Why I support Israel
And why you should too
War
In the last month, I saw something that I thought I would never see in my lifetime.
On October 7, 2023, on Simchat Torah, the happiest day of the Jewish calendar, almost exactly fifty years to the day after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, over 2,500 Hamas terrorists flooded into Israel. The IDF, taken by surprise, was unable to respond immediately. The result was pure evil. The terrorists attacked the villages surrounding the Gaza Strip. They burned down houses, went door-to-door killing civilians (including children and the elderly), raped women, and slaughtered hundreds of people at a Sukkot music festival. They kidnapped hundreds of civilians and brought them back to Gaza to be paraded around, tortured, and kept as political bargaining chips. They made no attempt to hide it: many of their atrocities were posted directly to their Telegram channel. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history, and the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. By the time the IDF was finally able to respond, around 1,400 people had been murdered, with another 200 taken captive to Gaza.
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Even more surprising to me than Hamas’ attack was the response to it. I saw a surge of both blatant, rampant antisemitism and weak moral stances against it. I saw Muslims I know post on social media, praying for the “martyrs of Palestine” (i.e. the terrorists). I saw my school’s Islam on Campus club post a statement condemning Israel’s response to the attacks and praying for God to “grant [the people of Palestine] victory over their oppressors” with no mention of the attacks themselves. I saw multiple clubs at my school host a “Day of Resistance” focusing on “what you can do to help” (help who? And who exactly is the “resistance”?). I saw a rally of keffiyeh-clad college students chant “from the river to the sea”. I saw posters of kidnapped Israelis ripped down and covered with Palestinian ones. I saw people I know with no connection to the region who had been silent on the initial attacks reposting Hamas propaganda, including the blatant lie that Israel bombed the al-Ahli Hospital with no warning and killed over 500 people.
Around the world, it was even worse. Muslims living in Western countries openly celebrated the attack. Leftist and Islamic activists around the country, including the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, released celebratory posts. Sitting Congresspeople waffled on condemning the terrorism. Protesters chanted “gas the Jews” and “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”, and displayed swastikas and Jewish stars in trash cans. Individual Jews were harassed. The worst of them all: a general sentiment from both people I know and a significant portion of the population of caring more about and condemning only Israel’s response to the terrorist attacks, and not the attacks themselves.
The old lies about Israel and the Jews are back in full force: the idea that Israel is a white supremacist settler colony committing genocide against the indigenous Palestinians, that Israel is an apartheid state that keeps Palestinians in terrible conditions, that Palestinians only want a peaceful, two-state solution that Israel is denying to them, that Israel indiscriminately kills civilians in Gaza. I wrote this article for the well-meaning but tragically misinformed people I know who are justifying acts of evil based on these lies: to educate them on what’s really going on, and to show them where their beliefs really come from.
Modern Palestinians are not the indigenous people of the region.
The oldest extant people who’ve ruled the region are not Palestinian Arabs, but Jews. Jews have maintained a continuous presence in Israel for at least 3,200 years1 and perhaps longer.
Historians agree that, around 850 BCE and possibly before2, there were two independent Jewish Israelite kingdoms, the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah.
Jerusalem housed the Temple, the holiest site in Judaism, for centuries. There’s evidence of the Israelites observing much the same customs as today’s Jews: not eating pork, circumcising boys, and distinct monotheism as opposed to the polytheism and idolatry practiced by the neighboring Canaanites at the time.
The Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel around 720 BCE, and the Babylonians conquered Judea around 587 BCE. The Babylonians were replaced by the Achaemenid Persians, then the Hellenistic Greeks, then another independent Jewish state, Hasmonean Judea. The Romans eventually conquered Judea3, and the land passed to the Byzantines, the Rashidun Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Crusaders, the Ayyubid Sultanate, the Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and the modern State of Israel.
Missing from this list is a Palestinian state. This is because there has never been a sovereign Palestinian state. Arguments along the lines of “it was always Palestine before 1948, until Israel colonized it” are misleading4.
Israelis/Zionists are not settler colonists.
Though Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel for three millennia, centuries of massacres, wars, forced conversions, and cultural changes caused their population to shrink from a majority in the 4th century to as small as around 2,000 by the late 1600s. This changed during the late 1800s. In 1880, there were around 15,000 Jews in Palestine. Driven by a desire both to flee the antisemitism of Europe and to return to their roots, Jews began immigrating en masse to Ottoman Palestine. A Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl (who I was in part named after) founded the Zionist Organization, with the goal of eventually establishing a Jewish state in Israel.
The Jewish National Fund was founded to buy and develop land for Jewish settlements, mainly along the coast and around the Galilee. The most famous of these settlements, built near the ancient city of Jaffa, is Tel Aviv. The Jews created their own institutions: the farming communes known as kibbutzim5, a labor union called the Histadrut, a militia called the Haganah, and even a national council and elected assembly with their own education system, welfare, healthcare, religious services, local government, security, and defense—all the infrastructure for a Jewish state. By 1914, the Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine had grown to nearly 100,000 (compared to about 500,000 Arabs), and 630,000 by 1947 (compared to about 1.2 million Arabs).
