For about one day — two at most — the story was painfully clear. Hamas and allied Palestinian gunmen burst into Israel on October 7, 2023, and committed the deadliest mass murder of Jews since the Nazi era: infants, grandmothers, festival-goers, Thai workers, whole families killed or abducted. Even governments that are normally “careful” on Israel condemned it outright.
And then, almost overnight, the global emotional camera swung away.
Within days, the streets of Western capitals were filled not with rallies against Hamas’s atrocities, but with vast, recurring, visually powerful demonstrations on behalf of Gaza and “the Palestinians.” Ceasefire marches became weekly rituals. Israel — the country that had just been attacked — was re-cast as the problem, the aggressor, the oppressor.
Israelis looked at this and said: What happened? How did the initiating crime get buried so fast? How did a terror pogrom become an afterthought, and the war to dismantle the perpetrators become the crime?
We can talk about media bias, Hamas’s human-shield strategy, Qatar-financed narratives, and European discomfort with Jewish power today — and all of that is true. But there is a deeper, more modern dynamic at work:
A big part of the world is emotionally addicted to ongoing, streamable suffering. In that emotional economy, Palestinians in Gaza supply an infinite feed; Israelis do not.
And — this is the hard part for us to say out loud — the “suffering halo” of the Holocaust is over. For the non-Jewish world, the moral credit extended to Jews because six million of us were murdered has expired. Period. Contemporary Jewish pain, even after October 7, no longer automatically commands long, durable compassion. Jewish suffering and antisemitism are no longer privileged objects of empathy. We will have to do what is right and ethical knowing that we may be seen, often, as oppressors — and almost never again as victims. That has to be OK.
The one-day victim
The massacre itself was shocking, but it was brief — a single day of horror, followed by hostage stories that were real but sporadic. Israel moved, as any normal state must, from bleeding to acting. The IDF fought back; the government said Hamas must be dismantled; the Air Force and ground forces went into Gaza. The focus turned to urban combat, to Hamas’s tunnels, to the unavoidable civilian toll in a territory where Hamas embeds inside apartments, mosques, schools, and hospitals. That’s a much less photogenic story for Israel, and an extremely photogenic story for Gaza.
An emotional culture that thrives on daily images of pain, rubble, funerals, wailing parents, and mass displacement will always shift to the side that can furnish those images every day. Gaza could. Israel could not.
Why Israel doesn’t “read” as a victim anymore
There are three overlapping reasons.
Israel is too capable. A state with jets, armor, cyber, and allies doesn’t fit the template of the helpless victim — even if what provoked the war was a massacre. The minute we act, the world forgets what we are acting about.
Jews “used up” global pity. For 80 years, the Holocaust provided a kind of moral insulation: “After what was done to the Jews, we give them some latitude.” That insulation has thinned to nothing. For much of the West, the Shoah is now history, not obligation. Jewish power has replaced Jewish suffering as the dominant image.
The colonial script won. Once Israel is locked into the “settler-colonial/white/Western” frame, it can no longer be the true victim — even of an antisemitic mass murder. In that frame, the colonizer can be wounded, but not wronged. The real victim must be the colonized. And in this story that role is reserved, permanently, for Palestinians.
So when Israel defends itself, it is not experienced as “a people saying Never Again.” It is experienced as “the powerful crushing the weak.” The Holocaust no longer overrides that perception. The halo is gone.
Emotional addiction to suffering
Let’s name the dynamic.
Empathy is rewarding. Feeling-with other people’s pain makes us feel moral.
Shared empathy is more rewarding. Feeling it in a march, in a WhatsApp group, in a campus encampment multiplies the high.
Ongoing suffering is the best fuel. A single atrocity doesn’t feed daily activism; a long campaign of bombing and displacement does.
So young people in London or New York or Berlin — already trained to see the world through oppressed/oppressor lenses — didn’t need Hamas’s charter, Gaza’s militant history, or Egypt’s closed border to choose a side. They needed a steady supply of images. Gaza gave it to them. Israel didn’t. So the emotional economy chose Gaza.
And because this is an addictive pattern, it is resistant to facts. Facts threaten the supply. If you say, “Hamas started this,” or “Hamas hides in civilian areas,” or “a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in charge guarantees the next war,” you are not just disagreeing — you are interrupting the emotional rush. Addictions defend themselves.
“But what about October 7?”
Israel kept saying: This started with Hamas. This is the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust. We still have hostages. And much of the world nodded…and went back to marching for Gaza.
Why? Because in the current global imagination Jews are not supposed to occupy the victim slot anymore. October 7 was, for many, an anomaly to be hurried past, not a revelation to be sat with. You could almost hear it: Yes yes, it was terrible — but look at Gaza.
That is the clearest signal that the Holocaust-era compassion subsidy is over. We cannot cash that check again. We cannot point to Auschwitz and expect Paris or Berkeley or Melbourne to say, “Then you must do what you need to be safe.” They are saying, “Not like that.”
So what do we do?
If we accept — and I think we must — that Jews and Israel will not be granted automatic, durable empathy again, then the path is not to beg for it. The path is:
Do what is necessary and ethical anyway. Our right to dismantle a terror army that murders our people is not contingent on campus approval.
Reframe loose empathy as prolonging suffering. “Your compassion is real — but when it protects Hamas, it forces Gaza to stay under a death cult. That’s not compassion, it’s codependence.”
Humanize Israeli vulnerability without apology. Keep telling the stories of civilians in the south and north living under fire, of the families of hostages, of the Jewish and Arab citizens who were murdered on October 7. Do it calmly, without pleading. Victims who don’t beg are harder to dismiss.
Name Hamas as the consumer of global empathy. Show that Hamas counts on Western emotional addiction to shield it. “They start wars knowing you will blame us.” That moves the audience from pure feeling to responsibility.
Teach a grown-up empathy. Childish empathy asks, “Who is crying now?” Mature empathy asks, “What will reduce crying tomorrow?” Mature empathy sometimes has to side with force.
The bottom line
Israel did not “lose” the world after October 7 because our case was weak. It lost the world because the world wanted a different victim, one that could feed its emotional appetite day after day.
That is not a reason for Israel to stop. It is a reason for Israel — and for Jews everywhere — to internalize a new, slightly colder reality:
The Holocaust halo is gone. Jewish suffering no longer guarantees compassion. We will often be seen as the oppressor. Our task is to act justly and defend Jewish life anyway — without needing the world to validate our right to exist and to protect ourselves.
If we can live with that, we can stop chasing sympathy that isn’t coming — and start speaking to the parts of the world still capable of hearing truth over the sound of its own feelings.
Richard Diamond is a retired technology executive, lifelong student of Jewish philosophy, and frequent writer on the intersection of theology, ethics, and public life. He brings decades of leadership experience, historical insight, and personal commitment to Israel’s future to his thoughtful explorations of contemporary Jewish challenges.