Israel’s ‘Justice’ Jihadists
An essay on Israel
Keep scrolling for Adam’s essay Israel’s ‘Justice’ Jihadists or stop for a quick clip from his appearance this week on The Trish Regan Show!
Israel’s ‘Justice’ Jihadists
The state of Israel was founded 75 years ago, and not a moment has passed when this small, beleaguered democracy hasn’t been forced to assume a posture of self-defense.
Security is not a choice for Israel, but an essential precondition of its existence. Israel was founded on roughly one-sixth of one percent of land which in ancient times was Israel’s indigenous home. This small sliver of territory, bounded by Lebanon to the North, Jordan and the West Bank to the East, and Egypt and Gaza to the Southwest, and which now encompasses the world’s only Jewish state, was also long under control of the Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire. An Islamist mega power which governed huge swaths of North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East for more than six centuries, many Jews migrated to Ottoman-ruled Palestine fleeing the despotic pogroms of Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.
After centuries of displacement, the state of Israel came into being in the wake of the Holocaust, and yet has not known anything resembling peace since the United Nations proposed its partition plan on November 29th 1947, offering a two state solution, one for Jews and the other for Arabs. On May 14th 1948, David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel’s key founder, and who became Israel’s first prime minister, declared the existence of the Jewish state. The following day, Israel’s five Arab neighboring states attacked it. The assault would be the first of many attempts since then to obliterate it.
Israel’s current battle with Hamas has yielded the obscene, ahistorical claptrap about Israeli ‘aggression’, its ‘occupation’, and an abundance of specious references to the Jewish homeland as an ‘apartheid state’, ignorantly consigning 1.2 million Israeli Arabs – who readily enjoy all the rights of full citizenship – to an invisible existence. This slander reared its reliably ugly head just moments after bloodthirsty Hamas madmen raped Israeli women, ruthlessly killed innocents at a music festival and left slain elderly Jewish bodies to rot in the streets. As the onslaught of criticism so painfully confirms, Israel may indeed be the only nation excoriated for defending itself in the wake of the bloodiest slaughter of Jewish men, women and children( infants decapitated among them,) since Hitler’s Final Solution.
Such vile language – the kind that calls into question Israel’s right to retaliate against a savage and genocidal terrorist organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction – is a noxious stew of knee jerk leftist anti-colonialism and kumbaya naiveté. Much of this bilious rhetoric is regularly spewed by many in the Western media and its amen corner within the “progressive” left. And too often, this smug lecturing involves admonishing Israel to accept a two-state solution, while making dubious delineations between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Most disquieting of all is how strident anti-Israel discourse masquerades as ‘legitimate’ criticism – or, more hypocritically, as ‘justice’ – while so many of the world’s people suffer daily under the rule of dictatorial governments and authoritarian regimes with nary a peep from today’s so-called social justice warriors.
Unlike most of the world’s other besieged nations and inhabitants, why is Israel and its military uniquely vilified? Why does this Jewish safe haven, barely the size of New Jersey, and regularly attacked by its closest neighbor hellbent on its annihilation, fall victim not just to double standards but mouth-frothing vituperation?
So again I ask: Why Israel? What accounts for the rabid fury of otherwise muted peaceniks, who recently have turned college campuses into febrile wells of Jew hatred? What other country’s actions result in worldwide protests such as a recent pro-Hamas rally in New York City sponsored by the DSA ( Democratic Socialists of America) Or experience anything like the Boycott Israel campaigns (the BS of BDS)? Or anti-Israel demonstrations where calls for a new Holocaust are not uncommon? Or how about the wholesale rejection of Zionism. While these demands are as futile as they are ominous, they ironically serve to make a robust case for a strong, indefatigable Israel. Does a democratic redoubt boasting freedom of speech and assembly, religious tolerance and one of the world’s largest LGBTQ Pride parades in arguably the world’s most volatile region really merit such feverish condemnation?
Myanmar continues to commit genocide against Rohingya Muslims in breach of orders by the UN’s top court, and deafening silence ensues for this besieged minority from the leftist social media mob who waste no time in slanderously accusing Israel of embarking on its own genocidal mission against Palestinians. China repressed Tibet for decades, and now reportedly consigns a Muslim minority called the Uighurs to concentration camps (essentially a Chinese gulag), and we barely hear a whimper. Long before Putin’s current quest to conquer Ukraine, Russia became the first nation since World War Two to annex territory from another European country (here’s looking at you, Crimea), but presumably this qualifies as acceptable imperialism to those who lecture Israel about its ‘colonial’ conquests. Nothing comes remotely close to the loud and often vitriolic energy of the global anti-Israel movement.
U.N. member states like Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela and Uganda waste no time in joining the chorus of Israel haters in that body’s General Assembly, all the while being among the world’s most ardent human rights abusers. Not for nothing did the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., remark some 40 years ago that diplomacy regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict at the U.N., “has nothing to do with peace, but is quite simply a continuation of war against Israel by other means”.
