A few weeks ago, a pair of Palestinian youths entered a synagogue yelling Allahu Akbar (god is great) and killed three Rabbis and a fourth man at prayer before killing a police officer and being killed themselves. It brought the total number of Jewish Israeli citizens killed over the course of this past month to 11.
To many, this was a source of outrage. The brutal killing of innocent people, especially religious officials, is generally not applauded by the civilized world. And yet coming as it did in the wake of this summer’s conflict in Gaza, there was a remarkably low level of condemnation for the attack. Senior US officials made regretful noises, as is their obligation, but the general consensus from much of the rest of the world (and from a fair amount of American social media personalities) was sadly predictable: This is what you get, Israel, for daring to fight and win against Hamas.
As I’ve discussed before, one of the most tragic results of this past summer’s conflict and the ensuing tide of biased journalism and social media sensationalism that defined its legacy is the fact that it has, in all likelihood, ushered in a sea change in the way Israel is viewed by the western world. When I was growing up, the conflict was represented as a tragic but unavoidable result of two peoples being forced against their will to share a nation. We were taught that Israel was a state founded as a haven for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and that the Arab Muslims who shared the nation didn’t like the influx and empowerment of the Jewish citizens in what had once been a predominantly Arab Muslim region. We were taught that there was right and wrong on both sides, and that a peace process was the outcome to strive for.
But that was in the nineties. That was back before most people in America knew much about the Muslim world. The american public supported the peace process, but was staunchly on the side of Israel when it came to the military aspect of the conflict, seeing an obvious choice between the western style democratic state founded by survivors of the worst genocide in human history, and the black balaclava wearing, religious war declaring, child indoctrinating, negotiation refusing followers of an organization that explicitly and publicly wants to eradicate Jews and the Jewish state.
Now, thanks in large part to a nauseatingly effective social media PR campaign and the duplicity of many international news publications, the opposite is true. In Europe, the public has turned against Israel and now, without the need for any manner of hyperbole, things are beginning to look more than a little bit like they did in the 1930’s.
In the US, liberal citizens are publicly supporting the Palestinian side against Israel, and liberal politicians are giving tepid, if any, support to the Israeli side. Even while American citizens are being murdered by Islamic militants in the Middle East, large portions of the American electorate are raging against Israel in support of people whose ideology is damn similar to those currently murdering Americans, Christians, Yezidis, and anyone else who is not Muslim in the Middle East.
I won’t go into the tiresome details of exactly how and why this has occurred, since I’ve done it more than once before, nor will I explain why this makes very little sense from a strategic or geopolitical perspective, because I’ve done that as well. What I will go into is just how illogical and tragic it is that the western world, less than eighty years after doing its level best to kill every single Jew on planet earth and then turning around and vowing to never allow such a thing to happen again, is now squarely on the path toward doing precisely the opposite. The biggest difference? This time, most of the Jews in the world (with the exception of the large contingent that live in the north eastern United States) are clustered in one very small space surrounded on all sides by hostility and the sea.
Israel has won every war it has fought in its very short time on this earth. It maintains military superiority at all costs because if it did not, it would begin to lose wars. If it lost wars, it would cease to exist as a state. If it ceased to exist as a state, there would be a second (albeit far less well organized) holocaust underway in very short order.
When liberals rage against Israel’s aggressive and effective military operations, what they are essentially doing is condemning a the state (which, once again, is the extreme minority in its region) for defending itself effectively after it is attacked from without and within again and again and again and again and again and again. and again and again. For most of Israel’s history, they could count on European and American support against their innumerable enemies. Now, it seems, that era has ended.
I have faith that in the decades to come, the abandonment of Israel by the west will be seen as one of the great geopolitical calamities of the twenty first century unless it can be reversed. And it will only be reversed if and when the west can be made to understand who their true enemies are. Here’s hoping that happens sooner rather than later.
The Paine Report 
