Tsahi Shemesh has spent more than two decades teaching people how to protect themselves. He’s a former soldier, a Krav Maga instructor, a father. People sometimes call him brave for speaking openly about antisemitism. He hears the compliment, but he doesn’t quite accept it. In a new essay published Monday on American Thinker, Shemesh offers a different explanation for why he speaks: fear.
“I speak because I’m afraid of what happens when people see hostility growing around Jews and decide that silence is easier,” he writes.
The essay, titled “Now is the time to stand against antisemitism,” blends his military and self-defense background with a broader civic argument — that Americans are hesitating to make plain moral judgments about antisemitism, and that hesitation is itself a kind of threat.
A soldier’s instinct about warning signs
Shemesh says his years as a soldier taught him to notice the detail that doesn’t fit — to recognize a threat before it fully develops. Waiting until everyone agrees a threat is obvious, he argues, can leave you reacting after the situation has already changed.
That instinct follows him into his self-defense classes and into his reading of the current climate for Jews in America. He points to several specific warning signs: Jewish students intimidated on campuses, synagogues targeted, and American Jews treated as representatives of the Israeli government — pressured to denounce Israel before being accepted in certain political spaces.
He is careful to acknowledge that each incident deserves its own facts, but he argues the repetition tells its own story. “Hostility can be excused as activism when the target is Jewish, and the language is wrapped in the vocabulary of social justice,” he writes.
Negotiating with danger
One of the most dangerous habits Shemesh says he sees in his self-defense work is “negotiating with warning signs.” People sense something is wrong, then search for an explanation that lets them delay action. They worry about overreacting, misreading the situation, or appearing unreasonable. Delay, he says, gives a threat more room.
He sees the same dynamic in public life. Americans, he argues, have grown reluctant to make plain moral judgments when doing so might offend a powerful political coalition. Context is useful for understanding events, he says, but it becomes dangerous when it’s used to avoid naming obvious intimidation and hatred.
Shemesh stresses that he believes in free speech — that people should be able to criticize Israel, protest wars, argue about settlements, and challenge American foreign policy. He says he strongly disagrees with plenty of what people say. But, he adds, a free society requires the confidence to recognize when criticism of a government crosses into collective hostility toward Jews.
What self-defense teaches about peace
Shemesh draws a direct line between his Krav Maga training and his views on civic engagement. People sometimes ask whether someone committed to peace should train in the martial art at all. His answer: yes. “Peace is more durable when you can protect yourself if another person chooses violence,” he writes.
He acknowledges that adults must exercise judgment, just as children are taught never to hit first. But he notes that in self-defense, intent, ability, distance, and behavior can make a threat clear before the first blow lands. In some situations, he says, it can be lawful and necessary to strike first — because waiting for physical confirmation can leave you reacting too late.
“The civic lesson is about timing,” Shemesh writes. “We don’t need to wait for violence before challenging hatred.”
The cost of silence
Silence is attractive, Shemesh argues, because most of its cost is delayed. You keep the friendship, the invitation, the business relationship, your place in the room. But the environment shaped by repeated silence gets passed forward — to children, to institutions, to the next generation.
As a father, he thinks about what his children will inherit. He wants them to walk through New York wearing a Star of David without studying the room first. He wants them to speak openly about being Jewish without being asked to explain the decisions of a foreign government. He wants them to grow up in an America confident enough in its own principles to protect people who are being singled out.
Speaking publicly has come with consequences. Shemesh says he’s received threats. Relationships have changed. Some people decide you’re inconvenient. He accepts those costs, he writes, because he’d have a harder time living with the knowledge that he saw the direction clearly and chose comfort.
That’s why the word “brave” never feels quite right to him. “My calculation is practical,” he writes. “I know what I’m afraid of losing.”
He’s afraid of a country where Jews gradually learn that being less visible makes life easier. He’s afraid of institutions so frightened of political pressure that obvious standards become negotiable. Most of all, he says, he’s afraid of looking back and realizing that the warning signs were recognized — and that America kept waiting for something worse.
“That fear tells me to speak,” he writes.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/now-is-the-time-to-stand-against-antisemitism/