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| Tel Aviv at night |
Lest I forget, I am a New Yorker, “Go Knicks!”
I am writing this piece – Israel: Defending the Indefensible – in the hope of changing hearts and minds, knowing full well that most human beings live their lives in Echo Chambers and rarely change their minds, as it means admitting that they were wrong. Many human beings don’t want to listen to a contrary opinion. I hope they will read my piece anyway. Everything that I have to say in this essay will be sourced; I am not making this stuff up.
Nota Bene: Links that are boldface and blue are worth looking at or reading. Links that are NOT boldface and blue are just sources for my written claims.
But, before I go further, let me be clear about what I will NOT try to argue.
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is as (un)popular in Israel as President Trump is in America. I approve of neither of them. PM Netanyahu will probably end up in prison, while Trump will never have to see the inside of a courtroom or be held accountable, even by (spineless) Democrats in Congress.
- I have serious reservations about aggressive Israeli actions in the West Bank. I understand Israeli Jewish frustration and anger, but I do not condone it.
- While I am friendly to AIPAC’s mission – an excellent American Israeli relationship – AIPAC’s brand has nevertheless become quite toxic lately, spending large pools of money supporting pro-Israel candidates for office, regardless of how otherwise awful they may be. Americans need to build a wall of separation between money and politics, and Jewish money should not be an exception. AIPAC should take a five year vacation from throwing loads of money into American politics and devote their money to doing some good (AIPAC should act more Jewish). Nevertheless, I would never give my vote to any Democratic candidate who went out of his way to target the money that AIPAC was spending to defeat him (Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan).
- U.S. aid to Israel. Since 1946 – 80 years – Israel has received about $174 billion in foreign aid from us. But we have spent $195 billion on Ukraine since 2022, and $113 billion on the war in Iran in less than five months. Historically, foreign aid is typically 1% of our total budget, and Israel’s piece of that pie is 7%, so 7% of 1%. Do we get value from aid to Israel? Do we get value from supporting Ukraine, or fighting a war in Iran? Do we get value from any of our foreign aid? Or do you only object to foreign aid to Israel?
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Now to the meat of this piece.
A New Antisemitism in America. Until recently, antisemitism in America was very rare but very visible. Neo-Nazis never had much power, and they were less dangerous than they were the object of ridicule. And they voted Republican at least since the 1970’s. But the day after Hamas’ declaration of war on Israel – October 7th, 2023 – the number of Israel haters in the USA exploded on “elite college campuses” nationwide (they didn’t even wait for Israel to invade Gaza before calling Israel genocidal), and that movement has grown as fast as any in my memory. They claim that Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed; that, therefore, October 7th was not an act of premeditated war, but an “act of resistance” (historically, “resistance” rarely takes the form of a declaration of war). Palestinian “freedom fighters” slaughtered 1195 Israeli Jews and took 251 hostages. Had this “act of resistance” been visited on America, we would have sustained more than 60,000 deaths and lost 12,500 hostages. Imagine how we might have responded; compare October 7th to how we reacted to 9/11. Bit of a no-brainer, eh?
Why, then, this perverse rush to judgment among our “elite college” freshmen? 1) As soon as young people begin to leave their nest, they begin to individuate themselves, typically as distinct from their parents. 2) That individuation nearly always consists of finding an in-group to attach themselves to (ah, the irony!). 3) Young minds like simple answers (good guys and bad guys). 4) 19 year olds tend to be temperamentally idealistic, and they tend to favor an underdog; in today’s world, Israel is no longer the underdog (militarily). 5) At no time are most human beings so cocksure that they are right (Dunning Kruger Effect) as when they leave the nest, these days at age 19. 6) “Hey, I’m in MIT/Berkeley/Stanford, I must be some kind of hot dude.” There is nothing quite so ego-intoxicating as realizing that they got into such a good school! They think they’re entitled to their newly won arrogance. 7) They are as ignorant as they will ever be (lest you think I am disparaging young people, turn it upside-down and you get, “every day I get a little bit smarter” (the Big Bang Theory of human development)). It’s the human condition to be ignorant of all the history that happened before you began to care about the history that is happening in your own lifetime. 8) Over the ages, Jews have been an easy target, as their numbers have always been small and they have not been armed for two thousand years, at least until the day (May 14th, 1948) that the state of Israel declared its independence as a nation among the nations of the world, and decided that, “Never Again” will Jews be victims.
