RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/11/israels-bad-faith-critics/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Their real goal is to delegitimize the Jewish state

It has become a cliché to point out that there is a difference between criticism of Israel and denial of its right to exist. The former is well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as it is with any country; the latter is not, as it entertains the possibility of dismantling a sovereign state (that just so happens to be the world’s only Jewish state), which is not considered a legitimate geopolitical option in any other context. But the distinction can be elided by disguising rejection of Israel’s right to exercise sovereignty — including the right to conduct defensive wars — as mere criticism of its conduct.

Not everyone attempts the disguise. Open Israel-haters like U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese deny that Israel has any right to self-defense, because they consider it an illegitimate state to begin with. Some call Israel’s military actions “genocide” not because of Israel’s conduct but because the war occurred within “the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years,” as the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote less than a week after October 7.

These extremists deny that Israel has any right to wage war against Hamas, even after October 7. Even if Israel killed only Hamas terrorists, and destroyed only weapons caches, and conducted a miraculous operation without harming a single civilian, Israel would still be in the wrong. Indeed, on this view, Israel could escape such condemnation only by accepting violence against its citizens or ceasing to exist — in other words, by forfeiting its most basic obligations as a sovereign nation. It is easy to see why most other Israel-haters would avoid making such an argument outright: When it is that easy to identify, it is easily dismissed as extreme, immoral, and, frankly, impractical.

What complicates things, however, are the frequent calls for “cease-fire” couched in terms of criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war. Most of Israel’s critics — humanitarians and opportunistic Hamas-sympathizers alike — have adopted this line. This is where classical just-war theory comes in. The theory holds that, for a war to be just, two distinct conditions must be met: First, a nation that resorts to war must do so for legitimate reasons. Second, the war itself must be conducted according to some basic principles that restrain soldiers from needless cruelty. These two parts of the theory have been wielded against Israel in a deliberately confusing manner since it launched its counteroffensive to destroy Hamas. This conflation strikes at the heart of our ability to speak and think clearly about Israel’s war against Hamas, and about what it would take to satisfy Israel’s supposed critics, including, occasionally, America’s most important elected officials and diplomats.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-palestine-of-the-mind

In 1974, the writer Jean Genet, an uncontested celebrity of the French Left, whose works extol the beauty of hoodlums, assassins, Black Panthers, the S.S., and Yasser Arafat’s Fedayeen, explained his attachment to the Palestinian cause: “It was completely natural for me to favor not only the most disadvantaged but those who distill hatred for the West most purely.”

For decades now, the Palestinians—or rather, a mythical view of the Palestinians—have brought together two elements essential to this distillation: they were poor, in contrast with the purported colonizers, who arrived partly from Europe (though a million Jews thrown out of Arab countries, beginning in 1948, also became Israelis); and they were Muslims, that is, members of a religion that some on the left see as the spearhead of the disinherited. Thus, during a time when leftist revolutionary horizons were darkening, a certain orphaned progressivism took up the Palestinian revolt against Israel. Surprisingly, however, what originated as a minority preference has developed into a majority position, winning significant support from the highest reaches of political power and from the academy, in both Europe and the United States—and reshaping the mind of an era.

The extraordinary degree of media coverage devoted to the conflict exemplifies this shift (though a period of relative reduction in attention occurred in the mid-2010s, with the emergence of the Islamic State as an international problem). It is as if the fate of the planet were playing out in a little patch of land between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza. The condemnation of Israel is first an obsession with Israel. The media focus tends to convey little accurate information but is satisfied to reinforce a stereotype: the confrontation between what is deemed a racist and colonial state, a latecomer in the Arab world; and a crushed, dispossessed people. 

The widespread ignorance about this region of the world, far from a handicap, is an asset: no need to know, for instance, what river is referenced in the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea,” since the point is Justice, with a capital J. Where Western support for the Palestinians is concerned, we find ourselves in the realm of pure ideas—abstractions—not flesh-and-blood human beings.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-killing-of-nasrallahand-the-virtue?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

What Israel has managed to accomplish over the past two weeks will long be studied by military historians.

In a series of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grâce on Friday that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s war is not just with Israel. It has American, Syrian, and Lebanese blood on its hands as well.

Recall that in 1983, the group killed 241 servicemen with a massive bomb at the Marines barracks in Beirut. The organization was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 innocent people were murdered. In 2012, Hezbollah bombed a bus with young Israeli tourists at the port of Burgas, Bulgaria, that left five dead and 32 injured.

But Hezbollah’s bloodiest campaign was reserved for Syria, where it became the shock troops for the country’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, during his brutal suppression of a democratic uprising. Hezbollah’s forces led the ground operations in the siege of Aleppo, a vicious campaign in 2015 and 2016 that starved the ancient city and reduced most of it to rubble.

A day after Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 70,000 Israelis. Nearly a year later, those people have not been able to return to their homes.

With this kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group, or even an ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is escalation.