A Relatively Comprehensive Comment on Anti-Israeli Sentiment in the Context of the Gaza War
Yesterday, May 14, was Israeli Independence Day.
Israel, and the enormous backlash against its perceived conduct in the Gaza War, has been in my mind of late. A few days ago, one of those student encampments was established at the big university in my city, and I regularly see anti-Israeli protestors in public when I go out, not to mention all the time online, despite my generally trying to avoid it.
Every time I try to write about this topic, ever since the slaughter by Hamas in October, I really struggle with it. There is so much to say, and I feel obliged to say it all: to lay out the historical background necessary for understanding the current events; to reveal the active role of anti-Semitism, Western guilt, and Islamic extremism in shaping current opinion; to analyze and refute the misinformation and disinformation plaguing anti-Israeli activism right now; and to tie it all together into a decisive "case" that the anti-Israeli position is not only objectively wrong but also unwittingly (and occasionally very deliberately wittingly) fueled by the hatred of Jews.
The reason I always feel obliged to "say it all" is because the center of anti-Israeli sentiment in the US presently is the left: my political home. To speak on this issue is inevitably to speak out against, and condemn, many of my ideological allies and even some of my own friends. This is quite a disorienting thing, and also puts my own credibility on trial. Furthermore, it is necessarily an occasion to reflect on the sheer tenuousness of leftist "rightness," i.e. the proximity of political leftism in general to being right on the issues and dwelling on the right side of history, as defined by my personal principles and convictions centered around humanism, equality, liberty, opportunity, and let's call it a forward-looking view of further developing human civilization.
Without the benefit of all of the above, the bottom line of what I want to say is pretty hard to swallow, but here it is nevertheless: The Israelis are largely in the right, and the Palestinians are largely in the wrong. And Hamas, and all Islamic terrorists, deserve everything they get, and worse. And, moreover, most people in the West have very little clue about what is actually going on there, and this ignorance is leading to a modern eruption of straight-up Jew hatred around the world that is not only concerning by itself but also bodes extremely ill in this current moment of resurgent fascism, obscene disparities of wealth, and global disillusionment in constructive human endeavors like society and technology. I am not to the point of fearing for my life yet, obviously, both other Jews I know have reported a deep chilling effect of fear that has caused them to censor themselves and become even more private and reclusive about their personal views on this subject. And while I do not fear for my life I do feel, thickly, a sense of estrangement and betrayal by those who should know better, and, by extension, a disillusionment of my own in my hopes for humanity's capacity for self-improvement and attainment of justice. I learned a long time ago that liberals are only a very little bit smarter than conservatives (or moderates, or apoliticals), but I always hope that this little bit will add up to something big, like how the curvature of the whole Universe is defined by a few decimal points. Phenomena like this eruption of hate against Israel are strong evidence against my hopes.
This Jew hatred isn't existentially dangerous to Jews yet, in my opinion-although it is situationally very dangerous to some Jews living in vulnerable locations (i.e. outside the US and Israel)-but I suppose I might say it "poisons the soul" of the people who become mesmerized by it, weakening their consciences like a fungal leaf blight on a plant and thereby making them more susceptible to wickedness and heinous acts in the future. Jew hatred is the classical hallmark of individual evil: No other group of people in the whole Abrahamic world, with the possible exception of chattel slaves alone, has been subject to a more constant and brutal persecution than Jews. From before the time of the Roman emperors, Jews have repeatedly and systematically been physically segregated from the rest of society, barred from owning land and and property, barred from marrying outside their communities, barred from the rights of citizenship, barred from access to civic institutions and infrastructure, legally robbed and stripped of their possessions, forcibly exiled from their lands, scapegoated for all manner of crimes both petty and high, caricaturized in literature and pop culture as ghoulish servants of the underworld, and assaulted, mutilated, raped, murdered, and mass-murdered without penalty by their perpetrators, or sometimes even by governments themselves on false charges or pretenses. Tens of thousands of Jews were burned alive on false accusations for causing the Bubonic Plague. Hundreds of Jewish communities were annihilated by the Russian Empire on politicoeconomic grounds. The words "ghetto," "pogrom," diaspora," and "holocaust" were ALL originally coined in reference to gentile policies against Jews. And before we discuss "Israeli genocide" in Gaza, I want you to stop and consider that, today, virtually zero Jews live in the countries surrounding Israel, including the Palestinian Territories, whereas historically Jews flourished as a small but vibrant minority throughout the entire region, from Persia to Ethiopia. Today there are almost none left. That is genocide.
Historically, Jews were persecuted as such, i.e. as an ethnoreligious group. Attacks against Jews were necessarily made directly against their character and customs. But in 1948, some Jews, with a mandate from the newly-formed United Nations and support from the UK and the US, erected a shield around all Jewish people in the world, and that shield is the State of Israel. Israel, now, is the first target of, and the first line of defense against, anti-Semitic forces worldwide. As an actor on the world stage, Israel stands for Jewish interests and problematizes efforts by foreign powers to discriminate against Jews living in their own borders. Israel acts as a deterrence against the recurrence of ghettos and pogroms and diasporas and holocausts. In this way, Israel provides a measure of protection for Jews everywhere, not simply those living within its borders. And it makes me think how many on the left prefer people to be weak and helpless in order to receive leftist sympathy. If the Jews had no state, and were a near-extinct minority on the periphery of Muslim societies in far-off, failing countries, these same progressives who are screaming in the streets that Zionism is genocide would be posting little Stars of David and effusing worthless statements of solidarity and love-just like they do with the Palestinians. But since Jews instead have a spine and the hands to protect themselves in the form of the State of Israel and its military, well...the mask comes off. The fact that Israel can defend itself, and is doing so, and is answered in its efforts not with relief but with denunciation, tells us a lot about the true nature of many leftists.
Meanwhile, the forces of Jew hatred around the world do find silver linings in this cloud of Israel-as-a-shield: For one, the creation of Israel accelerated the murder and exile of Jews in the Middle East and surrounding areas. For another, and more importantly these days, now that the Jewish people have a polity of their own Jews around the world are subject to normalized political criticism of their identity via criticism of the policies and actions of the Israeli state and its lawfully-elected democratic government. If you're an anti-Semite you don't have to attack Jews openly. You can attack Israel and get a whole lot farther in terms of what you can say.
This is why anti-Israeli conduct and rhetoric is so worrisome. Attacks on Israeli policy and conduct are sometimes sincere (though not as often as you might expect), but more frequently they are furtive attacks on Jews and Jewishness-the same old stereotypes and hatred, bubbling up in a modern form. Israel is a sufficiently effective shield that it necessitates discrediting and delegitimizing "the Jewish state" first before Jews themselves can be effectively attacked en masse on identity-based grounds directly. And, by the way, you can see these same dynamics playing out in a lesser form when you hear people attacking "the Jewish lobby" in the United States, sometimes including (often with a high degree of inaccuracy and irrelevance) the names of specific Jewish-affiliated lobbying organizations, like AIPAC.
To tell apart sincere criticism of Israel from veiled anti-Semitism, look hard at the substance of the criticisms. It's often quite obvious once you begin thinking to look. An Israeli soldier assaulted a Palestinian prisoner? That's despicable, and deserves to be called out. "AIPAC" is funding Zionist apartheid? That's Hitlerism in a Groucho mask.
I also want to draw a contrast between the eruption of antipathy against Israel of late versus the near-silence on other mass-loss-of-life events occurring in the world in recent times. All those same people who are shouting so loudly about "Israeli apartheid" and "Israeli genocide" have very little to say about the ongoing North Korean holocaust and tyranny, or the carnage in Sudan over the past year, or the resurgence of the brutally oppressive Taliban in Afghanistan following American withdrawal there, or the Chinese government's ethnic cleansing of non-Han peoples in China's south and west...just to name a few. There are no college campus encampments about any of these atrocities. Even the Western outrage against Russia's blatantly genocidal invasion of Ukraine is losing its steam, just as Putin predicted. And I guess you could say that "The difference is that the US government is a major strategic ally, financier, and arms supplier of Israel, and not of North Korea or Sudan or China or Russia, etc." And fair enough; that's a good point; but why then is so much of this vehemence directed not at the US government but at Israel?
