Israel: What Happens When A Country Can Do No Wrong?
September 13th, 2023. Iracema Cavalcante speaks to the New York Times about her son, Danilo, following his escape from prison.
Given that Danilo had recently killed his ex-girlfriend in front of her young children by stabbing her 40 times, and given that she was the second person he had murdered, you might assume that Iracema would finally recognise that her son was at fault. You’d be wrong:
Did it happen? It happened. But it happened because of the stranglehold she put on him, the stance she took with him […] It wasn’t femicide. He had to, he had no other choice.
June 8th, 2016. Dan Turner writes a letter to Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky on behalf of his son, Brock.
Given that Brock had just been found guilty of sexually assaulting and attempting to rape an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, you might imagine his father would be more focused on the suffering of the victim than the change in his son’s appetite. You’d be wrong:
…Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a very good cook himself […] Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist […] His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.
December 12th, 2025. U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, responds to a question about Israel’s then-recent attack on Qatar.
Given that Israel had admitted launching a strike on a residential area that killed and injured several civilians, and given that Israel was over a year into an particularly well-publicised genocide, you might expect Huckabee to say something, anything, that acknowledged Israel’s responsibility for its actions. You’d…well, you get the idea by now:
There’s been some talk that Israel attacked the country of Qatar. It did not. It did, in fact, send a missile to attack a terrorist […] Unfortunately, there were some people who were near that missile strike [who] were injured or killed by it.
Back in August 2025, political correspondent Prem Thakker decided to test the limits of Congress’ love for Israel.
Thakker had already spent over two hundred days pressing the White House for answers about Israel’s murder of Hind Rajab, a war crime for which there has still been no consequences or accountability.
But that’s just a six-year-old Palestinian girl, five members of her Palestinian family, and the two Palestinian paramedics who had explicitly told the Israeli military who they were and where they were going before trying to rescue her. Nobody cares if Israel murders them. But Thakker assumed American politicians would at least pretend to care about Israelis killing American citizens.
He was wrong.
He reached out to twenty-one senators for comment about the murder of Sayfollah Musallet, an American citizen who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers during a visit to the West Bank. None of them bothered to reply.
He asked Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin if he knew how many Americans the Israeli military had killed in the preceding twenty-one months. Mullin replied that he, “hadn’t even given it much thought.”
And when he asked Maine Senator Susan Collins for her thoughts on the American citizens killed by the Israeli military, she simply replied, “I’m pro-Israel” as she scurried into a waiting car.
Just to underline that, a journalist asked a United States senator for comment about American civilians killed by a foreign country’s military, and she responded by declaring her allegiance to the foreign country.
And the most remarkable part of this seemingly unlimited sycophancy is how unremarkable it is. Here’s former president Jimmy Carter describing this exact problem almost twenty years ago:
I think it’s accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries or to publicise the plight of the Palestinians, or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good-faith peace talks.
Israel isn’t a misunderstood kid, it isn’t driving Palestinians from their farms in the West Bank or levelling entire villages in Lebanon because there’s no other choice, its decades of settler terrorism and ethnic cleansing can’t be dismissed as “a few minutes of action,” it is a nuclear power that has plainly stated and demonstrated its desire to ethnically cleanse Palestine and beyond.
And yet at every level, be it the tech industry, social media, news media, or politicians, we find people who are inexplicably, pathologically determined to deny or defend crimes that even Israeli soldiers aren’t bothering to hide.
We cannot hope for a functioning world order when our leaders treat one country like a child that can do no wrong, when they’re willing to violate international and domestic law to make sure it always gets its way, when the leader of that country is so confident of this endless impunity that he boasts that America is “something that can easily be moved,” and proves that it’s easily moved, at least under Trump, by dragging it into yet another Middle Eastern war that benefits nobody but Israel.
We can all understand the instinct to defend the things we love. But surely we also understand that failing to hold people accountable doesn’t make them better, it makes them worse.
Of course, some readers are already convincing themselves that the only reason to seek moral consistency about ethnic cleansing and mass murder is hatred of Israel, just as spoiled children convince themselves that anyone who criticises must hate them.
But this isn’t about liking or disliking anyone, it’s about the fact that our leaders are clearly incapable of talking about Israel like morally sane human beings. It’s about the fact that celebrities and professors and children’s entertainers have to risk everything to offer even the mildest of critiques. It’s about the fact that our media and political class is determined to act as if blindly defending a country that just slaughtered 75,000+ people, destroyed almost all the civilian infrastructure in Gaza, and has sparked an escalating regional war in the Middle East is perfectly normal.
And Israel, ironically, is far less afflicted by these problems!
In Israel, politicians like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert aren’t afraid to describe Israel’s “war” in Gaza as the “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” Another former prime minister, Ehud Barak, had no problem admitting that it had become “totally unjustifiable” and had “nothing to do with the security interests of Israel [or] the future of the hostages.”
It’s our politicians who are too cowed to do anything but swear their undying loyalty and send whatever weapons Netanyahu demands.
In Israel, the media can speak freely about the widespread evidence that Israeli soldiers killed Israelis on October 7th. They could acknowledge, even while Joe Biden was still lying about it, that the reports about beheaded babies hanging from washing lines and baking in ovens were atrocity propaganda.
It’s our media that can barely bring themselves to name Israel when talking about its crimes.
And in Israel, people like Amiram Levin, a former IDF general, can acknowledge the similarities between Israel’s policies in the West Bank and the antisemitic policies in Nazi Germany. Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israeli counterintelligence, can admit that he too “would fight against Israel in order to achieve [his] liberty,” if he were a Palestinian living in Gaza or the West Bank.
