I mean it's true that Israel messed up lots and committed lots of war crimes and this hurt international sympathy. I do think it was inevitable that the public opinion was going to turn hostile to Israel given the inevitable Palestinian civilian deaths, third-worldism, and just straight up Jew-hate. But I do agree that Israel made lots of mistakes that worsened the situation. The paramedic massacre is really bad. Yehuda Vach is known to say things like any military-aged male who ignores evacuation orders is a combatant.
The "cope" that is actually correct is that there's now a peace deal and the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide. With the war ending, things will get better. This idiot government gets voted out in 2026 too. The other thing is that Palestinoids are so dumb that they will do really dumb things and lose Western public sympathy again and again. All Israel has to do is wait and not fight any big wars and it will be fine.
You may be right that the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide, but they're almost certainly not going to rule that Israel didn't commit genocide.
And I think you're counting out "this idiot government" way too soon.
Permanent damage has been done to Israel's reputation.
The city of San Francisco, generally considered one of the most progressive, liberal bastions in the US, lit up City Hall in blue and white in support of Israel for several days after Oct 7 and there was essentially zero negative public fuss about it.
The National Museum of American Jewish History is there, in a super-prominent place - right in the common area with the Liberty Bell Center, the Visitor's center, etc.
You can see the museum from an open unimpeded vantage point. They had a massive Israeli flag up the day I was there, and this was right after some big gathering had taken place in the common area.
I was on a guided walk and I asked the leader if that had caused any issues & he looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.
No, there were no problems with a giant Israeli flag in the middle of Philadelphia's historic tourist district. But... I wonder if it would be different now.
You know it's funny, I think Zionism isn't an airtight ideology and it certainly has some issues, but if this blog is the best its critics can do, it really speaks volumes. In this particular article I find it funny that the author is guilty of the same thing he accuses "Zios" (a term invented by David Duke) of doing: i.e. cherry-picking examples to suit his thesis.
For example, hundreds of people celebrating October 7th around the world isn't representative of anything, but a single comment by a Portuguese politician is enough to declare the entire narrative a "myth." From what I could tell, the vast majority of politicians, including the President of the United States Joe Biden, went with the "both sides" and "all lives matter" approach. Not exactly a wave of sympathy for the Israelis.
A couple of other points of clarification: that "someone" at the DSA who was talking about "hipsters" was Ahmed Husain, then a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee. Not exactly some random nobody who wandered in off the street, and even if he were his comments got huge cheers, laughs, and applause.
Here are some more progressives who expressly celebrated October 7th, and didn't just express sadness for the Palestinians who died:
* Students for Justice in Palestine: "The Palestinian resistance stormed the border fence…Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity…".
* Ali Abunimah, head of the website Electronic Intifada: "Palestinians in Palestine and around the world are elated that their resistance broke out of the ghetto and humiliated the enemy oppressor."
* 170 faculty at Columbia University: "[it was] a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years"
* Joseph Massad, prominent pro-Palestinian academic at Columbia: "an innovative Palestinian resistance...the sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers."
* The UK Socialist Workers Party: "The Palestinians have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day. Victory to the Resistance."
* The director of CAIR: “[I am] happy to see Palestinians break out of Gaza on Oct. 7" and that "Palestinians in Gaza “have the right to self-defense.”
* A pro-Palestinian student group at the University of Michigan: "Palestinians in Gaza are fighting back", "Palestinians have broken free of their cage," and that, "This is the response of a people pushed beyond endurace."
* “It wasn’t Hamas that resisted; it was the Palestinian people who resisted. You can’t separate Hamas from the Palestinians. Hamas is the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are Hamas.” - MK Zoabi
* Noura Erekat: “We, as advocates and as scholars, have been insisting that you cannot defeat Hamas militarily, that it is part of the national and political fabric of Palestinians, and that they must be engaged with diplomatically.”
* Palestine Solidarity Activist: "Most of us understand the heroism behind Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the resistance that has thrived in Palestine for over a century."
* Founder of CAIR at an AMP event: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7…And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,”
* Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament: "It’s not just Hamas that commissioned the October 7 attack, it’s all components of Palestinian society"
* WOL: "We will not condemn October 7th. We will not condemn our people’s resistance forces."
I'll stop there for the sake of brevity, but one last thing: the tearing down of the hostage posters being due to "desperation" is pure cope. They drew swastikas on Kfir Bibas' forehead out of desperation too? The only desperation I can see is from the anti-Zionists and non-Zionists of the world now that they're realizing Israel has won the war yet again.
Woah, you're telling me that the Socialist Workers Party, Electronic Intifada AND Noura Erekat responded to October 7th by criticising Israel? This totally disproves my point.
Joe Biden responded by giving Israel 13 billion dollars.
I agree that it is frustrating when Zionists act as if the Keir Starmers of the world were marching for Palestine on October 8, but I think you underestimate the extent to which hasbarists are kinda right about the obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred (even if it is not an endlessly mutating "antisemitism," but a mongrel mix of Islamism, right wing conspiracy bullshit, and Soviet-era propaganda). Like I don't think if other countries approached a war against an enemy like Hamas the way Israel did they'd be getting hauled in front of the ICJ. Perhaps this is just reality, but I think it is fair to complain about such a reality.
The ICJ isn't made up of Islamo-gauchists. The real difference I suppose, is that in the case of median generic country, there wouldn't be another country like South Africa which saw a way to boost its cred by brining the case. But if a country did bring a case, I'm pretty sure the ICJ would hear it.
So you think if, say, Egypt prosecuted a war against Hamas in a similar way it'd be treated the same as Israel has been treated by the international community?
In some ways it would have been treated more harshly (it certainly wouldn't have been given anything like the amount of emergency aid Israel received), and in some ways more leniently in terms of scrutiny of specific actions. How leniently would depend to a large extent on how it managed its relations with Turkey and Qatar who control a lot of media perception.
" obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred "
It is. I just didn't see a lot of it after October 7, except from the usual quarters. I observed a pro-Hamas demo in mid-October in Manhattan - the one that "Maskil' refers to in the poast -- it was tiny, confined to a small area in the west 40s, and 99% Muslim immigrants & progeny. The photos are deceiving.
Also, if I weren't a total weirdo who spends too much time online, I would not have known about Columbia or the demos at various parts of NYC. Life went on as normal. This was not Vietnam, when demonstrations shut down the city.
