Since October 7, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel. The campuses, the left-wing media, and the new Democratic Socialist officials, both federal and state, following the cue of student activists and professors from the Middle East, have painted Israel and their Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists, and among the worst murderers in today's bloody world.
This is nonsensical. The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced. Instead, it spawned a gathering storm of antisemitism.
What Was Israel Supposed to Do?
Leftists and pro-Hamas students and faculty were shouting the eliminationist slogan 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' in euphoria almost immediately in response to the news of the slaughter. Hundreds of dead Jews set off a Pavlovian spasm of glee from the Middle East to American campuses.
During the three-week hiatus following the mass killings — well before the IDF entered Gaza on October 27 — Israel and its supporters were damned in ways we have not seen for years. Even as Israel sought to negotiate a release of the 251 hostages and a surrender of all those in Hamas responsible for the massacres, the international furor at Israel only mounted.
Yet Israel's demands were met with more defiance. Hamas, and its delusional supporters, both in the Middle East and in the West, saw October 7 not as the end of bloodletting but as the beginning of far more slaughter — and of the hoped-for end of Israel altogether.
When Israel finally invaded Gaza on October 27, it was almost immediately damned for conducting 'genocide.' None of its libelers offered alternate pathways for how Israel might stop the Hamas slaughterers or get the hostages back.
A Hypothetical: What Would America Do?
Consider this: the United States is roughly 34 times larger than Israel, with roughly 340 million to Israel's 10 million citizens. Apply that asymmetrical magnitude to a thought experiment about how Americans would react to a proportional slaughter of their own.
Suppose that some 200,000 Sinaloa cartel killers (34 times the size of Hamas's 6,000) swarmed across the southern border. They then began massacring 40,000 American civilians (34 times the Israeli number of 1,200 dead) — as well as torturing, dismembering, raping, and beheading. And then they were followed by thousands of tag-along civilians eager for loot and torture themselves.
Further imagine that the killers returned south across the border with 8,500 American hostages (34 times the 251 Israeli hostages). Once there, they then descended into a vast multibillion-dollar labyrinth of cartel tunnels beneath the cities of Sinaloa, protected by supportive and sympathetic citizens. Their tunnel entries and exits would be built beneath hospitals, schools, and churches.
So what exactly would the U.S. do if neither the Mexican government nor the cartel planners agreed to hand over the hostages and surrender the killers? Take our case to the UN? Ask NATO member Spain to chair talks? Go to Geneva to negotiate with El Chapo and his henchmen?
Who Are the Real Ethnic Cleansers and Settler-Colonialists?
Do we ever hear to what degree these libels of genocide and ethnic cleansing apply far more accurately to a host of other nations, some of which are also recipients of U.S. aid?
Over the decades, we have sold arms and given billions of dollars in military aid to Turkey. Yet between 1915 and 1920, the Turkish government conducted a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing against their Armenian population, for which it has never apologized and which it continues to deny.
None of our current critics of Israel seems worried that Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and ethnically cleansed Northern Cyprus of its Greek inhabitants. The Turks then sent thousands of their own 'settler colonialists' to help the Turkish minority population occupy the north to this day and alter Cypriot demography.
Before the 1967 war, there were nearly one million Jews whose ancestors had been living for centuries in the Arab and Muslim Middle East. But during the serial Arab-Israeli wars of the last century, they were almost entirely ethnically cleansed from Arab countries. Today, almost none remain in the Arab Middle East.
By contrast, when Israel was founded in 1948, some 800,000 Arabs lived within its borders. That number shrank to 150,000 during the violent wars that immediately followed. Yet today, the size of the Arab population has rebounded to 14 times its original post-1948 numbers, to include roughly 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel. So, who are the real ethnic cleansers?
The List of Absurd Asymmetries
The furor over Gaza is accompanied by the silence over the recent 30,000 unarmed Iranians murdered by a theocratic dictatorship, one often cheered on by the Left for its resistance to the US. Or the disgraceful and mostly covered-up history of France in Chad, where French repressive measures over the course of their 20th-century colonial occupation led to as many as 300,000 deaths.
In short, the tell-tale sign of antisemites is not necessarily opposition to Israel. It is instead an endless fixation on the supposed 'crimes' of Israel, when far greater documented horrors elsewhere never merit a word from them.
