What do you say about Israel?
The calls are everywhere to speak out about the recent Israeli-Palestinian violence. But even thinking about it is a moral torment. What or who is right in this situation? And what good would it do anyway? Who will listen? But now that there is a cease-fire, perhaps we can all draw a breath and make some assessments. So I will answer the call and offer my assessment: Both sides are wrong.
The Palestinians seem to be getting most of the sympathy because they are the bigger victims: they are oppressed, and they are suffering more deaths and injuries. This is understandable, but Palestinian suffering does not excuse Palestinian brutality. Palestinians cheer when Hamas rockets attack Israeli towns, and when Hamas bombs blow up Israeli buses. Palestinians support terrorism, and there is no excuse for terrorism. Importantly, terrorism is not just morally wrong; it also doesn’t work at achieving its goals. As the political scientist Max Abrahms has shown, launching rockets and bombs at Israeli civilians just communicates to Israelis that Palestinians want to kill them all, turning left-wing voters into right-wing voters who say, “They tried to kill my children.” Palestinians end up further than ever from freedom. Terrorism is not just crime; it is also a blunder.
The Palestinians claim they are fighting for justice, but that is a half-truth at best. They support Hamas despite its bloodcurdling anti-Semitism and its determination never to make peace with Israel. And it’s not just Hamas: When peace was never closer, during the 2000 Camp David negotiations, even moderate Fatah negotiators could not bring themselves to recognize that Israelis had some right to the land of Israel. They could not even acknowledge that Israelis believe they have a historical right rooted in the Bible. The sad truth is that what Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times is right: if Israel withdrew from all of the West Bank as well as Gaza, Palestinian rockets would continue to fly at Israel, because there would still be disputes about Jerusalem, and refugees, and land, and water. The Palestinians are not just fighting for justice; they want the land, and they want all of it.
There is no excuse for Palestinian terrorism and Palestinian maximalism.
That said, there is also no excuse for Israeli brutality and Israeli maximalism. There is no excuse for a military occupation of Palestinian land that has already lasted more than 50 years, longer than formal apartheid existed in South Africa. There is no excuse for the continued program of demolishing Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, for unpunished settler killings of Palestinian civilians, for seizures of Palestinian land, for the long-term deprivation of human rights and civil rights, for keeping the Palestinians a people without a nation. The laws of war require that soldiers apply violence discriminately and proportionally to avoid unnecessary harm to civilians. Israeli attacks on Gaza often departed from that standard, and there is no excuse for that either.
The Israelis claim that what they are doing is necessary for their security, but that is a half-truth at best. Israelis are not just fighting for security; they want the land, and they want all of it. At Camp David, when peace was never closer, Israel’s opening bid was for a Palestinian “state” that resembled an apartheid-era South African Bantustan more than a real independent nation. Since then, the accelerating pace of Israeli settlement in the West Bank and the mounting calls for Israel to annex West Bank territory leaves no doubt about Israeli intentions to permanently dominate the land and the Palestinian people there. There is no excuse for such maximalism. There is no excuse for continuing to support a corrupt and brutal Prime Minister Netanyahu. There is no excuse for Israeli support for the corrupt and seditious President Trump. They aren’t good for the Jews; anti-Semitism around the world is rising in response to Israeli brutality.
If both sides are wrong, what then should we do? The answer is simple: support neither side. Support for an oppressive Israel is wrong, so US aid should be cut off. At the same time, support for the Palestinians, who continue to support Hamas’s genocidal rhetoric, is unthinkable. At the moment, neither justice nor peace is within reach, so both sides need to be put under increasing pressure to take the first step and stop their brutal behavior. Both sides, though wrong, also have a right to live in peace, justice, freedom and security. For now, all we can do is to repeat our fruitless calls for it. The current cease-fire is at least a start.