Every Israeli war has a deadline that is measured not in time but in bad PR. The goal for the government is to push off that deadline as much as possible by acting affirmatively to show how much they're trying not to kill civilians and do war crimes. Unfortunately, this requires not having ministers of the government not bragging about how much they love war crimes, and usually a genuine effort to avoid doing war crimes. Ah well
Surprised you didn't mention Hind Rajab getting blown up by a tank. That was a pretty bad one and I think where public opinion really started shifting. I know Red Crescent is a sus org, but hearing a recording of the girl crying for help had a lot of people start to question what Israel's game plan was.
Before that, the pro-Hamas crowd mostly busied themselves with nitpicking Oct. 7; if anyone was actually raped, how many babies were actually killed, etc. They tacitly acknowledged that it was indefensible, but just not nearly as bad as the white supremacist, zionist, imperialist media was making it out to be (and also "b-but whabout nakba?!?"). After everyone heard the recording of the girl, that's when I saw them go full bore on zionazi rhetoric.
Then with every accumulating mishap and fuck-up, normies followed. A few months ago, I saw a wholesome animal shelter page in Australia post a pro-Pally textwall. This is someone who's largely apolitical, maybe a little skeptical of immigration, and was probably shocked by Oct. 7, and here she's now posting about Tantura and the conspiracy against the Palestinian people.
"The pro-Hamas crowd mostly busied themselves with nitpicking Oct. 7; if anyone was actually raped, how many babies were actually killed, etc. They tacitly acknowledged that it was indefensible,"
The miquetoast Palestine-sympathetic crowd, maybe.
But the actual pro-Hamas crowd never acknowledged anything of the sort. They vacillated between blaming the "Hannibal directive" for all civilian deaths vs outright cheering the "resistance".
> "But the actual pro-Hamas crowd never acknowledged anything of the sort. They vacillated between blaming the "Hannibal directive" for all civilian deaths..."
Is there literally any truth to this, or is wikipedia lying to me again? I can understand the IDF preferring dead soldiers over tortured ones, but civilian reservists seem like a grey area at best.
There are two verified instances of Israeli civilians killed in cross-fire.
1. When a few dozen Hamas fighters took around 15 hostages and barricaded in a house in Kibbutz Beiri. They fired on the IDF from the windows and a tank returned fire and some hostages were killed.
2. When a car carrying hostages was shot on its way into Gaza.
There are no truthful reports of deliberate attempts to kill hostages. There's footage from helicopters where the pilots are reluctant to shoot at Hamas convoys out of fear of killing potential Israelis.
There are hundreds of hours of footage of Hamas massacring civilians.
Yeah there were a lot of crazies, but many people I followed who were never sympathetic to Israel and have by now descended into full blown antisemitism were kind of perturbed by the event because they knew what the consequences would be. Their damage control was basically "people were only murdered, raped or beheaded!!!"
A lot of pontificating about how focusing on sexual violence was playing into stereotypes of dark savages to avoid addressing the fact that over a thousand randos were butchered in cold-blood.
It wasn’t just things Israel did, it was also the media’s briefly-suppressed hatred of Israel, as most clearly seen in the Al Shifa (edit: Al Ahli) Hospital incident.
The claim the media gleefully spread around was that Israel had killed 500 people in or near a hospital. The truth when the dust cleared is that a Palestinian rocket had killed fewer than 50 people, maybe far fewer.
But it was obvious from the beginning that there were holes in the story, including because Al Jazeera happened to randomly *see the rocket impact* in their coverage; they pulled it quickly but not quickly enough. The media might have, I don’t know, done the bare minimum of fact checking before repeating the claim. But they didn’t, and it was an inflection point.
It’s clear that the IDF needs to clean house. It’s at least as clear that the media does, too. Of the two, personally, I think there’s at least a chance the IDF will.
The Al Shifa hospital thing was a massive PR win for Israel which gave it cover to continue causing massive civilian casualties for an extra month at least. Hasbarists are so confused and disorganised that they don't even know when they are winning.
The people who feed the world the death statistics from Gaza got caught in a massive lie 3 weeks into the war, and in the light of morning when the lie was exposed there was no reflection or accountability, so they kept doing it. The supposed aid massacres, which you cite the Wikipedia article for (lol) were hugely damaging for Israel despite there being no actual evidence that they happened other than statements from the guys who brought you the al-Ahly hospital massacre that wasn't.
There was loads of reflection and accountability! For the next 12 months, it was impossible for any mainstream new organisation to quote statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health without adding 'Hamas run', allowing Israel supporters to promote a narrative that real casualties were lower when they were (and are) almost certainly higher. This was a major tactical victory in the PR war which allowed Israel more leeway which it then used to do a bunch of stupid shit. Stop gaslighting yourself!
I dunno. I'm seeing lots of links/references to an alleged Israeli air strike on fleeing civilians linking to mainstream news outlets who never took down their articles.
The actual footage of this event doesn't show any planes overhead (or the sound they would make), and for some reason the retired Irish army colonel consulted to inspect the footage concluded a precision-guided IDF missile must have been responsible, rather than any of the thousands of imprecisely-guided rockets that Hamas has manufactured and routinely kill their own citizens.
Wikipedia itself has apparently decided that 'genocide' is a settled question, though I guess you can debate whether it's a mainstream source.
Bagel and have been referring to the wrong incident, He meant the al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing, and I didn't bother to check it up. Hard to keep track of all these hospital bombings. [And by the way, while in the short term Israel's story was widely accepted, it seems that subsequent evidence suggests it was an Israeli munition after all].
And what sort of missile was it, exactly? If Hamas is so confident that it was an Israeli munition, which would be a massive PR win for them, why did their explosive unit sweep up all the fragments and refuse to show anyone? There is literally no evidence Israel did it … but the headlines claiming Israel did it were significantly more prominent than any retractions.
Finally, if you’re so concerned with the sanctity of hospitals in wartime, you should be pressuring Hamas to not use them as bunkers. Otherwise someone might think you just want Hamas to have an uninterruptible way to kill Jews.
> "it seems that subsequent evidence suggests it was an Israeli missile after all"
Do you have a link to this? I'm scratching my head as to why Israel would deliberately target a hospital, unless some particularly inept IDF bazooka unit was passing by.
The meaningful change in their behaviour was that from that point onward they added 'Hamas controlled' every time they cited statistics from the Gaza MoH. This creates an impression that the statistics are unreliable which gave the IDF or leeway than it other wise would have. That's what a tactical victory in a PR war looks like if you even know what game you are playing.
But I already said that, so I don't know why I bother.
While I mostly agree with this, there are real constraints that the army operates under. A big one is the simple fact that the soldiers do not want to die, and have significant uncertainty around who is a combatant. Even much better run armies like the US and UK have many egregious war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the shock and awe air strikes there were a bunch of screw ups and tons of civilian death. This is relevant not because that makes it ok, but because it raises the question of whether it’s really possible to train kids to kill and have a sufficiently robust supervisory system to have them all color within the lines all the time.