When leftists talk about colonialism, they usually have a mental image of a group of evil conquistadors landing on an island, claiming it as their own, genociding the natives and destroying their culture, and extracting all its resources. This is virtually the opposite of what the Jews did. Before 1939, virtually all Jewish immigration was legal. They legally bought mostly undeveloped land from willing Arab sellers, and turned it into fertile cropland and new towns and cities. Some say this is colonialism regardless, to which I would respond that by that standard, all development is colonialism, and the argument can be dismissed6.
A particularly wrong version of this argument says that Israelis are “white”, or that their existence is a type of “white supremacy” or “white settler colonialism” against the “indigenous/POC/brown” Palestinians. On the contrary, Israeli society is highly multiracial. There are 60,000 Israelis descended from the Bene Israel of India, 160,000 descended from the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, and over 2 million Israeli citizens are Arabs: Sunni Muslim, Bedouin, Druze, Christian, and Lebanese. Over 60% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, with most or all of their ancestry coming from the Middle East, not Europe. Mizrahi Jews, Palestinian Arabs, ancient Israelites, and ancient Canaanites have remarkably similar genetics.
A similar argument to this is that Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together peacefully before the Zionists came and ruined it. This is true in that the Jews had relative peace and security under Muslim rule in Palestine (especially compared to the antisemitism under Christian rule in Europe), but there were still incidents like the Safed Plunder. Jews and Christians were not equal to Muslims, however—they had the status of dhimmi, effectively second-class citizens; forced to live in ghettos and pay higher taxes.
The Palestinians don’t want peace or a two-state solution.
The pattern throughout history is clear: Israel proposes peace and the Arabs reject it.
Throughout the 1920s, the Arabs launched multiple riots and pogroms against legal Jewish immigration and land purchases, rioting in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, and all throughout the territory in 1929.
In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed to partition then-Mandatory Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs, giving the Arabs the majority. The Arabs responded to this by launching a major, two-year armed revolt against the British. To appease the Arabs, the British heavily limited Jewish immigration and land purchases.
In 1947, the UN proposed to partition the territory between a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews were given the western Galilee region, an indefensible strip of land on the Mediterranean coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and the largely empty and inhospitable Negev desert. The Arabs were given everything else. The Arab state was to be 90% Arab, while the Jewish state was to be just 55% Jewish. The Jews accepted this plan, the Arabs rejected it. On the day the British mandate expired, May 14, 1948, the Jews declared the independence of the State of Israel within the borders agreed upon by the UN plan. The very next day, a coalition of seven Arab states (Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen) invaded with the explicit goal of destroying the nascent state and taking the entire territory for themselves.
In 1967, after the Six-Day War, the Arab League announced a policy of “no peace, no negotiation, no recognition” with Israel. To signal willingness for peace, Israel did not annex the West Bank or Gaza Strip, did not displace any of the Palestinians living there, and allowed the Islamic Jordanian waqf to maintain control over the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, where Jews are banned from praying to this day.
In 1979, Israel voluntarily gave up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, including the infrastructure they had built, in exchange for a peace treaty.
In the early 1990s, Israel recognized the Palestinian Authority’s right to govern Palestinians and withdrew from most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for peace. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat used this as an opportunity to appropriate billions of dollars of financial aid to support terrorism.
In 2000, Israel offered Arafat an independent Palestinian state7 on 92% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip plus some land from the pre-1967 borders of Israel, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, sovereignty over half of the Old City, custodianship of the Temple Mount, and a massive refugee aid program. Despite this meeting nearly all of the Palestinian demands, Arafat rejected it without a counteroffer and launched the Second Intifada, leading to the murder of 700 Israeli civilians.
In 2005, Israel fully withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians responded by electing the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, to power. Hamas’ charter explicitly states, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it” and “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at Israel over nearly two decades, and until under a month ago, the Israeli policy was to simply let them do it so as not to lead to war.
In 2008, Israel offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an even more generous peace deal: 94% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, some land from the pre-1967 borders, all the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and an Arab-majority commission given sovereignty over the Old City and Temple Mount. Again, Abbas rejected it with no counteroffer.
To this day, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Hamas remain in a state of war with Israel, despite numerous Israeli offers for peace. 24 other states do not recognize Israel, 9 of which do not even allow Israeli citizens to enter. Just six Arab countries have diplomatic relations with Israel8.
Israel is not an apartheid state.
Apartheid was a system that existed in South Africa until the 1990s. It split the population into distinct racial groups (White, Indian, Coloured, Black) and instituted a strict racial hierarchy with Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom. People were not allowed to marry outside their racial group, public accommodations (including even schools and hospitals) were strictly segregated, Black people could not vote or work outside of their “homelands” without a permit, and the law of the land was stringently socially conservative—abortion, homosexuality, pornography, gambling, etc. were heavily restricted. This is very different from how Israel is run.
