Speaking just two slots before Trump and Vance family members on the RNC stage last night were the parents of Omer Neutra, an American-Israeli hostage taken on October 7 and still being held in Gaza. It was a meaningful gesture by the Republican National Convention, and at one point Orna and Ronen Neutra led the crowd in a “bring them home” chant. Orna read a Psalm with which the crowd was no doubt quite familiar—“Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil”—but in Hebrew, the language in which it was written over 2,500 years ago.

It was a moving scene, as was the prayer for the hostages held at the beginning of the convention. But sadness inevitably intruded, not only because of the fact that Omer Neutra remains in captivity nine months after he was taken, but also because of the realization that there will be only one such moment this summer, not two. It’s hard to imagine anything meaningfully close to this happening at the Democratic convention. And that would have been true even if the convention had taken place on October 8.

The contrast was a reminder that the plight of the hostages, taken during Hamas’s murder spree while a ceasefire was in place, did not become an uncomfortable subject for Democrats because of the trajectory of the war that ensued, but, rather, it began that way. The second the hostages were taken, the Western public unleashed a deep, dark hostility toward them that has left an indelible mark on how the Jewish community will see the world around us from that point forward.

Like the scent of blood to a shark, the sight of Jewish victims unleashed the worst in people. Immediately throngs of angry people converged like zombies on the posters of the kidnapped and tore them down, as if the only thing they could think to do was to join in the effort to make them suffer, even the infants and the sick and the elderly.

I keep going back to the first response of Yazmeen Deyhimi, a former Anti-Defamation League intern, when she was caught ripping down hostage posters: “I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times.” She saw Jews being victimized and didn’t know how to process it because they are so much lower on the grievance pyramid than she is. The sympathy they received was, in her mind, a matter of stolen valor.

Similarly, pro-Palestinian activists in New York were confronted by an Israeli artist asking why they were tearing down pictures of the kidnapped. Their response was that more Palestinians than Jews were killed over the course of the conflict, and their message was clear: Jews don’t get to mourn until far more of them are dead.

When theaters would host a screening of atrocities committed and filmed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, anti-Israel thugs would inevitably descend on those venues and start attacking people. These incidents took place before there was any Israeli military incursion into Gaza after the attack. The sympathies of these folks were with terrorists who burned Jews alive—no matter what happened next.

The campus protesters fluently spoke the language of progressive culture warriors, asserting that the Jews in Israel are usurpers who don’t belong there, who trade in stolen land, who must be removed from the country so that, as the chant says, “Palestine [can be] Arab.”

We are nine months into a war, and it can be easy to forget what it was like on October 7 and October 8 and October 9. Though it sounds like we’re having a debate about the Israeli military’s response, we aren’t—the people who would disrupt a Democratic convention’s attempt at praying for the hostages do not believe any Israeli military response is justified, just as they don’t believe Israeli existence is justified. We have somehow let the public debate on this issue get stuck on the question of whether Israel’s response has gone too far, as if that has any relevance at all to the fate of those murdered or kidnapped on October 7.

As I detailed last month, some of the legal complaints made by pro-Palestinian students against their universities amount to objections that the schools denounced the bloodshed of October 7. As these students see it, such a statement implies a lack of justification for Hamas decapitating a child or burning a peace activist beyond recognition. You have to balance the crimes of each side, according to these students—that is, you must balance Hamas’s crime of murder with Israelis’ seemingly equal crime of existing.

In a sane world, it would be unthinkable to oppose events for American hostages at an American political convention. But because these hostages are Jews, this country has become somewhat polarized over whether they deserve their fate. (I say “somewhat” because these progressives are outnumbered among the general population and within the Democratic Party by non-sociopaths; it’s just at Democratic Party events that—though they are still a minority—they have enough sway to impose their heartlessness on everybody else in the room.)

I have no doubt the hostages will be mentioned—prominent Democrats are among some of the hostages’ greatest advocates—but the sincerity and decency and affection we saw this week is highly unlikely to be repeated. That says something about our political culture that will long outlast this war and this election.