Sure, so I think you should adjust your tactics to comport with the ability to control your troops. Is there a US war crime in Iraq as bad as the ambulance massacre?
Shock and Awe doesn't seem a relevant comparison, because in the equivalent stage of the Gaza war Israel was getting a pass.
I'm skeptical that if America had universal conscription and genocidal neighbors that wanted to kill us, rather than a professional army that vetted people, that we would do a better job than Israel. In fact I think we would do a worse job if anything. America has plenty of dumb rightoids that would commit a lot of war crimes. Obviously that isn't great either, and it doesn't mean we don't criticize Israel for the paramedics massacre.
I do think it's worth emphasizing that Israel isn't some kind of uniquely evil country, and has to kill a bunch of third-worlders in wars because of its circumstances. The Gaza War was a war of necessity. Iraq and Afghanistan? That's the US killing a bunch of third-worlders in a stupid and pointless war.
I agree they should do that. I guess I’m saying it’s not uncommon for these things to happen, likely because of organizational constraints in any army (internal policing inevitably results in prosecuting gray areas, and making the force less effective). I know in any organization, adding compliance requirements adds cost and lowers effectiveness at the margins. Well designed compliance rules and departments can mitigate that. My overall impression is that really bad war crimes are inevitable and it takes a lot of effort and cost to effectively reduce and penalize them. The US does an OK job of this. Israel seems to do a mediocre job of it, and in this war there seem to have been many pockets of doing a poor job. But I think there were real resource and morale constraints.
By the way, the Korean War was orders of magnitude worse than Gaza on just about every dimension. Technically after genocide convention, but perhaps gets grandfathered in to the WW2 way of waging war.
I think it's kind of difficult to evaluate Israeli actions in Gaza because there isn't much to compare it to. When developed countries fight wars nowadays, they are usually under very different circumstances. The Gaza War was FAR more justified than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's not even close.
Invading Afghanistan wasn't especially hard to justify, it was the confused policies regarding reconstruction that weren't.
(Post-war Iraq, to be fair, has eventually become a relatively stable US-allied democracy, although the road to that endpoint could have been a lot smoother and the rationale for going in was pretty thin. It just isn't a *liberal* democracy.)
I agree with your general point that any substantially large population is going to commit crimes at some non-zero frequency, and if the population in question is an army at war then you will get non-zero war crimes. However, one can compare the relatively surgical blitzkrieg tactics Israel employed in dealing with Syria, Iran and Hezbollah recently with the protracted attrition and apparently confused objectives of the war in Gaza, and the contrast becomes conspicuous.
I’m not sure what the point is here. Obviously if Israel could have defanged Hamas as effectively as it did Hizbolla it would have happily done so. The reason it didn’t is because of intelligence resources going to the larger threat (Hizbolla) and because the motivations, willingness to bear cost, and relationships to the population are different for Hamas and Hizbolla. A ground war in Lebanon, if the civilians did not leave, and in which Hizbolla refused to give up, and had hostages, would have played out very similarly to Gaza.
I also think in terms of cultural attitudes it's very hard to thread the needle of not having too many self-hating leftists who don't want to win the war and not having too many rightoids who commit war crimes. There are only so many small-l liberal elite human capital people on the center-right (fortunately likely next PM Naftali Bennett is such a person). I think that Yehuda Vach, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir are absolutely horrible people. But I also think that a center-left government, which I'd certainly prefer in peacetime, would have gotten a far worse hostage deal.
George W. Bush condemned this and four Marines were charged with murder (more than Israel has done about any post-October-7 war crimes, as far as I know), but nobody spent any time in prison over it:
Of course it's super egregious that US politicians got huge numbers of Iraqis and US soldiers killed for no good reasons, but that's a separate issue-there is a real distinction between jus ad bellum (being justified in going to war) and jus in bello (fighting a war justly).
the attempt to "starve Hamas" by withholding aid from Gaza. After spending months having the hasbarists and sympathetic pro-Israel people express disgust at accusations that Israel would use "weaponize hunger" or use "access to food as a weapon" the government of Israel decided it would do just that and then acted bewildered when they started getting accused of famine. for a lot of people who were not anti-israel before this made the concept of genocide much more plausible
the failed attempt to arrest the prison guards for sodomizing a prisoner which led to RW nut jobs storming the prisons to free them, the prison guards becoming minor celebrities who escaped any punishment, and ben gvir - the guy in charge of the prisons crowing about how much they deserved it - and helped cement the idea that israel regularly and systematically rapes the Palestinians it imprisons
> The next big cope is that Israel’s isolation is temporary because the far Right are going to take over in Europe and only bugmen and blue-haired pansexuals have a problem with killing 65,000 people.
I think you're right here. The far right in some form or other probably will have a big influence in Europe, in control of many countries, but they are more likely to have pro-European than pro-Israel policies. (The exception here in Britain which because of its history with the EU has a large anti-European tinge to its politics and if Farage wins the next election (he probably will) he is very unlikely to rejoin the EU or any new European institutions that may be set up.)
Certainly the rise of the Right will dampen sentimental pro-Palestinian politics, but the smart move for the Right if they want to repatriate substantial numbers of Muslims is to mollify the Muslim world where they can, including taking a tough line with Israel, so I think these will basically balance each other out.
Good piece. I was at UCLA, and while there were and are way more pro-October-7 scumbags there than you'd find at most other places in America, even there, a lot of people who generally did not like Israel had sympathy for Israel for some time after October 7. I remember a left-wing student council member going to a rally the Jewish community organized to honor October 7 victims, and having her staff go as well. Other left-wing activists were condemning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and saying that Americans who supported October 7 were outrageous and hypocritical because by their own standards, they deserved to be killed because the American government has done some awful things. I agree with the Jewish, conservative and centrist groups that have pointed out that many universities have messed-up political cultures and something should be done about this (I also agree with your analysis that the problem here is mainly far-left callousness and this is different from but no better than antisemitism), but even in the spaces that were and are least sympathetic to Israel, lots of people looked at what Hamas did on October 7 and their response was 'what the hell, that was really awful'. In normie spaces, outrage and sorrow about October 7 was pretty much universal and unambiguous.