For starters, Israel is a pluralistic liberal democracy. All Israeli citizens over the age of 18 have the right to vote (and trust me, they love to exercise it). Israel leads the Middle East in women’s rights9, gay rights10, and on multiple different measures of freedom. Despite accusations of Israel being an ethnostate, there are over 2 million Arab citizens of Israel. Israel’s Arab citizens have full equality under the law and are not required to serve in the IDF (though many do). There have been Arab members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, continuously since the first elections in 1949, and Arabs have sat on the Israeli Supreme Court11 and even held ambassadorships. Arabs and Jews live together in many Israeli cities. Arabs living in territories that Israel has annexed (the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem) have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship, are entitled to municipal services, and have municipal voting rights.
Many people admit that Israel doesn’t discriminate against its Arab citizens, but claims that they discriminate against the Palestinians. It’s true that Palestinians can’t visit, live, or work in Israel without a permit and aren’t protected by Israeli law and citizenship. However, this is because they aren’t Israeli citizens. They don’t pay Israeli taxes and don’t serve in Israel’s military. This concept of citizenship and borders exists everywhere in the world. You wouldn’t expect Jordan or Egypt to let Israelis in to live and work without a permit either. Israel’s system is not based on race like South Africa, but on citizenship.
Of course, there is no parallel among the Palestinians. Despite accusations of occupation and colonization, they have control over their domestic affairs through the Palestinian Authority and are represented in international organizations such as the Arab League. However, it’s possible that there’s not a single Jew living in either Gaza or the Palestinian parts of the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, considered the more “moderate” of the two Palestinian governments, actively enforces a law that makes selling land to Jews punishable by death. The Palestinian Territories are an apartheid ethnostate: exactly what they accuse Israel of being.
Israel does not aggressively expand its territory.
You may have seen some variation of this map.
Though it’s a very effective piece of political propaganda, it isn’t an accurate one. The 1946 map shows virtually the entire region, labeled “Palestine”, as Palestinian land, with a few specks belonging to the Jews. In reality, the region labeled as “Palestine” was not a sovereign Palestinian state as the map implies, but a British territory. The green land shows not just land owned by Arabs, but also land owned by the British state and land that wasn’t used at all. The real extent of Palestinian land is shown by the green regions on this map:
When you take a look at the UN partition plan, you should be able to see why they assigned the Jews and Arabs the territories that they did, and why the supposed loss of land between 1946 and 1947 wasn’t actually a loss of land. Similarly, the 1947 borders didn’t show a loss of land because they never existed: the Arabs rejected the plan to give them an independent Palestinian state for the first time ever, and the day after the British mandate expired, they invaded Israel to try to destroy it. In 1948-9 and 1967, Israel captured land in defensive wars, and in 1993, agreed to the first-ever partially recognized Palestinian state in the Oslo Accords, actually ceding land to the Palestinians. Israel never annexed the West Bank or Gaza, did not exile their inhabitants, and has offered them to the Palestinians in exchange for peace for decades.
Israel is not committing genocide against the Palestinians.
This is probably the single most blatant and evil lie. It’s been repeated for decades, but especially in the last few weeks of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip. This accusation is not too far off from the blood libels used to kill Jews in medieval Europe.
First, all casualty figures for civilians in Gaza come from Hamas. This is a group internationally recognized as a terrorist organization by the US, UK, EU, and even Saudi Arabia—the very same group that committed heinous atrocities against civilians just a month ago. Unsurprisingly, Hamas frequently lies, calling into doubt the number of civilians who have actually been killed. For example, on October 17, there was an explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry claimed that it was an Israeli airstrike that leveled the hospital and killed over 500 people. Despite the lack of evidence, the media immediately ran with this claim. Extensive analysis quickly revealed that it was a misfired Palestinian rocket, and that it didn’t even hit the hospital directly, meaning far fewer than 500 people died. Similarly, the media ran stories saying Israel had destroyed the historic Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrios, even though it hit a separate building that was used as a rocket launch center.
This is an incredibly clear pattern: Hamas uses schools, hospitals, and other protected sites as rocket launch sites or military targets, something that is strictly forbidden under international law. When Israel bombs them, they are accused of war crimes. Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, something that is notoriously difficult in a dense urban environment like Gaza. They send warnings in the form of text messages, phone calls, and leaflets to urge civilians to evacuate targets that are about to be bombed. They drop non-explosive or low-yield bombs (“roof-knocking”) on homes to give people time to flee, even if they’re Hamas political or military leaders. Even though the Al-Shifa Hospital is the operational headquarters of Hamas (in violation of international law), Israel has refused to bomb it in order to spare civilian lives.
In contrast, Hamas doesn’t care about the Palestinian people. They consider it the highest honor for civilians to become “martyrs” for their cause. They tell people to remain in their homes when warned to evacuate by the IDF. They have an extensive network of tunnels that they use for terrorism, but don’t allow civilians to shelter in them. The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, and other senior Hamas officials live in luxury hotels in Qatar, far from the poverty of their people in Gaza. They use water pipes donated by relief organizations to make rockets, rather than to help their people.
