AMAC Magazine Exclusive – By Victor Davis Hanson
By early 2023, Israel was at its historical zenith in terms of prosperity, security, and self-confidence. Its per-capita income had surpassed the average in the European Union. Vast new natural gas fields, the world’s most efficient desalinization plants, and a highly productive tech industry seemed to have solved Israel’s old challenges of ensuring sufficient energy, water, and access to foreign sophisticated goods. Mediterranean allies like Cyprus and Greece were eager to partner in joint energy development projects.
The Israel Defense Forces faced no conventional threat from either Arab nations or its hostile Palestinian neighbors. Israel assumed its fortifications, sophisticated intelligence, and conventional military deterrent had neutralized existential dangers from the West Bank and Hamas.
Then came October 7, 2023.
At a time of both peace and holiday, some 1,200 Hamas terrorists of the Al-Qassam brigades and other Palestinian militants, accompanied by several hundred tag-along Gazan civilians, invaded Israel—and caught the civilian population and the IDF completely by surprise. The lethal force murdered some 1,200—nearly 900 unarmed civilians and over 300 Israeli soldiers. Over 250 hostages were taken. Well over 100 captives are still being held. No one has any idea how many are still alive.
The terrorists were not shy about taping, recording, streaming, posting, testifying, and boasting about their mass rape, torture, mutilation, and decapitations. For months, their leaders bragged about the precision and detail involved in conducting their carefully planned massacre. Far from showing remorse, the Hamas hierarchy, ensconced in luxury in Qatar and Beirut, bragged of endless October 7s still to come.
The slaughter marked the worst single-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Yet these medieval atrocities were met with jubilation in Gaza and the West Bank. The savagery resonated through much of the population of the 500-million-Muslim Middle East and millions of expatriate Middle Easterners in Europe and the United States—and especially among foreign students at Western universities.
Some professors voiced “exhilaration” and near ecstasy at the news. Others harassed Jews in their classes. In the months following the massacre, Jewish citizens in Europe and America were hounded on Western campuses, assaulted on the streets, and threatened with ethnically targeted expulsion from parks and subways.
Eliminationist chants such as “From the River to the Sea” soon gave way to overt threats to “Kill the Jews” and open praise of Hitler’s Final Solution. Heads of state, provincial and state governors, mayors, police chiefs, and college presidents did little to stop often violent demonstrations and rarely arrested anti-Jewish lawbreakers. Overt, unapologetic, and unpunished anti-Semitism became routine in Europe and America, in a way eerily reminiscent of late-1930s Nazi Germany.
Few among the Western elite seemed bothered by the serial Hamas braggadocio over their barbarity of October 7. Instead, the media focused only on what followed, once Israel sought to destroy Hamas and stop the shower of some 7,000 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza. Once the IDF descended into a 400-mile labyrinth of tunnels, beneath Gaza, Hamas arsenals and headquarters were uncovered. All were deliberately situated beneath schools, hospitals, and mosques. If Israel uses its military to protect civilians, Hamas drafts civilians to shield its gunmen.
Israel had left Gaza in 2005. Autonomous Gaza voters had soon elected Hamas to power in 2006, after which all subsequent elections were canceled, opponents murdered or exiled, and a theocratic dictatorship imposed.
The Hamas terrorist command correctly believed that the combination of anti-Semitism, anti-Western and anti-white demonization, the huge supportive Muslim expatriate populations in the West, the multi-trillion-dollar Arab petroleum-fed investment portfolios, and the rise of woke diversity/equity/inclusion ideology would win it sympathy despite, if not because of, its barbarity.
A left-wing media declared Israel the settler “oppressor” and the Palestinians “the oppressed” and thus fueled that crude Marxist binary. Once Israel was forced to fight house to house inside and below Gaza, Hamas eagerly sacrificed its own civilian population as shields to protect its armed terrorists—and then inflated the body count to further gain global sympathy against Israel’s supposed “genocide.”
None of the world’s anti-Semitic protestors who decried “occupation” and “refugees” dared mention Turkey’s 50-year take-over of Northern Cyprus, the expulsion of 200,000 Cypriots, and the ensuing occupation by some 45,000 Turkish soldiers. Today, there is equal silence about the recent ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Armenians from their ancestral homes in Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijani troops or the ongoing genocidal attacks waged by Islamic forces in Sudan. What Russia did to the Muslim population of an utterly destroyed Grozny in the Second Chechen War and the near enslavement of one million Uyghurs by the communist Chinese are of no interest to anti-Semitic student protestors.
This singular targeting and hatred of Israel, and the glorification of the October 7 monstrous killers, stagger the mind. After all, we are not yet 80 years from the end of the Holocaust that by 1945 had exterminated some six million Jews in the death camps of the Third Reich. Israel remains the only authentically constitutional government in the Middle East. It has been for the last 70 years the most reliable American ally in the world. And the Jewish state’s global contributions to scientific, medical, and technological advancement are unmatched by any nation its size.
Israel is the only tolerant multi-religious nation in the Middle East. Its two million Arab-Israeli citizens enjoy more secure human rights than are found in any Muslim nation in the world.
Most thought anti-Semitism had disappeared in America—given that 95 percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in either Israel or the United States. After 1945, these two countries alone had traditionally been recognized as the world’s only sanctuary states where Jews could live free and unfettered lives, without either religious, ethnic, or cultural persecution.
Yet today, all Jews in the West are in some danger. Israel faces an array of existential enemies well beyond the murderous clique that organized October 7. Iran, for the first time in the Jewish state’s history, launched an array of drones and missiles into the homeland of Israel. Nearly weekly, the theocracy boasts of an existential war to come, ostensibly when it soon obtains a nuclear arsenal. Hezbollah’s relentless missile attacks have virtually destroyed Israeli life on its northern border and forced some 100,000 Israelis from their homes. Yemen on occasion launches missiles at Israel’s southernmost cities.
So, why has the world in general and the Biden administration in particular turned on the Jewish state in its hour of greatest need?
Aside from the engrained anti-Semitism, the power of Gulf oil money, and the half-billion people of the Middle East, millions of well-off Middle Eastern students have flooded Western universities that are often endowed with anti-Israeli Middle Eastern programs from rich Gulf sheikdoms. In many European countries, the Muslim immigrant diaspora—for the most part anti-Western, unassimilated, and unintegrated—has reached 20 percent of the population.
In key swing states in the US such as Michigan, a few hundred thousand Arab-American votes can determine a national election, as the Democratic Party so fears.
The Biden administration deliberately distanced America from Israel, signaling to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran that their collective attacks on the Jewish state would not necessarily be met with a strong American response, especially given President Biden is often more critical of Israel’s elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than he is of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah’s thuggish autocrats.
Finally, the road from September 11 to October 7 is a long trail of violent attacks against Westerners by radical Muslim terrorists against teachers, writers, artists, journalists, law enforcement, the military, and politicians—and has created a cowardly public fearful of calling out radical Islamic atrocities.
The diversity/equity/inclusion orthodoxy has also taken over much of the media, universities, and cultural institutions of the West. DEI operatives have adopted the Palestinians as fellow victims of supposedly imperialistic and colonial white male Christian oppressors.
Add up all the roles of such realpolitik, fear, money, propaganda, and numbers—and the unthinkable of turning a liberal republic like Israel into the villain and terrorist Hamas killers into heroes becomes all too real.
At this eleventh hour, it is left to the American people to resume their strong support for Israel—and at no better time than this November.
Victor Davis Hanson is the author of the current New York Times bestseller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descent into Annihilation, and a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.