October 7, 2023
Every time Israel enters into conflict, I am deeply disgusted by many of the moral positions that I see on the Internet and in the news. The discourse around complicated issues is boiled down to a crude narrative where Israel is a belligerent occupying force, and Palestinians are meek victims expressing their struggle for freedom.
This is a smear narrative easily dismissed by a simple thought experiment: if the Palestinians put their weapons down, there would be peace instantly – and they would have a self-governed state. But if the Jews stopped defending themselves, there would be a massacre.
Recent and ongoing events prove this statement unquestionably. On October 7, Israelis were swiftly massacred in their own homes in ways that are unimaginably gruesome. In many cases, entire families, including toddlers and infants, were gathered and shot at point-blank range and then mutilated by their murderers. Terrorists from Gaza burned down villages, and murdered and raped more than 260 civilians during a local music festival. They abducted children, mothers, and grandmothers presumably to be used as human shields in the war that would inevitably arise. The evil is indescribable.
In the past, most available media on Israel would hold the country to impossible moral standards. This time, the shear horror of October 7 has garnered more mainstream support for Israel. But will that support last in the coming months? Even on the day of the massacre, the defamatory views of Islamist anti-Semites and/or political extremists have a platform from mainstream outlets and academia. But is it fair or responsible to present the views of these terror and rape apologists as if there is moral equivalence between Hamas’ actions and the apparent sin of Israel’s existence and right to self-defense?
No country anywhere is more heavily criticized or scrutinized for the actions it takes from no-win positions than Israel. In the last 8 decades, Israel has made many efforts towards peace. She has accepted partition plans in 1947 that would have precluded the decades of violence. But Israel is surrounded by ideological enemies with a deep-seated revenge culture, and the only peace she can know is through security. Nevertheless, Israel has proposed several far-reaching peace deals with the Palestinian Authority. And through tireless efforts for recognition, Israel has successfully made peace with Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain.
The underlying premise of the smear narrative is that Israel is somehow an illegitimate state. Many of the people that assert these claims believe that Jewish people and the Jewish religion are illegitimate – that we have no inherent right to self-determination and no inherent connection to the land. Others subscribe to political dogmas so much so that they cannot think critically about the issues – that victims are always morally preferable regardless of the actions that led to their victimhood.
This does not mean that Israel is above reproach or that we should not feel heartbroken for Palestinian civilians that are caught in the crossfire. Israel’s government – especially its current one – is far from perfect. Moreover, some Israelis hold troubling views about their Arab neighbors, and they deserve rebuke for it. But in general, Israelis understand the complexities of their existence, and they have not been brainwashed by their government to hate Palestinians unconditionally.
Israeli society is progressive and multi-faceted. We use their medicine and their technology every day. We watch their TV shows and learn from their distinguished intellectuals. Israel is a democracy, and its citizens – Jews, Arabs, Christians, Druze, and others – are freethinkers constitutionally endowed with rights to free expression. They hold their government, their military, and their culture accountable when those institutions make mistakes.
But is the same standard applied towards Hamas whose stated aim is to “obliterate” the state of Israel and to “fight and kill” Jews everywhere through Islamic Jihad? At least this much should be crystal clear: Hamas is a terrorist organization. They have been firing rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians for decades. They do this from densely populated areas, including hospitals and nurseries where their own citizens are coerced to remain as human shields. They are not a political organization that cares about its citizens but an extremely violent and oppressive force that routinely murders its own people as part of a larger jihad.
Ironically, Israeli military policy values the life of Gazans more than Hamas officials who are willing to use their own dead children as political propaganda to perpetuate blind hatred towards Jews. Israelis regularly drop flyers, and send text messages, phone calls, radio messages, and warning shots to Gazans telling them to evacuate areas where Hamas operates. But most of these people are coerced to stay and die so that Western media has pictures of dead civilians. Meanwhile, the cowardly leaders of Hamas don’t even live in Gaza. They watch their citizens die as political pawns from the comfort of their Doha mansions.
And yet, there are still people who view the actions of Hamas as a justifiable struggle for “indigenous” reestablishment. Others go as far as calling Israel an apartheid state that engages in ethnic cleansing, never mind that the population of Arab-Israelis has consistently grown and that Arabs in Israel serve in parliament, the military, public life, and generally enjoy more political freedom than they would in any other Arab nation. Arab-Israelis have very legitimate grievances, but nearly all would prefer the safe, normal lives they have in Israel compared to the suffering they’d face under Hamas.
