Israel and Its Global Discontents Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/israel-and-its-global-discontents/
I just returned from 17 days abroad and watched a lot of BBC and CNN international news, given there were no other alternatives. Their coverage of the recent Israeli effort to destroy a terrorist network in Jenin was surreal. It can be summed up as the following: Killing Jews randomly inside Israel is acceptable behavior. But trying to stop that by using violence to break up terrorist enclaves are crimes against humanity.
This asymmetry is, of course, not new. But what continues to explain the Western, and indeed, European, dislike of Israel?
The old anti-Semitism?
The fear of Islamic terrorism (Europeans slurring Judaism and Jews earn no rebuke, but printing a cartoon mocking the prophet can get an editor killed)?
The boilerplate leftwing mantra of “imperialism” and “colonialism” that slurs Israel as a Western interloper that has no business in the historic homeland of the Jews?
The Western overdog syndrome? Elite Westerners, Europeans in particular, must pay obeisance to the “victims” of the West?
Add up the biases and the current Pavlovian hostility still remains surreal. Yet one thing remains constant: year-by-year the leftwing/radical Palestinian/the Squad mantra of a Palestinian nation “to the sea” is not going to happen, ever.
I also just returned from Israel, and I was there a year ago as well. It has never seemed so wealthy, busy, and confident—despite media accounts to the contrary and Palestinian terrorists’ recent attacks on Jews inside Israel.
Construction cranes are ubiquitous. Young people predominate. Families are everywhere with not one or two, but three, four, and five children.
There are few visible homeless. There are no smash-and-grab crimes, no car jackings, no Saturday night shooting gallery à la Chicago, nor gratuitous violence such as in a typical day in Portland or San Francisco. I saw no excrement on the sidewalk. Sophisticated San Franciscans should send a delegation to Tel Aviv to be instructed in municipal hygiene.
Contrary to propaganda, Israel is diverse. There are black, brown, and white Jews, secular and religious, native born and immigrant. There are lots of Arab Israelis who at least publicly, whatever their private sentiments, seem to enjoy living more inside Israel than outside it.
Shared Jewishness seems a stronger bond for Jewish immigrants of different colors and ancestries than Americanism is for a diverse United States.
The Biden administration has been quite critical of the Israeli government for pruning back the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court, which unlike its American counterpart, has few if any checks on its growing jurisdictions, often in partisan fashion.
Yet for all the protests, Israel did not experience 120 days of arson, mass violence, 35-40 dead, 1,500 police officers wounded, and its own youth torching courthouses and police precincts as did America in summer 2020. Its president, whom the Left detests, is learned and articulate; ours cannot finish a sentence and believes Putin is currently fighting the Iraq war.
Its military has experienced nothing like the American humiliation in Afghanistan. Its investigatory agencies are not weaponized as are ours.
In sum, the elite of the United States, and particularly leftwing administrations, likes to lecture Israel on its supposed moral failings. Yet America of today has lost the moral right, the right derived from its once constitutional superiority, calm, efficiency, cohesion, honesty, and stability, to lecture Israel on its shortcomings.
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