Looking at longer-term population trends, the lie becomes even more obvious.
Only one of the above charts shows a genocide. Can you tell which one?
Israel is not ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.
Others say, okay, maybe Israel isn’t genociding the Palestinians, but they’re still committing acts of ethnic cleansing. This is similarly false.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli War is known to the Israelis as the “War of Independence”, and to the Palestinians as the Nakba, the “Catastrophe”. During the war, around 700,000 Palestinians were displaced. Some were expelled by the Israeli military, such as in Lydda and Ramle, where 60,000 Palestinians were kicked out of their homes. This was a rare atrocity committed by the Israeli government, and one that I won’t defend—it was wrong. However, it’s not clear how many of the Palestinians left voluntarily or were urged to leave by Muslim leaders, and how many were expelled by Israel.
A similar idea is that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegally built on stolen land12. This primarily comes from the UN and the International Court of Justice (part of the UN). ICJ decisions are only binding on nations that voluntarily agree to its jurisdiction, which Israel does not. Israeli settlements are not built on existing Palestinian villages, but on empty land or farmland. A better analogy is not to see it as theft or conquest or colonization, but as eminent domain. Countries use private land for development all the time.
Something else that happens all the time historically is displacement. For example, did you know that after World War II, somewhere between 12 and 15 million Germans were expelled from Silesia, East Prussia, Brandenburg, and Pomerania, and somewhere between 500,000 and 2.5 million people died? Similarly, somewhere between 10 and 20 million people were displaced after the partition of India and Pakistan. A parallel Nakba happened to the Jews as well: around 900,000 Jews from Muslim countries from 1948 to 1980. Some Jewish communities which were over 2,500 years old were expelled almost entirely. Today, there are only around 400 Jews in the entire Middle East.
Despite these, we never hear about the “right of return” for Jews to Cairo or Baghdad. Why? Because Israel took in nearly a million refugees displaced from Arab countries, while the Arab countries have allowed Palestinian refugees to remain in refugee camps paid for by the UN and western countries for literally four generations.
Gaza is not an open-air prison or a concentration camp.
A brief history of Gaza: though it wasn’t part of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, it had a Jewish community for nearly 3,000 years. Most fled after Arab riots in 1929, and the rest fled after Egypt took the area over in 1948. Egypt established a puppet state, the All-Palestine Protectorate, did not give the Palestinians living there Egyptian citizenship, and did not allow them to move freely in and out of Egypt. In 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War. Gaza’s GDP per capita grew steadily over the next 15 years, aided by higher-wage work opportunities for Gazans in Israel. Israel built agricultural settlements in parts of Gaza over the next few decades. Eventually, Israel decided to withdraw from Gaza: mostly in 1994, and fully in 2005, including forcibly evacuating 21 settlements and over 8,000 Jews, as well as all military infrastructure. The Palestinians promptly looted and burned their synagogues, and the next year, elected Hamas, a known terrorist group, to power. Hamas refused to honor the Oslo Accords, recognize Israel, and renounce violence, and brutally cracked down on rival faction Fatah in 2007 to gain sole control of the Gaza Strip. Since then, it has ruled mercilessly. Freedom House ranks Gaza as one of the least free countries in the world13. There are no elections, no freedom of speech, press, or religion, no due process, no LGBTQ+ or abortion rights, and almost no rights for women.
Israel is often blamed for keeping Gaza poor, but the blame really lies on Hamas. Between 1994 and 2020, it’s estimated that over $40 billion in financial aid has been given to the Palestinians. This aid comes from the UN, the US, the EU, various countries around the world (Arab and western), and plenty of nongovernmental institutions. The UN alone spent $4.5 billion in Gaza between 2014 and 2020. Israel provided Gaza with all of its utilities: water, electricity, telecommunications, issued tens of thousands of work permits to allow Gazans high-paying jobs in Israel, and has provided humanitarian aid and reconstruction assistance in Gaza after wars started by Hamas. Hamas has captured much of this aid through confiscatory taxes, and used it to fund a network of terror tunnels, tens of thousands of rocket attacks on Israel, and lining their own leaders’ pockets: Hamas’ top officials are worth billions of dollars.
Many cite Israel’s border restrictions on Gaza as a reason for calling it an “open-air prison”. First of all, Gaza is not an open-air prison: a quick search on YouTube will show you otherwise. Second, Israel has no choice but to close Gaza’s borders. Gaza is quite literally controlled by terrorists, and these terrorists have used Gaza as a staging ground for massive attacks on Israeli civilians for decades: the First Intifada from 1987 to 1993, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, and the October 7 attacks in 2023. Egypt, a Muslim Arab country, has even stricter border restrictions on Gaza than Israel does, for the same reason. It would be outrageous to expect any other country in the world to allow a hostile terrorist group free entry. Why is Israel any different?
Israel must destroy Hamas.
