The facts don’t matter anymore. People refuse to see the evidence in front of them when it doesn’t fit their narrative. They feel right about condemning Israel. It makes them feel like good human beings. It’s so easy to take a reductive stance and be comfortable with it when it’s socially acceptable to do so. It’s almost always socially acceptable to dislike Israel, no matter the decade and no matter what we’ve done lately.
We are not a perfect nation. But we are also not more imperfect than any other nation at war. Somehow, we still receive the lion’s share of global condemnation, no matter how much our people strive to do the right thing. The world doesn’t care about our doing the right thing. They want to blame us for this awful war we didn’t start, and tell us how ashamed we should feel about protecting our people from violence and murder.
I’ve been done engaging with people like this for a while. Their opinions are irrelevant. They feel like they’re doing something positive for the world by making judgment calls from safe houses, when they’ve never heard a single siren as missiles rain down over their heads. They’ve never run to find a bomb shelter while caught outside when the siren calls. The siren has never jarred them awake two or three times every night and twice in the day, over and over, as they attempt to catch an hour of genuine sleep and expect the next attack any moment.
They’ve never worried about their friends and family being stabbed or shot in the supermarket for being Jewish—the supermarket a few minutes away that we’ve shopped in, too. They’ve never lived in a war zone and they’ve never had anyone tell them to their faces that all their people should be wiped off the face of the earth, or watch in horror as their enemies celebrate the murder of Israelis with fireworks and gunshots and more attacks, more attacks, even more attacks.
Their opinion is completely irrelevant. They don’t have the knowledge to make any judgment calls about justice here. They don’t have the capacity to grasp the situation. They take in the opinions of trusted celebrities who genuinely believe they are acting morally by condemning Israel, who speak so much misinformation with every breath it’s sickening.
They summon up the appropriate level of righteousness, as though they’re taking action to make the world better, to speak up on a complex, horrible political nightmare decades in the making that will never hurt them or traumatize them. They don’t want to know that genuinely evil people exist, started this war, and don’t want peace. And they, who condemn us with such grave surety, aren’t the ones who could die if peace never comes.
They don’t want to know that our enemies would sacrifice every innocent child in their domain if it meant nations and activists across the world kept hating the Jews and kept condemning Israel. That’s complicated and it’s scary and it’s difficult to believe if you don’t want to see it. And who would want to see it?
What’s not difficult is making an opinion about the fact that dead children and starving people are a bad thing. Well, we all agree on that. We just don’t agree on the primary cause. And we do not agree on what it takes to stop those things permanently. We don’t agree because we do not see the same things. We are not forced to contend with the same threats. Some of us are not sheltered from hard truths. Some of us see the threat of our own existence. Some of us understand that leaders who lie shamelessly and intentionally sacrifice their children’s safety on the duplicitous altar of global PR just to keep Israel harmed and hated will refuse ceasefire after ceasefire, without end, until someone ends them. Some of us recognize they’ve refused the olive branch dozens of times since the war began. Some of us grasp the fact that war and innocent deaths and starvation help them achieve their lifelong goals, and that peace could never do that.
We understand our enemies are satisfied to see their own people starving and dying for years more. We know they shoot Gazans traveling to aid trucks, to discourage them from seeking free aid, since they’re meant to buy it from Hamas at insane prices. We know they target and murder workers of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the one organization that has succeeded in distributing millions of free meals without Hamas stealing it for their own benefit (usually). We know one of their negotiation demands to end the war is to stop the GHF from distributing in Gaza ever again, insisting it all go through the UN, which has allowed them to steal 90% of their trucks’ lifesaving contents, so they can control it and get rich off their people’s desperation.
We understand they refuse to return 20 live hostages and 30 dead bodies back to us in return for a ceasefire; that they would rather keep everyone trapped in this hellish war than give back people and bodies they stole as they slaughtered and raped their way across our lands. We understand this because they’ve said it explicitly, and they’ve lived that truth by refusing every permanent ceasefire offered.
And the world responds to these facts with: Israel, shame on you.
How could I ever see that as relevant, when I have seen and lived a life so different than the lies at the foundation of their judgements? Nothing can make them true: not if every world leader and every celebrity spoke them. It can only make them loud.
And surrounded by people who tell us we are wrong, we are deluded, that we are taken in by Israeli propaganda (we’re a nation of liars, you see)—somehow, surrounded by all this vitriol and misinformed judgements in the guise of speaking up for justice; in the midst of endless calls for us to abandon the hostages in their darkest days and give up the war so the world might feel better about themselves; as they ignore all the other wars and truly genocidal attacks in all the other countries; as they insist we trust in a peace process with a bad faith enemy, refusing to acknowledge how it will expose our necks for the next slaughter, and the next, as our enemies promised us repeatedly, a torrent of slaughtering and terror, until October 7 is like a single heartbeat in a fatal heart attack—somehow, we live our lives and we breathe each day.
And that is enough of an offense to keep our enemies angry and active. So no: if you are okay agreeing with those enemies—and you’re never at risk of physical harm or death as a result of the world deciding you are the villain it’s been waiting for—then your opinion on this subject will never truly matter. You are not part of this equation. You contribute nothing. You cannot. Just keep breathing on your own, where no one is offended by it. Just keep living your lives. I’m sure they are good enough lives. So are ours. We will keep living even if the world thinks we should not. Am Yisrael Chai. Od Avinu Chai. Od lol avdo tikvatenu.