In terms of why there's been so much backlash against Israel, I agree that the main problems Israel can control are Israeli war crimes and cartoon-villainy statements by people in the Israeli government, but I think another factor is how anyone who criticizes the war crimes and cartoon-villainy statements gets bombarded with accusations that they're an antisemite and pro-Hamas and generally awful. People like Piers Morgan who've spent lots of time condemning Hamas and supporting Israel's right to defend itself still face some of this when they refuse to either ignore or praise the aforementioned war crimes. Jose Andres, who provided humanitarian aid to displaced Israelis after October 7, also get harshly denounced, accused of antisemitism and compared to Nazis for being outraged that Israel killed his staff. Even people who don't really have a problem with Israel but don't want the US to be involved may face this, especially if they're elected or appointed officials. This makes the issue higher-salience and more polarized, and makes people see Israel's government and its supporters as dishonest and/or delusional, censorious and hysterical. For instance, the conspiracy theories that the Mossad murdered Charlie Kirk are ridiculous (and a good example of how many far-right people can't handle any horrifying event without blaming the Jews, like you've discussed), but it apparently is true that before he died Kirk got really frustrated with pro-Israel people who couldn't accept him even engaging with prominent right-wingers opposed to the US-Israel alliance.
Charlie Kirk had a difficult job figuring out what to do with genuinely poisonous cranks like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Clearly his strategy hasn't worked out very well, though maybe no strategy would, but I don't think any donors, and certainly not Jewish donors, are obliged to pay for him pussyfooting about with them.
With that said, it's clear they they tend to bundle up the issue of having a firewall against literal blood libels with uncritical support for Israel, and this actually helps Tucker Carlson maintain plausible deniability about what he is doing. The Far Left are actually basically 100% correct that committed Zionists don't give a shit about anti-semitism in the diaspora and purely use it as leverage to gain even very short term benefits for Israel.
Yeah, to be fair to Jewish conservatives and their allies, they encounter a lot of straight-up antisemitism (in 2016 Ben Shapiro talked about how the worst antisemitism he'd faced up to that point came from right-wingers who responded to his criticism of Trump by saying he should be put in a gas chamber), and I can't blame them for trying to shove the antisemites out of the mainstream of the conservative movement and into the marginality they richly deserve. I don't think they'll succeed but I respect them for trying. Now that I'm thinking about it more, I agree with you that Charlie Kirk getting pushback and funding cuts from Jewish donors was not a great example of the (very real and significant) phenomenon of false accusations of antisemitism and other unhinged reactions to criticism of Israel.
"Committed Zionists don't give a shit about anti-semitism in the diaspora and purely use it as leverage to gain even very short term benefits for Israel." This is 100% true, although with the grassroots Zionists I know it's more that they don't really realize that the distinction between literal blood libels and criticism of Israel exists. There are a lot of Zionists who genuinely believe that people saying stuff like "Israel's needlessly killing lots of Palestinian kids due to vengefulness and disregard for Palestinian life and that's awful and they need to cut it out" is indistinguishable from people saying Jews kill Christian kids to put their blood in Matzah. (A lot of times people assume hardcore Zionists must be lying because some stuff they say is so outrageous, but while there is a lot of deliberate lying by Zionists, especially those in positions of power, at least on the grassroots level a lot of Zionists fully believe everything they're saying-I know because I've heard what they say when they're talking amongst themselves and have no reason to lie, and because I used to be one of them.) But I'm sure there are also cynical people who know that a lot of criticism of Israel is not antisemitism but deliberately conflate the two to advance Israel's interests, even though they know that by doing this they're undermining the fight against antisemitism. There's definitely a history of Zionists seeing antisemitism as useful, both because some antisemites historically liked the idea of getting Jews out of Europe and into Palestine (I dunno if this is a big thing nowadays, today many Israel-haters are not antisemites but most antisemites do hate Israel), and because if Zionists can't offer you something beautiful and inspiring and worth dedicating your life to for its own sake (I think they theoretically could do this, but in practice most of them don't) they can gain your support by saying they're the only ones who will protect from being oppressed and slaughtered by antisemites.
“… by avatar of centrism so centrist that his centrism transcends mere policies and is pure essence, Matthew Yglesias”
You know literally nothing of American politics - and apparently very little about Substack - if you call Matthew Yglesias a “centrist”, let alone the ultimate one.
Yglesias is a progressive. You wanna call him center-left, that’s fine. He’s actually at the far edge of center-left.
You wanna call him the center of the Democrat Party, that’s fine would be arguable, although I grants that the left is so whack now that he is indeed to the right of the center of gravity of the Dem party.
But he is definitively not “centrist” by any reasonable definition of that term.
Yep, imagery matters to people with limited attention span. Still, in Europe this summer I was surprised by over the top reactions by Spaniards against Israel.
I don’t mean to disagree with you, but I believe you can strengthen the opposing view. You could argue that Israel generally faces high levels of hostility around the world, and that the events of October 7th were just a blip in that context. Even if Israel had done nothing, over time, things would likely return to the way they were. i would be interested to see your analysis of peace deal, will it stand or crumble, will hamas regain power in gaza.
I mean it's true that Israel messed up lots and committed lots of war crimes and this hurt international sympathy. I do think it was inevitable that the public opinion was going to turn hostile to Israel given the inevitable Palestinian civilian deaths, third-worldism, and just straight up Jew-hate. But I do agree that Israel made lots of mistakes that worsened the situation. The paramedic massacre is really bad. Yehuda Vach is known to say things like any military-aged male who ignores evacuation orders is a combatant.
The "cope" that is actually correct is that there's now a peace deal and the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide. With the war ending, things will get better. This idiot government gets voted out in 2026 too. The other thing is that Palestinoids are so dumb that they will do really dumb things and lose Western public sympathy again and again. All Israel has to do is wait and not fight any big wars and it will be fine.
You may be right that the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide, but they're almost certainly not going to rule that Israel didn't commit genocide.
And I think you're counting out "this idiot government" way too soon.
Permanent damage has been done to Israel's reputation.
https://manifold.markets/Shump/will-the-icj-determine-that-israel
I agree you may be right that the ICJ won't rule that Israel committed genocide but it's not going to exonerate them either.
They'll likely find some violation of international law, but I think that falsely alleging genocide is pretty costly.
>Falsely alleging genocide is pretty costly.
It is? To who?
The people alleging genocide. Big reputational cost.
Excellent.
I remember post-October 7 quite clearly - I have to admit, I was a bit nervous about the response.
I got nothing but support from non-Jewish friends and they weren't all from NYC (NYers don't count).
I even saw a black homeless guy on the street telling an Orthodox Jew, coherently, about his sympathy for "the Jews."
I mention this because the activists say that the support was only official and not grass roots.
It was both.
The city of San Francisco, generally considered one of the most progressive, liberal bastions in the US, lit up City Hall in blue and white in support of Israel for several days after Oct 7 and there was essentially zero negative public fuss about it.
I was in Philly some time in 2024.
