As if the politics of the Israel-Hamas War did not have enough zaniness, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes. Forget for a moment that the ICC actually carrying out the arrest would trigger the Hague Invasion Act, thereby giving the U.S. the ability to release the captors and even shut down the kangaroo court. It is the moral inversion with which the ICC issues the arrest warrants. In the twisted world of woke identity politics that has permeated through out multiple international institutions, Jews end up being the aggressors, even as they were being raped, kidnapped, murdered, or decapitated on October 7, 2023. The ICC was created as a "court of last resort" (their words, not mine) to prosecute crimes that de facto have no infrastructure to do so, not take political potshots by going after the leaders of a democratic country that are simply trying to protect its citizens from barbarism.
The warped sense of morality goes beyond the ICC trying to persecute Israel for the "crime" of defending itself against racist, genocidal terrorists or making a moral equivalence between Hamas' belligerence and Israel defending itself from such barbarism. There is a classic case of projection here. In psychology, projection is a defense mechanism in which one consciously or unconsciously attributes their traits, thoughts, or feelings onto others. You are probably wondering what psychology has to do with Middle Eastern geopolitics. The answer? What those on the pro-Palestine side accuse Israel of are acts that Arab nations or the entity known as Palestine have either committed already or would like to commit against Israel and the Jewish people.
Colonizer. Israel is not a settler colonizer. Israel gained its land fair and square, whether it was through international law with the West Bank or a legitimate case of casus belli, as was the case with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula in the Six-Day War. It is also worth pointing out that Israel gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in the 1970s to make peace.
There is only one Jewish state on the planet and it is about the size of New Jersey. Since Israel is the indigenous land of the Jewish people, Israel is a textbook example of decolonization. You cannot colonize your own land. Colonization comes from an outside force. If you want a lesson on true colonizers, look at how much land the Muslim caliphs conquered since the 7th century and the fifty-plus Muslim-majority nations that currently exist. And if "from the river to sea, Palestine will be free" does not make it clear enough, they always wanted all the land and still do because the "grievance" is not about peace. If they cared about peace, they would not have rejected the numerous opportunities presented. Much like has been the case in Islamic history, the goal of the "Palestinian people" is domination, plain and simple.
Genocide. As I pointed out last year in my critique of the genocide accusation, Israel is by definition not committing genocide and is doing what it can to minimize civilian casualties, which is a tall order in urban warfare. Let us ignore a fact that Gazan civilians have been receiving the food aid equivalent of 3,000 calories a day (Fliss-Isakov et al., 2024)....that is when Hamas is not busy stealing the food and starving its people. I hate to break it to the ICC, but starvation and suffering are common in war: "Normalcy ends [in war], things run out, people go hungry, people suffer, people die. It is dreadful. It is why, ideally, wars should not be started."
Hamas losing a war that it started is not genocide. But Hamas does not care about the suffering of its civilians. For Hamas, maximizing casualties and human suffering while garnering international sympathy is a military tactic, much like its calls for a ceasefire are. It is why Hamas stores military munitions in civilian infrastructure and uses its own citizens as human shields. More to the point, Gaza's population has grown nearly fivefold since 1950, according to United Nations data. It has also grown 2.02 percent since the October 7 attacks. If this were an actual genocide, Gaza's population would not be growing the way it has.
Finally, Hamas has wanted to wipe Israel off the map since its founding in 1988. You can read Hamas' original charter for yourself, especially the Introduction and Article VII. On October 7, 2023, it committed an act against Israel, the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, with genocidal intent. After the October 7 attacks, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed to repeat the October 7 attacks until Israel is annihilated. With all the wars, the intifadas, and suicide bombing, Hamas and other Palestinian organizations have made it crystal clear that they would wipe out Israel and the Jews if they had the military advantage.
Oppressor/Apartheid State. I have refuted the apartheid claim in 2023, 2016, and 2012, which is why I will not go into too much detail today. I will say that all citizens are equal under Israeli law and Arabs hold influential positions in Israel, whether as members of Israeli Parliament, diplomats, police officers, doctors, or the Israeli Supreme Court. Jews and Arabs can take the same public transit and have access to universities, theaters, cinemas, beaches, and other places. Israel is nowhere near the definition of apartheid that is under the 1998 Rome Statute, which would be defined as a system of legalized segregation in which one racial group is deprived of civil rights.
I would accuse Palestine of being an apartheid state, except for two main issues. First, there has never been a sovereign Arab nation-state known as Palestine. Two, prior to the current war with Hamas, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. There is not a single Jew for the Gazan government to oppress. And if you want to see who is oppressing its citizens, look at Freedom House's analysis of how Hamas oppresses its own people by curtailing political rights and civil liberties in Gaza. Israel ranks significantly better on Freedom House ranking, which is another signal that the ICC's arrest warrants are politics masquerading as legal proceeding.
Ethnic cleansing. Israel has accepted Muslims into its country and has a Muslim population of about 1.8 million. Contrast that to the 10,000 Jews that live in Arab countries. In the mid-1940s, there was anywhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews in the Arab world. Guess what happened to most of them? In response to Israel becoming a nation-state in 1948, Arab nations ethnically cleansed their countries of their Jews. Many of those refugees moved to Israel where their descendants live today. The fact that there are more Muslim Arabs in Israel than there are Jews in Arab countries is a reality that should speak volumes.
And in terms of ethnic cleansing, it is not as if Mahmoud Abbas is all that much better than the genocidal Hamas. Abbas already stated that a future Palestinian state would not have a single Jew in it, which is not surprising for a man who blamed the Holocaust on the Jews. Given the current demographics in the Middle East, you cannot actualize that type of nation-state without ethnically cleansing Jews. "From the river to the sea" is a call for ethnic cleansing, if not downright genocide.
Conclusion. This is not solely about a war in the Middle East, as important as that outcome is for geopolitical purposes. This is about moral clarity. I am not here to say that every last thing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) does has been or will be perfect. At the same time, there is a distinction as clear as night and day who the good guys and the bad guys are. It should be unambiguous by now that what the pro-Palestine side accuses Israel of are things that the entity known as Palestine would like to do to Israelis, whether that is to colonize, oppress, ethnically cleanse, or systematically erase Jews from the planet. To support Hamas and its ilk is to support genocide, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, human rights violations, and an assault on moral decency, which is ironic given that the Left has historically advocated against these maladies and yet increasingly comes out on the side supporting the terrorist organization known as Hamas.
The issue with Palestine is not a matter of a "few bad apples" in their governmental bodies and institutions, but an entire society that generally and fundamentally despises Jews. If Hamas, Fatah, and indeed the majority of the people known as Palestinians had their way, Jews would either not exist in the Middle East or, even more likely, would be wiped off the planet. It is lamentable as it is true that Jew-hatred amongst the Palestinian people is a norm rather than an exception. In an age where moral relativism reigns supreme, we need to find the directness and cojones to call a spade a spade and a Jew-hating terrorist a Jew-hating terrorist.
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