Jonathan S. Tobin
The younger generation’s opposition to a “genocidal” Jewish state has become one of the organizing principles of U.S. politics. But these toxic beliefs have nothing to do with the actual place.
People surf on a sand dune in the Western Negev Desert in southern Israel, April 22, 2022. Photo by Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90.
For those who visit Israel regularly, the love affair with the country can take on many forms. Some are entranced by the somberness and spirituality of Jerusalem; others love the hustle and bustle of Tel Aviv. There are deserts and mountaintops, swaths of farmland and the dramatic hills of Judea, the Galilee and the Golan. Most visitors are entranced by all these different geographical areas—so much differentiation in one small place.
And throughout all of it are the Israeli people—a wonderful, welcoming, brusque, emotional, infuriating and complex collection of Jews, in addition to Christian, Arab, Druze and Bedouin minorities who each play their own sometimes contradictory roles in a vibrant and democratic society.
Israel, for those who come to know it, is a complicated place. It’s not the idealized fantasy of novels like Exodus or other classics of Zionist cheerleading. Bringing together Jews from different cultures and traditions from the world over is a wild and often difficult ongoing experiment that is still only eight decades old. Clashes between religious and secular, Ashkenazi and the Mizrachi, as well as adherents of right and left-wing political factions, remain a messy business and adds stress to everyday life. Not to mention the ongoing struggle against an entrenched government bureaucracy and the efforts of liberal elites to hold onto power, despite their diminishing share of the population.
It can be a place of anger, inveterate political squabbling and endless arguments.
But the main takeaway from the experience of being in Israel after arriving back in the United States is that, whatever its great strengths and shortcomings, it’s nothing like the place described in the U.S. and international media.
Belief in a fictional ‘genocide’
One of the most extraordinary developments of recent history is the way opinions about Israel have become one of the organizing principles of American politics. Opposition to the Jewish state and its supposed policies of “genocide” and “apartheid” have become ubiquitous not just in the liberal media that has long treated it unfairly and judged it by double standards not applied to any other democracy, let alone one fighting for its life. But the drumbeat of incitement against Israel and its supporters—Jewish and non-Jewish—has now become an ever-present topic not merely of debate but of political allegiance.
As seen in the last year, candidates throughout the United States—so-called “progressives” and others who unashamedly label themselves as “socialists”—have embraced the cause of what some called “Palestinianism” and others more accurately label as antisemitism.
Some in the left wing of the Democratic Party do talk a good deal about affordability: housing and health costs, transportation, and rising food and gas prices. They advocate for a version of economics that hinges on the absurd and often disproved notion that society can prosper by impeding the creation of wealth and by offering people free stuff that isn’t really free.
The issues providing the energy for these left-wing insurgents who have defeated incumbents and party stalwarts—and continue to scare the Democratic establishment—are largely driven by hostility to Israel and ICE agents. Since almost all of the support for the left comes from credentialled elites and other college-educated people, the talk about affordability is largely a case of the privileged classes pretending to care about the lives of the working class when, in fact, they couldn’t care less.
That’s illustrated by the fact that their campaigns consist almost entirely of a fashionable opposition to borders and the enforcement of immigration laws that holds little appeal outside of the left. Most Americans (the anti-ICE coverage in the liberal media notwithstanding) understand that the invasion of millions of illegal migrants during the Biden administration was a disaster for the country in general, and for working-class Americans and their communities in particular.
But the Israel-bashing has become the centerpiece of the progressive effort to transform politics in the United States. And it has its echo on the right with podcasters like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, far-right political commentator Candace Owens and the neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes, aided and abetted by apologists like media celebrities Megyn Kelly, who are similarly obsessed with Israel.
The facts don’t matter
Much of the rhetoric from both the left and the right hinges on their unfounded assumption that the defensive war being waged by Israelis against Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists is “genocide.” That is a blood libel with no foundation in truth.
As has been proven over and over again by military experts like retired U.S. Army officer John Spencer and British Col. Richard Kemp, the Israel Defense Forces have taken more care to avoid civilian casualties than any other modern military, with the number of non-combatants killed in urban warfare a historic low.
That’s especially true considering that both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon go out of their way to endanger civilians, using them as human shields. In Gaza, where the Islamist group used international aid to build a tunnel system as extensive as the New York City subway system, civilians, including women and children, are denied entry into them for safety or any other reasons. In Gaza, as in Lebanon, and in stark contrast to the practice in Israel, bomb shelters are for the bombs and the terrorists. Civilians are deliberately put in harm’s way to boost casualty numbers, which are reported in statistics that vastly exaggerate the actual toll of war.
At this point, it’s become painfully clear that pointing out the facts to those who routinely fling the “genocide” accusation against Israel is an utter waste of time. The lie has been repeated so many times that it has become an article of faith for those who oppose Israel, alongside other fictional crimes, such as “apartheid” and “fascism,” to describe the activities of the Jewish state.