Let me stop being coy about it: There is a huge and glaring double standard playing out here, and it is really obvious to anybody who is being honest with themselves what exactly this double standard signifies. Only the Jewish state is being singled out for virulent opprobrium, and that's not because of anger at the US government. If it were, that anger would manifest in many other forms, which is not happening.
This is Jew hatred.
And I realize you may not believe it. It's easy and convenient, isn't it, for people who are doing bad things today to hide in the shadows of the oppression inflicted on their forbearers? I know that. And I also know that, just going by the odds of who my readers are, you are much more likely to be sympathetic to the Palestinians and distressed by what you perceive to be Israel's actions in Gaza. And you can no doubt say, with some confidence, that you are not, deep down, a raving anti-Semite.
And, yeah: You're probably right. You're probably not. That's the thing about Jew hatred. Just like we saw in Germany nearly a century ago, most Germans weren't the sorts of raving lunatics who would rage themselves to tears over whatever old Ben Finkelstein down the street was up to. Most Germans were "normal," ordinary folks who, with a bit of vanity and ignorance, got swept up in a prevailing zeitgeist much larger than themselves, and, in so doing, either ignored anything that would cause them cognitive dissonance, or rationalized to themselves that it was for the best.
What form might that kind of attitude take right now? It's exactly what we see happening: The othering of Israel as an "apartheid" state. (It is not.) The demands to cut US foreign aid to Israel. The demand for companies and organizations to submit to the BDS movement-that's "Boycott, Divest, Sanctions," referring to Israel of course. The use of en vogue leftist vocabulary like "colonization" to (wrongly and ridiculously) accuse Israel of being an inherently illegitimate colonialist occupier. (Jews have lived in the region for thousands of years-as a minority, yes, but when has being a minority ever been an argument in leftist thought that a people's presence in a place is invalid and those people should be deported?) And, besides these concrete things, a whole lot of just-beneath-the-surface bubbling of anti-Semitic thought and idea-framing. All of this kind of sentiment is, generally speaking, indicative of a population-in this case, Western leftists-trying to work itself into the belief that it is righteous and just to oppose another group-in this case, Israelis-and denounce them as non-credible in the context of preexisting social awareness that the group they are attacking is a historically persecuted minority. This is what modern-day white supremacists are doing when they focus on "black people causing most of the crime"; most of these lovely dears don't spend their days ranting and raving either. But the hatred is there, and there is just enough of it within them to cement them into this ugly movement.
I am not saying that it is impossible to criticize Israel, or that you can only validly do so on my arbitrary terms. I am saying that the posture and behaviors of the anti-Israel protest movement largely conform to the posture and behaviors of any run-of-the-mill hate group. And the total lack of nuance in these people about the exceedingly complex and wrought issues of the Gaza War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict more broadly is especially revealing.
My advice to you: If you find yourself angry and disgusted at "Israel" because of the Gaza War, you owe it to yourself, and to humanity, to step back and check your understanding of the situation. If you are in fact not a raving anti-Semite, I think you will find serious problems with the anti-Israeli position and the tactics and language of the protest movement, even if you don't end up arriving at a pro-Israeli position at the end of your reflection.
By the way, in my original draft of this essay I didn't mention it, but let me just say really quickly: You may have noticed me using the term "anti-Israeli" rather than "pro-Palestinian." This is by design, because that's what the protest movement is. Its prevailing posture isn't pro-Palestinian in any way. In fact it is typical cringeworthy Western exoticization of a foreign population; while there are a few people who are genuinely trying to learn more about the Palestinians and their history and ways, most are content to keep the Palestinians in their minds as an abstract, conveniently-brown population in need of saving. The real pro-Palestinians-and these folks do exist-aren't wasting their energy trying to vilify Israel; they are participating in relief efforts to help Palestinian civilians, and calling for negotiations and peace talks. Just as it is with telling apart legitimate criticism of Israel from cloaked Jew hatred, it is also pretty easy to tell apart pro-Palestinian activities from anti-Israeli ones.
Now, let's talk briefly about what is actually happening in Gaza. It is being labeled as "genocide" etc. by bad-faith actors, and then that kind of language gets repeated in the wider discourse across the anti-Israel protest movement, serving to caricaturize the conflict and make everyone more ignorant.
To be direct and succinct about it, no: Genocide is not happening in Gaza systematically. There have been individual incidents that qualify as atrocities, which by my understanding are not coordinated and deliberate but the result of either institutional failures or isolated bad actors. Compare that to, for instance, the reemergence of tensions between Serbia and Kosovo that is happening right now. It's pretty obviously clear that Israel is not trying to slaughter the Palestinians per se (as distinguished from Hamas fighters), or drive them out of Gaza, or steal their children, or any of the other things that comprise the modern UN definition of genocide.
Rather, a war is happening in Gaza, and the destructiveness of that war is the result of determined urban warfare by a technologically superior force against a terrorist guerilla force that has little regard for human life among its own population. Hamas, not Israel, stations Hamas operatives and equipment in civilian buildings. That leaves Israel with only two choices: attack them anyway, wherever it reasonably can, or don't. That's the only choice. There is no diplomatic solution. (It has been tried multiple times in the past.) Israel can't bribe Hamas with money or land or anything else. (It has been tried multiple times in the past.) Israel can't isolate and cut off Gaza and leave it to its own business. (This has also been tried in the past.) And the slaughter of October 7 makes it culturally impossible for Israel to simply do nothing at all. So, really, there is no choice at all. When war comes to you, your not wanting it doesn't make it go away.
The death toll of Palestinian civilians is high. It is painfully high. It is embarrassingly high. Even though there is the complicating factor that Palestinian casualties are reported by Hamas, which is not a credible source, for the sake of argument I always presume that the death toll is accurate, because I would rather have this argument on those grounds than to try to claim that the death toll is lower and eventually be proven wrong. The current claimed death toll, and the sheer scale of destruction of buildings and infrastructure, makes me question Israeli strategy in the war. Clearly, the Israelis are being "looser" in their methods this time around. In the past, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were excellent at minimizing civilian casualties, even though they never got any credit for it. But that isn't the case this time, and by all accounts this is by design, with the IDF given much more latitude by the Israeli government to pursue military targets at a higher acceptable level of collateral damage. Israel is sincere in its desire to eliminate the military apparatus of Hamas as a coherent organization, and is willing to do what it takes to fulfill that valid goal.
In any other time and place, we would simply say "Israel is sincere in its desire to win the war." But, because of this insidious double standard, we are denied the intuitiveness of this obvious statement and instead are forced to speak of Israeli goals at a higher degree of detail and specificity, which perhaps isn't a bad thing when it comes to war discourse in general, but which is certainly dangerous when it occurs only as a double standard against Jews and Israel.
Nevertheless, despite being so high, the death toll is still commensurate with what one would reasonably expect of a war fought under these conditions. Hamas fighters are extremely dangerous. They are combat-hardened and well-armed, and while they lack large-scale military infrastructure and deep economic resources, they have more than enough means to mount a guerilla war against Israel. They have planning, logistical capability, defensive resources...you would not want these people to be out to kill you. This fact gets lost in the shadow of Israel's military superiority, but if Israel did not have that superiority this would be a much bloodier war.
And, so, because Hamas uses human shields, stationing themselves in civilian locations, the reported civilian death toll is in line with what we would reasonably expect in the face of a determined Israel who fully intends to put an end to Hamas after decades of terrorism but who still wants to minimize civilian casualties to the extent feasible.
That last phrase is important: If Israel did not want to preserve civilian life, the death toll would be vastly higher, perhaps a whole order of magnitude higher. Gaza is incredibly small, and incredibly dense. Israel could probably wipe out Hamas in a single week if it wanted to, but it could only do so at the expense of killing much of the Palestinian public as well, and that isn't acceptable to Israel. (Nor should it ever be acceptable to anyone.) So instead we have had this long, drawn-out affair where the Palestinian public has slowly been squeezed across the entirety of Gaza as Israel has conducted operations in different sectors sequentially. This is the lifesaving alternative. For as negatively as it is being spun in the news via stories of Palestinian refugees without homes or basic goods, and for as gruesome as it indeed is for civilians to be subjected to these conditions-especially since the Palestinian population is very young and many of these refugees are children-this is the alternative to those same people being dead. And if you don't like that, talk to Hamas.
