Palestinian militancy guarantees Palestinian statelessness

What the far left gets wrong about Israel

An incoming Israeli military strike on buildings in Gaza City, as seen from the border area on October 23, 2023 near Sderot, Israel. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few days trying to come up with a topic for a post about something other than the Israel-Gaza war. But I’ve failed. I’m thinking about little else. There are several reasons why.

For one thing, the situation is extremely dangerous and could easily spiral into regional war involving the United States. That would be bad enough. But if it happens, China could well see it as a rare opportunity to make trouble in the Taiwan Straits on the presumption that, between the Middle East and Ukraine, we would be too distracted to do much about it.

For another thing, I’m Jewish and the horrifying stories of what Israel endured on October 7 have left me deeply shaken—and angrier than I’ve been in a long time.

Finally, the things I hear every day now from the international “anti-colonialist” far left strike me as colossally stupid, based on a mixture of historical ignorance, faulty moral assumptions, breathtaking naiveté, and straightforward Jew hatred. And as if that weren’t enough, this foolishness could contribute to making Joe Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump next year even more difficult than it’s already shaping up to be.

Rather than losing my cool about all of it on Twitter/X, I’ve decided to try and make my case against the anti-Israel left in the form of rebuttals to three erroneous proclamations I keep hearing from some of its more prominent figures.

 

“Biden Should Call for a Ceasefire”

Over and over, we hear people calling on the United States to demand that Israel agree to a ceasefire in the war. Who could oppose that? Just stop the killing. Let food, water, and medicine get to the people of Gaza. Prevent the suffering and deaths of thousands of men, women, and innocent children struck down in Israeli air strikes, let alone all those who will be killed once Israel begins its much-anticipated ground invasion. “Blessed be the peacemakers.” To resist a call for a cessation of hostilities, you’d have to be a bloodthirsty monster. Right?

Except for one thing: The primary responsibility of a government is to protect its citizens from rape, torture, murder, mutilation, and kidnapping at the hands of their country’s enemies. Israel’s government failed in this responsibility on October 7, and now it is acting to make sure that failure is never repeated. Its citizens are demanding nothing less, as the citizens of any country would do.

So the questions that need to be asked are: Would a ceasefire make this goal more difficult to achieve? And how much more difficult? If the imagined ceasefire would be a brief pause, maybe it would make sense—provided it didn’t allow Hamas to rearm itself, which would only prolong hostilities (and the resulting civilian suffering) once they recommence, which they will. Israel—like any country in the world with the capacity to defend itself—is simply not going to allow Hamas to continue governing Gaza going forward.

That is extremely unfortunate for the civilian population of Gaza, but it is nonetheless an inexorable fact. Israel should do everything it reasonably can to abide by the rules of war while it does battle with Hamas in response to this attack. But such moral considerations cannot delegitimize Israel’s need to defend itself against a group that has now demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that it possesses the will and the means to do considerable damage to the country and its citizens.    

“I’m not an anti-Semite, I’m just an anti-Zionist”