One of the most common viewpoints I’ve seen, even among people who see the evil of Hamas and the October 7 attacks, is that Israel should hold back, rather than do everything they can to destroy Hamas. They point to the roughly 11,000 Palestinians killed since the beginning of the war according to Hamas, the images of Gazan buildings destroyed in airstrikes, and videos of parents and children alike crying as they learn their family members have been killed. Each civilian death, each destroyed home, and each sobbing parent and scared child is deeply tragic, but it remains in the best interest of both Israelis and Palestinians to wipe Hamas out.
First of all, there is no moral equivalence between the October 7 attacks and Israel’s response to them. Hamas deliberately planned a coordinated attack on civilian villages, and murdered over a thousand people by hand in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. Their goal from the outset has been to destroy Israel and kill all Jews worldwide, and the only reason they haven’t is because they lack the power. In contrast, Israel launched a retaliatory attack in response to Hamas’ outright declaration of war. They’ve taken every reasonable step to minimize civilian casualties: warning of air strikes in advance, issuing evacuation orders, and even delaying their ground invasion by nearly three weeks in order to allow time for evacuations and prevent large-scale civilian death. Attempting to equate Hamas’ terrorist attack to Israel’s military response, or to “both sides” the situation, are morally bankrupt.
Palestinian civilian deaths aren’t Israel’s fault, but Hamas’. Hamas started the war on October 7, forcing Israel to retaliate. Hamas’ policy of using Palestinian civilians as human shields remains in full force. Not only do they place missile launch sites in schools, hospitals, and UN buildings, but they actively prevent their citizens from leaving danger zones, sometimes even shooting them as they try to escape. After due warning, Israel has to launch air strikes to destroy terrorist infrastructure. To simply refuse to do so for fear of any civilian casualties would give Hamas a free pass to brutalize more civilians. What the genocide accusers don’t seem to understand is that there is no magic button to kill only terrorists with no civilian deaths whatsoever. Civilian deaths, as collateral damage, with due warning, are simply a part of war.
Then there are those who accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. I’ve already addressed the lie in the broader context of the last few decades, but Israel clearly isn’t committing genocide in this war either. It has one of the most modern and capable air forces in the world, bombing an area with the population density of San Francisco for several weeks. If their goal was simply to wipe out all the Palestinians, the death toll would be a lot higher. They wouldn’t risk thousands of their own troops in a ground invasion, and they wouldn’t warn civilians to leave buildings before a strike.
It’s true that many more Palestinians than Israelis have died. Between 2008 and 2023 (before October 7), 6,407 Palestinians and 308 Israelis were killed; and since October 7, 10,582 Palestinians and 1,452 Israelis were killed. Aside from the fact that all data on Palestinian casualties comes from Hamas and does not exclude combatants or people killed by misfired Hamas missiles, trying to establish morality based on death toll is a fool’s errand. Rarely in real life are both sides of a war roughly balanced: it isn’t a video game. Israel is a wealthy country with missile defenses, while Hamas does nothing to protect Palestinian civilians.
Furthermore, the differences in makeup of Israeli vs. Palestinian casualties are striking. Israeli casualties roughly match the distribution of the Israeli population, a sample of all its civilians, while Palestinian casualties are heavily clustered towards military-age males, exactly the types of people who you’d expect to be combatants. Most importantly, morality in war is not based on simple numbers, but on the intent behind them. 20,000 civilians were killed in the war against ISIS, and between 300,000-500,000 civilians in Nazi Germany died in Allied bombing raids. Does that mean that the world should simply have allowed ISIS, or Nazi Germany, to continue to exist? No.
Why are there so many airstrikes and so much death and destruction? Because Israel has to make sure that Hamas can’t attack them ever again. The people actively agitating for a ceasefire directly after the worst attack in Israel’s history do not understand the realities of war. Why should Israel give its enemies time to rearm, re-equip, and prepare for the next assault? In fact, Israel and Hamas were already under a ceasefire when Hamas attacked. The only thing that can stop Hamas from attacking Israel in such a brutal way again is to destroy Hamas.
Israel is clearly more in the right than its enemies.
It’s clear to anyone paying attention that there is a strong asymmetry between Israel and its enemies.
Jews have lived in Israel far longer than Muslims, yet people consider Arabs to be the region’s “indigenous population”.
Sovereign Jewish states ruled Israel for centuries, while there has never been a sovereign Palestinian state, yet people still believe “the land was Palestine before 1947”.
Muslims brutally conquered the Levant, replacing Jews and Christians, and even building the al-Aqsa Mosque on top of the ruins of the Jewish Temple. Jews bought land and immigrated to the region legally from the 1880s to the 1940s. Yet people still believe the Jews are the “settler colonists”, and frequently don’t recognize the very right of Israel to exist at all.
700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from Israel in 1948-49. 900,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries over the following years, and yet most people condemn only Israel.
Arab countries and/or Palestinians started every war involving Israel14. Many of these wars were started with the explicit goal of destroying Israel and/or massacring Jews. Israel has never started a war without a legitimate casus belli15, yet people accuse Israel of being the aggressor.