I can't underscore that enough. It boggles my mind just how bad Israeli PR is and how deep-seated anti-Semitism must be for Israel to have so completely lost the public opinion war when it is Hamas who are literally using Palestinian human shields-their own people!-as one of their primary warfighting tactics.
I realize that this too-"if you don't like it, talk to Hamas"-doesn't sound quite right in the minds of many people whose loyalties ultimately lean anti-government. Every terrorist organization claims some righteous cause, and some of these claims are more sympathetic than others. Many people in the West, who don't know the truth about the history of the region and instead know only the lies that they have been fed by anti-Semitic agents in the West, have in their own minds dehumanized the Israeli people and discredited Israel as a legitimate state. Israel has no right to defend itself, and Hamas (and the Palestinians more broadly) have every right to fight for their freedom. That might be a compelling story if it were true, but it's not. Hamas doesn't want freedom or a better future for the Palestinian people. They want their own glorification and the destruction of Israel. They subject the people under their rule to corrupt governance, economic mismanagement, and religious extremism. Hamas has passed up many opportunities over the decades to participate in the peaceful economic development of Gaza, and has always sought to maximize its own power and wealth, spread its extreme version of Islam, and pursue its grudges against Israel, always at the expense of a more equitable outcome for Palestinians more generally. This is true of all the Islamic terror groups in the Palestinian Territories and in surrounding countries. Israel, for its part, obviously doesn't want its uncomfortably-close neighbor to be hostile, and would gladly seek an equitable peace. (As indeed they did from the beginning, agreeing to the UN partition plan for a two-state solution while the Arabs rejected it, leading to war, and seriously engaging in Palestinian statehood talks as recently as the Obama years.) And Israel is a legitimate state, not a colonial occupier. In fact Israel de-occupied Gaza years ago, specifically in hopes of achieving peace, after having occupied it decades earlier in response to the terrorist campaigns of the day. But to stick on the point: Jews have as much right as anyone to live there; they have been there longer than anyone. They are natives there. Jews are not going away, yet this is Hamas' ultimate goal, on which it refuses to budge, and this filters out into Western anti-Israeli demands as well. Hamas doesn't want freedom; they want Jews killed. There are phone recordings of Hamas fighters saying exactly that on October 7; one fighter called his parents in a crying glee to report that he had killed Jews; that is the ultimate goal of Hamas. And it troubles me when I see frequent reports of Western anti-Israeli activists shouting genocidal slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," which refers to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, i.e. the east and west borders of Israel, and is a dog whistle for destroying Israel and killing the Jews who live there. There's one video I saw a couple days ago of some Islamic dude teaching a group of American progressives how to chant "Death to Israel!" and the old classic "Death to America!" in Arabic. And they were doing it; they were going along with it even after he told them what it means. He said "It doesn't always mean 'death to'; sometimes it means 'down with.'" Ah, well. That makes it okay, then!
The anti-Israeli position in the West is that Israel is the aggressor, that Israel was the one who truly started hostilities, that Israel is the one in the wrong. No, it isn't. Those are lies. Those are relatively rudimentary propaganda lines that should embarrass the people who so easily believe in them. Anti-Israeli propaganda has been refined over decades by Islamic extremists and Western anti-Semites (mostly in academia) who, together-though not necessarily in close ongoing coordination-have perfected anti-Israeli invective for the Western progressive palate. You might be surprised just how much of this crap traces a straight line back to Islamic terror organizations, governments of countries like Iran, and anti-capitalist extremists living here in the US or in other Western countries who are more than happy to use Israel as an outcropping to advance their agenda of, depending on their internal zeal, anything from self-loathing nihilism to violent revolution.
Anti-Israeli propaganda is very hard to break, because the same people who buy into it are the ones who are the least interested in listening to rational refutations. They don't care about evidence; their minds are already made up. I spilled a lot of ink on this back in college, but with this current war I rarely bother to try. It's a losing battle.
Anyway, here's an obvious question: If most anti-Israeli rhetoric is lies and most anti-Israeli sentiment is fueled by Jew hatred, what's legitimate? Where does one legitimately criticize Israel? Well, first of all, if you liked that sentence consider what it says about your predisposition toward assuming Israel is guilty. But, to answer: The only room for debate is in the nitty-gritty of how vigorously Israel defends itself in this war. And I say "defend" even though I know that such a word probably won't ring true for some people, as Israel is clearly the superior power operating within its opponent's borders. Yet despite this disparity it really is Israel on the defense: Israel may tower over the Palestinians but it is vastly outnumbered in the region, and its enemies have the patronage of countries like Iran and Russia, among others. There are only 15 million Jews in the world, which comprises 0.2 percent of humanity. The vast majority live in Israel (7+ million) and the United States (6+ million). Israel is a small country in both size and numbers, and is extremely vulnerable to attack. Indeed, it has been invaded multiple times in its short existence, sometimes by several foreign powers simultaneously. As a result, Israel has universal conscription and a strong lived experience of the danger of the wider world and the importance of self-defense: lessons we in the West have largely forgotten. Israel knows that it will be attacked when it is perceived as weak. The historical precedents and the contemporary rhetoric are both there to prove it. I think a starting point for validly criticizing Israel is understanding and acknowledging that Israelis rightly view Hamas as an active existential threat and legitimately fear for Israel's continued existence.
From that basis, we can argue about how Israel fights this war. That's a valid topic. Some Israelis themselves have become critics of this! But it's also a difficult topic: The main knobs available for control are scale and time. Israel has been fighting a relatively large-scale campaign on relatively fast timetable. Israel could, theoretically, turn either or both of those knobs down and still eventually achieve the intended victory. Doing so would decrease collateral damage in immediate magnitude but would also increase its occurrence over a longer period of time. Would that be better in the end? I'm not sure. I don't know what the best strategy might be for preserving civilian life while still delivering Israel the victory it seeks and deserves, but I am open to listening to arguments. Yet, thing is, no one is making these arguments. The anti-Israel voices here in the US, when they wade into the subject of war strategy at all, naively and disingenuously call only for an immediate ceasefire, with no regard to the geopolitics fueling the war. A ceasefire is not going to happen. Not until Israel feels it has sufficiently degraded Hamas. What happened to Israel on October 7 is like your neighbor coming over to your house at dawn and murdering your kid, and there are no police in the region to help you. You're on your own. And you know they're going to come back again tomorrow to murder another kid if they can. There's only one recourse for that: You have to stop them. And maybe some people would choose to turn the other cheek-i.e., the ceasefire-and submit to having all their children eventually murdered in this way, and that would be valid for them, but seeking justice-i.e., chasing that murderer down and killing or capturing them-is also a valid choice, and indeed it is the right choice for anyone who respects their own life and way of life, and their own people and society. Arguments about how Israel fights the war must operate within the premise that the war itself is valid. Being opposed to the war entirely without a valid solution to the active threat of Islamic terrorism may not intrinsically be anti-Semitic, but it is nonsensical.
We can also argue about the specific policies of the Israeli government. That is a valid topic too, and a more fruitful one perhaps. I will be the first person to say-and for years I have been saying-that the Netanyahu government is corrupt, extremist, and undemocratic. I am fully aware that Netanyahu is exploiting the tragedy of October 7 and the ensuing war to hold onto power as long as he can. He is a criminal-literally; much like Trump he has tried to stop the government from putting him in prison by remaining in power. It is my sincerest wish that the Israeli people would vote Netanyahu out of office once and for all, and reject right-wing politics in general.
But I am also aware that the reason Israel has drifted to the right in recent decades is exactly because of Western treachery. The West may send money and arms to Israel, but they do very little in the grand scheme of things to protect Israel against virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions on the world stage, including in the United Nations and in organizations like the International Criminal Court, which have delegitimized themselves in my eyes in part because of their blatant anti-Semitic actions against Israel over the course of my adult life. Israelis are left to feel that they have no true friends in the world and can rely on no one but themselves when their need is at its most dire, and they are well aware that they are a tiny ten million in a world of eight billion. They know how tenuous their existence is. They hear the anti-Semitic slurs against Jews all over the world. The hear their immediate neighbors all routinely call for Israel to be destroyed.
If that were the world you lived in, what kind of worldview might you develop?