The National Museum of American Jewish History is there, in a super-prominent place - right in the common area with the Liberty Bell Center, the Visitor's center, etc.
You can see the museum from an open unimpeded vantage point. They had a massive Israeli flag up the day I was there, and this was right after some big gathering had taken place in the common area.
I was on a guided walk and I asked the leader if that had caused any issues & he looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.
No, there were no problems with a giant Israeli flag in the middle of Philadelphia's historic tourist district. But... I wonder if it would be different now.
It is:
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/weitzman-national-museum-of-american-jewish-history-philadelphia-vandalism-spraypaint/4259490/
Thanks Anonymous. What does one incident prove?
https://6abc.com/post/suspect-weitzman-national-museum-american-jewish-history-vandalism-philadelphia-turns-himself-police/17778170/
It shows things are different.
It shows one sicko did something.
Diana seems to have blocked me, but I'm glad to hear it
You know it's funny, I think Zionism isn't an airtight ideology and it certainly has some issues, but if this blog is the best its critics can do, it really speaks volumes. In this particular article I find it funny that the author is guilty of the same thing he accuses "Zios" (a term invented by David Duke) of doing: i.e. cherry-picking examples to suit his thesis.
For example, hundreds of people celebrating October 7th around the world isn't representative of anything, but a single comment by a Portuguese politician is enough to declare the entire narrative a "myth." From what I could tell, the vast majority of politicians, including the President of the United States Joe Biden, went with the "both sides" and "all lives matter" approach. Not exactly a wave of sympathy for the Israelis.
A couple of other points of clarification: that "someone" at the DSA who was talking about "hipsters" was Ahmed Husain, then a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee. Not exactly some random nobody who wandered in off the street, and even if he were his comments got huge cheers, laughs, and applause.
Here are some more progressives who expressly celebrated October 7th, and didn't just express sadness for the Palestinians who died:
* Students for Justice in Palestine: "The Palestinian resistance stormed the border fence…Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity…".
* Ali Abunimah, head of the website Electronic Intifada: "Palestinians in Palestine and around the world are elated that their resistance broke out of the ghetto and humiliated the enemy oppressor."
* 170 faculty at Columbia University: "[it was] a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years"
* Joseph Massad, prominent pro-Palestinian academic at Columbia: "an innovative Palestinian resistance...the sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers."
* The UK Socialist Workers Party: "The Palestinians have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day. Victory to the Resistance."
* The director of CAIR: “[I am] happy to see Palestinians break out of Gaza on Oct. 7" and that "Palestinians in Gaza “have the right to self-defense.”
* A pro-Palestinian student group at the University of Michigan: "Palestinians in Gaza are fighting back", "Palestinians have broken free of their cage," and that, "This is the response of a people pushed beyond endurace."
* “It wasn’t Hamas that resisted; it was the Palestinian people who resisted. You can’t separate Hamas from the Palestinians. Hamas is the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are Hamas.” - MK Zoabi
* Noura Erekat: “We, as advocates and as scholars, have been insisting that you cannot defeat Hamas militarily, that it is part of the national and political fabric of Palestinians, and that they must be engaged with diplomatically.”
* Palestine Solidarity Activist: "Most of us understand the heroism behind Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the resistance that has thrived in Palestine for over a century."
* Founder of CAIR at an AMP event: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7…And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,”
* Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament: "It’s not just Hamas that commissioned the October 7 attack, it’s all components of Palestinian society"
* WOL: "We will not condemn October 7th. We will not condemn our people’s resistance forces."
I'll stop there for the sake of brevity, but one last thing: the tearing down of the hostage posters being due to "desperation" is pure cope. They drew swastikas on Kfir Bibas' forehead out of desperation too? The only desperation I can see is from the anti-Zionists and non-Zionists of the world now that they're realizing Israel has won the war yet again.
Woah, you're telling me that the Socialist Workers Party, Electronic Intifada AND Noura Erekat responded to October 7th by criticising Israel? This totally disproves my point.
Joe Biden responded by giving Israel 13 billion dollars.
Thanks for proving my point.
Which statement(s) made by Biden in the first days after Oct. 7 are you thinking of?
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/18/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-october-7th-terrorist-attacks-and-the-resilience-of-the-state-of-israel-and-its-people-tel-aviv-israel/
I agree that it is frustrating when Zionists act as if the Keir Starmers of the world were marching for Palestine on October 8, but I think you underestimate the extent to which hasbarists are kinda right about the obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred (even if it is not an endlessly mutating "antisemitism," but a mongrel mix of Islamism, right wing conspiracy bullshit, and Soviet-era propaganda). Like I don't think if other countries approached a war against an enemy like Hamas the way Israel did they'd be getting hauled in front of the ICJ. Perhaps this is just reality, but I think it is fair to complain about such a reality.
The ICJ isn't made up of Islamo-gauchists. The real difference I suppose, is that in the case of median generic country, there wouldn't be another country like South Africa which saw a way to boost its cred by brining the case. But if a country did bring a case, I'm pretty sure the ICJ would hear it.
So you think if, say, Egypt prosecuted a war against Hamas in a similar way it'd be treated the same as Israel has been treated by the international community?
In some ways it would have been treated more harshly (it certainly wouldn't have been given anything like the amount of emergency aid Israel received), and in some ways more leniently in terms of scrutiny of specific actions. How leniently would depend to a large extent on how it managed its relations with Turkey and Qatar who control a lot of media perception.
" obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred "
It is. I just didn't see a lot of it after October 7, except from the usual quarters. I observed a pro-Hamas demo in mid-October in Manhattan - the one that "Maskil' refers to in the poast -- it was tiny, confined to a small area in the west 40s, and 99% Muslim immigrants & progeny. The photos are deceiving.
Also, if I weren't a total weirdo who spends too much time online, I would not have known about Columbia or the demos at various parts of NYC. Life went on as normal. This was not Vietnam, when demonstrations shut down the city.
Every Israeli war has a deadline that is measured not in time but in bad PR. The goal for the government is to push off that deadline as much as possible by acting affirmatively to show how much they're trying not to kill civilians and do war crimes. Unfortunately, this requires not having ministers of the government not bragging about how much they love war crimes, and usually a genuine effort to avoid doing war crimes. Ah well
Surprised you didn't mention Hind Rajab getting blown up by a tank. That was a pretty bad one and I think where public opinion really started shifting. I know Red Crescent is a sus org, but hearing a recording of the girl crying for help had a lot of people start to question what Israel's game plan was.