The only factor that I can pretend to try to fix is young people’s ignorance. But only if they are willing to listen. For starters, Palestinians do not really want peace; if they did, they would not provoke war with Israel so often. Palestinians don’t really want a state (over and over, statehood was offered; it was never enough, and they never countered with what they wanted in exchange for peace). Palestinians chant “Free Palestine, from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.” Palestinians want to replace (majority) Jewish Israel with a (pure) Muslim Palestine. Many of our new antisemites don’t understand this, many do, many don’t care. I am all for a “free Palestine” living in a secure peace with its neighbor, a “free Israel.”
Let’s look at the history of Palestine
During or after the Bar Kohkba revolt (132–135 CE), Rome renamed the Jewish lands Syria Palestina. A nasty way of reminding the Jews who was boss. Palestina was Latin for what the Jews called Philistines (you remember Goliath, he was a Philistine). Even in the early 20th century, Jews of the region had no trouble calling themselves Palestinian Jews, as they lived in Britain’s Mandatory Palestine. Arabs of the 20th century did not call themselves Palestinians until the mid-1960’s. A Palestinian people, stretching back all the way to Ishmael or Muhammad, is a fiction. It is one thing to claim that 2 billion Muslims have a problem with Jewish Israel, it is quite another to claim that 8 million Israeli Jews have oppressed only a few million Palestinians (whose Muslim brothers and sisters in neighboring lands don’t support).
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A brief run through history will make some things clearer.
But when should we begin? At the beginning, of course.
The Hebrew Abraham (3812 – 3637 BCE, even if imaginary) was the patriarch of the Arab “race” (through his first son, Ishmael) and of the Israelite/Jewish “race” (through his second son, Isaac). So, Arabs and Jews are quite literally brothers. But we are not concerned here with Arabs but with Muslims.Muhammad (570-632 CE) created Islam in 610 CE. In 622 CE, Muhammad brokered a military alliance with local Jews. But it took less than ten years before Muhammad demanded their allegiance to Allah (the God of Islam) and to Muhammad himself. The most persistent trait of Jews through history is: Jews are a “stiff-necked” people, Jews don’t bend the knee except to their own God (even those Jews who deny His existence).
In 1948, five Muslim states (with a population of some 30+ million souls) fought a war of annihilation on Israel (about 716,700 Jews and 156,000 Arabs), and the Jews decided that they would not lose that war. Going forward, Palestinians attacked and made war on Israel multiple times, and Israel kept not losing. If Israelis can today be labeled oppressors, it has only been for their own survival, personal and collective. Christians and Muslims are proselytizing (“convert or die”) religions and number 4.3 billion humans, more than half of the world’s total population. Jews are more like an exclusive club that would deny Groucho Marx (a Jew) membership. Jews number about 15 million in the world (0.2% of world population, less than 1% of the Muslim population). It is hard to reconcile these two facts: Jews’ tiny numbers and the limitless power that antisemites attribute to them. But survival can be a powerful motivator! One nation’s survival may be another nation’s Nakba (catastrophe). And, perhaps, egged on by their personal and collective will to survive, the Jews of Israel have not behaved the way that non-Jews think they should.
On the day that the state of Israel declared its independence – with the blessings of the U.N. and the United States, among other nations – the Muslim states that attacked Israel told the Arabs living there to leave and to return after they had won the war. Israel's new Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion implored the Arab population to stay and become citizens of Israel.
“WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
725,000 Palestinian Arabs left or fled (the Nakba), 150,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in Israel. Yeah, there were issues; many Arabs stayed, nevertheless. Those who left became refugees. What is remarkable about these refugees is that their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are still officially recognized as refugees, the only time in history that refugee status has been inherited. And the nations of the world have sent them cash ever since. While Israeli Arabs may face real discrimination, 1) so do various Israeli Jewish sects, as Israel is as guilty as most nations with regard to social inequality, but 2) Israeli Arabs lead better lives than Arabs living in majority Muslim nations in the region (they have the right to vote, they are members of the Knesset, and of Israel’s Supreme Court, and women and gays do not fear from being women and gays).
In the years following 1947-48, the population of Jews living in Arab Muslim countries, where they had lived for centuries, collapsed by more than 99% from 850,000 to 4,000. If this collapse had happened to any other people, it would be called “ethnic cleansing.” The number of Muslims living in Israel proper (NOT Gaza or the West Bank) increased from 150,000 to 2 million, a steady annual increase of 3.5%, while the number of Jews increased from 630,000 to 7.76 million, an annual increase of 3.4%.