It’s only here, in the West, where this incredibly basic level of integrity and empathy is mischaracterised as “antisemitism.”
Israel is many things to many people. For some, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it’s the only place they believe they can be safe. Others believe they must revere this seventy-eight-year-old country as if it were the same place God referred to in the Old Testament. And still others clearly love this nation with the same irrational blindness a parent has for their child.
But if they think that this fawning, unconditional support will do anything except make Israel more extreme, they’d be wrong.
Most people cannot recognize contemporary atrocities. It is simply not how the world is processed in adult minds.
Decent folk of European descent could not see the crimes perpetrated against millions of native Americans for centuries. The brutality of chattel slavery foisted on Africans was invisible to many civilized folk for almost as long. The native Americans, after all, did raid and kill European settlers. And chattel slaves were, after all, less than human per the rulings of God and science. And the worst among the Palestinians have absolutely committed atrocities against even the best among the Israelis.
As a high schooler I remember suggesting that the only way for the Middle East conflict to be resolved might be to arm the two sides equally and allow things to be worked out the modern way... that is to butcher the other side out of existence . I was shamed for that comment in my decent little group, but I'm even more ashamed that that is what can feel like is happening today--except for the part about equally arming each side.
The likely reality is that those who readily look past the atrocities of today--or who can see only the atrocities committed against their side--will be long and comfortably dead by the time history books in some distant future show remorse. It is more comfortable that way. More comfortable to wish our less desirable neighbors the peace of a detonated nuclear bomb or some sort of work camp.
This is not the way any of my personal heroes have argued that the world should be. This was EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the position of Matthew's Jesus or of Rabbi Hillel or even the Utilitarian Bentham. But fighting for "doing to others as you would have done to yourself" is a hard battle as easily lost today as it was two hundred and two thousand years ago.
Thank you for fomenting the conversation even if every side gets angry because the other side is at least a little bit wrong.
I love your Brock Turner example.
Two people go as freshman to a frat party and totally get trashed.
One passes out, one loses all inhibitions.
The one that lost all inhibitions is accused of attempted rape.
BOTH WERE EQUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RAMIFICATIONS THAT HAPPENED.
Society has no responsibility to protect someone who is stupid enough to get shitfaced drunk and passed out. But someone society now thinks it is.
Choose wisely when you go to a frat party. Maybe just don't go!
As for Israel and the Palestinians.
Its way, way, way, way, way easier than you try to make it out to be.
This is a religious war. Its been going on since the Muslims invaded the Levant in the 8th century. The Muslims had the might to keep the area Muslim mostly through to the 20th century. With brief losses during the crusades. When the Ottoman empire collapsed. The Muslim's lost their might. Coincidentally Hitler (which the Ottoman empire supported), happened at the same time and tried to wipe the Jews from Europe. Many Jews started immigrating to what would become Israel as a result. They also immigrated to Israel because the British divided up the Ottoman empire and created countries that had Muslim governments. The new countries (no surprise given the Ottoman Empire supported Hitler) persecuted the Jews. So those Jews migrated to the area that is Israel.
The Jews bought most of the land but also drove out the Palestinians in the some of the areas. All the Muslim nations that now surrounded the Jews given the way the British divided the Ottoman empire went to war to make sure the Jews didn't create a state. Surprise of all surprises the Jews won. Not just once but every time the Muslim's tried to drive them out. The Jews (with the help of England and the US) for the first time in centuries had the might. Rational Arabs/Muslims didn't dispute the issue and became Israeli citizens. They are still challenged because Israel is a Jewish state. Oh well.
Irrational Muslims that focus on the principal that Jews should not have a state and let alone control the city of Jerusalem that includes the Al Aqsa Mosque left or were driven out. Their goal is still to eliminate the Jewish state today and especially take back control of the Al Aqsa Mosque (i.e. Make East Jerusalem the capital of the state of Palestine). Issue with this is that the Al Aqsa sits on the most holy site in the Jewish religion, the Temple mount.
Funny thing about this is all the Muslim IMAMs acknowledged that it was the Temple mount - wait for it - until the Jews declared the state of Israel. Then they started changing their views and saying it wasn't. Isn't that convenient for them.
Your need to frame this as some morality concept ignores basic humanity 101. Might makes right. You can judge Israel all you want but for the first time since about 800BC the Jews have the might to hold the area they believe is God given to them. In fact based on the Torah, God was irritated when the Jews migrating from Egypt wouldn't take the land by force because they were scared. That's the story of Joshua and the wall of Jerusalem falling when he blew the horn.
There is no "moral" right or wrong in the Israeli/Palestinian war about the land. Its the oldest religious conflict still playing out over 1300 years later. You can try and claim some new age religious moral position but your position is no more valid than the Israelis or Palestinians.
The thing about the Jews versus Palestinians and Muslims in general is that they are a very, very, very patient bunch. They have patiently waited in diaspora for millennia. The 1st and 2nd world war and the bad choices of the Ottoman empire gave them a chance to reestablish themselves in what they view as their God given right.
From a totally pragmatic perspective, I would rather have the Jews and the state of Israel than a Palestinian state. I know the Jews could care less if I am LGBTQ or Christian for that matter. They have no goals to convert what they refer to as Gentiles.
The Muslims on the other hand are pretty clear that the world is meant to be one world Caliphate under Allah. Its just a matter of making it happen through Jihad.
Thanks for letting me verbalize how naive most thought is on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.