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.

Land for terror

All of these peace offers and territorial concessions have been disasters. Israel didn’t—as its once dominant left-wing political parties proclaimed—exchange “land for peace.” What they’ve done is to trade land for terrorism.

That is not only because efforts to make peace didn’t succeed. Rather, it’s that every tangible concession has been used by the Palestinians and the terror groups that they have chosen to lead them to continue their century-old war against the presence of Jews in their ancient homeland.

The extremism and violence that plagued Israel in the 1990s after allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to set itself up as an autonomous government in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would have been impossible without Oslo. The same is true of the Second Intifada, which followed the Jewish state’s offer of an independent Palestinian state in 2000 that cost more than 1,000 Israeli lives.

The incessant rocket fire on Israel from Gaza since Hamas turned it into a terrorist fortress in 2007—and then the horrors of Oct. 7—could not have happened if not for former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 decision to withdraw every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement as part of a disastrous effort to advance the peace process.

To Israelis and their supporters, the recitation of the history of these failed peace efforts is old news. Few bother even to cite it as they fend off fallacious charges of genocide and apartheid that so many foreign observers have swallowed hook, line and sinker.

If Israelis are indifferent to international opinion, it’s not just because the Zionist ethos has created a spirit that saw the accomplishments of the Jews as more important than what the world thought of them. It’s because, unlike their critics, they know that they’ve taken risks for peace and paid for them not only in bad press clippings but in oceans of blood.

Ignorance or ideology

It’s possible that a great many otherwise decent people simply don’t know the history of the conflict. But the real problem today is that under the influence of indoctrination in the toxic left-wing myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism, a great many others don’t care about the facts. They believe that Israelis and Jews are “white” oppressors who are always in the wrong, and the Palestinians are “people of color” who are always in the right. There is no convincing them of the truth under any circumstances.

Unlike most populations, who have no conception or sense of their own mortality as a group, Israelis and Jews understand what it means to be faced not only with fanatics who seek their deaths but the very real possibility that they may succeed. The Thomas Friedmans of the world can mock the idea that a Holocaust that happened 80 years ago should influence the policies of a country that has become a regional superpower with a First World economy.

But the mass murder, torture, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction that took place on Oct. 7 was Hamas putting its genocidal ideology into action. The killing of 1,200 Israelis—the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—and the kidnapping into Gaza of 250 others was just the trailer for what the Palestinian Arabs intend for the rest of Israel. If Iran invested massive resources over decades into an effort to build a nuclear weapon that has hopefully been thwarted by last month’s American and Israeli airstrikes, it was because it wants a bomb with which it can inflict a new Holocaust on the Jews.

Any discussion of the cost that Israel is being made to pay for its successful efforts to degrade and eliminate the threats against its population from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran cannot ignore the alternative to military success and the attendant casualties suffered by civilians in Gaza being used as human shields.

Yet that is exactly what Western liberals and leftists are doing.

Israelis will continue to debate the best way to protect their security, as well as whether their leaders and the military have succeeded in achieving their objectives. Anyone who thinks that they should choose policies that put their lives at risk to avoid being falsely accused of genocide knows nothing of Jewish history or the reality of the Middle East. The Jews need a state and the ability to defend themselves far more than the good opinion of the multitudes that didn’t wait until the bodies of the Oct. 7 victims were buried to start sympathizing with the murderers. Remember: The IDF didn’t start operations in Gaza until three weeks later, long after the first mass rallies spewed chants of “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada.”

There have already been enough dead Jews. It’s time for decent people to understand that the willingness of living ones to defend themselves is something not only to be understood, but to be supported.

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