I don't like it that Israel has hardened its heart, but I completely understand it. Nevertheless, I am still fine with legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy, and I make those criticisms myself often (if not necessarily in places where you can see them). I am open to arguments that Israeli policy should be changed. I for one believe that most of the settlements in the West Bank should be removed; I think the West Bank should be a continuous territory in part of a future Palestinian state, and not peppered with the Swiss cheese holes of Israeli settlements. And I wholeheartedly condemn the reports of sporadic abuses committed by Israeli troops and units against Palestinian prisoners and civilians, and I support reprimands and harsher punishments as warranted for those offenses. I demand that Israel continue to minimize civilian casualties at least as vigorously as it has been doing thus far if not more so. And I call on the Israeli people to come to their senses and reject Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government immediately. Israel may not be at a place where it can go leftist, but it can at least go center-right.
There is a lot to criticize about Israel that is fair game. But what you can't criticize is the fundamental principle of Israel's continuing existence, its right to self-defense, and the legitimacy of the Jewish people. Those views are inherently discrediting.
I have said a lot about Jews and Israelis and anti-Semitism. Jew hatred lurks at the heart of most evil in the Abrahamic world, not only as a cultural hallmark of wickedness but also as a nexus of conspiracy theories and slander in general. Yet, let me speak in conclusion about the Palestinian people. Not Hamas, but the general, ordinary, Palestinian public.
I will be honest with you: It is hard for me to feel any sympathy for them right now. Palestinian culture is fundamentally broken, and while Israel is easy to scapegoat, and Israel does play a direct role in Palestinian suffering via its containment of Palestinian-originated terrorism, Palestinian suffering ultimately isn't Israel's doing. Rather, the Palestinian people are the sad pawns of the entire world. It is in the strategic interests of other Middle Eastern powers, and of all anti-Western powers around the world, for the Palestinians to be destabilized, radicalized, and in continual conflict with Israel. And a great deal of money and weapons go to terrorist groups within the Palestinian Territories for precisely this reason, even as ordinary Palestinians remain beset by poverty and a lack of economic mobility, which is a huge precursor to radicalism. Additionally, Arab powers in the region refuse to let Palestinian expatriate and refugee populations properly integrate into their societies, which, considering that there is not as yet an actual Palestinian state, leaves Palestinians without a refuge of their own the way Israel is for Jews. This is by design; Arab powers want the Palestinian people to exist in misery, because it bolsters authoritarian Arab governments' own grip on power and claims to legitimacy by reinforcing the narrative of a common enemy: "the Jews." Finally, added to all this is the fact that Islam is at its most degenerate point in centuries, having fallen in many regions into barbarism and right-wing fanaticism so extreme that it makes the Christian Dominionism we have at home look moderate. Religious extremism will ruin any society, and Islamic extremism is the tragedy of the entire modern Islamic world, and certainly the Middle East.
The deck is stacked against the Palestinian people, and they have failed as a society because of it. And their radicalism and violence forces Israel to keep a check on them, and control their ports, and the cycle perpetuates.
I want you to think about an analogy here in the United States: The Palestinians are not unlike white conservative Americans. They have a right-wing ideology that glorifies violence. They live in poverty, religious extremism, and a culture of fear and resistance to change. They are dominated by corrupt religious and government authorities, and for the most part don't understand what good governance even looks like. They hate education and science. They are opposed to programs that would help the poor and get society on the right track. And they are unified in their subtle but omnipresent racism against black people. This all overlaps considerably well with the Palestinian people; just swap out blacks for Jews. And the reason I draw this analogy is because I think it is important to acknowledge that the Palestinian people are not wholly innocent. They are not passive victims of their current plight. They are indeed the pawns of nefarious powers around the world, but they also willingly perpetuate their own misery. This is what it means for a culture to be broken. Many other cultures around the world are broken thus, or broken in other ways. Which leads me to my next point:
Normally I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians, for all of the reasons I mentioned earlier. These days I am not feeling it, understandably, but that doesn't stop me from holding on to my principles, and my principles oblige me to include the Palestinians in my best wishes for the Israelis, just as I include American conservatives in my best wishes for a better America. I dearly want peace, safety, and a return to normalcy for the Palestinians. Everyone deserves that. And more than that, I want them to escape this broken culture and the cycle of violence. The Palestinian radicals who were committing acts of terror during the Second Intifada when I was in college are the old guard now; it's a whole new generation of Palestinians who are on the front lines of Hamas today. And that's horribly sad. Israeli civilians were only being slaughtered on the very first day of the war, but on every day since then it has been Palestinian civilians who have paid the price of Hamas' insanity. And I realize that the impressions of Israel being formed in Palestinian children's minds today may never be healed. Hamas can be destroyed, if Israel stays the course, but war alone will not resolve Palestinian terrorism against Israel. And I don't know what will fix it, other than for a generational awakening among Palestinians to look within their own house for the cause of the insanity, and reject the doctrines of martyrdom and Islamic extremism and recourses of terrorism that have fueled generations of misery for their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and beyond.
Only when the Palestinian people develop a sense of dignity can this cycle of violence end, I think. And nothing Israel might do or not do is going to create this sense of dignity. It is up to the Palestinians to save themselves, and they have a great deal of responsibility to do so, I think, because, like I said, they are not wholly innocent in this conflict. And when they do save themselves, they will find their Jewish neighbors filled with gladness and relief. I guarantee it. Jews want peace. Like, all our holidays and all our songs are about peace. It's the first Hebrew word that non-Jews learn: Shalom. Jews really just want to be left alone in peace, like hobbits I suppose. We understand that the rest of the world has no love for us, to the extent we are viewed as Jews rather than as other labels. While no land is free of bigots, and the actions of Islamic terrorists have hardened many Israelis' hearts, I am quite confident that, if the Palestinians were ever to insist, genuinely, upon peace, the Israelis would be glad to meet them at that table. But for that day to come, the Palestinians must accept that the Jews aren't going away (which I think is not too big of an ask for most ordinary Palestinians), and must accept their own responsibility for setting their own destinies and upholding their dignity as a people.
In conclusion, I want to cover some miscellaneous notes that didn't fit into this essay:
1. One might ask whether Hamas is not in fact in its rights to fight, just as Israel is. To that I would say no, for the reasons I outlined above about Hamas' motives and goals. I wouldn't go so far as to say that terrorism is never a valid solution, because every once in a while it is, but there are two problems here: First, the Israelis are not the unreasonable party in this conflict; the Palestinians are. Israel has sincerely engaged in peace talks many times, and has offered some pretty serious concessions in the past. When such options are on the table, terrorism is almost impossible to validate. Second, there is no credible strain of Palestinian terrorist liberation. It's all just Islamic extremists, and that's never valid ever.
2. Recently, anti-Israel encampments have sprung up on college campuses across the United States as a form of protest against Israel's perceived conduct in the Gaza War-an ongoing hot war phase amid the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian Conflict-and against the United States government's perceived role in funding and supplying that perceived conduct. These protests have been mostly nonviolent, with some notable exceptions, and I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with such actions inherently. Peaceful protest is a part of the American tradition, and what better place for it, both socially and in terms of a person's individual lifetime, than at college? In other words, I don't inherently think they should be shut down. Nevertheless, I am quite concerned about these encampments as focal points for radicalizing anti-Semitic discourse and views in America, and I am saddened and frustrated at the sheer amount of misinformation that comes out of these protestors. They are direly wrong about virtually everything they say.
3. The sheer wrongness of the prevailing consensus on the left about the Gaza War and Israel's role leaves me wondering what else we are wrong about that I might not know about. I happen to be well-informed on this issue, but this instance of being pitted against my political home has reminded me just how tenuous most people's grasp of most issues is. I suspect that I have underestimated in the past just how poorly many leftists grasp exactly why the positions we hold on the left are in fact credible and tenable positions. It troubles me that most people are so much more responsive to propaganda tactics than to facts and reason, which in turn forces me to wearily reevaluate my relationship with how best to guide and persuade people on the issues.
4. I have had glancing conversations with a handful of friends who are against me on this issue, and one thing I take away from it is that people are well-primed to recognize their own oppression and exploitation by others, but are often poorly-equipped to see the exact same injustices inflicted upon others. Many people who have lots of "underprivileged" status points on the left-being racial or sexual minorities, disabled or differently-abled, etc.-are among the worst tramplers of the rights and struggles of other groups within our umbrella of the disadvantaged. It blows my mind that people who have experienced a lifetime of systemic injustice themselves can look at at small nation of 10 million people trying to defend itself against literal terrorist groups and a whole region of adversaries and conclude that actually it's the terrorists who are right.
