October 8 Saw Rising Antisemitism; Morality and Compassion Drop
- Ofek Kehila
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
In a lecture given on March 6, 2025 at Princeton University, entitled “October the 8th: Antisemitism as Cognitive Comfort,” sociologist of culture Prof. Eva Illouz posed a difficult question: Why did Hamas’s October 7 attack, which resulted in the massacre of some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, elicit by October 8 an identification with and justification of the perpetrators, especially since this reaction goes against the moral assumption that compassion for the victims of such a tragic event is the hallmark of civilization and liberal thought?
Let’s dive into the possible answers to this essential question.
Oct. 7 reactions
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other terrorist organizations carried out a coordinated attack on southern Israel, shooting rockets, sending paragliders, and launching a full-scale ground invasion of military bases and 21 civilian communities. The attack included the rape, torture, mutilation, and burning alive of Israeli citizens and teenagers who participated in the Nova music festival. In the aftermath of October 7, the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, 1,195 were murdered, the majority of whom were civilians.
On October 8, 2023, whereas various nations denounced the attack and the ensuing massacre, many others, particularly intellectuals, artists, and leading academic figures from the liberal left, celebrated the deadly event, justified the perpetrators, or even denied it altogether. Especially illustrative is the reaction of Andreas Malm, a professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden: “The first thing we said in these early hours consisted not so much of words as of cries of jubilation. Those of us who have lived our lives with and through the question of Palestine could not react in any other way to the scenes of the resistance storming the Erez checkpoint: this maze of concrete towers and pens and surveillance systems, this consummate installation of guns and scans and cameras – certainly the most monstruous monument to the domination of another people I have ever been inside – all of a sudden in the hands of Palestinian fighters who had overpowered the occupation soldiers and torn down their flag. How could we not scream with astonishment and joy? Same with the scenes of Palestinians breaking through the fence and the wall and streaming into the lands from which they had been expelled.”
Whereas harsh criticism of Israel, as in the case of any other country, can be legitimate and even understandable, it is much harder to understand or justify the kind of reaction expressed by Malm and other prominent figures in academia, especially since compassion for the defenseless victims of a mass slaughter is not only one of the defining features of liberal sensibility, but also a hallmark of human morality. How can we explain this and other joyous reactions to the October 7 attack?
Explanation 1: transcendental anti-Zionism
One of the explanations proposed by Illouz for the October 8 reactions is what Steve Cohen calls “transcendental anti-Zionism.” In his book, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic: An Anti-Racist Analysis of Left Antisemitism, Cohen writes: “Quite clearly, anti-Zionism is not in itself anti-Semitic. However, much of what the Left poses as anti-Zionism is transcendental: it relates neither to the struggle of the Palestinians nor to what the Israeli state is actually doing. Rather it is concerned with ascribing world power to Zionism and holding all Jews in the world responsible for this. Left practice presents as anti-Zionism something which is neither about Zionism nor about Palestinian liberation, but is about some alleged responsibility of Jews on a global scale. This is anti-Semitism” (10).
Put simply, under the guise of anti-Zionism, meaning the opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel, many intellectuals and scholars express ideas and opinions that are anti-Semitic in essence, meaning the hostility, prejudice, and discrimination against Jewish people in general.
These ideas are disconnected from the concrete events surrounding the October 7 attacks or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, which makes it possible to ignore the massacre of civilians in favor of a superficial and even distorted vision of reality.
Explanation 2: virtuous antisemitism and cognitive comfort
However, this is not the whole picture: the October 8 reactions do not stem from the disregard of the complexities of reality alone, but also from what the writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry termed “virtuous antisemitism.”
According to Améry, anti-Zionism is not only an updated version of traditional antisemitism, but also a worldview that enables anti-Semitic people to endow hatred of Jews with moral significance, creating a point of convergence between antisemitism and morality.
In the words of Illouz: “Antisemitism elicits intense moral fervor and passion precisely because Jews are viewed as a danger to humanity. It’s no surprise then that the young people who all over the world are calling for the dismantling of the State of Israel do not consider themselves antisemites. They can deny Israelis their right to existence (a right not denied to any other people on Earth) because they are passionately defending the survival of the world threatened by a thug state whose criminality is viewed as unique and uniquely threatening. No other state violence elicits the moral outrage that Israel does. No other country triggers such an urge among well-meaning people defending morality for that country to be eliminated.”
Thus, the view that Jews constitute a danger to humanity and that antisemitism is a moral virtue exempts those who hold it from feeling compassion for the victims of the October 7 massacre.
According to Illouz, the problem of modern antisemitism is a problem of cognitive comfort, meaning the fantasy that the gap between our understanding of the cosmos and its fearful complexity does not exist: “Antizionism is simple, it ignores complexity. It ignores that Zionism was both colonial and anticolonial, racist and antiracist, a project of domination and a project to give shelter to persecuted people. It ignores the fact that the conflict with the Palestinians is a conflict between two groups who are native. When it comes to the Jews and Israel, it is immoral to resort to complex thinking or even to have knowledge and expertise to grasp it. To introduce complexity becomes immoral,” she summarizes in her lecture.
Explanation 3: a divide between compassion and morality
Compassion is the feeling of concern for the suffering of other people. Similar to empathy and sympathy, it is an other-oriented reaction that entails the desire to improve the welfare of someone else. For its part, morality is defined as a set of standards of right conduct and behavior. Although feeling compassion for others is considered by many a moral virtue, there is a significant divide between the two notions. This is due to the selective nature of compassion, which, like empathy and sympathy, is highly modulated by the social context: experiments have shown that individuals are more likely to feel other-oriented emotions toward close others, such as friends and family, than toward enemies or strangers.
In a nutshell, when we feel compassion for an individual or a collective, it will likely be at the expense of other individuals or collectives. In this sense, despite common assumptions, compassion is not inherently moral: we may feel compassion for a close other, even if that close other is none other than the perpetrator of atrocities. This is perhaps why the October 7 attack elicited positive reactions and a justification of Hamas’s crimes: it was due to the moral shortcomings of compassion.
Wrap up
The reactions to the events of October 7 reflect an unholy alliance of antisemitism, morality, and compassion. According to Illouz and others (this reporter included), the best way to counter that unholy alliance is via a strong coalition between the Israeli and Arab people. As negotiations to end the Gaza war ensue, there is hope for a better future in the Middle East.
Ofek Kehila (Israel, 1987) is a scholar of Spanish Golden Age literature and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. His research bridges the gap between those traditions, highlighting their aesthetic, cultural, and historical dialogue. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2022) and was a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2023-2025).