Israel has only captured territory twice—in defensive wars—and voluntarily ceded land for peace many times: the Sinai to Egypt in 1979, most Palestinian areas in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority in 1995, and all of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in 2005. The Arabs have never ceded land to Israel, and yet people accuse Israel of expanding its territory.
21% of Israel’s population is Arab, with equal rights to its Jewish citizens. There are literally 0 Jews in Gaza, likely 0 in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, and less than 400 in the entire Middle East, yet people accuse Israel of being an apartheid ethnostate.
Israel is a liberal democracy with free speech, free press, free markets, human rights, and limited government. No other country in the region is—especially not Gaza, and yet people condemn Israel more than any of them.
Hamas is far more brutal than the IDF by any reasonable standard: going door-to-door massacring civilians by hand, baking a baby in an oven, beheading people, not sparing children and the elderly, raping women, taking hostages, and more. Israel launched a retaliatory, targeted attack, and has tried to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible. Yet Israel is the one accused of “genocide”.
The contingent of Israelis who hate Palestinians and want a Jewish ethnostate from the river to the sea are fringe, mostly religious people with little power, and are deeply unpopular among the majority of the population. The contingent of Palestinians who hate Jews and want an Islamic ethnostate from the river to the sea are the vast majority. Yet people accuse Israel of racism, irredentism, and radicalism.
So why do people side with Hamas over Israel, chant for Israel’s destruction at protests, and tear down posters of kidnapped children? Where is this unprecedented rise in antisemitism coming from? Two groups of people: Muslims, and “progressive” woke leftists.
The Evil of Antisemitism
Growing up in the Jewish enclave of Boca Raton, Florida, I was frequently warned about antisemitism. The Nazis murdered much of my extended family during the Holocaust. My grandfather used to say “If anyone tries to make you do something you don’t want to do because you’re Jewish, kill him.” Yet the age I grew up in was far detached from the real, material antisemitism that had decreased steadily since the 1940s. Examples of antisemitism throughout my childhood included anonymous fools drawing swastikas on bathroom stalls, politicians making references to money without mentioning Jews, and a rapper with longstanding mental issues praising Hitler for contrarian shock value. Reading about the Holocaust felt abstract, unreal, like a bygone era of history that our modern tolerant society had fully overcome. I rolled my eyes when a rabbi at a Rosh Hashanah service talked about “taking his Torahs and running to the hills” when Trump was elected president, and scoffed at the idea of antisemitism ever being a threat in America, a country with such strong freedom of speech and religion, and so many Jews in powerful positions.
The last month has proven me wrong. Antisemitism was brewing just under the surface, and it’s a civilizational scourge. In one important respect, however, I was right—the antisemitism we’ve seen has come almost entirely from the left. What American Jews, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat16, must understand is that the true dangerous antisemites of society are not mythical tiki-torch-bearing brownshirts with MAGA hats chanting “Jews will not replace us”, they’re college students tearing down posters and chanting “from the river to the sea”, Muslim immigrants who have not assimilated into Western society, and blue-tribe bureaucrats, journalists, and university administrators who hesitate to condemn any of this. In the last three days alone on Instagram, I’ve been called a “zio cunt”, “baby murdering rapist coloniser occupier genocidal maniac” who should “leave Palestine and fuck off to Europe”, “🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱baby killer”, “tireless dog”, “eternal victim”, and much more17: not from white supremacist Nazis, but from leftists and Muslims.
So why is this? Why do leftists side with a far-right, racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, oppressive terror organization over a pluralistic, liberal democracy? Because wokeness doesn’t care about good or evil: merely power and oppression. Critical theory—the academic discipline that gave birth to woke ideologies like critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonialism—is fundamentally based on “reveal[ing], “critiqu[ing]”, and “challeng[ing]” power structures. Under the assumptions of wokeness, any disparity between two groups must be the result of an oppressive power imbalance that must be corrected by any means necessary. The stronger group is the oppressor and therefore evil; the weaker group is the oppressed and therefore good. Israel is stronger and wealthier than the Palestinians, ergo, Israel is the evil oppressor and Palestinians are the oppressed victims. As a consequence, the woke left treats even the most horrific atrocities committed by the Palestinians as justified “resistance” or “decolonization”, and even the slightest retaliation by Israel as “genocide” that must stop immediately by imposed ceasefire.
Western Muslims are the other culprit. When Hamas committed the October 7 attacks, there were celebrations from Muslims, even in Western countries, even before Israel had retaliated. Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Hamas Jewish organization, protested in droves against Israel’s retaliation. In contrast, the silence of Muslims on Hamas’ terrorism has been deafening. There was hardly any outrage from Muslims even on Muslim countries mistreating other Muslims. Where was the outrage towards Hamas keeping the Palestinians poor and using them as human shields for decades? Towards Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad bombing Palestinian refugee camps? Towards the entire Arab world refusing to accept a single Palestinian refugee? Towards Egypt applying even stricter border controls on Gaza than Israel does? Towards Pakistan currently forcibly deporting 1.7 million Muslim Afghan refugees back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?