Before that, the pro-Hamas crowd mostly busied themselves with nitpicking Oct. 7; if anyone was actually raped, how many babies were actually killed, etc. They tacitly acknowledged that it was indefensible, but just not nearly as bad as the white supremacist, zionist, imperialist media was making it out to be (and also "b-but whabout nakba?!?"). After everyone heard the recording of the girl, that's when I saw them go full bore on zionazi rhetoric.
Then with every accumulating mishap and fuck-up, normies followed. A few months ago, I saw a wholesome animal shelter page in Australia post a pro-Pally textwall. This is someone who's largely apolitical, maybe a little skeptical of immigration, and was probably shocked by Oct. 7, and here she's now posting about Tantura and the conspiracy against the Palestinian people.
"The pro-Hamas crowd mostly busied themselves with nitpicking Oct. 7; if anyone was actually raped, how many babies were actually killed, etc. They tacitly acknowledged that it was indefensible,"
The miquetoast Palestine-sympathetic crowd, maybe.
But the actual pro-Hamas crowd never acknowledged anything of the sort. They vacillated between blaming the "Hannibal directive" for all civilian deaths vs outright cheering the "resistance".
> "But the actual pro-Hamas crowd never acknowledged anything of the sort. They vacillated between blaming the "Hannibal directive" for all civilian deaths..."
Is there literally any truth to this, or is wikipedia lying to me again? I can understand the IDF preferring dead soldiers over tortured ones, but civilian reservists seem like a grey area at best.
There are two verified instances of Israeli civilians killed in cross-fire.
1. When a few dozen Hamas fighters took around 15 hostages and barricaded in a house in Kibbutz Beiri. They fired on the IDF from the windows and a tank returned fire and some hostages were killed.
2. When a car carrying hostages was shot on its way into Gaza.
There are no truthful reports of deliberate attempts to kill hostages. There's footage from helicopters where the pilots are reluctant to shoot at Hamas convoys out of fear of killing potential Israelis.
There are hundreds of hours of footage of Hamas massacring civilians.
Yeah there were a lot of crazies, but many people I followed who were never sympathetic to Israel and have by now descended into full blown antisemitism were kind of perturbed by the event because they knew what the consequences would be. Their damage control was basically "people were only murdered, raped or beheaded!!!"
A lot of pontificating about how focusing on sexual violence was playing into stereotypes of dark savages to avoid addressing the fact that over a thousand randos were butchered in cold-blood.
It wasn’t just things Israel did, it was also the media’s briefly-suppressed hatred of Israel, as most clearly seen in the Al Shifa (edit: Al Ahli) Hospital incident.
The claim the media gleefully spread around was that Israel had killed 500 people in or near a hospital. The truth when the dust cleared is that a Palestinian rocket had killed fewer than 50 people, maybe far fewer.
But it was obvious from the beginning that there were holes in the story, including because Al Jazeera happened to randomly *see the rocket impact* in their coverage; they pulled it quickly but not quickly enough. The media might have, I don’t know, done the bare minimum of fact checking before repeating the claim. But they didn’t, and it was an inflection point.
It’s clear that the IDF needs to clean house. It’s at least as clear that the media does, too. Of the two, personally, I think there’s at least a chance the IDF will.
The Al Shifa hospital thing was a massive PR win for Israel which gave it cover to continue causing massive civilian casualties for an extra month at least. Hasbarists are so confused and disorganised that they don't even know when they are winning.
The people who feed the world the death statistics from Gaza got caught in a massive lie 3 weeks into the war, and in the light of morning when the lie was exposed there was no reflection or accountability, so they kept doing it. The supposed aid massacres, which you cite the Wikipedia article for (lol) were hugely damaging for Israel despite there being no actual evidence that they happened other than statements from the guys who brought you the al-Ahly hospital massacre that wasn't.
There was loads of reflection and accountability! For the next 12 months, it was impossible for any mainstream new organisation to quote statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health without adding 'Hamas run', allowing Israel supporters to promote a narrative that real casualties were lower when they were (and are) almost certainly higher. This was a major tactical victory in the PR war which allowed Israel more leeway which it then used to do a bunch of stupid shit. Stop gaslighting yourself!
I dunno. I'm seeing lots of links/references to an alleged Israeli air strike on fleeing civilians linking to mainstream news outlets who never took down their articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_Palestinians_evacuating_Gaza_City
https://www.ft.com/content/95c5fcf1-c756-415f-85b8-1e4bbff24736?sharetype=blocked
The actual footage of this event doesn't show any planes overhead (or the sound they would make), and for some reason the retired Irish army colonel consulted to inspect the footage concluded a precision-guided IDF missile must have been responsible, rather than any of the thousands of imprecisely-guided rockets that Hamas has manufactured and routinely kill their own citizens.
Wikipedia itself has apparently decided that 'genocide' is a settled question, though I guess you can debate whether it's a mainstream source.
Bagel and have been referring to the wrong incident, He meant the al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing, and I didn't bother to check it up. Hard to keep track of all these hospital bombings. [And by the way, while in the short term Israel's story was widely accepted, it seems that subsequent evidence suggests it was an Israeli munition after all].
I did mean Al Ahli, that is correct.
And what sort of missile was it, exactly? If Hamas is so confident that it was an Israeli munition, which would be a massive PR win for them, why did their explosive unit sweep up all the fragments and refuse to show anyone? There is literally no evidence Israel did it … but the headlines claiming Israel did it were significantly more prominent than any retractions.
Finally, if you’re so concerned with the sanctity of hospitals in wartime, you should be pressuring Hamas to not use them as bunkers. Otherwise someone might think you just want Hamas to have an uninterruptible way to kill Jews.
> "it seems that subsequent evidence suggests it was an Israeli missile after all"
Do you have a link to this? I'm scratching my head as to why Israel would deliberately target a hospital, unless some particularly inept IDF bazooka unit was passing by.
Accountability? So who got fired?
Or did newspapers literally just add a tiny bit of boilerplate and move on without meaningfully changing their behavior?
The meaningful change in their behaviour was that from that point onward they added 'Hamas controlled' every time they cited statistics from the Gaza MoH. This creates an impression that the statistics are unreliable which gave the IDF or leeway than it other wise would have. That's what a tactical victory in a PR war looks like if you even know what game you are playing.
But I already said that, so I don't know why I bother.
It was probably better than nothing, and I’m glad they did it.
But they also kept credulously publishing Hamas’s lies. They were no more cautious the next month, or the month after that.
Which doesn’t feel like accountability or victory, to me. Why does it feel that way to you?