Outside of the Islamic world, most critics of Israel do not see their words or actions as a form of anti-Semitism, but instead as “anti-Zionism.” To them, there is nothing wrong with Jews per se but with the existence of a Jewish State. Jews, they say, are colonizers – no different than white European colonialists that usurped land from natives.
This narrative, however, is highly misleading. The land of Israel was very sparsely populated during Ottoman rule and before. The Arab population in Palestine steadily increased when waves of migrants (mostly Egyptian but also Saudi, Yemenite, and Syrian) came to the area during the late 19th centuries and during the British Mandate from 1917-1948. This happened concurrently with waves of Jewish migrants, albeit in smaller numbers coming to the region to escape rising anti-Semitism in increasingly nationalistic European countries. The number of Jewish migrants would increase significantly following the Holocaust and WWII.
The Jews that came during this period legally purchased land from the existing governments and landowners. Even before Israel’s establishment, Jews effectively built the region into a livable environment. The Gush Dan region, also known as the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, was almost entirely uninhabitable until Jewish migrants drained its malarial swamps and plowed its dunes into arable land. Jews built roads, dams, and reservoirs. They planted trees and irrigated barren swamps and deserts into farms, kibbutzim, and neighborhoods. The Israel that the world knows today is an ecological and technological miracle.
But why is this part of Israeli history ignored? Why is there disproportionate focus on the aftermath of its War of Independence in 1948? Certainly Israel made irreparable mistakes during those years, but one has to ask what would have happened to the Jews if they lost what their enemies called a “war of extermination?” Is it fair for us, in 2023, to judge combatants who were fighting for their right to exist as Jews and doing what they believed would lead to the security of their future state? What exactly is the alternative timeline that doesn’t lead to more bloodshed?
Perhaps the most important question though is why are Jews, of all the ethno-religious groups in the world, the only ones singled out with regards to the rights of self-determination in a country that they have historical ties to? Does anyone doubt the legitimacy of Croatians in Croatia or Armenians in Armenia?
As a Jew and son of Israeli parents, I am acutely aware that history has not been kind to my ancestors. There were once many Jews living in the nations of Europe and the Middle East. Never mind how we got to those nations (we were expelled from Israel by actual colonizers), we kept to ourselves for generations and sought acceptance from our hosts despite state-sanctioned acts of violence (pogroms) and inexplicable Jew-hatred that confined us to abject poverty, ghettos, gulags, and shtetls.
And where are the Jews from those nations now? Where are my German relatives, my Iraqi relatives, my Ukrainian relatives? What happened to the vast Jewish communities of Poland, Hungary, and Eastern Europe? What happened to the Jews living in Morocco, Syria, Yemen, and Iran?
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. As Jews, nationalism is the only line of defense for us in a world that has never granted us legitimacy or freedom of movement. Our shared values, traditions, and history in the land of Israel date back to at least 1000 BCE and most likely before that. Understanding the region as our historic and spiritual homeland is a fundamental tenant of our religion. Given the millennia of suffering that we’ve endured, our right to self-determine is undeniable, and Israel – home to all of our holiest sights – is the only possible symbol for our united front.
Israel and Jews in general are unique in the fact that we face daily existential threats from political extremists on both sides of the spectrum, terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and countries like Iran that openly sponsor terrorism or threaten full-scale war. Being a Jew is terrifying, but we remain resolved to never again allow our people to be exterminated and trampled on.
The history of Israel is complicated, the people of Israel are complicated, and the security demands of Israel are complicated. But Israel’s right to exist and defend itself is not complicated, and neither are the events of October 7. It was a day of pure evil. A Jewish-Israeli 9/11. The worst event in Jewish history since the Holocaust.
Hamas celebrates the death and rape of innocent Jews. They believe that killing Jews brings Muslims closer to God, and that bystanders dying for this cause will receive eternal paradise. They want Israel to retaliate. They want their civilians to die at the hands of the Israeli military because that will unite the Arab world in its anti-Semitic crusade against Israel. The conflict that they want - a regional war with Iran and Hezbollah - could kill millions of people, which is acceptable in their worldview. We can only hope that Israel’s Arab and Western partners see through this ploy.
The actions and ideologies of Hamas must be unequivocally denounced. Supporting them in anyway is totally reprehensible, possibly treasonous and criminal. The parties that support them now should be categorically dismissed as genocidal anti-Semites. Let them hear us: Israel will persist, Jews will persist, and the West will defend its civilization and its values.
