This week in Daniel’s Corner Café’s Nazi against Nazi, managing editor Daniel Hadas has argued that both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict have locked themselves in a tug of war of fruitless accusations—“genocide” and “antisemitism”. Both sides have their skeletons in the closet, both sides have committed crimes, and the fans of both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews can be as bad as each other.
This is a line of thought I am well acquainted with, including through sometimes long-winding WhatsApp discussions, not just with Daniel. Daniel himself has made a similar point before, for example, here. While Café Américain puts an emphasis on the defense of Israel, we do not shy away from the constructive criticism Daniel’s view has offered, especially because I happen to know that Daniel—the guy—is coming from what they call a “good place” and his criticism is well-intentioned.
However, I am not a big fan of both-sidesism in the Israel-Palestine conflict, because I think that—no matter the intentions—it simply ignores reality. To explain, I am going to refer to the article to make a somewhat bigger point.
- I think leaving out the reality of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in an article about Israel/Palestine is disingenuous. I also believe that one cannot talk truthfully and sincerely about the conflict—today—without mentioning October 7.
- One also cannot in good faith ignore the wider historical reality of the conflict. One cannot write about it as though the history of the conflict is just a long series of events where “both sides” did “bad things”. One cannot write, I think, as though the wars of aggression in 1948, 1967, 1973, and the Second Intifada (which led to “border checks” in the West Bank in the first place) did not happen. None of these attacks was about land. If you look at the charters and declarations of war of those who committed these attacks, you find that the leaders even admit that it was not about land: it was always about the “Zionist entity”, Jews having a sovereign state. It was always about Jew hatred. There was no “Arab Palestine” before Israel came along and allegedly took it away from them. And before Israel was given a chance to exist, the Arabs were offered land, good land. But time and again, the Arab leadership wanted no part of the land, never mind statehood, while Israel was even happy with the worthless Negev desert. In July 2000, Arafat walked away from another offer of statehood and instead called for the Second Intifada. This is not about land. This is about hatred of the Jew as sovereign subject.
- But there is another, and for this discussion much more relevant, lopsidedness to both sides-ism. Instead of being “just” and “balanced” —because it regards the actions of both as equally good/bad —I think it is very much unbalanced. And this has less to do with the speaker’s intentions, than with the—let’s call it euphemistically deeply unbalanced reality of Jews today, as compared to other minorities:
One cannot honestly and truthfully write a both-sidesism article which ignores the impact of Jew hatred on the everyday lives of Jews. It’s not mosques in Western cities that need 24-hour police protection every day (and I’m glad for that), but synagogues. It is not Muslim schoolkids that need police protection (and I’m glad about that, too) but Jewish school children. Muslims can be openly Muslim in any Western city today, but Jews cannot.
The media and the Pro-Palestine Industrial Complex have seen to it that Jewish life is not only becoming unsafe, but is also beginning to disappear. This is not happening to Muslims, or Buddhists, or Catholics, or Mexicans, as a group. It is happening to Jews. Jewish film festivals and Jewish book fairs, Jewish cultural events, are off the table for “security concerns”. Jewish restaurants and bakeries are forced to shut down because of Schutzstaffel-style threats to their businesses. This does not happen to any other group in the West, religious, ethnic, or other.
The media and the Pro-Palestine Industrial Complex have seen to it that Jewish life is not only becoming unsafe, but is also beginning to disappear.
The war in Gaza is not why attacks on Jews because they are Jews happen—on Bondi Beach, in London’s Golders Green, in Manchester, Paris, Amsterdam, on the streets on Manhattan. Rather, the war in Gaza is used to justify the open killing of Jews—and if not killing, then the intimidation, the threats, the libel (see the New York Times’s insane ‘Israel trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners’ piece), the slander. The “genocide” libel is the direct enabler and justification for violence against Jews. And how can it be perpetuated? Because Jews are not seen as victims, even if they are. They are seen as perpetrators, as those who “deserve” it.
The “genocide” libel is the direct enabler and justification for violence against Jews. And how can it be perpetuated? Because Jews are not seen as victims, even if they are. Jew hatred is real.
What other group or nation is collectively held responsible for the acts of their government? Do we hear of Chinese people getting randomly attacked on a daily basis for their government’s human rights violations? Turkish people? Russians? I do not remember that even in peak apartheid South Africa, white South Africans would be targeted because they are white South Africans anywhere in the world. Moreover, the Israeli government is, of course, not even “their government” for Jews outside Israel who are not its citizens. So forgive me if I can hardly believe that Jew hatred has nothing to do with why Jews get randomly attacked daily in cities across the West.
In the past yep and a half years, calling someone an “antisemite” has never led to the killing/celebration of the killing of that person. In short: the “genocide” accusation gets people killed. The “antisemite” accusation: not so much.
- It is true that 70 000 people were killed in Gaza, a third— by some estimations even half of them —Hamas fighters. Would most of these people be alive today if Hamas hadn’t decided to wage a war on Oct 7? Absolutely.
- However, as we all know, Hamas’s whole calculation was to make the genocide libel against Israel common and popular (and boy, were they successful). This is why they hid themselves and large arsenals of ammunitions and military infrastructure in highly populated areas, in hospitals, schools, UN offices, even children’s bedrooms.
An IDF soldier was faced with a choice: if he wants to stop Hamas from killing Israelis, he must kill Hamas fighters first. But then, because of the particular infrastructure that Hamas built—to get as many civilians killed as possible—he might also kill civilians. There was no way around it. This is why the IDF called civilians on their landline and cell phones, telling them to evacuate, while leaflets indicated the area which they could evacuate to. Many did not want to leave—intimidated by Hamas, who told them they could not leave, and stopped people actively from leaving, booby-trapping houses (Andrew Fox’s reporting from Gaza in instructive here). Ultimately, when everything is said and done, the terrible choice was to kill many more people than one intended to kill—or be killed yourself. This is not only a hard choice to make. It is almost impossible. But Israelis want to survive. And if you want to survive and not be killed by an Iranian-made rocket, you shoot first.
It’s not been a war between Palestinians and Israelis. It’s been a war between Hamas (and the Houthis, and Hezbollah) and Israel. Many Palestinians want to live in peace with Israelis; many in fact want to move and work in Tel Aviv or Haifa. I genuinely believe that Arabs as a whole do not hate Jews, or even the Israeli government. It is the radicals—the political side—that do. This is why a book like The Arab Case for Israel by Hussein Al-Husseini is possible. This is why Realign for Palestine and dozens, perhaps hundreds of hard working Palestinian Arabic peace activists exist. But their activism starts by acknowledging that Jew hatred is real.
