VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Spare us the selective outrage and hypocrisy”

Since October 7, 2023, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel. The campuses, the left-wing media, and the new Democratic Socialist officials, both federal and state have painted Israel and their Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists, and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world.

Victor Davis Hanson The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced. Instead, it spawned a gathering storm of antisemitism.

Note that leftists and pro-Hamas students and faculty were shouting the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in euphoria almost immediately in response to the news of the slaughter. Hundreds of dead Jews set off a Pavlovian spasm of glee from the Middle East to American campuses.

Indeed, during the three-week hiatus following the mass killings – well before the IDF entered Gaza on October 27 – Israel and its supporters were damned in ways we have not seen for years. Even as Israel sought to negotiate a release of the 251 hostages and a surrender of all those in Hamas responsible for the massacres, the international furor at Israel only mounted. Or was it instead an ebullition of anticipation that still more slaughter of Israelis would follow?

Hamas, and its delusional supporters, both in the Middle East and in the West, saw October 7 not as the end of bloodletting but as the beginning of far more slaughter – and of the hoped-for end of Israel altogether. In their unhinged hatred, they assumed that Iran’s vaunted “ring of fire” (the terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis and scattered contingents in Syria and Iraq) would now ignite Israel from all sides.

Yet when Israel finally invaded Gaza on October 27, it was almost immediately damned for conducting “genocide.” None of its libelers offered alternate pathways for how Israel might stop the Hamas slaughterers or get the hostages back.

So how exactly was Israel supposed to restore deterrence, punish the guilty, and prevent such future mass butchery?Go to the U.N. Security Council and beg China (one million Uighurs in Chinese camps) and Russia (engaged in a Verdun-like invasion of Ukraine) to examine the facts empirically?

Ask Hamas to shed their civilian shields and fight Israelis head-to-head? Fly to Geneva to have European premiers and presidents like Pedro Sanchez, Emmanuel Macron, and Keir Starmer oversee “negotiations”?

Moreover, do we ever hear to what degree these libels of genocide and ethnic cleansing apply far more accurately to a host of other nations, some of which are also recipients of U.S. aid?

Did Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil rally his armies of idealists to damn the Islamic-driven ethnic cleansing of this ancient population of Christian Armenians, or to call for the U.S. to sever joint arms deals with Turkey?

Over the decades, we have sold arms and given billions of dollars in military aid to Turkey. Yet between 1915 and 1920, the Turkish government conducted a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing against their Armenian population, for which it has never apologized and which it continues to deny. And that was not just ancient history.

None of our current critics of Israel seems worried that Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and ethnically cleansed Northern Cyprus of its Greek inhabitants. The Turks then sent thousands of their own “settler colonialists” to help the Turkish minority population occupy the north to this day and alter Cypriot demography. There are no demonstrations anywhere in America on behalf of the far more recent “Nakba” of the Cypriot Greeks.

For that matter, did any of the loud campus Left demand distance from American ally Turkey when its president, Recep Erdogan, recently cheered on Azerbaijan’s 2023 ethnic cleansing of some 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh — oddly, at almost the same time as the October 7 massacre.

Before the 1967 war, there were nearly one million Jews whose ancestors had been living for centuries in the Arab and Muslim Middle East. Note that the current Arab population of Israel is close to 77 times larger than the remnant of 27,000 Jews who remain in Muslim-majority Middle Eastern nations.

So, who are the real ethnic cleansers, and who are the displaced persons and refugees? Of course, no one dares to say Arabs “ethnically cleansed” almost all their Jewish citizens. Instead, that charge is reserved only for Israel, where its Arab population has swelled to 21 percent of the current Israeli total.

After October 7, we were also lectured that Israel was not just guilty of various war crimes but illegitimate in its very existence. Indeed, it became chic to condemn Israeli Jews as “settler colonialists” — despite residing in the 3,500-year homeland of the Jewish people.

New York Mayor MUSIM Zohran Mamdani seems to loathe Israel. In that context, his supporters and would-be appointees have damned the Jewish state as an illegitimate settler-colonial enterprise. In short, the tell-tale sign of antisemites is not necessarily opposition to Israel. It is instead an endless fixation on the supposed “crimes” of Israel, when far greater documented horrors elsewhere never merit a word from them.

The global Left’s relentless obsession with condemning Israel completely vanishes when actual ethnic cleansing and brutal massacres occur across the rest of the world. From the historical atrocities of the French in Chad to the modern-day actions of Turkey and Iran, the international community consistently ignores massive human rights abuses to focus entirely on one tiny nation.