Israel, and the enormous backlash against its perceived conduct in the Gaza War, has been in my mind of late. A few days ago, one of those student encampments was established at the big university in my city, and I regularly see anti-Israeli protestors in public when I go out, not to mention all the time online, despite my generally trying to avoid it.
Every time I try to write about this topic, ever since the slaughter by Hamas in October, I really struggle with it. There is so much to say, and I feel obliged to say it all: to lay out the historical background necessary for understanding the current events; to reveal the active role of anti-Semitism, Western guilt, and Islamic extremism in shaping current opinion; to analyze and refute the misinformation and disinformation plaguing anti-Israeli activism right now; and to tie it all together into a decisive "case" that the anti-Israeli position is not only objectively wrong but also unwittingly (and occasionally very deliberately wittingly) fueled by the hatred of Jews.
The reason I always feel obliged to "say it all" is because the center of anti-Israeli sentiment in the US presently is the left: my political home. To speak on this issue is inevitably to speak out against, and condemn, many of my ideological allies and even some of my own friends. This is quite a disorienting thing, and also puts my own credibility on trial. Furthermore, it is necessarily an occasion to reflect on the sheer tenuousness of leftist "rightness," i.e. the proximity of political leftism in general to being right on the issues and dwelling on the right side of history, as defined by my personal principles and convictions centered around humanism, equality, liberty, opportunity, and let's call it a forward-looking view of further developing human civilization.
Without the benefit of all of the above, the bottom line of what I want to say is pretty hard to swallow, but here it is nevertheless: The Israelis are largely in the right, and the Palestinians are largely in the wrong. And Hamas, and all Islamic terrorists, deserve everything they get, and worse. And, moreover, most people in the West have very little clue about what is actually going on there, and this ignorance is leading to a modern eruption of straight-up Jew hatred around the world that is not only concerning by itself but also bodes extremely ill in this current moment of resurgent fascism, obscene disparities of wealth, and global disillusionment in constructive human endeavors like society and technology. I am not to the point of fearing for my life yet, obviously, both other Jews I know have reported a deep chilling effect of fear that has caused them to censor themselves and become even more private and reclusive about their personal views on this subject. And while I do not fear for my life I do feel, thickly, a sense of estrangement and betrayal by those who should know better, and, by extension, a disillusionment of my own in my hopes for humanity's capacity for self-improvement and attainment of justice. I learned a long time ago that liberals are only a very little bit smarter than conservatives (or moderates, or apoliticals), but I always hope that this little bit will add up to something big, like how the curvature of the whole Universe is defined by a few decimal points. Phenomena like this eruption of hate against Israel are strong evidence against my hopes.
This Jew hatred isn't existentially dangerous to Jews yet, in my opinion-although it is situationally very dangerous to some Jews living in vulnerable locations (i.e. outside the US and Israel)-but I suppose I might say it "poisons the soul" of the people who become mesmerized by it, weakening their consciences like a fungal leaf blight on a plant and thereby making them more susceptible to wickedness and heinous acts in the future. Jew hatred is the classical hallmark of individual evil: No other group of people in the whole Abrahamic world, with the possible exception of chattel slaves alone, has been subject to a more constant and brutal persecution than Jews. From before the time of the Roman emperors, Jews have repeatedly and systematically been physically segregated from the rest of society, barred from owning land and and property, barred from marrying outside their communities, barred from the rights of citizenship, barred from access to civic institutions and infrastructure, legally robbed and stripped of their possessions, forcibly exiled from their lands, scapegoated for all manner of crimes both petty and high, caricaturized in literature and pop culture as ghoulish servants of the underworld, and assaulted, mutilated, raped, murdered, and mass-murdered without penalty by their perpetrators, or sometimes even by governments themselves on false charges or pretenses. Tens of thousands of Jews were burned alive on false accusations for causing the Bubonic Plague. Hundreds of Jewish communities were annihilated by the Russian Empire on politicoeconomic grounds. The words "ghetto," "pogrom," diaspora," and "holocaust" were ALL originally coined in reference to gentile policies against Jews. And before we discuss "Israeli genocide" in Gaza, I want you to stop and consider that, today, virtually zero Jews live in the countries surrounding Israel, including the Palestinian Territories, whereas historically Jews flourished as a small but vibrant minority throughout the entire region, from Persia to Ethiopia. Today there are almost none left. That is genocide.
Historically, Jews were persecuted as such, i.e. as an ethnoreligious group. Attacks against Jews were necessarily made directly against their character and customs. But in 1948, some Jews, with a mandate from the newly-formed United Nations and support from the UK and the US, erected a shield around all Jewish people in the world, and that shield is the State of Israel. Israel, now, is the first target of, and the first line of defense against, anti-Semitic forces worldwide. As an actor on the world stage, Israel stands for Jewish interests and problematizes efforts by foreign powers to discriminate against Jews living in their own borders. Israel acts as a deterrence against the recurrence of ghettos and pogroms and diasporas and holocausts. In this way, Israel provides a measure of protection for Jews everywhere, not simply those living within its borders. And it makes me think how many on the left prefer people to be weak and helpless in order to receive leftist sympathy. If the Jews had no state, and were a near-extinct minority on the periphery of Muslim societies in far-off, failing countries, these same progressives who are screaming in the streets that Zionism is genocide would be posting little Stars of David and effusing worthless statements of solidarity and love-just like they do with the Palestinians. But since Jews instead have a spine and the hands to protect themselves in the form of the State of Israel and its military, well...the mask comes off. The fact that Israel can defend itself, and is doing so, and is answered in its efforts not with relief but with denunciation, tells us a lot about the true nature of many leftists.
Meanwhile, the forces of Jew hatred around the world do find silver linings in this cloud of Israel-as-a-shield: For one, the creation of Israel accelerated the murder and exile of Jews in the Middle East and surrounding areas. For another, and more importantly these days, now that the Jewish people have a polity of their own Jews around the world are subject to normalized political criticism of their identity via criticism of the policies and actions of the Israeli state and its lawfully-elected democratic government. If you're an anti-Semite you don't have to attack Jews openly. You can attack Israel and get a whole lot farther in terms of what you can say.
This is why anti-Israeli conduct and rhetoric is so worrisome. Attacks on Israeli policy and conduct are sometimes sincere (though not as often as you might expect), but more frequently they are furtive attacks on Jews and Jewishness-the same old stereotypes and hatred, bubbling up in a modern form. Israel is a sufficiently effective shield that it necessitates discrediting and delegitimizing "the Jewish state" first before Jews themselves can be effectively attacked en masse on identity-based grounds directly. And, by the way, you can see these same dynamics playing out in a lesser form when you hear people attacking "the Jewish lobby" in the United States, sometimes including (often with a high degree of inaccuracy and irrelevance) the names of specific Jewish-affiliated lobbying organizations, like AIPAC.
To tell apart sincere criticism of Israel from veiled anti-Semitism, look hard at the substance of the criticisms. It's often quite obvious once you begin thinking to look. An Israeli soldier assaulted a Palestinian prisoner? That's despicable, and deserves to be called out. "AIPAC" is funding Zionist apartheid? That's Hitlerism in a Groucho mask.
I also want to draw a contrast between the eruption of antipathy against Israel of late versus the near-silence on other mass-loss-of-life events occurring in the world in recent times. All those same people who are shouting so loudly about "Israeli apartheid" and "Israeli genocide" have very little to say about the ongoing North Korean holocaust and tyranny, or the carnage in Sudan over the past year, or the resurgence of the brutally oppressive Taliban in Afghanistan following American withdrawal there, or the Chinese government's ethnic cleansing of non-Han peoples in China's south and west...just to name a few. There are no college campus encampments about any of these atrocities. Even the Western outrage against Russia's blatantly genocidal invasion of Ukraine is losing its steam, just as Putin predicted. And I guess you could say that "The difference is that the US government is a major strategic ally, financier, and arms supplier of Israel, and not of North Korea or Sudan or China or Russia, etc." And fair enough; that's a good point; but why then is so much of this vehemence directed not at the US government but at Israel?
Let me stop being coy about it: There is a huge and glaring double standard playing out here, and it is really obvious to anybody who is being honest with themselves what exactly this double standard signifies. Only the Jewish state is being singled out for virulent opprobrium, and that's not because of anger at the US government. If it were, that anger would manifest in many other forms, which is not happening.