In a few ways, the last month has actually made me more sympathetic to certain left-leaning ideas. I now see clearly that hate exists, and that it must be fought against in order to keep society free and tolerant. Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance is correct: tolerant societies cannot tolerate the intolerant. Hateful people must be held accountable for their actions, and businesses and employers have the right to not associate with them. (Where the left failed was defining hate far too broadly, but that’s another article). The rest of wokeness, however, is fundamentally evil and morally bankrupt. If you see terrorists paragliding into a music festival and machine-gunning hundreds of civilians, burning people alive in their homes, and calling their parents to brag about murdering Jews as justified “resistance”, it’s an indictment of your ideology much more than it’s an indictment of those who would retaliate against such horrors.
If you find yourself supporting any of this, start by asking yourself some questions. Why should Israel agree to a ceasefire with a group that actively seeks its destruction? What would you do differently in your response if you were the Israeli government? Do you really think that Hamas cares about Palestinians, or that what they did on October 7 furthered the Palestinian cause? Do you think that if you were to replace Israel with a Palestinian state (presumably run by Hamas or the PA), that it would respect the 7 million Jews that live there? Why do you side with a group that hates every liberal principle you stand for over the only liberal state in the Middle East? Reading a single article like this probably won’t fully convince you, but hopefully it’ll plant the seeds of doubt in your mind.
So what is to be done now? Fight antisemitism wherever you see it. When you see your friends post misinformation on social media, swipe up and educate them. When you see people rip down posters of kidnapped children, call them out. Do not vote for those who say “from the river to the sea” is an aspirational call for “freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence”, or those who don’t condemn them. Reconsider allowing unlimited amounts of people who are openly hostile to Judaism and Western values to immigrate to Western countries without assimilating. The phrase coined by Jews after the Holocaust is more relevant now than ever: “Never again”.
The first evidence of Jews’ presence in Israel comes from 1200 BCE with the Egyptian Merneptah Stele, and ironically reads “Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more”.
The Bible describes the history as follows: the Hebrew Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were given the land of Canaan by God. Jacob moved his family to Egypt after a famine in Canaan, and they grew in population, but were eventually enslaved by Egypt’s Pharaoh. Moses, aided by God, led the Israelites out of slavery, through the desert for forty years, and at last back to Canaan. The Israelites, led by Joshua, invaded Canaan, defeated the Canaanites, and divided the land between the Twelve Tribes of Israel. They alternated between periods of struggling against their enemies (the Philistines) and winning against them, led by prophets called “judges”. The prophet Samuel anointed the first King of Israel, Saul, who united the twelve tribes. Saul was unworthy to rule, however, and was replaced by King David, who defeated the enemies of Israel. David was succeeded by his son Solomon, who built the Temple and ruled over a time of unprecedented prosperity. Upon Solomon’s death, the kingdom fractured into two. None of this is confirmed by historical evidence, so I’ve left it in a footnote.
This is a super interesting historical nugget that I’m again condemning to a footnote. Throughout the 1st century BC, the growing influence of the Roman Republic made Hasmonean Judea a vassal state, and later a province of the Roman Empire. Tensions between Roman culture and repressive Roman rule on one end, and Jewish culture and local rule on the other end, eventually led to three massively destructive wars. The first, often called the Great Jewish Revolt, ended with the destruction of the Temple and much of the city of Jerusalem. The Romans renamed the city to Aelia Capitolina and built a temple to Jupiter on the ruins of the Temple Mount. The second, the Kitos War, led to the destruction of the Jewish communities of Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Egypt. The third, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, was a complete and total Jewish defeat. Jews were banned from entering Jerusalem, massacred, and their religious and political autonomy destroyed, ending Jewish rule in Israel for the next 1,800 years. Most of the surviving Jews spread throughout the Roman Empire. Those who stayed in Judea or went to other parts of the Middle East and Central Asia became known as Mizrahi. Those who went to Spain, Portugal, and North Africa became known as Sephardic. Those who went to France and Germany, and later Britain and Eastern Europe, became known as Ashkenazi. The Romans renamed the province of Judæa to “Syria Palæstina”, after the Philistines, the Jews’ historic enemies, originating the name of “Palestine”. Between the three Roman-Jewish Wars, nearly a million Jews were killed. Some have speculated that if the Romans hadn’t decimated the Jewish population, it would stand at 500-800 million today.
Of course, the entire idea of “indigeneity” is a little silly. Land belongs to individuals, not ethnicities. This is often brought up in the context of the colonization of the Americas, and ignores the fact that “indigenous people” weren’t one big bloc, but thousands of smaller states, confederations, and tribes who were often at war with each other and stole each other’s land. Unsurprisingly, some of the loudest voices don’t want to give back their land or their property to the natives: it’s virtue signalling.
What makes leftist criticisms of Zionism ironic is that Zionism used to effectively be a left-wing movement. They saw things from a Marxist perspective: a Jewish working class would come to Israel, build centrally planned farming communes (kibbutzim), and an urban proletariat with strong labor unions. Mapai (Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel) was the sole dominant political party of Israel well into the 1970s, and both David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were democratic socialists.
