International Court of Justice

In shocking footage, a doctor and nurse at a hospital in Tuscany, Italy proudly discarded life-saving medicine — not because it was defective, but because it was made in Israel.

In another disturbing instance, two Australian nurses made international headlines: one declared she wouldn’t treat Israeli patients (“I would kill them”), while the other boasted that he had killed Israeli patients and made a throat-slitting gesture.

These chilling episodes expose the disturbing truth: while antisemitism is a prejudice and a form of racism, it is more than that. It is a consuming worldview, a sickness that colonizes the brain, overpowering all reason and ethics, professional or otherwise.

Hatred toward Israel is but its most recent incarnation.

When we talk about hatred toward Israel, we are talking about a phenomenon that goes far beyond the political. We are talking about something that, for the people in its grip, approaches the theological.

To them, Israelis are not human beings. They are demons. Israelis receive zero understanding, compassion, or sympathy, regardless of the atrocities visited upon them; to the contrary, such atrocities are lauded. Israelis only receive vitriol, disgust, and boundless rage. Hence the vicious words of a Yale professor who, on Oct. 7, 2023, sneered contemptuously on X, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.”

This is the mindset that propelled the hate-fests, disguised as “protests,” that marred city streets around the world the day after the Oct. 7 massacres, before the bodies had turned cold and while Israel was still actively fighting terrorists on its own soil. It is the mindset that caused people to tear down the posters of kidnapped children, and to shoot a young couple in cold blood in Washington, D.C., and to firebomb a crowd of mostly elderly civilians in Boulder, Colorado.

The Italian doctor and nurse’s discarding of Israeli medicine shows that they would rather risk patients’ lives than accept lifesaving treatment from Israel. This is pathological in its hatred.

They may not know or care, but Israel is a leader in biotechnology and pharmaceutical innovation.

Take only Teva Pharmaceuticals, the company whose products they were throwing away. It develops Copaxone, for the treatment of multiple sclerosis; Austedo, used to treat involuntary movement disorders, including Huntington’s disease; and medicines for a variety of cancers.

The media twists and turns to make Israel, the aggrieved party in this war, the aggressor. Its every action is stripped from context, and then scrutinized under a microscope. Hamas’s extremism and murderousness, on the other hand, is shrugged off or justified. Reading reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a true “through the looking glass” experience.

One of the worst massacres of Oct. 7 was when Hamas slaughtered 364 revelers at the Nova music festival. And yet, artists have dehumanized the murdered and sided with their killers: at Coachella, an Irish rap band projected, “F*ck Israel, Free Palestine,” and at the Glastonbury Festival, a performer led the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the IDF.” An anti-Israel propaganda film won Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, where famous actors such as Mark Ruffalo wore pins depicting a red hand, a clear reference to the lynching of Israelis at the start of the Second Intifada; their murderer raised his blood-stained hands in triumph in front of a cheering mob.

The Venice Film Festival has now been dragged into the anti-Israel misinformation campaign with over 1,500 Italian filmmakers and cultural figures signing a petition calling for the festival’s leadership to “acknowledge the genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza” as well as reportedly demanding the banning of Israeli actress Gal Gadot from attending the festival, who had never planned to attend.

And while a Palestinian historical epic about the Arab revolt against the British in the 1930s is set to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), in marked contrast, TIFF pulled a documentary about the Oct. 7 attacks (a decision later reversed only in the face of outrage).

The same double standard is evident in international law institutions and human rights organizations. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have fixated on Israel with a zeal absent in their approach toward Iran, Syria, or China. Groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International pay a disproportionate amount of attention to Israel, painting it as uniquely villainous, while atrocities elsewhere are downplayed or ignored.

Across medicine, journalism, the arts, and international law, the same pathology emerges whenever Israel is involved.

The singular obsession of the “anti-Zionist” movement is not explicable, except when one views it as what it is: the latest iteration of the oldest hatred, antisemitism.

And unless we fight back with everything we can muster, it will continue to corrode the very professions meant to uphold life, truth, culture, and justice.

Elliott Broidy is the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Broidy Capital Holdings and Co-Chairman of the Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism, and Hate.