As a cease-fire holds in the Gaza Strip, more than 1,000 pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered over the weekend outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Demonstrators were calling on the U.S. government to end aid to Israel.
Several pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been held in Texas over the past two weeks, including in Downtown Dallas and outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin.
Jewish leaders in Texas say there has been an increase in anti-Semitic social media posts. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 17,000 tweets with a variation of the phrase, "Hitler was right," were posted during one week in May.
"One of the real challenges of Twitter and other social media platforms is people get wind of information, true or not. It gets magnified and spread virally in a way people live with a lot of falsehoods. They live with a lot of first impressions," says Charles Kaufman, a Dallas-native and president of B'Nai B'rith International. "We're having a conversation in the country about how we can manage free speech and propaganda that leads to actions that are violent and hateful."
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Kaufman says, "we can only reverse this hatred if we confront this hatred."
"When you hear people say hateful things, you have to confront them," he says. "You have to say, 'that's hateful. That's wrong. That's a lie.'"
Kaufman says the fight over territory in the West Bank is not just about land, it is about anti-Semitism. He says the Torah mentions Israel 600 times.
"It's important for the world to understand Jews' place in Israel goes back 3,000 years," Kaufman says. "They really might as well just hate Jews because anti-Israel and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism."
The cease-fire in the Gaza Strip ended 11 days of fighting.
Friday, the U.S. State Department said the next budget would maintain aid for Israel while also providing "humanitarian aid" for Palestinians.
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