Animosity toward the Jews and Israel, the only Jewish country, obviously is not the only such prejudice. It is merely the most prevalent. It is today apparent primarily on the left, where the Israelis are condemned as white colonialists (as are the Boers in South Africa) and Zionism an odious creed (just like the other “isms”). But it exists in a smaller segment of the modern right as well.
The editors and writers of the American Conservative are unmoved by Israel’s cause, finding it not only distinct from, but in important respects opposed to the American national interest. Its political embodiment is the “Israel Lobby,” an illegitimate force in American politics. Politicians who support the Jewish nation are bought off by the Israel Lobby or wilt before its intimidation. Its operatives are not loyal Americans but interlopers, shilling for a foreign power.
It is, moreover, a sinister foreign power, for the same reasons adduced by the left. Thus, Andrew Day, senior editor of the American Conservative, charges Israel’s government with “expansionist militarism” aimed at “ethnic cleansing.” That is the essence of the conflict: Israel’s campaign to conquer and obliterate the Palestinians. Netanyahu, the prime minister, got up one day and decided to play Genghis Kahn. The IDF thereupon entered Gaza.
Day’s piece was written before the recent outbreak of warfare between Israel and Iran, and we will not speculate how, if at all, the more recent event might affect his thesis. But the October 7, 2023 atrocity was certainly an extension of Iranian policy toward Israel, which would have its ultimate application in the use of a nuclear weapon.
Day mentions October 7 only once, when he quotes President Trump disapprovingly. He does not acknowledge that in 2005, Israel’s “expansionist militarism” led it to withdraw from Gaza, leaving the Palestinians to govern themselves and prosper. That did not quite encompass their objectives, it would seem. Who is trying to cleanse the region of whom?
Day argues that the Trump administration should cut off arms supplies to Israel. The ostensible basis is the present IDF operation to complete the defeat of Hamas; liberate the rest of the hostages, or as many as can still be found alive; and occupy Gaza until it can be reconstituted in some secure and peaceful form.
That, in Day’s mind, would be a “grim finale, namely ethnic cleansing.” The Israelis determined to make war, after they were attacked and the enemy had ensconced itself among civilians. Some of those civilians will perish in the fighting, and therefore victory for the IDF is immoral.
It is necessary to save the Israelis from themselves, says Day. If they are allowed to defeat Hamas, nobody will like them. They will be “isolated and despised on the world stage.” This, we are to understand, is a future and contingent prospect, already on the way. For “[l]ike much of the world, Americans are turning against Israel.” And in ten years’ time, the Israelis will get theirs: “pronounced military vulnerability, deep unpopularity globally, and near total diplomatic isolation.” And so, “Trump should cut Israel off now before it finds itself in that unenviable circumstance.”
It is, after all, for the Israelis’ own good. If they are prevented from vanquishing Hamas, they will enjoy more of the international goodwill in which they basked when they departed Gaza in the first place. The reader will recall that.
No nation — not North Korea, Communist China, or the Russian Federation — is visited with as much opprobrium, day after day, as Israel. No people, other than the Jews, in every city where they exist and from both sides of the political spectrum, is confronted with such contumely, now extending, even in American cities, to physical menace.
The whole while, commentators like Day insist that this same people have some greater and dominating power (the “Israel Lobby”), which courageous officeholders must resist.
Apart from the beneficence that we are to show the Israelis by cutting off their armaments, Day reminds us that the Israelis are obliged to us on many other counts. We send them “billions of dollars in military aid every year.” We apparently advantage them both by providing military aid and by cutting it off. The United States also “positions U.S. forces to deter Israel’s enemies” and “scrambles to thwart attacks on Israel when deterrence fails.” It “runs diplomatic cover” for Israel at the United Nations.
Obviously, Israel never does anything for the United States. It is a perpetual burden, pure and simple. It isn’t as though America is a beneficiary of Israel’s technological research and development, including that of a military nature, or that the 1967 Israeli victory had been one for the United States in the Cold War, even before the next Egyptian administration expelled the Soviet Union.
To Day and his colleagues at the American Conservative, the interests of the United States coincide at least as much with those of Iran as of Israel. Iran’s insistence that it be allowed to enrich uranium is only reasonable and the contrary position “unrealistic.”
Indeed, why should America incur the enmity of Iran? Just to please the Israel Lobby, with its divided loyalties? Why should we accede to its view that Iran is an enemy? Merely because the first act of its present regime was to seize our embassy and hold its staff hostage for over a year? Just because in 1983, Islamic Jihad, acting for Iranian intelligence, killed hundreds of our Marines? Or because when we were fighting in Iraq, the Iranians supplied the explosive devices that blew the limbs off of American soldiers? Or because the Iranian regime refers to the United States as the “Great Satan” and generates mobs chanting “Death to America” (as well as “Death to Israel”) in its streets?
Day draws instruction from Plato and the attempt to define justice in the first book of the Republic. There, the old man Cephalus says that justice is paying back what is owed. Socrates counters with the example of someone borrowing a knife from a man who goes crazy before the time comes to give it back. It would hardly be justice to return it under those circumstances.
Certainly, the Mideast is the right location to go looking for crazy people. Is it not rife with religious fanaticism, suicide bombing, death cults, honor-killing, child marriage, and jihad? Surveying this region, Day locates his crazy man: Israel! We must not let it have a knife.
Any nation attacked with such savagery as was Israel on October 7 would respond with all of the force it possessed. The fact that Day lacks an iota of sympathy for the Israelis really does not make them crazy.
Image via Pxbarn.
Source link