In the spring of 2023, I started making phone calls to the heads of major American Jewish organizations. Jews were being murdered in Judea and Samaria, week after week, and I had one question: what are we doing about this? Every organization gave me some version of the same answer. “We’re busy. We have a lot of priorities.”
In April of that year, six months before the October 7 attacks, My neighbors – Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina – were murdered on the second day of Passover while driving through the Jordan Valley. Rabbi Leo Dee, their husband and father, is a friend, and we often sit next to each other in synagogue. I knew them.
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October 7 was not a surprise to us at Israel365. It was the confirmation of everything we had been warning about for years. We live here, many of us in Judea and Samaria itself. Every time there was a terror attack — and there were many — we ran charity campaigns to support the families of the victims, visited shiva houses and met the people whose lives were shattered. We knew the victims and understood that something even more terrible was coming. And yet we watched Jewish organizations in America and Israel respond to each attack the same way every time: with sympathy, and then with a return to business as usual.
October 7 did not change our mission. It changed our audience. Millions of Jews and Christians suddenly wanted to act, and Israel365 Action was ready for them.
What does Israel365 Action do?
We fight for Israeli control over Judea and Samaria, against the relentless international pressure to create a Palestinian state in the biblical heartland of Israel. We fight the lies about Israel in the media, on campuses, and in Washington. And we fight to build and protect the Jewish-Christian alliance that is the foundation of everything Israel365 does.
What we do ruffles a lot of feathers – which is precisely the point.
The Jewish organizational world operates, in large part, on the fear of controversy. Say the wrong thing and a major donor walks. Take a strong position and the establishment press calls you an extremist. The result is a world of organizations that love Israel in theory and hedge in practice — organizations that would never say what Israel365 says, because they have calculated that boldness isn’t good for business.
Israel365 Action is regularly attacked in the Jewish media. We have lost donors. We have been condemned for supporting President Trump, for our commitment to Jewish-Christian relations, and for rejecting a Palestinian terror state. We have paid real prices for real positions.
But we will not waver.
Support this fight. Donate to the Rise Up with Israel campaign at israel365charity.com/rise-up/
Here is what worries me now, two and a half years after October 7: people are going back to sleep.
Antisemitism in America is worse today than it was before October 7 — Jews are being intimidated and attacked in New York and across the country — and yet the conversation has quieted. People have adjusted to the new reality. The emergency feeling has faded. Donors who wrote checks in November 2023 are tired, and have returned to their normal giving patterns. Organizations that briefly said bold things are back to issuing carefully worded statements.
This is what human beings do. The nervous system cannot sustain crisis-level alertness indefinitely. The shock fades, the grief softens, and the path of least resistance is to decide that things are basically under control.
They are not under control. The battle for Judea and Samaria is not over. The war for truth is not over. And the alliance between Jews and Christians is under sustained attack from a host of bad actors – Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and many more – who despise everything we stand for.
Israel365 Action was built to keep people awake. Not to exploit urgency, but to sustain it; to channel the shock of October 7 into something permanent, growing, and willing to fight the long fight that Israel actually needs.
We raised the alarm before October 7. We are not going back to sleep now.
The Torah describes the Jewish people with words that have never felt more true: “A people that rises like a lion — it does not rest until it devours the prey” (Numbers 23:24). That is Israel right now. Not surviving. Winning. And Israel365 Action is part of that fight every single day.
This is our annual Rise Up with Israel campaign. It funds everything I’ve described — the advocacy, the trips, the content, the battles we refuse to walk away from. If you are not going back to sleep either, this is where you stand up and be counted.
Rise Up with Israel — donate at israel365charity.com/rise-up/
