That’s what I’ve learned over the last year since the October 7 massacre. It dawned on me some years ago that, although they wouldn’t put it this way, Europeans and most European Jews had basically come to opposite theological conclusions about the meaning of the Holocaust. After a spasm of post-war ethnic cleansing of Germans, Europe concluded that there should be no more exclusivist nationalism — any ethno-national privilege had within it the seeds of hatred and destruction of “the other.” Europeans didn’t disestablish the nation-state, but they tried in many cases to cure chauvinism with liberal piety. Ironically, the chief beneficiaries of this piety have been Muslim immigrants, who in turn have made European societies more unwelcoming and dangerous to Jews. Jews, quite a bit more practically, concluded that earlier Zionists had been right: No longer would they be a nation without a state to protect them.
There’s been a relish to preemptively declare Israel guilty of crimes in its response to October 7, often without evidence. I read this morning on social media that the “most conservative international estimates” are that Israel has killed over 200,000 Palestinians. In fact, the most liberal estimates, based on what Hamas says, are that 41,000 Palestinians have died, a number that doesn’t differentiate between combatants and civilians; Israel estimates that 17,000 of those killed were combatants. In the past year Israel has been falsely charged with adopting a policy of starvation against Gazans. This was a lie. And all of these lies were in service of the largest lie, that Israel was attempting to commit genocide.
It is Hamas and Hezbollah that have practiced indiscriminate killing. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets at civilians. Hamas massacred women and children on October 7. It purposely killed even those Jews living in leftist communities dedicated to peaceful relations with Palestinians. Why? Because they were Jews.