This is Jew hatred.
And I realize you may not believe it. It's easy and convenient, isn't it, for people who are doing bad things today to hide in the shadows of the oppression inflicted on their forbearers? I know that. And I also know that, just going by the odds of who my readers are, you are much more likely to be sympathetic to the Palestinians and distressed by what you perceive to be Israel's actions in Gaza. And you can no doubt say, with some confidence, that you are not, deep down, a raving anti-Semite.
And, yeah: You're probably right. You're probably not. That's the thing about Jew hatred. Just like we saw in Germany nearly a century ago, most Germans weren't the sorts of raving lunatics who would rage themselves to tears over whatever old Ben Finkelstein down the street was up to. Most Germans were "normal," ordinary folks who, with a bit of vanity and ignorance, got swept up in a prevailing zeitgeist much larger than themselves, and, in so doing, either ignored anything that would cause them cognitive dissonance, or rationalized to themselves that it was for the best.
What form might that kind of attitude take right now? It's exactly what we see happening: The othering of Israel as an "apartheid" state. (It is not.) The demands to cut US foreign aid to Israel. The demand for companies and organizations to submit to the BDS movement-that's "Boycott, Divest, Sanctions," referring to Israel of course. The use of en vogue leftist vocabulary like "colonization" to (wrongly and ridiculously) accuse Israel of being an inherently illegitimate colonialist occupier. (Jews have lived in the region for thousands of years-as a minority, yes, but when has being a minority ever been an argument in leftist thought that a people's presence in a place is invalid and those people should be deported?) And, besides these concrete things, a whole lot of just-beneath-the-surface bubbling of anti-Semitic thought and idea-framing. All of this kind of sentiment is, generally speaking, indicative of a population-in this case, Western leftists-trying to work itself into the belief that it is righteous and just to oppose another group-in this case, Israelis-and denounce them as non-credible in the context of preexisting social awareness that the group they are attacking is a historically persecuted minority. This is what modern-day white supremacists are doing when they focus on "black people causing most of the crime"; most of these lovely dears don't spend their days ranting and raving either. But the hatred is there, and there is just enough of it within them to cement them into this ugly movement.
I am not saying that it is impossible to criticize Israel, or that you can only validly do so on my arbitrary terms. I am saying that the posture and behaviors of the anti-Israel protest movement largely conform to the posture and behaviors of any run-of-the-mill hate group. And the total lack of nuance in these people about the exceedingly complex and wrought issues of the Gaza War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict more broadly is especially revealing.
My advice to you: If you find yourself angry and disgusted at "Israel" because of the Gaza War, you owe it to yourself, and to humanity, to step back and check your understanding of the situation. If you are in fact not a raving anti-Semite, I think you will find serious problems with the anti-Israeli position and the tactics and language of the protest movement, even if you don't end up arriving at a pro-Israeli position at the end of your reflection.
By the way, in my original draft of this essay I didn't mention it, but let me just say really quickly: You may have noticed me using the term "anti-Israeli" rather than "pro-Palestinian." This is by design, because that's what the protest movement is. Its prevailing posture isn't pro-Palestinian in any way. In fact it is typical cringeworthy Western exoticization of a foreign population; while there are a few people who are genuinely trying to learn more about the Palestinians and their history and ways, most are content to keep the Palestinians in their minds as an abstract, conveniently-brown population in need of saving. The real pro-Palestinians-and these folks do exist-aren't wasting their energy trying to vilify Israel; they are participating in relief efforts to help Palestinian civilians, and calling for negotiations and peace talks. Just as it is with telling apart legitimate criticism of Israel from cloaked Jew hatred, it is also pretty easy to tell apart pro-Palestinian activities from anti-Israeli ones.
Now, let's talk briefly about what is actually happening in Gaza. It is being labeled as "genocide" etc. by bad-faith actors, and then that kind of language gets repeated in the wider discourse across the anti-Israel protest movement, serving to caricaturize the conflict and make everyone more ignorant.
To be direct and succinct about it, no: Genocide is not happening in Gaza systematically. There have been individual incidents that qualify as atrocities, which by my understanding are not coordinated and deliberate but the result of either institutional failures or isolated bad actors. Compare that to, for instance, the reemergence of tensions between Serbia and Kosovo that is happening right now. It's pretty obviously clear that Israel is not trying to slaughter the Palestinians per se (as distinguished from Hamas fighters), or drive them out of Gaza, or steal their children, or any of the other things that comprise the modern UN definition of genocide.
Rather, a war is happening in Gaza, and the destructiveness of that war is the result of determined urban warfare by a technologically superior force against a terrorist guerilla force that has little regard for human life among its own population. Hamas, not Israel, stations Hamas operatives and equipment in civilian buildings. That leaves Israel with only two choices: attack them anyway, wherever it reasonably can, or don't. That's the only choice. There is no diplomatic solution. (It has been tried multiple times in the past.) Israel can't bribe Hamas with money or land or anything else. (It has been tried multiple times in the past.) Israel can't isolate and cut off Gaza and leave it to its own business. (This has also been tried in the past.) And the slaughter of October 7 makes it culturally impossible for Israel to simply do nothing at all. So, really, there is no choice at all. When war comes to you, your not wanting it doesn't make it go away.
The death toll of Palestinian civilians is high. It is painfully high. It is embarrassingly high. Even though there is the complicating factor that Palestinian casualties are reported by Hamas, which is not a credible source, for the sake of argument I always presume that the death toll is accurate, because I would rather have this argument on those grounds than to try to claim that the death toll is lower and eventually be proven wrong. The current claimed death toll, and the sheer scale of destruction of buildings and infrastructure, makes me question Israeli strategy in the war. Clearly, the Israelis are being "looser" in their methods this time around. In the past, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were excellent at minimizing civilian casualties, even though they never got any credit for it. But that isn't the case this time, and by all accounts this is by design, with the IDF given much more latitude by the Israeli government to pursue military targets at a higher acceptable level of collateral damage. Israel is sincere in its desire to eliminate the military apparatus of Hamas as a coherent organization, and is willing to do what it takes to fulfill that valid goal.
In any other time and place, we would simply say "Israel is sincere in its desire to win the war." But, because of this insidious double standard, we are denied the intuitiveness of this obvious statement and instead are forced to speak of Israeli goals at a higher degree of detail and specificity, which perhaps isn't a bad thing when it comes to war discourse in general, but which is certainly dangerous when it occurs only as a double standard against Jews and Israel.
Nevertheless, despite being so high, the death toll is still commensurate with what one would reasonably expect of a war fought under these conditions. Hamas fighters are extremely dangerous. They are combat-hardened and well-armed, and while they lack large-scale military infrastructure and deep economic resources, they have more than enough means to mount a guerilla war against Israel. They have planning, logistical capability, defensive resources...you would not want these people to be out to kill you. This fact gets lost in the shadow of Israel's military superiority, but if Israel did not have that superiority this would be a much bloodier war.
And, so, because Hamas uses human shields, stationing themselves in civilian locations, the reported civilian death toll is in line with what we would reasonably expect in the face of a determined Israel who fully intends to put an end to Hamas after decades of terrorism but who still wants to minimize civilian casualties to the extent feasible.
That last phrase is important: If Israel did not want to preserve civilian life, the death toll would be vastly higher, perhaps a whole order of magnitude higher. Gaza is incredibly small, and incredibly dense. Israel could probably wipe out Hamas in a single week if it wanted to, but it could only do so at the expense of killing much of the Palestinian public as well, and that isn't acceptable to Israel. (Nor should it ever be acceptable to anyone.) So instead we have had this long, drawn-out affair where the Palestinian public has slowly been squeezed across the entirety of Gaza as Israel has conducted operations in different sectors sequentially. This is the lifesaving alternative. For as negatively as it is being spun in the news via stories of Palestinian refugees without homes or basic goods, and for as gruesome as it indeed is for civilians to be subjected to these conditions-especially since the Palestinian population is very young and many of these refugees are children-this is the alternative to those same people being dead. And if you don't like that, talk to Hamas.
I can't underscore that enough. It boggles my mind just how bad Israeli PR is and how deep-seated anti-Semitism must be for Israel to have so completely lost the public opinion war when it is Hamas who are literally using Palestinian human shields-their own people!-as one of their primary warfighting tactics.
