“Truth is like the sun – you cannot cover it with your hand.”

There is a second saying worth remembering alongside it: if we do not tell the truth, someone else will tell a lie, and the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

History has vindicated both.

Truth does not evaporate because a crowd shouts louder. It does not cease to exist because it is inconvenient, unfashionable, or politically costly. It can be ignored, distorted, buried under slogans, or rewritten by propagandists with a talent for erasure, but eventually it breaks through anyway. Like the sun, it cannot be covered by a hand forever.

I go to these gatherings knowing almost exactly what I will hear before I arrive. I go anyway, because I am working on a documentary Ashes of Identity about antisemitism and October 7, and because a filmmaker does not get to look away from the thing he is trying to document. And yet, gathering after gathering, I find myself freshly startled. I expect the slogans. I am still not prepared for how far they go.

I was reminded of this most recently while watching yet another pro-Palestinian demonstration in Boston.

What I saw was not an honest search for peace, nor a genuine reckoning with a brutally complicated history. It was a performance of certainty – slogans standing in for scholarship, outrage standing in for argument. The chants were the same ones you can hear at any such rally now: that Israel has no right to exist, that all Zionists are racists, that Israel alone bears responsibility for eight decades of conflict.

This particular gathering had a specific target: Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital, whose ARC Innovation arm recently announced plans to launch a healthcare startup accelerator in Massachusetts. The demonstrators called this a “Trojan horse” – a front, in their telling, built to launder the reputation of a genocide. A hospital’s research-and-innovation partnership, treated as camouflage for invented mass murder. I have heard a great many overheated claims at these rallies. That one still stopped me, and I don’t think overheated is a strong enough word for it. It is a grotesque inversion of reality, and it says something troubling about a movement when accusing Israeli doctors of running cover for made up genocide is treated as a self-evident truth rather than the outlandish claim it plainly is.

The same demonstration demanded the release of Hussam Abu Safiya. Israel’s security services, police, and military are unambiguous about who he is: a colonel in Hamas’s Military Medical Services who ran Kamal Adwan Hospital as a Hamas terror hub, diverting humanitarian resources to terrorist operations and enabling attacks on Israeli forces and civilians. The evidence they cite is not subtle – a........

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