“UNCRITICAL SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL”?

THE IDEA THAT ZIONISTS IRRATIONALLY SUPPORT OUR CAUSE IS A DIRECT PROJECTION BY PEOPLE WHO CAN’T WIN AN ARGUMENT ON MERIT.

Check out the “uncritical support for Israel.”

“Uncritical support for Israel.”

These four words pop up repeatedly anytime someone makes a case in support of Israel. The supposition underlying the phrase is that people like me will defend Israel no matter what they do, regardless of all reason, rationality or evidence.

Let’s consider whether this assertion is true — then explore why it is so ubiquitous.

There has probably never been a form of nationalism more minutely scrutinized than Zionism has been — not only by its enemies, but by its adherents. Zionists have struggled profoundly with the moral challenges of self-determination coupled with being, for the first time since ancient epochs, a people governing another people, after millennia of experiencing the worst atrocities a stateless people have ever endured.

By its enemies and its friends, Israel has been subjected to parsing, second-guessing, condemnations, recriminations and assessments exceeding those devoted to almost every other country and empire in human history.

And all this for a miniscule country of (now) nine million people, making up a microscopic sliver of land on the eastern Mediterranean shore.

In other words, support for Israel is probably among the most critically considered and dissected positions in the world today. Let’s leave aside Israel’s enemies. Israelis and their friends — who are the ones targeted by the accusation of “uncritical support” — debate, criticize, moot, scrutinize and question every single step taken (or even theoretically trial-ballooned) by Israel’s government and society. This is an example of what is among the least “uncritical” phenomena in human discourse. Even Israel’s best friends — and its citizens, through arguably the world’s most disputatious democracy — examine and analyze to death every minute thing the country does.

So why does this phrase, “uncritical support for Israel” have such resonance? Why is it trotted out so incessantly?

At root, it is the projection that exemplifies both antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Jews have always been the empty vessel upon which Western, Islamic and other cultures have projected their fears, anxieties, hatred, uncertainties, confusion, envy and other disorders. Israel is the national embodiment of those projections. Everything we hate or find troubling about our societies — our histories of settler-colonialism, our systemic racism, our economic inequality, every form of injustice — is projected onto Israel and then we try to crucify the vessel, as our ancestors have done to Jews (or, more on the nose, to a single particular Jew, in the case of Christian tradition) for hundreds of generations.

But it goes deeper than this.

In the world’s imaginations, “The Jews” are the ultimate rationalists, the epitome of intellectuals, thinkers, critics.

The anti-Israel narrative, for whatever legitimate approaches it may take, has an undeniable stream of petty, sadistic spite. So the accusation of “uncritical” approaches is an added little dig. You think you’re so smart and rational? Without providing any evidence to the contrary, I will insult you by suggesting that the case you make for your people’s national self-determination and survival is based on irrationality. I posit that the very crux of your case for your country’s right to exist is directly counter to your core principles of dedication to truth and provable evidence.

They are wrong, of course. It is Zionists who have truth and evidence on our side. And that is why they do it. They have no other choice. They cannot win this rationally, so they accuse their enemy of irrationality.

Because the Palestinian cause — however just it may be to seek Palestinian self-determination — is premised foundationally on falsehoods. Without going entirely down that rabbit hole, just consider the two foundational falsehoods: The falsehood of invented indigeneity, in which the people who came later, the Arabs, are recast as the indigenous people on ancient Jewish lands; and the panorama of falsehoods around the division of the British Mandate for Palestine, which deceitfully ignores the existence of Jordan, which was intended as the Palestinian Arab state and alleges that the entire remaining scraps of Palestine, which were intended by the British for the Jews, was unjustly shared with the Jews (who, depending on the narrator, should have received less, or nothing at all).

Above all, perhaps, is the plain strategic failure of the Palestinian narrative. What could be more irrational and uncritical than continuing to follow the recipe of repeated disaster — violence, “resistance,” no negotiation, absolutist rejection of Jewish rights, demands for total victory “from the river to the sea”? The global “pro-Palestinian” movement, recognizing that this approach has led to disaster, mayhem and failure, call for more of the same.

Only through uncritical acceptance of stupid ideas could the global Palestinian movement have reached the level of support it currently enjoys.

To be clear: I’m not saying there is not a legitimate, convincing case for Palestinian self-determination. I’m saying the people who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” aren’t making it. Because what is best for Palestinians is nowhere near the top of their agenda. They are anti-Israel, first, last and always. In many instances, they actually revel in the growing number of dead Palestinians. This is the core premise of almost everything I write: If you are still under the misapprehension that “pro-Palestinians” are actually pro-Palestinian, you are precisely the sort of ignoramus I am writing for. (Whoops! There goes my 2025 new year resolution to be nicer!)

Scratch the surface of the next “pro-Palestinian” activist you stumble upon and you will probably find that they epitomize uncritical acceptance of a narrative of which they know practically nothing. They will repeat slogans that, when pressed, you will find they cannot defend. They take refuge in slanderers like “apartheid,” “genocide” and “settler-colonialism,” terms that they either cannot define or that demonstrate such ignorance of the facts in Israel and its region that they believe these lies.

Above all, to support a movement whose goal is the perpetuation of violence and Palestinian statelessness in the name of what (Western white-saviors think) is best for Palestinians has got to be the very definition of “uncritical support.”

For these reasons, and millions more, it is the Palestinian narrative that cannot be defended empirically. As a result, “pro-Palestinian” activists resort to the sort of ad hominem that is the only reasonable response when you can’t win an argument. No, you are the liar. I’m not irrational, you are. My position isn’t indefensible, yours is.

It is notable, too, that the accusation of “uncritical support” against Israel is usually leveled when there is any support for Israel. There is a fundamental premise in the anti-Israel narrative that there is no rational justification for Israel, therefore any defense is, by definition, uncritical.

Perhaps there is something else to it, though. When you have uncritically absorbed a narrative that is so deracinated from the facts of archaeology, history and current events that you accept the ludicrous Palestinian narrative root and stem, obviously you would look at the alternative narrative (based as it is on provable facts) and be confused.

So maybe I could be more generous and acknowledge that the accusation of “uncritical support for Israel” is an innocent attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance of one’s own ignorant acceptance of a false narrative when confronted with a more accurate one.

By my reckoning, then, there are two potential explanations for the assertion that people like me are “uncritically supportive of Israel.”

It could be deliberate lashing out by people of ill-will, or it could be plain old ignorance.

In either case, keep an eye out for this canard — and recognize it for what it is. Yet another projection. Yet another trick in the magic box of anti-Zionism to be employed by people incapable of winning a fair argument because the facts are simply not on their side.