Israel and Its Enemies
The Hamas blitz into Israel during the holiday of Simchat Torah and day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War has brought shock and outrage throughout the world. If there is one rule about the Israel-Palestine conflict that is a given, it is that social media does not converse intelligently about the matter. Nevertheless, the amount of expressed support for the Hamas blitz and terrorist assault against Israel and the naked anti-Semitism of political activists, writers, and accounts leads us to have to be concerned about the conflict rather than turn away from it.
While it is true that we should always be working toward peace, immoral equivocators never lose an opportunity to lump Israel into the same boat is Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, or other terrorist organizations when the Israel-Palestine conflict flares up. In doing so, their intent is revealed: Israel is as bad, if not worse, than the terrorists. It is never good enough to condemn terrorist attacks on Israel and Jewish civilians in Israel – one must always condemn Israel in the same breath as feigning outrage over Palestinian terrorist attacks. If you do not, you are suspect of just being a stooge for Zionism or “Neoconservatism,” which has now become a coded word for Jewish Zionism.
I was in Jerusalem during the summer of 2017 when a student at Yale, participating in the Young Scholars Workshop with the support of the Herzl Institute and Templeton Foundation. I stayed in Jerusalem after the workshop ended for several weeks with a family friend of mine who was Jewish and who happened to live not far from where the workshop was being held. The presence of armed soldiers and police officers in the Old City whenever I walked into those hallowed walls and upon those sacred streets was an enduring reminder of the possibility of violence erupting at any moment, but the Jerusalem I got to spend a month living in was a vibrant, bustling, multicultural city of peace, laughter, and adventure. I never felt unsafe as I walked the streets of Jerusalem, even at night, or ventured out of the city to nearby towns just to explore and do the things a twenty-something year old grad student does when venturing abroad.
Israel is a country with a much higher standard of living and economic opportunity than the Palestinian territories. This higher standard of living and economic opportunity ensure that Israel lives in relative peace and prosperity while being surrounded by neighbors often agitating for conflict, war, and the eventual extermination of the Jewish State of Israel. Israel has constantly accepted peace with its enemies. Israel’s enemies do not accept peace with Israel.
It is easy to criticize structures and systems of power from afar, especially when one lives in a peaceful and prosperous country. It is easy to criticize structures and systems of power when you do not have an existential threat to your existence howling for your extermination at any moment. That’s the reality that Israel does face, and face it nobly, honorable, and peacefully daily and yearly as time goes by.
It is the avowed position of Hamas to “obliterate” Israel in its founding charter. The PLO National Charter declares Israel the vehicle of Zionist “fascism” and that the 1947 partition of the British Mandate which granted land to an independent Israel as “illegal.” The PLO Charter also declares Israel to be the sole problem for Middle East peace.
What the Palestinian terrorist organizations and their political aims make clear is that Israel cannot exist, should not exist, and that Israel is the sole problem when it comes to the question of peace in the Middle East. There cannot be peace so long as Israel exists.
When Hamas terrorists bulldozed into Israel, murdering Israelis in their homes, their beds, and stripping and gagging prisoners so as to be humiliated in the streets of Gaza, they were manifesting what their founding charters and political goals call for: jihad against Israel, the Jew, and the Zionist. Hamas attacked Israel. Full stop.
Any organization that calls for, in its own political documents, the obliteration of an entire people and sovereign nation is evil. The people and the state in the crosshairs of that evil have every right to respond to such vicious attacks to protect its citizens and its existence. Israel is in the moral right to react to the evil unleashed by Hamas. Condemning Israel in the same breath as condemning Hamas shows how far the filth of immoral equivocation has sunk. You can be for peace while recognizing the evil of Hamas and Palestinian terrorism for what it is: an evil sprung from hate nurtured from within. Bringing Israel into that fold reveals the diseased mind and hardened heart.
As Israel is at war and the face of evil that is Hamas and their Iranian backers has revealed itself in this brutal and barbaric invasion, it must be acknowledged repeatedly and loudly that Israel is not the same as its enemies. Israel does not call for the obliteration of the Palestinian or Arab people. I pray for the safety, too, of the Goldberg family that showed me so much kindness and hospitality during the summer of 2017. Your heart of love gives hope for what Israel is trying to achieve and can achieve despite the evil that looms all around.
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