A prominent Los Angeles rabbi said he was “disappointed” in many of his allies on the left for their failure to condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7 atrocities that claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis.
Steve Leder, a senior rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, told podcaster Megyn Kelly that he was exhausted” by “people’s inability to disambiguate Hamas and Oct. 7 from other admittedly more complex, nuanced challenges” in the region.
“I’m disappointed in most…of my friends with whom I marched for their causes, and now I realized that we were marching on a one-way street,” Leder said during Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM.
Leder comments followed a Wall Street Journal poll released Monday that showed 24% of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinian people than their Israeli counterparts, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released Monday.
Just 17% of Democrats said they sympathized more with Israelis, while 48% had equal sympathy for both sides.
By contrast, 69% of Republicans said they were more sympathetic to Israelis, compared with 2% who sympathized more with the Palestinians and 17% who said they sympathized with both groups.
Leder said that those on the left who blame Israel “want to flip the script.”
“So I’m disappointed in people’s inability…to disambiguate…[by] deliberately conflating these things because they don’t want to face the truth about what happened on October 7, and they want to blame the victim,” he said.
Democrats under 50 had even more pronounced pro-Palestinian sympathies — 35% compared to 13%, per the poll. Among Democrats over 50, Israelis drew more sympathy, 22% to 12%.
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The Oct. 7 attacks and its aftermath have ignited fierce debate within the Jewish community — particularly among those who have expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
Jewish students have participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, which has antisemitic incidents skyrocket.
The administrators of elite universities have come under fire for failing to crack down on speech that has made Jewish students feel unsafe — with University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepping down last week following her disastrous congressional testimony.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