What else is Israel supposed to do following the unprovoked aftermath of the massacre of its people on October 7th? For a tiny nation consistently lectured by many a bad faith actor on the need for ‘peace’, there is a curious collective amnesia. Remember the 1978 Camp David Accords, in which Israel returned the Sinai desert to Egypt, then its longtime nemesis and agitator, in exchange for what remains a more than four decade detente? Remember Israel’s 1994 peace treaty with Jordan signed a year after the Oslo peace process showcased an historic handshake on the White House lawn between then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then PLO chief Yasir Arafat? Or one might recall how after a relatively long period of quiet in the region, President Bill Clinton and then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, proposed a monumental offer to the Palestinians that included the very same West Bank that Israel is routinely lambasted for occupying now? That deal would have yielded all of Gaza (which Israel evacuated in 2005 only to be under attack ever since Hamas took power) and 90 percent of the West Bank. Arafat rejected the offer following good faith negotiations, and instead launched an intifada (uprising). Nor was this the first intifada, of course. But given this harrowing moment – where there are more than 1,400 dead Israelis, a body count that would be the equivalent of roughly 40,000 dead Americans relative to the size of Israel’s 9.3 million population – there is a disturbing silence, and/or more collective amnesia, over all the deaths that resulted from those years of uprisings, which itself counts more than 1,000 dead Israelis.
And there is more collective,and purposefully wilful amnesia: Jewish parents long lived with the prospect of Palestinian suicide bombers murdering their children. Understandably, that’s why Hamas’s thwarted attempts to ambush Jews through subterranean tunnels remain a heightened Israeli security concern.
But what use are historical facts when a morally bereft, dangerous moral equivalency has transformed the Israel/Gaza debate into a hodgepodge of double standards and perilous idealism further fueling the world’s most enduring and reprehensible hatred? The incendiary language and epithets hurtled at Israel, and consequently Jews writ large, are not simply odious in words. The scourge of phony virtue signaling by many ‘activists’ over the conflict in Gaza has, wittingly or not, created a safe space for some of the most venomous antisemitism to be unleashed worldwide since the dawn of the Third Reich.
The Anti-Defamation League recently reported that anti-semitic attacks in America were at an all-time high, up 36% in 2022, and are at the highest level they have been in decades. If the precarious existence of being Jewish is safeguarded by a strong and secure Israel (and it is), then by definition, a movement that discredits and seeks to destroy Israel is unequivocally antisemitic. Critics often scoff at this implication, but such dismissals are often woefully informed by misbegotten identity politics and modern day ‘wokeism’ which curiously, and mortifyingly, sees a Jewish homeland as incompatible with their definition of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Campus “progressives” who find common cause with an Iranian backed terrorist government that spurns modernity, women’s equality, LGBTQ rights and the rule of law are incandescently abhorrent, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of us who attended elite institutions.
Many university campuses are rotting the brains of young people with pseudo intellectual “postcolonial” theory and Marxist gobbledygook and have produced two generations of students who subscribe to a reductive, yet false dichotomy of a world divided between the oppressed and the oppressor. A prevailing academic concept known as intersectionality contends that intertwined discrimination among various marginalized groups is the dominant motif in American political life (Jews not included, naturally,) thereby rendering racial and ethnic identity as the essential calling cards for victimhood. And when students erroneously associate the role of the oppressor with Israel and Jews, they end up defending terrorism and Hamas. At the University of Pennsylvania this week, a large campus walkout was accompanied by chants of “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide, we charge Jewish genocide.” And over 30 student groups at Harvard made news when holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’s bloodbath. Call it the curdling of the American mind. But anyone not hypnotized by a deluded view of left-wing “justice” must also call it grotesque.
To be fair, many on the left are neither anti-Israel nor anti-semitic. But what of the majority of the Democratic Party remaining mostly mum when Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Talib refused to answer a reporter’s question when asked if she would condemn Hamas’s barbaric infanticide. Or when the party largely ignored Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who openly wept over voting ‘present’ for the Iron Dome, a defensive missile radar system which harms no Palestinians but ensures the safety of millions of Israelis, and which also passed with a whopping bipartisan majority with nearly every single Republican voting yes. The Democrats can’t run against a MAGA authoritarian movement with any moral clarity so long as some of their loudest ‘progressive’ (and popular) voices repeatedly put Jews in harm’s way.
Only magical thinking would hold that Hamas could ever love the Palestinian people whom they oppress more than they could hate Jews. And only the morally obtuse can fail to see how the profusion of antisemitic incidents generated by the relentless attacks on Israel only make being a Jew anywhere all the more dire. Tragically, this all makes for a ghastly turn of events less than eighty years after the soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.