A Little Rant
I’m aware that I’m only slightly less ignorant than the people on the streets (mostly college age and younger) calling Israel a colonizer/oppressor/apartheid state, so I decided to try and learn its history. Websites are helpful for sort of a quick overview but can’t compare with books written by historians and researchers.
So, on the recommendation of John Podhoretz of Commentary, I bought this old book, published in 1986, called The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, by Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irishman and Catholic, not that it matters. His interest in the region’s conflicts began (he says in the Prologue) in the mid-fifties after Ireland became a member of the United Nations and he became a delegate and represented Ireland on the Special Political Committee, where there was an ongoing debate on The Question of the Palestine Refugees. He was seated between the delegates from Iraq and Israel. He enjoyed the Israeli delegates more than he did the Iraqis.
It’s a long-ish book for someone like me, who reads every word and usually glances at endnotes, and I’m the kind of reader that sometimes has to sort of step back and try to get the bigger picture before working through it chapter by chapter. After skimming the chapter headings, examining some of the maps and timelines, and reading the Prologue, I followed a footnote reference at the end of Prologue which led me to the Epilogue, which is where I read this paragraph (see image). This one paragraph seems to explain in a nutshell what the protesters on the streets don’t seem to understand.
This book was written in the early eighties, yet what the author writes in this paragraph seems as if it’s still true today. Israel’s pattern of what appears at first glance to be an “asymmetrical” military response “shocks the outside observer” because the outside observer simply can’t do math (my words, not the author's). In other words, if Israel’s military response to an attack on its citizens within its border seems asymmetrical, it’s because the loss of a thousand young Israelis is devastating if your population is already small. It's not unlike the problem with calling October 7th “Israel’s 9/11.” Numerically that’s not accurate. For October 7th be Israel's 9/11, we would have needed to have lost over 30,000 people on that day.
Anyway, all this to say…details and accuracy and truth matters. When college kids on the streets scream “colonizer” or “oppressor,” I want to ask them to please explain what they mean. I want to see if they’ve done any reading on the issue, if they understand the history, if they’re informed. Unfortunately, I already know the answer.
And so, the beat goes on. Jew hatred has crawled back up from the sewers. Yet for some reason, it seems even more vile than ever since it’s being spewed not by neo-Nazis but by some of our own—elites in academia, members of Congress, journalists, op-ed writers, editors at top newspapers, and perhaps scariest of all, young people: college kids, young adults in their mid-twenties, full of rage and bile, who get all their information not from historians but from memes they read on TikTok.
