Jews don’t need more security. They need a country willing to treat Jew-hatred as the threat it is.

On Thursday, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove an explosives-laden truck through the doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, rammed it down a hallway, and opened fire with a rifle while one hundred and forty children were inside. Ghazali, a Lebanese immigrant, was killed by security.

The New York Times covered the aftermath with a headline that asked: “After Latest Attack, Some Jews Wonder How Much More Security Is Possible.”

That is the wrong question. It has always been the wrong question. And the fact that we keep asking it is precisely why we keep writing these stories.

Jewish institutions in America now spend $765 million annually on security, according to the Jewish Federations of North America. A typical Jewish organization devotes 14 percent of its entire budget to keeping its members alive. No other religious community in America is expected to finance its own survival. That figure is cited as evidence of communal sacrifice, but, in reality, it is evidence of societal failure.

When Jews have to spend three-quarters of a billion dollars a year on security, the problem is not Jewish vulnerability. The problem is a society that has learned to tolerate Jew-hatred.

That money represents resources diverted from education, community programming, and outreach because a hatred that should have been confronted and crushed decades ago was instead tolerated, platformed, institutionalized, and in some quarters, celebrated. That’s just the Jewish community’s direct spend; it doesn’t include the law enforcement resources mobilized every time a threat materializes, the school lockdowns, the emergency evacuations, the bomb squads. On Thursday alone, at least 30 law enforcement officers were hospitalized for smoke inhalation after charging into a burning synagogue to clear the building. Jew-hatred doesn’t just cost Jews. It costs everyone. We have simply decided, as a society, to let Jews pay the price alone.

No amount of security ends this. Security is a response to a threat. It does not eliminate the threat. You do not stop a war by building better bunkers. You stop it by defeating the enemy.

The enemy here is not a lone gunman. The enemy is the ecosystem that radicalizes him, funds him, platforms him, and excuses him afterward. It is an ecosystem – an ideological infrastructure that has been constructed, funded, platformed, and legitimized over years, which has now, quite foreseeably, produced acts of depraved violence.

Consider what has happened in just the past several weeks in this country.

Mahmoud Khalil – a man who served as ringleader of anti-Jewish protests that included the illegal occupation of university buildings and the systematic deprivation of Jewish students’ civil rights – was invited to speak at SXSW, one of the most prominent cultural platforms in America. He was hosted for dinner at Gracie Mansion by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He has been celebrated, lionized, and given a megaphone by mainstream institutions that would never extend the same courtesy to someone who led campaigns targeting any other minority group.

This is neither incidental nor accidental. It is intentional and foundational. When a society decides that anti-Jewish agitation is acceptable – that the people who lead it deserve dinner invitations and festival bookings – it sends a message. The message is that Jews are a legitimate target. That their civil rights are irrelevant. That their safety is a problem for them to solve, not a responsibility for the rest of us to share.

More than 9,354 antisemitic incidents were recorded in 2024 according to the ADL – the highest number since records began in 1979, a 344% increase over five years, and an 893% increase over a decade. In the days after the United States and Israel began airstrikes on Iran, online posts targeting Jews with violent rhetoric nearly doubled, with some explicitly naming synagogues as fair targets.

These are not statistics. They are a trajectory that runs directly through every campus that hosted a protest encampment that blocked Jewish students from class, every city council that passed a resolution endorsing the rhetoric of groups that call for Jewish elimination, and every media outlet that platforms the grievances of people who attack synagogues.

What the Jewish community needs is not a better alarm system. What it needs – what any targeted community needs – is deterrence. Deterrence has one prerequisite: consequences.

There are no consequences for Jew-hatred in America. There are press releases. There are vigils. There are statements from politicians who will, within weeks, return to voting against measures that would actually hold perpetrators accountable. There are convictions, sometimes, for the most egregious acts. But the organizations that radicalize the perpetrators, the funders who bankroll the infrastructure of hate, the platforms that amplify the ideology – they face nothing. They continue operating. They continue receiving tax-exempt status. They continue getting invited to SXSW and to dinner with the Mayor.

This must change. Federal prosecutors have the tools. RICO and conspiracy statutes exist precisely to dismantle criminal enterprises that operate through networks rather than individual acts. The organizations that have spent years building the ideological infrastructure for anti-Jewish violence should be investigated as the conspiracies they are. Follow the money. Pierce the nonprofit shield. Pierce the corporate veil. Charge the funders alongside the foot soldiers.

Platforms must be denied. Tax exemptions must be revoked. Any official, elected or appointed, who hosts, endorses, or legitimizes anti-Jewish agitators should be held accountable by the voters and institutions that put them in office. And any official who, standing before cameras after a terrorist rams a truck into a synagogue full of children, refuses to call it terrorism, should be removed.

Temple Israel called Thursday’s attack what it was: an act of terrorism. The synagogue said so in its official statement, before law enforcement would. That matters. A community that names its reality clearly deserves a country willing to match that clarity.

The rabbi quoted in the Times was right that synagogues are not Fort Knox. He was right that there is a limit to how fortified a house of worship can become. But the answer to that observation is not despair, and it is not another round of federal security grants. The answer is to ask why, in the United States of America in 2026, we have arrived at a place where houses of worship need to be fortified at all.

The answer is that we allowed it. We allowed the normalization of a hatred that has only one historical endpoint. We allowed the people who foment it to be celebrated. We allowed the institutions that fund it to operate without consequence. We asked Jews to build higher walls instead of demanding that the government dismantle the machine that keeps attacking them.

$765 million a year in security spending, and a truck still drove through the doors.

The question is not how much more security Jews can afford. The question is how much longer we are going to let this go on.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)