The All-Conquering Goliath
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Palestinian mother’s grief when losing a child is as heartbreaking and painful as that of an Israeli mum’s loss. Another truth is that over 72,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since October 2023, and over 550 have been killed by the IDF since last October’s ceasefire. A further 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF and by Jewish settlers in the West Bank in the last two years alone. Which leads me to ask: Are Palestinian lives only as worthy as the bugs we swat away and kill during the summer months, mere statistics?
Yet another truth universally acknowledged, except among Netanyahu supporters, Hollywood ignoramuses, and well-off types in upper Manhattan, is that the death toll of Palestinians is disproportionate to that of Israelis killed by Hamas in October 2023—850 or 1,200, depending on who is counting. These numbers should raise outrage, but alas they do not. To the contrary. “Israel under attack” is the mantra, and anyone that disputes it is a Nazi-like antisemite according to some, like Bari Weiss before her appointment as head honcho at CBS.
Recognizing the suffering and despair of a brutal, 60-year occupation does not seem to be within the cognitive potential of most Israelis, nor of many Jews. Framing the latter as eternal victims has not only given Israel the right to steal land from poor Palestinians, but also allowed brutal settlers cut off water supplies from small farms, forcing their owners from their land and taking them over. Those who resist are shot dead and declared by the settlers to be terrorists. How do I know all this? Easy. I began my journalistic career in Jordan back in 1968, and got to know the region well.
My first ever assignment covered the refugee camps in Jordan, camps that had been set up after the 1948 war that saw Israel defeat three Arab armies and establish the Israeli nation. The camps were bursting with poor souls that had been there since 1948 and with the new refugees after the Israeli victory in the 1967 war. I covered the 1973 war from the Israeli side, but was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister in 1977. Begin was the first exponent of Jewish supremacy, and encouraged assaults on Palestinians while building illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Settlers are known to refer to Palestinians as sub-humans and to shoot before asking questions; they number more than 700,000. There are roadblocks everywhere that make it impossible for Palestinians to move around. As a local doctor said, “Dante’s Inferno should be updated to feature a circle of Hell called the West Bank.”
But let us return to 1968. The refugee camps seem to have marked me for life. Watching very old people who had been there for a generation, and whose children and grandchildren had also grown up in those terrible conditions, was a daily reminder of the injustice foisted upon innocent people. With whatever small means at my disposal, I’ve been attempting to expose the plight of those innocents ever since. Sticking up for homeless Palestinians in horrible camps made it a certainty that I’d be seen as an antisemite, a libel spread by that one-tune Johnny, Norman Podhoretz. His hysterical theatrics managed to convince William F. Buckley to fire the kind and gentle Joe Sobran, an act that ruined Joe’s life and led to his death. Podhoretz and his ilk tried the same foul tricks with our cofounder Pat Buchanan, but to no avail. They also failed with yours truly. But charging antisemitism against the slightest criticism of Israel is an old trick. The sheer levels of depravity of many settlers against the locals not only go unpunished, but unreported, as too many journalists and diplomats are afraid to be tainted with the charge of antisemitism .
Never mind. Pretend behavior is at its zenith when Israel presents itself as victim and at the mercy of the all-powerful Arabs. What is grossly unfair is to attack those whose sympathies lie with victims in camps and to paint them as antisemitic. These unscrupulous types will say and do anything. They were the ones that convinced George W. Bush, whose brain cells had gone AWOL, to attack Iraq and save the world from Armageddon. Now they need to attack Iran to yet again save the Western world from their non-existent nukes. The Holocaust is yet again instrumental to excuse Israel’s actions against all its neighbors and some even farther away.
Trump is ready and willing to attack Iran once again, with Netanyahu urging him on. Will an attack benefit Uncle Sam? Who knows? What I do know is that it will benefit Israel, keeping Netanyahu in power and making the West Bank settlers more aggressive. Israel is no longer the beleaguered outpost of democracy it once was, but an all-conquering and expanding Goliath. And in the long run, Israel is no friend of Uncle Sam.
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