Credible arguments can be made that Israel has missed opportunities to address the stalemate in the Middle East. However, in his Opinion piece in the November issue of the PRT (“Victim Versus Victim”), Mr. Levowitz makes none of them.
Instead, he challenges the very legitimacy of the State of Israel, calling it the product of cynical decision makers (“white boys”) in the UN and the United States (“Israel’s fox hole buddies”) to dump “a big bunch of badly battered Jews from Europe” in Palestine, take the land, “as in the glorious Crusades,” and expel the Arab population. According to Mr. Levowitz, Israel is now “unsurprisingly” paying the price of this injustice.
What is lost in this narrative are the facts about Israel’s origins.
In 1947, the United Nations partitioned the land known as Palestine, attempting to honor both Jewish and Arab populations by creating a Jewish and Arab state—the original two state solution. The Jews accepted the partition plan, but Arabs rejected it and declared war on the Jews. They lost the war along with the land that would have been theirs under the United Nations mandate. Israel was soon admitted to the United Nations, not the first nor the last time that a modern state was comprised of disparate peoples.
At the heart of Mr. Levowitz’s argument is the characterization of Israelis as colonists. This is simply wrong. The Jewish people lived and prayed in these lands for more than a thousand years before Jesus, and without interruption since the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Palestine has been a homeland of Jews for 3,800 years, and, as is starkly apparent in the convulsion of antisemitism around the world, is their ultimate refuge.
Israel is also a nation where nearly two and a half million Arabs—25 percent of its citizens—more than the population of Gaza—live and work. They are descendants of Arabs who remained after Israel’s statehood, refuting Mr. Levowitz’ claim of “rank barbarity” in expelling Arabs. They hold respected positions in government, academia, business, and medicine.
Moreover, nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population is comprised of refugees, and their descendants, expelled from Arab countries and Iran, hardly the stereotype of white colonists. More than half of Israel’s population are people of color.
Few critics of Israel have difficulty acknowledging the unspeakable acts of Hamas on October 7. But the shift to denouncing Israel has been mind-numbingly swift. For ideologues like Mr. Levowitz, the history of failed peace attempts becomes a blame-ridden tale of Israel’s colonial ambitions, not its response to Palestinian intransigence. Carnage in the Middle East is seen as Israel’s burden alone, not the responsibility of the UN, the Arab world—which has done nothing to aid and absorb Palestinian refugees—or the Palestinian people themselves who have submitted to Hamas’ control of their destiny.
The debate will continue for years whether Israel’s current response to Hamas’ barbaric attack is “proportionate.” But the starting point must be the right and duty of Israel, like any nation, to protect its citizens; those who continue to deny the legitimacy of Israel’s origins, 75 years after its founding, would deprive Israel of its fundamental right of self-defense.
Let‘s be blunt about this: What Mr. Levowitz is really saying is that Israel bears blame for the monstrous massacre committed against it. Mr. Levowitz morally equates an army of sadistic rapists and murders with their victims. The assertion of moral equivalence between Hamas’ brutal and grotesque actions and Israel’s action to eradicate an existential threat is intellectually and morally indefensible.
I ask the residents of this community to take up the work of serious persons seeking solutions to tough problems: to adopt constructive discourse and reject destructive propaganda. Israel deserves this from its critics, no less than what we owe ourselves as Americans facing our own political challenges.