I realize that this too-"if you don't like it, talk to Hamas"-doesn't sound quite right in the minds of many people whose loyalties ultimately lean anti-government. Every terrorist organization claims some righteous cause, and some of these claims are more sympathetic than others. Many people in the West, who don't know the truth about the history of the region and instead know only the lies that they have been fed by anti-Semitic agents in the West, have in their own minds dehumanized the Israeli people and discredited Israel as a legitimate state. Israel has no right to defend itself, and Hamas (and the Palestinians more broadly) have every right to fight for their freedom. That might be a compelling story if it were true, but it's not. Hamas doesn't want freedom or a better future for the Palestinian people. They want their own glorification and the destruction of Israel. They subject the people under their rule to corrupt governance, economic mismanagement, and religious extremism. Hamas has passed up many opportunities over the decades to participate in the peaceful economic development of Gaza, and has always sought to maximize its own power and wealth, spread its extreme version of Islam, and pursue its grudges against Israel, always at the expense of a more equitable outcome for Palestinians more generally. This is true of all the Islamic terror groups in the Palestinian Territories and in surrounding countries. Israel, for its part, obviously doesn't want its uncomfortably-close neighbor to be hostile, and would gladly seek an equitable peace. (As indeed they did from the beginning, agreeing to the UN partition plan for a two-state solution while the Arabs rejected it, leading to war, and seriously engaging in Palestinian statehood talks as recently as the Obama years.) And Israel is a legitimate state, not a colonial occupier. In fact Israel de-occupied Gaza years ago, specifically in hopes of achieving peace, after having occupied it decades earlier in response to the terrorist campaigns of the day. But to stick on the point: Jews have as much right as anyone to live there; they have been there longer than anyone. They are natives there. Jews are not going away, yet this is Hamas' ultimate goal, on which it refuses to budge, and this filters out into Western anti-Israeli demands as well. Hamas doesn't want freedom; they want Jews killed. There are phone recordings of Hamas fighters saying exactly that on October 7; one fighter called his parents in a crying glee to report that he had killed Jews; that is the ultimate goal of Hamas. And it troubles me when I see frequent reports of Western anti-Israeli activists shouting genocidal slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," which refers to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, i.e. the east and west borders of Israel, and is a dog whistle for destroying Israel and killing the Jews who live there. There's one video I saw a couple days ago of some Islamic dude teaching a group of American progressives how to chant "Death to Israel!" and the old classic "Death to America!" in Arabic. And they were doing it; they were going along with it even after he told them what it means. He said "It doesn't always mean 'death to'; sometimes it means 'down with.'" Ah, well. That makes it okay, then!
The anti-Israeli position in the West is that Israel is the aggressor, that Israel was the one who truly started hostilities, that Israel is the one in the wrong. No, it isn't. Those are lies. Those are relatively rudimentary propaganda lines that should embarrass the people who so easily believe in them. Anti-Israeli propaganda has been refined over decades by Islamic extremists and Western anti-Semites (mostly in academia) who, together-though not necessarily in close ongoing coordination-have perfected anti-Israeli invective for the Western progressive palate. You might be surprised just how much of this crap traces a straight line back to Islamic terror organizations, governments of countries like Iran, and anti-capitalist extremists living here in the US or in other Western countries who are more than happy to use Israel as an outcropping to advance their agenda of, depending on their internal zeal, anything from self-loathing nihilism to violent revolution.
Anti-Israeli propaganda is very hard to break, because the same people who buy into it are the ones who are the least interested in listening to rational refutations. They don't care about evidence; their minds are already made up. I spilled a lot of ink on this back in college, but with this current war I rarely bother to try. It's a losing battle.
Anyway, here's an obvious question: If most anti-Israeli rhetoric is lies and most anti-Israeli sentiment is fueled by Jew hatred, what's legitimate? Where does one legitimately criticize Israel? Well, first of all, if you liked that sentence consider what it says about your predisposition toward assuming Israel is guilty. But, to answer: The only room for debate is in the nitty-gritty of how vigorously Israel defends itself in this war. And I say "defend" even though I know that such a word probably won't ring true for some people, as Israel is clearly the superior power operating within its opponent's borders. Yet despite this disparity it really is Israel on the defense: Israel may tower over the Palestinians but it is vastly outnumbered in the region, and its enemies have the patronage of countries like Iran and Russia, among others. There are only 15 million Jews in the world, which comprises 0.2 percent of humanity. The vast majority live in Israel (7+ million) and the United States (6+ million). Israel is a small country in both size and numbers, and is extremely vulnerable to attack. Indeed, it has been invaded multiple times in its short existence, sometimes by several foreign powers simultaneously. As a result, Israel has universal conscription and a strong lived experience of the danger of the wider world and the importance of self-defense: lessons we in the West have largely forgotten. Israel knows that it will be attacked when it is perceived as weak. The historical precedents and the contemporary rhetoric are both there to prove it. I think a starting point for validly criticizing Israel is understanding and acknowledging that Israelis rightly view Hamas as an active existential threat and legitimately fear for Israel's continued existence.
From that basis, we can argue about how Israel fights this war. That's a valid topic. Some Israelis themselves have become critics of this! But it's also a difficult topic: The main knobs available for control are scale and time. Israel has been fighting a relatively large-scale campaign on relatively fast timetable. Israel could, theoretically, turn either or both of those knobs down and still eventually achieve the intended victory. Doing so would decrease collateral damage in immediate magnitude but would also increase its occurrence over a longer period of time. Would that be better in the end? I'm not sure. I don't know what the best strategy might be for preserving civilian life while still delivering Israel the victory it seeks and deserves, but I am open to listening to arguments. Yet, thing is, no one is making these arguments. The anti-Israel voices here in the US, when they wade into the subject of war strategy at all, naively and disingenuously call only for an immediate ceasefire, with no regard to the geopolitics fueling the war. A ceasefire is not going to happen. Not until Israel feels it has sufficiently degraded Hamas. What happened to Israel on October 7 is like your neighbor coming over to your house at dawn and murdering your kid, and there are no police in the region to help you. You're on your own. And you know they're going to come back again tomorrow to murder another kid if they can. There's only one recourse for that: You have to stop them. And maybe some people would choose to turn the other cheek-i.e., the ceasefire-and submit to having all their children eventually murdered in this way, and that would be valid for them, but seeking justice-i.e., chasing that murderer down and killing or capturing them-is also a valid choice, and indeed it is the right choice for anyone who respects their own life and way of life, and their own people and society. Arguments about how Israel fights the war must operate within the premise that the war itself is valid. Being opposed to the war entirely without a valid solution to the active threat of Islamic terrorism may not intrinsically be anti-Semitic, but it is nonsensical.
We can also argue about the specific policies of the Israeli government. That is a valid topic too, and a more fruitful one perhaps. I will be the first person to say-and for years I have been saying-that the Netanyahu government is corrupt, extremist, and undemocratic. I am fully aware that Netanyahu is exploiting the tragedy of October 7 and the ensuing war to hold onto power as long as he can. He is a criminal-literally; much like Trump he has tried to stop the government from putting him in prison by remaining in power. It is my sincerest wish that the Israeli people would vote Netanyahu out of office once and for all, and reject right-wing politics in general.
But I am also aware that the reason Israel has drifted to the right in recent decades is exactly because of Western treachery. The West may send money and arms to Israel, but they do very little in the grand scheme of things to protect Israel against virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions on the world stage, including in the United Nations and in organizations like the International Criminal Court, which have delegitimized themselves in my eyes in part because of their blatant anti-Semitic actions against Israel over the course of my adult life. Israelis are left to feel that they have no true friends in the world and can rely on no one but themselves when their need is at its most dire, and they are well aware that they are a tiny ten million in a world of eight billion. They know how tenuous their existence is. They hear the anti-Semitic slurs against Jews all over the world. The hear their immediate neighbors all routinely call for Israel to be destroyed.
If that were the world you lived in, what kind of worldview might you develop?