To listen to the way the tiny nation surrounded by enemies is described in public discourse is to take a trip back into the Jewish past. The resentment against it is increasingly disconnected even from the familiar critiques of Israel-bashers about settlements or distortions about “settler violence.” Such rhetoric is a combination of vast exaggerations of actual incidents and mischaracterizations of Jews defending themselves against daily Arab terror or merely having the chutzpah to visit places like Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the holiest place for Jews.
Imagery of demonization
Listening to podcasts, and reading social media and the comments left on YouTube videos, one encounters the traditional tropes of hatred in which the Jews and Israel are treated as the source of all the world’s ills. Everything from political corruption, the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal, economic setbacks and the outcomes of wars is blamed on them. The Jewish state is spoken of as not merely a source of irritation to the Arab and Muslim world, which regards its existence as an affront to their honor. Instead, it is, as Owens believes (stating so on Carlson’s program), the “demon” that is the driving force of global evil, as well as the main factor corrupting American politics and foreign policy.
Nor is such imagery confined to the far right. Democratic Socialists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speak of AIPAC and pro-Israel supporters as “monsters.” In the philosophy of the intersectional left, the destruction of Israel—an event that could only be made possible by the genocide of half of the Jews on earth who live there—is linked to the undoing of all oppression on earth.
All of this is a throwback to the same sort of conspiratorial thinking that dominated medieval demonization of Jews, the tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as Nazi propaganda. These are also ideas that are echoed in the propaganda spread around the Muslim world by Iran and its terror proxies. While the modern version of these maniacal ideas is often cloaked in the language of human rights, it is still hate speech untethered from the truth.
The popularity of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish canards can be explained in a variety of ways. But the main reason is that it offers, as it always has throughout history, the dissatisfied a scapegoat that can be blamed for their troubles. And it gives people a permission slip to engage in the oldest of hatreds while still being able to pretend that they are decent persons.
That’s why the transition from time spent in the real as opposed to the fictional Israel back to immersion in popular discourse about it in the United States is enough to give you whiplash.
The truth about hopes for peace
It’s always been a given that visits from the Diaspora have, to some extent, been impacted by the long siege inflicted by its enemies. The impact of wars and nonstop terror has brought endless tragedy and grief to the Israeli people. And the conflict has, at times, fractured its society over the years.
The evidence of the impact of the war started by the barbaric Palestinian-Arab atrocities committed on Oct. 7, 2023, can be seen in the ruins of the communities in the south attacked on that awful day. It’s also seen in the nearly empty towns of the north that have been made unlivable by constant rocket fire from Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.
Israelis disagree about a great many things and air their frustrations with each other with the kind of venom that is often hard to stomach. But life in the Jewish state, even at its most divisive and worst, bears no resemblance to its largely fictional portrayal in the Western press and on social media.
What those who are subjected to relentless propaganda about genocide, especially young people who not only haven’t been to Israel but who get their world news dictated by the algorithms of their TikTok feeds, know nothing of life in this part of the Middle East.
A dream palace of hate
If they were to walk its streets and talk to its people, they’d see no evidence of genocidal culture or apartheid. Instead, they would come to understand that life in the one Jewish state on the planet is lively and democratic—and anything but fascistic, let alone dedicated to the indiscriminate killing of Arab children. If they were to speak, as I have, to soldiers going into battle in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as those who have just left it, they would be acquainted with the fact that decent people are fighting to defend their homes and families against forces actively trying to achieve the genocide of the Jewish people.
And if they took a deep dive into the culture of the Palestinians, they’d realize that these much-lauded victims don’t wish for two separate states or the chance to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors. Instead, they would discover that the national identity of these darlings of the international press is inextricably tied to their goal of eradicating the Jewish presence in the ancient homeland of the Jews.
The war to destroy Israel has become the “dream palace,” as the late Lebanese scholar Fouad Ajami called it, of Arab and Muslim fantasies in which the Jews are the scapegoats for their problems. It now plays the same role for disgruntled Westerners who mindlessly mouth the anti-Zionism propaganda cooked up by Soviet disinformation specialists in the 1960s and ’70s without knowing its source.
These lies have not only been mainstreamed by much of the corporate media. They are also part of the indoctrination of students in an education system dominated by progressives whose toxic theories about race falsely define Israelis and Jews as “white” oppressors. That is a tragedy. And because of that, Israel and its friends need to be more focused on this threat and to get smarter in the ways they combat these falsehoods in places where young Americans pick them up.
Still, the starting point for any honest discussion is that the living, breathing country that is Israel is a place that in no way resembles the evil state that is the subject of so much rhetoric and political exploitation in the United States. We can debate endlessly about how best to make this point in the press and on social-media platforms. But it is best understood by spending some time in the actual Jewish state. It’s a shame that more people, including leftist Jews, don’t climb out of their dream palaces and explore the reality on the ground that is Israel.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
Airbus linii Electra Airlines (Sg1959 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=194158028)
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