By Johnathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — Even Israel’s most severe and unfair critics have to acknowledge two things. One is that since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, the strategic situation in the Middle East has been substantially altered in favor of the Jewish state. The other is that although Israel has become extremely unpopular around the globe and even lost favor with many Americans as a result of the war with Hamas in Gaza post-Oct. 7, most Israelis value their security over the opinions of spectators to their struggles.
This is hard for Western liberals and leftists to understand. And yet, it points to a profound truth about the dilemma of Jewish life in the 21st century — and every one of them throughout the last two millennia. The choice facing Israel and the Jewish people is clear: If they refuse to let themselves be slaughtered and their state demolished, then they’re going to be mightily judged by a double standard applied to no other nation or people on the planet.
Pariah status
The Zionist movement and Israelis have, for entirely understandable and often correct reasons, always downplayed the cost of victory amid the fight for survival in terms of international opinion. No matter how unfair the charges, the branding of this nation of fewer than 10 million as a pariah state is no small matter.
Nevertheless, the puzzlement about the fact that Israelis prefer to be live pariahs rather than a fondly remembered people to be memorialized is nothing more than just the latest example of what author Dara Horn memorably pointed out in her 2021 collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews.
Largely due to biased coverage of the post-Oct. 7 war on the part of the international media as well as mainstream U.S. outlets like The New York Times and CNN, many, if not most, people on the political left in Europe and America have started to believe the pro-Hamas propaganda about Israel being guilty of “genocide” in Gaza. They are also apparently astounded by the indifference of its citizens to the fact that a great many of the supposedly enlightened and educated people in the West think that they are very bad. And they similarly dismiss friends of Israel who dispute these false charges.
The Times attempted to explain this conundrum with a “news analysis” titled, “The Cost of Victory: Israel Overpowered Its Foes, but Deepened Its Isolation,” by White House correspondent Michael Shear. The article seeks to contrast the growing hostility to the Jewish state with a fairly solid consensus inside Israel about the necessity to defeat and remove Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran’s nuclear threat.
A secure future
But buried in the 12th paragraph is a statement presented as something of a great insight into the thinking of an Israeli people, depicted as largely clueless about their image abroad. After summarizing how disliked the Jewish state has become and the way a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the United States has collapsed, the piece puts forward the following conclusion, a rare instance of the paper reporting something unquestionably true about the conflict in the Middle East: “Many Israelis welcome the prospect of a future in which they are no longer surrounded by well-armed enemies determined to do them harm, even if it means being viewed negatively by the rest of the world.”
What rational citizen of any country would think differently?
The self-evident answer is none. But somehow, Israelis are portrayed as an insular and heartless people because they support removing existential threats in the form of genocidal Islamist terrorist movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and their Iranian paymasters.
A surge of antisemitism
The Times goes on to argue that the cost of the defeat of those foes in the last 21 months cannot be worth the price of global opprobrium, in addition to the bitter feelings of Palestinian Arabs and their supporters, who are disappointed that the conflict has turned against them after having committed the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
The newspaper is right that Israel’s victories in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran have come at a cost — and by that, they don’t mean the nearly 900 soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces who have fallen in the battle for their nation’s survival. There is no question that the vituperation against Israel and Zionism, as well as open antisemitism, has surged since Oct. 7. This took the form of pro-Hamas mobs who took over the streets of cities around the world and on North American college campuses.
In Europe, examples of mass outbursts of anti-Israel invective are no longer confined to political forums or the press. They have become routine happenings at cultural events that have nothing to do with the debate about the Middle East, such as the Glastonbury music festival in England, where, along with one of the performing bands, crowds recently chanted “Death to the IDF!” Similar vitriol was apparent at the annual running of the bulls at Pamplona, Spain, where a huge banner proclaiming “destroy” Israel was unfurled while organizers allowed activists to take over the ceremony.
Such histrionics aside, the effort to diplomatically sanction and economically isolate it does hurt Israel, as well as making it more difficult for its citizens to travel or do business abroad. The status as an international pariah, coupled with the hostility of organizations like the United Nations, and that coming from European and American left-wingers, remains a problem. Still, perhaps only readers of the Times would consider it such a terrible fate that it ought to prompt Israelis to reassess their nation’s successful struggle for survival and security.
In his 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman memorably wrote that Israel could best be described as “Yad Vashem with an air force.” He did not mean this reference to Israel’s national Holocaust museum and memorial as a compliment.
Friedman viewed the Jewish state’s concern for its security in a region where its neighbors had been working toward its annihilation from the moment of its modern-day establishment in 1948 as the obsession of a nation of delusional paranoids.
In the decades since, Friedman has posed as a foreign-policy expert even as events proved him wrong over and over again. Like most of his readers, he considers the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have rejected peace offers and far-reaching Israeli concessions, such as those ceded in the 1993 Oslo Accords, the 2000 Camp David summit, the 2005 disengagement from Gaza and other negotiations, as meaningless.
And that is the point that the Times analysis of the cost-benefit ratio of Israeli victory in exchange for calumnies and isolation misses.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts.