Peter Berkowitz
Real Clear Politics, May 11, 2025
“Despite the terrible death toll in Gaza over the last 19 months, Arab fatalities in the Middle East at the hands of other Arabs in just the last 14 years exceed by more than sevenfold the total number of Arab deaths in all the wars that Arabs have waged against the Jews for more than 100 years.”
In the United States and Europe, university students and professors, journalists and diplomats, activists and NGOs, international court judges in The Hague, and international organization bureaucrats in Turtle Bay, Brussels, and Geneva take a peculiarly intense interest in condemning Israel. It would be bad enough if Western condemnations only demonstrated bias against the Jewish state. But they also display an antipathy to principles such as the dignity of the person and virtues such as the courage to defend one’s family and nation with deep roots in Western civilization. Since Israel embodies these principles and virtues, which are essential to the preservation and flourishing of freedom and democracy in the 21st century, learning from and standing by the Jewish state fortify the West.
The critics work overtime to vilify Israel, but their favorite accusations conflict with the facts and rely on gross double standards.
First, the critics allege that inspired by Zionism, Israel illegitimately embraces nationalism, conceiving of itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people. This allegation neglects that Israel remains the Middle East’s lone rights-protecting democracy. It ignores that like all minorities in Israel, Arab citizens, some 21% of the population, enjoy full civil and political rights. (They are not required to serve in the army but may enlist.) And it overlooks that like Israel – but often with less success in integrating Muslim minorities – nation-states across Europe combine the protection of rights, democratic self-government, and devotion to nationhood.
Second, according to legions of detractors in the West, Israel occupies the West Bank (territory Israelis often refer to by the biblical names Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. Yet military imperatives compel Israel to maintain overall security responsibility for the West Bank where, within Palestinian Authority administered areas, Iran-backed Hamas plots against both the PA and Israel. Meanwhile, many in the West justify Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel – Gaza jihadists killed around 1,200 persons, mostly civilians, and took around 250 persons hostages, mostly civilians – as laudable resistance to occupation, notwithstanding Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. ….SOURCE