At the Jerusalem theatre on Thursday night, concertgoers and staff expressed a mixture of anger, sadness and defiance as weeks of pro-Palestinian protests across dozens of US college campuses reached a tumultuous climax 6,000 miles away.
The noisy demonstrations have been closely followed in Israel, reported by major media and discussed by prominent public figures.
Idan Degani, a security guard at the theatre, said many in Israel viewed the protests with confusion and anxiety, seeing them as an attack on the country and not just its government.
“We didn’t know so many people hated Israel. I don’t think these young people know a lot about Israel or about the conflict. I think the older people do, but not this younger generation,” the 28-year-old said, as he watched late arrivals hurry for a programme of Haydn and Schubert. “I certainly don’t think it will change how anyone here sees the war.”
Such feelings appear widespread among the Jewish majority in Israel, seven months after war was triggered by surprise attacks launched by Hamas into the south of the country in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 taken hostage.
“We thought we understood how much hate there was out there. I mean, I’m a child of Holocaust survivors, but it’s still such a shock. It makes it unbelievably real,” said Danae Marx, a public relations specialist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Many are deeply critical of the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the far-right ministers in his coalition government, but Jewish Israelis interviewed by the Guardian this week blame outrage overseas on misinformation, ignorance, historical hostility from international institutions such as the UN, global “double standards” and entrenched antisemitism.
“At the beginning people took these demonstrations pretty lightly … but now they are seen as evidence of how the progressive camp in liberal democracies can take over the public agenda and use it to attack Israel or whatever Israel does,” said Prof Tamar Hermann, a political scientist at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem.
“People see that [protesters] put all Israelis in the same basket and [there is] so much false information that even opponents of the [current Israeli] government can’t accept it. They are united in their resentment of these protests abroad.”
In the right-leaning Jerusalem Post, the commentator David Weinberg wrote that “unbalanced criticism” of Israel was not new.
“Long before Benjamin Netanyahu, [far right coalition partners] Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich were anywhere near the Israeli government, the world was fiercely critical of Israel. Rarely have Western pundits shown understanding for [Israeli military] operations against Palestinian terrorists,” he wrote.
An article in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper on Wednesday described “Columbia’s entitled squatters and the Manhattan version of air-dropped aid”.
Analysts said the perceived downplaying of evidence of sexual abuse suffered by Israelis during the 7 October attack and accusations that Israel was committing genocide – a staple of chants and posters at recent US protests – had shocked many Israelis, particularly on the left.
More than 34,600 people have died in Gaza in the Israeli military offensive, mostly women and children, according to local health authorities. The offensive has laid waste to much of the territory and caused an acute humanitarian crisis, threatening famine. The international court of justice called on Israel in January to act to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza and allow aid into the territory.
Many in Israel have attributed the accusation of genocide to antisemitism and see the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the destruction of Israel. Protesters have repeatedly denied the charge of using hate speech.
Netanyahu recorded a video statement last month about the protests on US campuses, telling Israelis that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities”. “They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students,” he said.
Observers said the growing diplomatic isolation of Israel and increasingly strained relations with the US had reinforced a historical sense among Jewish Israelis that their country had no reliable allies or protectors, which was connected to collective memories about persecution of the Jewish people over millennia.
On Thursday Netanyahu met Holocaust survivors who will participate next week in the opening ceremony of the annual memorial day commemorating the more than six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
“If we need to stand alone, we will stand alone. If it is possible to recruit the nations of the world, how much the better. But if we do not defend ourselves nobody will defend us,” Netanyahu said afterwards.
His office released a quote on Friday from Itzhak Kabilio, an 88-year old Holocaust survivor from Yugoslavia: “Today, the state of Israel is the one and only haven of the Jewish people. If somebody ever thinks that the USA could be a haven, with what is happening there today, we see that it is no longer the case. Therefore, we must strengthen the state.”
On Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street at 11pm on Thursday night, teenagers sat outside cafes, filled bars and ate ice-cream. Some spoke of friends in the US who had described a “terrible situation” on campuses.
Joseph, 21, an off-duty soldier who had recently immigrated to Israel from the UK and preferred not to give his surname, said protesters in the US were misinformed. “Everyone has the right to protest and to voice their views, but I don’t think they have the full picture of what is actually happening here and in Gaza,” he said. “When it comes to antisemitism or anti-Zionism, it’s often pretty hard to tell the difference. If you hate the Jewish state, then you hate Jews.”
Jewish Israelis constitute just under three-quarters of the population of 9.3 million, and attitudes to the war, as well as pro-Palestinian protests overseas, are different among Palestinian Israelis.
The protests in the US are part of a movement to force educational institutions to divest from businesses that support the war in Gaza and reflect how the war has become a major flashpoint in US politics.
Since the campaign against Hamas began, the US has been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, providing substantial military support, including most recently in a $15bn aid package.
At the Jerusalem theatre, many concertgoers described the current war as one of many that Israel would have to fight over coming decades.
“Jews are stupid … For hundreds of years it’s been like this and we always think it will get better but it never does,” said Joseph Avi Cohen, a retired bank manager. “We need to be stronger. We need to fight back. It’s in the Bible. If someone hits you, you hit them back, twice as hard, 10 times as hard.”