Israel is probably the second-greatest post-colonial development success story of any country on Earth (next to Singapore). Israel has made huge strides in agriculture, doubling the amount of arable land since 1948 and actually becoming a net exporter of fresh produce despite its arid climate. Over half the country’s water supply comes from desalination, overcoming the water shortage of the Jordan River. Israel is the only country in the world to end the 20th century with more trees than it started it with. It’s managed to accommodate an over 10x population increase since 1948, largely due to immigration of Jews from other countries. Israel has the most startups per capita and spends the highest percentage of its GDP on research and development of any country in the world, earning it the nickname of Startup Nation. There are over 530 R&D centers in Israel owned by multinational companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and hundreds of others. Israel has managed to do all this despite decades of open hostility from its neighbors and several major wars.
It should be noted that in all of these peace plans, all Israeli settlements in territory to be given to the Palestinians were to be evacuated, and all Jews forcibly moved back to Israel. However, there was no such parallel guarantee for all Arabs living in Israel to be forcibly moved to the new Palestinian state—one of the many double standards applied between Israel and the Palestinians.
Arab states that recognize Israel: Egypt (since 1979), Jordan (since 1994), Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and UAE (since 2020).
Countries that do not recognize Israel: Algeria, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia.
Countries that recognize Israel but do not have diplomatic relations: Bolivia, Comoros, Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Tunisia, Cuba, Venezuela, Oman, Qatar, Maldives.
Women in Israel have full equality under the law, are protected from discrimination, and serve in all areas of the workforce. Golda Meir, one of the most famous prime ministers in Israeli history, who served from 1969 to 1974, was the first female head of government in the Middle East. In contrast, women in other Middle Eastern countries often lack basic rights under Islamic law.
Israel forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation. Gay people are allowed to adopt children and serve openly in the military Same-sex marriage is technically illegal due to Israel’s strong Orthodox Jewish lobby, but same-sex marriages performed outside of Israel (including online) are recognized. Tel Aviv is widely regarded as one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world. In other countries in the Middle East, homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment or even death.
In fact, it was an Arab judge (George Karra) who convicted former Israeli President Moshe Katsav of rape, indecent acts, sexual harassment, and obstruction of justice, and sentenced him to seven years in prison. The counterfactual where a Jewish judge sentences a former leader of an Arab country to prison is hard to imagine.
Another argument for the legality of West Bank settlements is that in 1967, Israel seized the West Bank not from a sovereign Palestinian state, but from Jordan. In 1988, Jordan renounced all claims to the West Bank, leaving Israel as the sole sovereign state with a claim over the West Bank.
A footnote within a footnote: Jordan had some serious tensions with the Palestinians. Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1949, giving the Palestinians there full citizenship, equal rights, and half the seats in the Jordanian parliament. In 1951, a Palestinian extremist assassinated Jordanian King Abdullah I. The assassin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of which Hamas is an offshoot. Palestinian fedayeen terrorists used the Jordanian West Bank as a base, and continued to use Jordan as a base when Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. In 1970, with an increasingly powerful PLO beginning to call for the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy, Jordanian King Hussein was forced to fight a civil war in order to kick the PLO out of Jordan. Palestinians continued to commit terror attacks against Jordan, such as assassinating Prime Minister Wasfi Tal in 1971. When Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank in 1988, the Palestinians living there lost their Jordanian citizenship. Jordan made peace with Israel in 1994.
Gaza earned an 11/100 on the scale, compared to 22/100 for the West Bank, 77/100 for Israel. The least free countries were Tibet, Syria, and South Sudan (1/100), while the most free were Norway, Sweden, and Finland (100/100). The United States earned an 83/100.
Wars involving Israel: the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949), the Palestinian fedayeen insurgency (1950s-1960s), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1967-1970), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), the 1982 Lebanon War, the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), the First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), the 2006 Lebanon War, and the Gaza-Israel conflict (2006-present). These wars were either directly started by Arab countries or were pre-emptive strikes.
The wars that Israel “started” include:
The Suez Crisis (1956): A joint British-French-Israeli force took over the Suez Canal. This was because Egypt nationalized the British-owned canal and cut off Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran, an act of war.
The Six-Day War (1967): In response to Egypt cutting off Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran and massing its armies on the border.
Operation Litani (1978) and 1982 Lebanon War: In response to Lebanon harboring PLO terrorists, and the PLO using southern Lebanon as a staging ground to launch attacks into Israel.
2006 Lebanon War: In response to Hezbollah abducting two Israeli soldiers.
Interestingly, the more “Jewish” (i.e. religious) Jews get, the more likely they are to lean right. 80% of Reform Jews lean Democrat, compared to 70% of Conservative Jews and just 20% of Orthodox Jews. If you look at an election map of New York City, you’ll see two deep red areas in Brooklyn out of a sea of blue. These are the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Borough Park and South Williamsburg. The Orthodox also often vote against establishment Jewish Democrat candidates such as Jerrold Nadler.