Israel is routinely cast as the region’s aggressor. On campuses and in much of the media, Israel is vilified as a collective, and Jews worldwide face rising hostility from people who blame them collectively for the world’s ills.
Since long before October 7, 2023, Israeli officials and advocates have played defense, explaining a history the world has largely stopped listening to. Few remember the roughly 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim lands after 1948. Fewer still know of the Farhud — the 1941 massacre of Jews in Iraq — or the 1929 Hebron riots, both of which took place before Israel’s founding and long before “settlements” entered the discourse.
1+It’s time to go on the offensive. That means being honest about the reality inside ‘Palestinian’ society: a widespread culture of antisemitic incitement in which children are taught that killing Jews and “liberating” all of “Palestine” are worthy goals. This isn’t a fringe phenomenon. IDF soldiers fighting house-to-house in Gaza reported finding copies of Mein Kampf in many homes and tunnel shafts under children’s bedrooms. An education system and media apparatus that glorify martyrdom don’t produce terrorists by accident — they produce them by design. None of this erases the individual ‘Palestinians’ who want no part of it. But ‘Palestinian’ parents, leadership, and institutions can be judged by what they build and what they teach, and on that measure, the ‘Palestinians’ have failed as a people. They are not peace-loving, and they have contributed little to the world.
The West has sorted the world into oppressor and oppressed. A more honest frame is good and evil — and a lot of people have lost track of which side is which. When protesters filled the streets of New York, London, and Berlin chanting “Free ‘Palestine’” and “From the river to the sea,” they were calling, whether they understood it or not, for the genocide of Jews and for the end of Jewish sovereignty in the only Jewish state on earth. These slogans must be named for what they are.
1+Plenty of supposedly serious people — heads of state, senior officials, elected leaders — have embraced the ‘Palestinian’ narrative wholesale and hold Israel guilty no matter the circumstances or its massive efforts at avoiding civilian casualties. Some Jews have joined them, using their “as a Jew” identity to lend credibility to arguments that trade in double standards toward the Jewish state. And Israeli media outlets that make a habit of feeding foreign governments and media the country’s worst moments, stripped of context, are playing a different game than legitimate internal criticism, one aimed at an international audience already inclined to believe the worst.
Unlike what Israel’s detractors believe, Israel did not commit genocide in Gaza, does not commit crimes against humanity or target civilians by design, and is not engaged in ethnic cleansing in Judea and Samaria. Israel’s war against radical Islam in Gaza is being fought under more scrutiny, and with more restraint, than any urban conflict in modern history. Unlike entertainer Ed Sheeran’s sobbing plea to the anti-Israel mob, Israel’s war in Gaza is fully justified and beyond proportional.
Israel’s war in Gaza is a lesson to the world on how to fight radical Islamic terrorists who commit double war crimes by hiding behind civilians while firing at civilians.
The critics don’t want a debate about facts or the last century of history; they’ve already decided. It’s time to stop playing defense, tell the truth about the evil that ‘Palestinian’ society has built, and hold up a mirror to a world that reserves its outrage almost exclusively for the one Jewish state.
Israel Kasnett is the Editor at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and a former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.