When “Careful Language” Becomes a Cover for Incitement

A Response to David Issacharoff editor and writer at Haaretz English edition (VINnews/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)

David Issacharoff argues in Haaretz that Israel’s response to the Bondi Beach massacre “exploits pain,” risks sowing fear, and should therefore be tempered for the sake of social harmony. This sounds enlightened. It is anything but.

Sixteen Jews were murdered at a public Chanukah celebration in Sydney. Dozens more were wounded, many critically. They were not combatants, provocateurs, or symbols. They were families—men, women, and children—doing the most dangerous thing Jews can apparently do in 2025: celebrate Jewish life in public.

This is not a debate about tone. It is a reckoning with reality.

Issacharoff’s central claim is that sharp Israeli condemnation—of Australia’s rhetoric toward Israel, of its indulgence of antisemitic agitation, of its failure to enforce red lines—somehow “plays into the hands” of the murderers. This is a neat trick: blaming Jewish speech after the massacre for Jewish deaths before it.

The massacre did not happen because Israel spoke too loudly afterward. It happened because antisemitic incitement had been spoken softly—and constantly—for a very long time.

For more than a year, anti-Israel rhetoric in the West has ceased to be about policy and become a morality play. Israel is accused of genocide. Zionism is branded as racism. Jewish self-defense is cast as criminal. These are not fringe slogans scribbled on cardboard; they are echoed by officials, mainstreamed by media, and chanted by crowds who are politely described as “passionate.”

The prophet Isaiah had little patience for this kind of moral acrobatics: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Yeshayahu 5:20). Isaiah was not warning about bad manners. He was warning about what happens when societies deliberately invert moral reality—and congratulate themselves for doing so.

Issacharoff dismisses Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion that Australia’s posture toward Israel “poured fuel on the antisemitic fire.” But this is not mystical thinking. When a government aligns itself with campaigns that delegitimize the Jewish state—while tolerating mobs that chant for its destruction—it sends a message. Not a subtle one. The message is that hostility toward Jews is understandable, maybe even virtuous.

Violent actors do not pause to distinguish between Israel’s cabinet and Jews lighting a menorah on a beach. They absorb the broader lesson: Jews are the problem. Everything else is footnotes.

To warn Jews, in the aftermath of a massacre, against “exploiting pain” is not moral sophistication. It is moral evasion. Outrage is not exploitation. Naming the ideological conditions that make murder imaginable is not incitement. What enables violence is the obsession with civility in the face of barbarism—the insistence that clarity is dangerous but euphemism is safe.

Issacharoff also frets about Israel aligning with “divisive” figures, as though the central scandal exposed by Bondi Beach is a questionable alliance rather than sixteen murdered Jews. This fixation on optics—who tweeted what, in whose company, and with what tone—would be comic if it were not so grotesque.

Shlomo HaMelech, who understood something about the power of words, put it plainly: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Mishlei 18:21). Words do not merely offend. They prepare. They license. They condition what people believe is permitted.

The blood of the victims did not cry out for softer phrasing. It cried out for truth.

Murder does not erupt spontaneously. Lies always arrive first. Dehumanization follows. Violence is the final act, not the opening one. Israel’s leaders are not “exploiting” this massacre by saying so. They are stating the thing that polite commentary tiptoes around: sustained anti-Israel incitement does not stay theoretical. It migrates. It metastasizes. And it gets Jews killed—far from Gaza, far from politics, far from anything resembling a battlefield.

The lesson of Bondi Beach is not that Jews must speak more carefully.

It is that the world must stop lying about Israel—and stop indulging those who do.

Anything less is not restraint.
It is complicity.

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