I don't like it that Israel has hardened its heart, but I completely understand it. Nevertheless, I am still fine with legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy, and I make those criticisms myself often (if not necessarily in places where you can see them). I am open to arguments that Israeli policy should be changed. I for one believe that most of the settlements in the West Bank should be removed; I think the West Bank should be a continuous territory in part of a future Palestinian state, and not peppered with the Swiss cheese holes of Israeli settlements. And I wholeheartedly condemn the reports of sporadic abuses committed by Israeli troops and units against Palestinian prisoners and civilians, and I support reprimands and harsher punishments as warranted for those offenses. I demand that Israel continue to minimize civilian casualties at least as vigorously as it has been doing thus far if not more so. And I call on the Israeli people to come to their senses and reject Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government immediately. Israel may not be at a place where it can go leftist, but it can at least go center-right.
There is a lot to criticize about Israel that is fair game. But what you can't criticize is the fundamental principle of Israel's continuing existence, its right to self-defense, and the legitimacy of the Jewish people. Those views are inherently discrediting.
I have said a lot about Jews and Israelis and anti-Semitism. Jew hatred lurks at the heart of most evil in the Abrahamic world, not only as a cultural hallmark of wickedness but also as a nexus of conspiracy theories and slander in general. Yet, let me speak in conclusion about the Palestinian people. Not Hamas, but the general, ordinary, Palestinian public.
I will be honest with you: It is hard for me to feel any sympathy for them right now. Palestinian culture is fundamentally broken, and while Israel is easy to scapegoat, and Israel does play a direct role in Palestinian suffering via its containment of Palestinian-originated terrorism, Palestinian suffering ultimately isn't Israel's doing. Rather, the Palestinian people are the sad pawns of the entire world. It is in the strategic interests of other Middle Eastern powers, and of all anti-Western powers around the world, for the Palestinians to be destabilized, radicalized, and in continual conflict with Israel. And a great deal of money and weapons go to terrorist groups within the Palestinian Territories for precisely this reason, even as ordinary Palestinians remain beset by poverty and a lack of economic mobility, which is a huge precursor to radicalism. Additionally, Arab powers in the region refuse to let Palestinian expatriate and refugee populations properly integrate into their societies, which, considering that there is not as yet an actual Palestinian state, leaves Palestinians without a refuge of their own the way Israel is for Jews. This is by design; Arab powers want the Palestinian people to exist in misery, because it bolsters authoritarian Arab governments' own grip on power and claims to legitimacy by reinforcing the narrative of a common enemy: "the Jews." Finally, added to all this is the fact that Islam is at its most degenerate point in centuries, having fallen in many regions into barbarism and right-wing fanaticism so extreme that it makes the Christian Dominionism we have at home look moderate. Religious extremism will ruin any society, and Islamic extremism is the tragedy of the entire modern Islamic world, and certainly the Middle East.
The deck is stacked against the Palestinian people, and they have failed as a society because of it. And their radicalism and violence forces Israel to keep a check on them, and control their ports, and the cycle perpetuates.
I want you to think about an analogy here in the United States: The Palestinians are not unlike white conservative Americans. They have a right-wing ideology that glorifies violence. They live in poverty, religious extremism, and a culture of fear and resistance to change. They are dominated by corrupt religious and government authorities, and for the most part don't understand what good governance even looks like. They hate education and science. They are opposed to programs that would help the poor and get society on the right track. And they are unified in their subtle but omnipresent racism against black people. This all overlaps considerably well with the Palestinian people; just swap out blacks for Jews. And the reason I draw this analogy is because I think it is important to acknowledge that the Palestinian people are not wholly innocent. They are not passive victims of their current plight. They are indeed the pawns of nefarious powers around the world, but they also willingly perpetuate their own misery. This is what it means for a culture to be broken. Many other cultures around the world are broken thus, or broken in other ways. Which leads me to my next point:
Normally I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians, for all of the reasons I mentioned earlier. These days I am not feeling it, understandably, but that doesn't stop me from holding on to my principles, and my principles oblige me to include the Palestinians in my best wishes for the Israelis, just as I include American conservatives in my best wishes for a better America. I dearly want peace, safety, and a return to normalcy for the Palestinians. Everyone deserves that. And more than that, I want them to escape this broken culture and the cycle of violence. The Palestinian radicals who were committing acts of terror during the Second Intifada when I was in college are the old guard now; it's a whole new generation of Palestinians who are on the front lines of Hamas today. And that's horribly sad. Israeli civilians were only being slaughtered on the very first day of the war, but on every day since then it has been Palestinian civilians who have paid the price of Hamas' insanity. And I realize that the impressions of Israel being formed in Palestinian children's minds today may never be healed. Hamas can be destroyed, if Israel stays the course, but war alone will not resolve Palestinian terrorism against Israel. And I don't know what will fix it, other than for a generational awakening among Palestinians to look within their own house for the cause of the insanity, and reject the doctrines of martyrdom and Islamic extremism and recourses of terrorism that have fueled generations of misery for their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and beyond.
Only when the Palestinian people develop a sense of dignity can this cycle of violence end, I think. And nothing Israel might do or not do is going to create this sense of dignity. It is up to the Palestinians to save themselves, and they have a great deal of responsibility to do so, I think, because, like I said, they are not wholly innocent in this conflict. And when they do save themselves, they will find their Jewish neighbors filled with gladness and relief. I guarantee it. Jews want peace. Like, all our holidays and all our songs are about peace. It's the first Hebrew word that non-Jews learn: Shalom. Jews really just want to be left alone in peace, like hobbits I suppose. We understand that the rest of the world has no love for us, to the extent we are viewed as Jews rather than as other labels. While no land is free of bigots, and the actions of Islamic terrorists have hardened many Israelis' hearts, I am quite confident that, if the Palestinians were ever to insist, genuinely, upon peace, the Israelis would be glad to meet them at that table. But for that day to come, the Palestinians must accept that the Jews aren't going away (which I think is not too big of an ask for most ordinary Palestinians), and must accept their own responsibility for setting their own destinies and upholding their dignity as a people.
In conclusion, I want to cover some miscellaneous notes that didn't fit into this essay:
1. One might ask whether Hamas is not in fact in its rights to fight, just as Israel is. To that I would say no, for the reasons I outlined above about Hamas' motives and goals. I wouldn't go so far as to say that terrorism is never a valid solution, because every once in a while it is, but there are two problems here: First, the Israelis are not the unreasonable party in this conflict; the Palestinians are. Israel has sincerely engaged in peace talks many times, and has offered some pretty serious concessions in the past. When such options are on the table, terrorism is almost impossible to validate. Second, there is no credible strain of Palestinian terrorist liberation. It's all just Islamic extremists, and that's never valid ever.
2. Recently, anti-Israel encampments have sprung up on college campuses across the United States as a form of protest against Israel's perceived conduct in the Gaza War-an ongoing hot war phase amid the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian Conflict-and against the United States government's perceived role in funding and supplying that perceived conduct. These protests have been mostly nonviolent, with some notable exceptions, and I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with such actions inherently. Peaceful protest is a part of the American tradition, and what better place for it, both socially and in terms of a person's individual lifetime, than at college? In other words, I don't inherently think they should be shut down. Nevertheless, I am quite concerned about these encampments as focal points for radicalizing anti-Semitic discourse and views in America, and I am saddened and frustrated at the sheer amount of misinformation that comes out of these protestors. They are direly wrong about virtually everything they say.
3. The sheer wrongness of the prevailing consensus on the left about the Gaza War and Israel's role leaves me wondering what else we are wrong about that I might not know about. I happen to be well-informed on this issue, but this instance of being pitted against my political home has reminded me just how tenuous most people's grasp of most issues is. I suspect that I have underestimated in the past just how poorly many leftists grasp exactly why the positions we hold on the left are in fact credible and tenable positions. It troubles me that most people are so much more responsive to propaganda tactics than to facts and reason, which in turn forces me to wearily reevaluate my relationship with how best to guide and persuade people on the issues.
4. I have had glancing conversations with a handful of friends who are against me on this issue, and one thing I take away from it is that people are well-primed to recognize their own oppression and exploitation by others, but are often poorly-equipped to see the exact same injustices inflicted upon others. Many people who have lots of "underprivileged" status points on the left-being racial or sexual minorities, disabled or differently-abled, etc.-are among the worst tramplers of the rights and struggles of other groups within our umbrella of the disadvantaged. It blows my mind that people who have experienced a lifetime of systemic injustice themselves can look at at small nation of 10 million people trying to defend itself against literal terrorist groups and a whole region of adversaries and conclude that actually it's the terrorists who are right.