I searched online for an unbiased and accurate list of deadly conflicts between Jews and Muslims since the beginning, and I only found this and this. I consider these sources biased in favor of Jews without condemning them as inaccurate (I don’t know enough to do that). If you can find a source of data that makes the case that Jews have oppressed (murdered, ghettoed, pogromed, expelled) Muslims over the years, please let me know. But why would such a small population of Diaspora Jews choose to oppress majority Muslims in their own countries? And how could such a small number of Jews succeed in oppressing majority Muslims in their own countries? A little absurd, don’t you agree?
One of the arguments against the legitimacy of Israel as a geopolitical state is the fact that the land was majority Muslim. But, their numbers never constituted the land as a Muslim state, as the region had been controlled by Ottoman Turks and the Brits for hundreds of years. Then, partition and multiple wars redefined the Palestinian region. Of the Jews who lived there in 1947-48, many were descendants of Jews who had lived in the Holy Land for centuries, but most were immigrants who fled persecution in the lands that they had called home (mostly Muslim states, not European states) and had purchased property in Palestine from Muslims. Jews had never been the majority population, never had their own homeland, of any region on Earth since the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE. Which might argue against a Jewish state in perpetuity, were it not for the fact that every national border in the world has been established by war.
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How have Jews contributed to American society and to world history?
Politics/Government. Adam Schiff (senator), Al Franken (senator), Barney Frank (House), Bernie Sanders (senator), Chuck Schumer (senator), Elena Kagan (SCOTUS), JB Pritzker (governor), Jamie Raskin (House), Josh Shapiro (governor), Merrick Garland (Attorney General), Michael Bloomberg (mayor), Paul Wellstone (senator), Rahm Emanuel (Chief of Staff), Robert Reich (Secretary of Labor), Stephen Breyer (SCOTUS), MANY more, less well-known.
The Law. Louis Brandeis, William Kunstler, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Alan Dershowitz, Judge Judy. If you don’t know everyone on this list, you are just dirt ignorant.
Medicine. My son (daughter!), the doctor.
Bankers. Never mind!
Chess. Since the beginning – 1886 – a Jew has been the World Chess Champion more than half the time.
Nobel Prizes. 32.2% of all American Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish (with 2.4% of today’s American population). 46.7% of Russian/Soviet Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish (with 0.06% of today’s Russian population). 25% of German Nobel Prize winners, fgodsake (with 0.15% of today’s German population). There have been 14 Nobel Prizes won by Israelis (current population 7 million) since 1948. There have been 12 - 14 Nobel Prizes won by Muslims (current population 2 billion) since 1901.
Sports? Well, Sandy Koufax! Usain Bolt? Kidding!
Can you imagine our entertainment industry without Jews? Take a legal pad, write down every American artist or entertainer that comes to mind until you get to 100. I would bet you dollars to donuts that at least 30 (50?) of them will be Jews.
Wikipedia has an entry entitled List of American Muslims and an entry entitled Lists of American Jews. Take a moment to glance at each page. Note how (un)equivalent they are!
Imagine the world’s population as 1,000 human beings. 288 are Christian, 256 are Muslim, 242 are unaffiliated, 149 are Hindu (that’s 93.5% so far), 41 are Buddhist, 22 are “other,” 2 are Jews, essentially a rounding error. Both Christians and Muslims are or have been “convert or die” religions, while Jews don’t want you in their exclusive club. Imagine if you can that these 2 Jews – out of 1000 human beings – are committed to world domination. If that makes sense to you, you are probably an antisemite.
There is one interesting argument that might support a “rational” antisemitism. How can it be that throughout history so many nations and empires have made war on its tiny Diaspora Jewish population? Can 100 nations all be wrong and only one tiny sub-national group be right so always? That makes no sense at all. But all those nations, all those empires, are gone and Jews live and thrive. And invariably benefit the nations where they are allowed to live and thrive. Wake up, America! Stop following your (foolish and ignorant) children!
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Now to (DSA’s) antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Support for Israel has been a bipartisan agreement for decades, in Congress and among most Americans. More recently, since at least Hamas declared war on Israel on October 7th, 2023, our own country’s “elite college” students have chosen a different path: to be pro-Hamas and anti-Israel.
