Russell Simmons says he lost a lifelong friend over a conversation about Gaza, and he went to Instagram to explain why he is not taking the words back. In the video, Simmons said he told the friend that he believed Benjamin Netanyahu was committing war crimes. He said he chose that phrase carefully and avoided the word genocide because he knew it would enrage the man. It did not matter. The two have not spoken since, and Simmons said he no longer remembers how long it has been.
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The lost friendship opens the video, but it is not the subject of it. Simmons frames the whole thing around attacks on Jewish community members, and he spends most of the running time asking his audience to separate the Israeli government from Jewish people who have no control over it. His argument is that anger about Netanyahu is being redirected onto individuals, and that those individuals are being targeted for their Jewishness rather than for anything they support.
The timing is not subtle. On Thursday, July 23, two men were stabbed with a screwdriver on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Moshe Grunhaus was wearing a yarmulke and leaving the Jewish Center on 86th Street when he was attacked. The other victim, 57 year old Chok Sung, is not Jewish. Police said the attacker shouted a religious phrase during both assaults, and arrested Raul Morales, who had not been charged as of Friday evening. It happened on Tisha B’Av. Days earlier, two Orthodox synagogues in Queens were vandalized with bags of feces and motor oil thrown at their entrances. Russell Simmons does not name any of these incidents in the video, but he is speaking into that week.
He is also speaking into a fight at City Hall. On July 21, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video saying New York cannot execute the International Criminal Court warrant for Netanyahu, calling him a war criminal, and urging the federal government to join the ICC and enforce it. Eric Goldstein, president of UJA-Federation of New York, called the message political grandstanding. City Council Speaker Julie Menin said the Jewish community overwhelmingly views the stabbings as antisemitic and that the fear is real. At the start of July, more than half of all hate crimes recorded in the city this year had targeted Jewish people, in a city where Jewish residents are roughly ten percent of the population.
Russell Simmons calls Netanyahu’s conduct unreasonable, unacceptable, and something humanity cannot tolerate. In the same breath he says Jewish people should have a place to live and be safe, that if Israel is that place he supports its right to exist, and that he considers himself a supporter of Zionism. He then draws a line between that and what he calls the expansion of Zionism under the guise of safety, which he says he sees differently than others do. He also says he believes in a Palestinian state completely, has believed it for as long as he can remember, and has gotten into trouble for saying so. He goes further and calls for reparations to the Palestinian people.
The core of his appeal is about fear. Simmons argues that Jewish people are a small population set against communities that vastly outnumber them, and that centuries of being targeted have produced a fear he considers justified even when it drives support for policies he finds indefensible. He is not asking anyone to agree with that support. He is asking people to understand where it comes from before they speak, and to be compassionate with someone who might otherwise stop listening.
He offers his friend as the example. The man he lost, Simmons says, is exactly the kind of person driven by that fear. He does not describe the friendship as a casualty of politics so much as a casualty of two people talking past each other, and he does not claim he was wrong.
Simmons has standing on this subject that most entertainment figures do not. He joined the board of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding as chairman in 2002, working alongside Rabbi Marc Schneier, who founded the organization in 1989 to rebuild the Black and Jewish alliance and later widened its mandate to Muslim and Jewish relations. In the video, Simmons says he tracked the rise of antisemitism throughout that period and recently saw a report showing it is now worse than at any point during those years. He also makes a point about that alliance directly, saying the Jewish community has been a greater friend to Black communities than any other, and that Black civil rights work and Black businesses have been moved forward by that relationship.
One claim in the video is his own anecdote rather than data, and he leans on it twice. Simmons says most of the Jewish New Yorkers he knows voted for Mamdani, and he uses that as evidence that Jewish New Yorkers are not a stand in for Netanyahu and should not be treated as one. That is his experience of his own circle, not a measurement of how the city voted.
His closing ask is narrow. Say what you want about Israel and Israeli government policy, but define it as being about Israel and Israeli government policy, and keep it off individuals. Russell Simmons says he feels threatened himself, because what happens to one member of a community happens to all of them, and he asks for peace, a just settlement, and a way through where nobody suffers. He is asking for that while still saying, on the record, that what Netanyahu has done amounts to war crimes.
