wisdom and the unfinished obligations of the living. But the grave should point beyond itself. It should direct us not toward the power of the dead, but toward the lives they led, the ideas they carried and the responsibilities they have left to us.

The World Cup’s final stages are being played in the United States, home to the largest Jewish community in the diaspora. Jews fill stadiums and gather in homes, bars, and public squares to cheer for their favorite teams. Many of the Jewish fans are descendants of families who fled persecution in the final four team countries, who found refuge in America.

By a remarkable twist of history, three of the four semifinalists are themselves home to three of the five largest Jewish communities in the diaspora: France (#2), the United Kingdom (#4), and Argentina (#5). Spain, whose once-great Jewish civilization was destroyed by the expulsion of 1492, today has only a small Jewish community.

The four teams were not traveling to America alone. Each arrived with ghosts.

England’s ghosts date to 1290, when King Edward I expelled all Jews from his kingdom. A Jewish community that had lived there for generations was driven out and would not officially return for more than three and a half centuries.

Spain’s ghosts carry the keys of 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jews to convert or leave. One of the world’s great Jewish civilizations disappeared almost overnight, scattering Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and eventually the Americas.

France’s ghosts stretch from repeated medieval expulsions to the Vichy regime, when French authorities enacted antisemitic laws and helped arrest and deport tens of thousands of Jews. They include the children rounded up in the Vel d’Hiv before being sent east.

Argentina’s ghosts are more recent. After World War II, the country became a refuge for Nazi fugitives, including Adolf Eichmann. Then, in 1994, the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people. More than three decades later, those accused of orchestrating the attack have never stood trial in Argentina.

Now these four nations compete for soccer’s greatest prize before enormous crowds in the very country where so many descendants of those earlier Jewish communities ultimately built new lives.

Jewish fans cheer for England, Spain, France, and Argentina. They wear the jerseys, sing the anthems, and celebrate spectacular goals like everyone else.

But perhaps there are other spectators in the stands. Quietly observing.

The rabbi who clutched Torah scrolls as England closed its gates. A Sephardic mother who had cried as she locked the door of her home in Toledo for the last time. A Jewish child wearing a yellow star in Paris. Families standing outside the shattered AMIA building praying for loved ones.

Those ghosts would see something they could scarcely have imagined: not only the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community hosting the World Cup, but thriving Jewish communities once again in England, France, and Argentina. Against every expectation, Jewish life somehow endured.

ABBI ELI CHITRIK watches a World Cup match, wearing a traditional Orthodox Jewish hat, even as a Muslim wearing a keffiyeh is among the other fans sitting nearby.(photo credit: Rabbi Mendy Chitrik)

Then, they would whisper.

They would remind us that England, Spain, France, and Argentina were all, in their own time, places where Jews believed they belonged until history proved otherwise.

Their warning would not be that America is destined to follow the same path. History never repeats itself so neatly. Their warning would be simpler: antisemitism rarely arrives all at once. It begins with words, exclusion, indifference, and the comforting belief that it cannot happen here.

As the Jewish descendants cheer from the stands, they wonder if they are hearing voices directed at them above the roar. The whispering ghosts watch too, not only the game, but today’s generation of Jews feeling both at home and increasingly distinct from their home countries.

The soccer tournament will end on Sunday. And Jews will consider their jerseys in a very different way than every other fan, in the days and weeks after they take theirs off and have to consider life beyond the game.

Related:

Watching Jewish Ghosts (March 2018)

For most Americans, armed guards outside synagogues still look unsettling. For Jews, they have become background scenery. And increasingly, so has something else: being mocked for wanting the guards there in the first place.

Security cameras and hardened doors. Police details and lockdown drills. Volunteers scanning crowds during services. This is now ordinary Jewish life in America.

And yet, at the very moment Jews are hardening schools and synagogues because they are under threat, influential voices across media, activist circles, and politics increasingly frame Jewish fear itself as manufactured.

Federal authorities recently uncovered what prosecutors describe as an Iran-linked terror network targeting Jews and synagogues across the United States and Europe. According to the allegations, operatives connected to Kata’ib Hezbollah coordinated surveillance and attack planning against Jewish institutions in New York, California, Arizona, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto.

The response from much of the cultural left was not moral clarity about why Jewish institutions feel endangered. Instead, the familiar machinery of minimization immediately activated.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a lengthy segment mocking undercover counterterror operations and emphasizing cases where authorities supposedly manufactured extremists through entrapment. The timing could hardly have been more revealing. Jews hear about Iranian proxy terror targeting synagogues while elite comedy television reassures audiences that perhaps the greater danger is excessive concern about terrorism.

At the same time, activist organizations like CAIR and civil-liberties groups fought efforts to create limited buffer zones around synagogues facing aggressive intimidation and harassment. Senators questioning Jewish witnesses during campus antisemitism hearings increasingly sounded less interested in confronting hatred than in interrogating whether Jews were exaggerating it.

The pattern repeats constantly. Jews are under attack and ask for protection. Influential institutions respond by interrogating whether Jews are too afraid and therefore undeserving of any support.

No other minority group is treated this way. If Black churches increased security after racist attacks, nobody would accuse them of hysteria. If mosques hardened entrances after terror threats, commentators would call it prudent. If Asian community centers hired guards after targeted violence, politicians would praise vigilance.

Only Jews are routinely told their fear may itself be socially dangerous.

That is what makes this moment so disturbing. Jews are not simply confronting rising antisemitism. They are confronting a cultural elite increasingly uncomfortable acknowledging why Jewish security measures became necessary in the first place.

So instead of confronting the ideology threatening Jews, many commentators, activists, and politicians redirect attention toward the people trying to protect them. The synagogue barrier becomes controversial. The undercover operation becomes suspicious. The frightened Jewish parent becomes the problem – a Chaya/Karen – to deconstruct. Much as Israel’s security barrier built to stop West Bank terrorists has been labeled by the alt-left an “apartheid wall,” they are broadly inverting Jewish defensive measures into offensive ones.

Let’s be clear: a society that grows more skeptical of synagogue security than synagogue attackers has lost its moral bearings.

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When Jews Are Attacked, The New York Times Worries About Jihadists (March 2026)