There are two things that can be said about most young people: they are idealistic, and they are ignorant (see above). So it goes with young DSA Democrats. Their youthful idealism compels them to root for the underdog. And no way can the state of Israel in 2026 still be counted as a (military) underdog (despite two/three thousand years of being the world’s favorite scapegoat). As to their youthful ignorance, as they grow in years, they will absorb the history that is being made in their lifetimes, and they will be “smarter” than their children for having a “context” for events that they have lived through. That is why their elders are smarter and wiser than they are, they have lived thorough more bygone years, and they have real context for their beliefs. All that young people see is death in Gaza. And devastation in Gaza. They ignore the fact that Hamas started this war. And they have no context for judgment as they are ignorant of the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict going back to 1948, or 1920, or 1890, or … any time in the past.
Which makes Israel’s reaction to said declaration of war on October 7th into an act of (defensive) war, not a genocide. In 3½ years, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews; in nearly 3 years, the IDF killed 80,000 Palestinians. In the last 100 years, there have been a dozen more deadly genocides; how many can you name?
Nearly 2 million Muslims live in Israel proper and identify more with their Israeli Jewish neighbors than with Gaza’s Muslims. Does that fit an antisemitic mindset?
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The only solution that I see to America’s new antisemitism is education. Education about Jewish and Muslim history, education about Palestine's history, education about the Israeli Palestinian conflict since 1948 (not an unsourced 20-minute version), education about Zionism (the right of the state of Israel to exist), education about “free Palestine” and the Palestinian “Right of Return,” education about Jewish and Muslim contributions to American and world history.
Here are some factoids that might help to enlighten our new antisemites.
Jews have several especially annoying character traits: 1) They don’t want to join us (by conversion), and they don’t want us to join them (by conversion). 2) The trust that they have among themselves (like brothers who love each other), they don’t render to others. 3) They are very bookish; they value education above all else. 4) Through the ages, every Jewish boy (now includes every girl) child had to learn Hebrew, a “dead” language that is now the official language of an entire nation. 5) Every industry where Jews have excelled was once either forbidden to their Christian or Muslim hosts or was held in low esteem by their hosts. 6) Despite the fact that Muslims want Israeli Jews dead, and despite the fact of worldwide antisemitism, Israel is nevertheless the 8th happiest country in the world (USA is 23rd and Palestine is 108th). 7) And the 91st in population!
Is antisemitism based on envy? Economist Thomas Sowell thinks so. There is little doubt that envy may play a part in some antisemitism, especially in recent years. But, while Jews of the past 2000 years have contributed to the societies in which they lived, their outlandish successes didn’t begin until the Rothschild banking family, ca. 1776 (coincidence?). Putting envy aside, antisemitism has been around so damned long and so everywhere, there must be some truth to it. Antisemitism has been normalized, and Jews are the world’s most dependable scapegoats. Maybe humans are just lazy and it’s just the little bit of history that we all seem to know about; maybe it’s just an unquestioned habit. Maybe humans don’t like to accept personal responsibility for their own failures, so they look for a scapegoat to blame. And until 75 years ago (Israeli independence), Jews didn’t – couldn’t – fight back. But antisemitism predates the 20th century. And the birth of Muhammad.
Why all these stories, why all these facts, why all these numbers? Because if you have paid attention, maybe you will come around to see that Israel – its Jews, or Jews anywhere in the world – are not the bad guys that some of you are quite sure they are. Think about what you have read for a moment or two before you judge.
Finally, some impertinent questions. How many Jewish friends have you? How many Muslim friends? Where would you rather live – Israel or Palestine – if you were gay, if you were a woman, if you were Black, if you were not a Jew or Muslim, if you were either? Which people do you have more in common with? Who would you rather be? Would you rather raise your children as Jews or Muslims?
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Post Scripts
The Chosen People
Many quite reasonable folks think it is the height of intellectual arrogance for Jews to call themselves The Chosen People. But, 1) Roman Catholics use the term much more than Jews do, and 2) you probably misunderstand what it means. This essay is one of ten thousand that attempts to explain it. So, if you are offended by Jews being called The Chosen People – and who could blame you – you should read it.
Mark Twain, Concerning the Jews
Ernest Hemingway – you know the name I hope – said, "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"
Mark Twain wrote this about the Jews.
The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report
An official UK attempt to educate the antisemites among them about the realities of October 7th.
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