While I mostly agree with this, there are real constraints that the army operates under. A big one is the simple fact that the soldiers do not want to die, and have significant uncertainty around who is a combatant. Even much better run armies like the US and UK have many egregious war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the shock and awe air strikes there were a bunch of screw ups and tons of civilian death. This is relevant not because that makes it ok, but because it raises the question of whether it’s really possible to train kids to kill and have a sufficiently robust supervisory system to have them all color within the lines all the time.
Sure, so I think you should adjust your tactics to comport with the ability to control your troops. Is there a US war crime in Iraq as bad as the ambulance massacre?
Shock and Awe doesn't seem a relevant comparison, because in the equivalent stage of the Gaza war Israel was getting a pass.
Not in Iraq, but the US bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, investigated itself and found it did nothing wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike
Fair. I think that was substantially Obama-halo effect. I recall more principled lefties complaining about this.
I'm skeptical that if America had universal conscription and genocidal neighbors that wanted to kill us, rather than a professional army that vetted people, that we would do a better job than Israel. In fact I think we would do a worse job if anything. America has plenty of dumb rightoids that would commit a lot of war crimes. Obviously that isn't great either, and it doesn't mean we don't criticize Israel for the paramedics massacre.
Probably, but you don't and won't. You might as well say Israel wouldn't commit any war crimes if it was on the moon.
When is Beresheet 2 going to be launched?
I do think it's worth emphasizing that Israel isn't some kind of uniquely evil country, and has to kill a bunch of third-worlders in wars because of its circumstances. The Gaza War was a war of necessity. Iraq and Afghanistan? That's the US killing a bunch of third-worlders in a stupid and pointless war.
I agree they should do that. I guess I’m saying it’s not uncommon for these things to happen, likely because of organizational constraints in any army (internal policing inevitably results in prosecuting gray areas, and making the force less effective). I know in any organization, adding compliance requirements adds cost and lowers effectiveness at the margins. Well designed compliance rules and departments can mitigate that. My overall impression is that really bad war crimes are inevitable and it takes a lot of effort and cost to effectively reduce and penalize them. The US does an OK job of this. Israel seems to do a mediocre job of it, and in this war there seem to have been many pockets of doing a poor job. But I think there were real resource and morale constraints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaqi_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massacre
This is a good Gemini summary of Iraq war, though as always needs to be double checked:
https://g.co/gemini/share/2cc0152821fe
By the way, the Korean War was orders of magnitude worse than Gaza on just about every dimension. Technically after genocide convention, but perhaps gets grandfathered in to the WW2 way of waging war.
Yeah, Korea was off the chain. I agree, it was kind of winding down from WW2.
Thanks for links.
I think it's kind of difficult to evaluate Israeli actions in Gaza because there isn't much to compare it to. When developed countries fight wars nowadays, they are usually under very different circumstances. The Gaza War was FAR more justified than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's not even close.
Invading Afghanistan wasn't especially hard to justify, it was the confused policies regarding reconstruction that weren't.
(Post-war Iraq, to be fair, has eventually become a relatively stable US-allied democracy, although the road to that endpoint could have been a lot smoother and the rationale for going in was pretty thin. It just isn't a *liberal* democracy.)
I agree with your general point that any substantially large population is going to commit crimes at some non-zero frequency, and if the population in question is an army at war then you will get non-zero war crimes. However, one can compare the relatively surgical blitzkrieg tactics Israel employed in dealing with Syria, Iran and Hezbollah recently with the protracted attrition and apparently confused objectives of the war in Gaza, and the contrast becomes conspicuous.
Gaza was one of the most hellish battlefields with the tunnels, and they held Israeli hostages. They had to go in and reoccupy the area for years.
I’m not sure what the point is here. Obviously if Israel could have defanged Hamas as effectively as it did Hizbolla it would have happily done so. The reason it didn’t is because of intelligence resources going to the larger threat (Hizbolla) and because the motivations, willingness to bear cost, and relationships to the population are different for Hamas and Hizbolla. A ground war in Lebanon, if the civilians did not leave, and in which Hizbolla refused to give up, and had hostages, would have played out very similarly to Gaza.
Totally agree. There are lots of reasons we should expect it to be worse:
- higher military necessity than anything US has fought since war of 1812
- Hamas tactics (uniforms, use of mosques and hospitals)
- density
- no evacuation of civilians out of Gaza
- reservist army
I also think in terms of cultural attitudes it's very hard to thread the needle of not having too many self-hating leftists who don't want to win the war and not having too many rightoids who commit war crimes. There are only so many small-l liberal elite human capital people on the center-right (fortunately likely next PM Naftali Bennett is such a person). I think that Yehuda Vach, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir are absolutely horrible people. But I also think that a center-left government, which I'd certainly prefer in peacetime, would have gotten a far worse hostage deal.
I think the US (post-Vietnam) does way fewer war crimes overall then post-October-7 Israel, but this seems comparable to the ambulance massacre: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-haditha-massacre-photos-that-the-military-didnt-want-the-world-to-see.
George W. Bush condemned this and four Marines were charged with murder (more than Israel has done about any post-October-7 war crimes, as far as I know), but nobody spent any time in prison over it:
https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/podcast-exposes-lack-accountability-haditha-massacre
Of course it's super egregious that US politicians got huge numbers of Iraqis and US soldiers killed for no good reasons, but that's a separate issue-there is a real distinction between jus ad bellum (being justified in going to war) and jus in bello (fighting a war justly).
This is interesting and relevant (don’t think it particularly helps my case): https://open.substack.com/pub/postkahanism/p/the-godfather-of-gaza?r=648b3&utm_medium=ios
Some other big own goals:
the attempt to "starve Hamas" by withholding aid from Gaza. After spending months having the hasbarists and sympathetic pro-Israel people express disgust at accusations that Israel would use "weaponize hunger" or use "access to food as a weapon" the government of Israel decided it would do just that and then acted bewildered when they started getting accused of famine. for a lot of people who were not anti-israel before this made the concept of genocide much more plausible
the failed attempt to arrest the prison guards for sodomizing a prisoner which led to RW nut jobs storming the prisons to free them, the prison guards becoming minor celebrities who escaped any punishment, and ben gvir - the guy in charge of the prisons crowing about how much they deserved it - and helped cement the idea that israel regularly and systematically rapes the Palestinians it imprisons
> The next big cope is that Israel’s isolation is temporary because the far Right are going to take over in Europe and only bugmen and blue-haired pansexuals have a problem with killing 65,000 people.
I think you're right here. The far right in some form or other probably will have a big influence in Europe, in control of many countries, but they are more likely to have pro-European than pro-Israel policies. (The exception here in Britain which because of its history with the EU has a large anti-European tinge to its politics and if Farage wins the next election (he probably will) he is very unlikely to rejoin the EU or any new European institutions that may be set up.)
