Many news sites publish flashy headlines and jarring photos to falsely frame Israel as the aggressor that is murdering innocent Palestinians whose land they greedily occupy under apartheid-like conditions. On social media, the misinformation is even more egregious.Yes, honest conversations about Israeli policies are completely warranted, but congress members, celebrities, and TikTokers alike go much further, maintaining that Israel is mostly to blame for the violence and that the United States must discontinue supporting its longtime Middle Eastern ally.This anti-Israel sentiment has become increasingly popular among progressives who see that Israel is more powerful and that Gazans live in poor conditions, so they erroneously deduce that Israel acts out of sheer malice to oppress Palestinians. They ignorantly compare the Middle Eastern conflict to more familiar situations, such as racial inequality in the United States or even apartheid in South Africa, seemingly unaware of how dissimilar these circumstances are.
When progressives Americanize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they fall victim to the colonial nature of which they accuse Zionists. Israel has been the Jewish homeland for thousands of years, and when exiled, returning to Israel remained a pillar of the Jewish identity.In contrast, a Palestinian state is a rather recent concept. Palestinian leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi told the Peel Commission in 1937, “There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”Arab calls for a Palestinian state were, and often still are, entirely meant to undermine any Jewish presence in Israel. Yet Israel is happy coexisting with Arabs—many of whom are citizens and can vote, some even hold seats in the Knesset and the Supreme Court. But unfortunately, many Arabs including the Arab governments are unwilling to coexist with Israel.
We would all be well-advised to follow the admonition of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”It’s easy to see hypocrisy in others, but we so often fall victim to it ourselves. If Mexico fired 4,000 rockets at the United States, our southern neighbor would likely face the entire might of the U.S. military at the expense of many innocent Mexicans. Yet when some Gazan civilians are killed (despite great attempts to avoid civilian casualties), many Americans condemn Israel for defending their citizens.Yes, there were more deaths of Palestinian than Israeli Jews, but this doesn’t mean Israel is at fault. Should Israel take more casualties to justify their actions to foreigners halfway around the world who subscribe to Hamas propaganda? Would critics think differently if Hamas was declaring war on them and their families?
Ultimately, the Israeli-Arab conflict is, and has always been, about Jews’ right to self-determination in their ancestral land, and even more fundamentally, their right to live.In 2018, author and journalist Frank Fleming aptly tweeted, “I think you’re always going to have tension in the Middle East when there’s people who want to kill the Jews and Jews who don’t want to be killed and neither side is willing to compromise.” Pro-Palestine sympathizers insist that many Palestinians don’t want to kill the Jews, but a holistic review of the conflict’s history and present state reveals that regional Arab governments have prioritized terrorizing Jews and destroying Israel, and current Palestinian regimes are no different.Any factual discussion about the recent conflict requires recognition that many of Israel’s antagonistic actions are in self-defense, and anyone who argues otherwise isn’t aware of, or is denying, the context.