Certainly the rise of the Right will dampen sentimental pro-Palestinian politics, but the smart move for the Right if they want to repatriate substantial numbers of Muslims is to mollify the Muslim world where they can, including taking a tough line with Israel, so I think these will basically balance each other out.
That's entirely possible.
Good piece. I was at UCLA, and while there were and are way more pro-October-7 scumbags there than you'd find at most other places in America, even there, a lot of people who generally did not like Israel had sympathy for Israel for some time after October 7. I remember a left-wing student council member going to a rally the Jewish community organized to honor October 7 victims, and having her staff go as well. Other left-wing activists were condemning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and saying that Americans who supported October 7 were outrageous and hypocritical because by their own standards, they deserved to be killed because the American government has done some awful things. I agree with the Jewish, conservative and centrist groups that have pointed out that many universities have messed-up political cultures and something should be done about this (I also agree with your analysis that the problem here is mainly far-left callousness and this is different from but no better than antisemitism), but even in the spaces that were and are least sympathetic to Israel, lots of people looked at what Hamas did on October 7 and their response was 'what the hell, that was really awful'. In normie spaces, outrage and sorrow about October 7 was pretty much universal and unambiguous.
In terms of why there's been so much backlash against Israel, I agree that the main problems Israel can control are Israeli war crimes and cartoon-villainy statements by people in the Israeli government, but I think another factor is how anyone who criticizes the war crimes and cartoon-villainy statements gets bombarded with accusations that they're an antisemite and pro-Hamas and generally awful. People like Piers Morgan who've spent lots of time condemning Hamas and supporting Israel's right to defend itself still face some of this when they refuse to either ignore or praise the aforementioned war crimes. Jose Andres, who provided humanitarian aid to displaced Israelis after October 7, also get harshly denounced, accused of antisemitism and compared to Nazis for being outraged that Israel killed his staff. Even people who don't really have a problem with Israel but don't want the US to be involved may face this, especially if they're elected or appointed officials. This makes the issue higher-salience and more polarized, and makes people see Israel's government and its supporters as dishonest and/or delusional, censorious and hysterical. For instance, the conspiracy theories that the Mossad murdered Charlie Kirk are ridiculous (and a good example of how many far-right people can't handle any horrifying event without blaming the Jews, like you've discussed), but it apparently is true that before he died Kirk got really frustrated with pro-Israel people who couldn't accept him even engaging with prominent right-wingers opposed to the US-Israel alliance.
Charlie Kirk had a difficult job figuring out what to do with genuinely poisonous cranks like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Clearly his strategy hasn't worked out very well, though maybe no strategy would, but I don't think any donors, and certainly not Jewish donors, are obliged to pay for him pussyfooting about with them.
With that said, it's clear they they tend to bundle up the issue of having a firewall against literal blood libels with uncritical support for Israel, and this actually helps Tucker Carlson maintain plausible deniability about what he is doing. The Far Left are actually basically 100% correct that committed Zionists don't give a shit about anti-semitism in the diaspora and purely use it as leverage to gain even very short term benefits for Israel.
Yeah, to be fair to Jewish conservatives and their allies, they encounter a lot of straight-up antisemitism (in 2016 Ben Shapiro talked about how the worst antisemitism he'd faced up to that point came from right-wingers who responded to his criticism of Trump by saying he should be put in a gas chamber), and I can't blame them for trying to shove the antisemites out of the mainstream of the conservative movement and into the marginality they richly deserve. I don't think they'll succeed but I respect them for trying. Now that I'm thinking about it more, I agree with you that Charlie Kirk getting pushback and funding cuts from Jewish donors was not a great example of the (very real and significant) phenomenon of false accusations of antisemitism and other unhinged reactions to criticism of Israel.
"Committed Zionists don't give a shit about anti-semitism in the diaspora and purely use it as leverage to gain even very short term benefits for Israel." This is 100% true, although with the grassroots Zionists I know it's more that they don't really realize that the distinction between literal blood libels and criticism of Israel exists. There are a lot of Zionists who genuinely believe that people saying stuff like "Israel's needlessly killing lots of Palestinian kids due to vengefulness and disregard for Palestinian life and that's awful and they need to cut it out" is indistinguishable from people saying Jews kill Christian kids to put their blood in Matzah. (A lot of times people assume hardcore Zionists must be lying because some stuff they say is so outrageous, but while there is a lot of deliberate lying by Zionists, especially those in positions of power, at least on the grassroots level a lot of Zionists fully believe everything they're saying-I know because I've heard what they say when they're talking amongst themselves and have no reason to lie, and because I used to be one of them.) But I'm sure there are also cynical people who know that a lot of criticism of Israel is not antisemitism but deliberately conflate the two to advance Israel's interests, even though they know that by doing this they're undermining the fight against antisemitism. There's definitely a history of Zionists seeing antisemitism as useful, both because some antisemites historically liked the idea of getting Jews out of Europe and into Palestine (I dunno if this is a big thing nowadays, today many Israel-haters are not antisemites but most antisemites do hate Israel), and because if Zionists can't offer you something beautiful and inspiring and worth dedicating your life to for its own sake (I think they theoretically could do this, but in practice most of them don't) they can gain your support by saying they're the only ones who will protect from being oppressed and slaughtered by antisemites.
Yes, most of the ground troops of hasbara are victims of their own delusions rather than malicious. Probably the delusion goes relatively far up.
“… by avatar of centrism so centrist that his centrism transcends mere policies and is pure essence, Matthew Yglesias”
You know literally nothing of American politics - and apparently very little about Substack - if you call Matthew Yglesias a “centrist”, let alone the ultimate one.
Yglesias is a progressive. You wanna call him center-left, that’s fine. He’s actually at the far edge of center-left.
You wanna call him the center of the Democrat Party, that’s fine would be arguable, although I grants that the left is so whack now that he is indeed to the right of the center of gravity of the Dem party.
But he is definitively not “centrist” by any reasonable definition of that term.
Yep, imagery matters to people with limited attention span. Still, in Europe this summer I was surprised by over the top reactions by Spaniards against Israel.
To quote one of the commenters from here, Spain after Franco basically became Antifa the country.
I don’t mean to disagree with you, but I believe you can strengthen the opposing view. You could argue that Israel generally faces high levels of hostility around the world, and that the events of October 7th were just a blip in that context. Even if Israel had done nothing, over time, things would likely return to the way they were. i would be interested to see your analysis of peace deal, will it stand or crumble, will hamas regain power in gaza.
Egypt 🥱
Let's fuss about Israel 🙄
I want through my archives, and on 22 October in Brussels there was already a big rally for Palestine.