WASHINGTON ― Top Republican lawmakers brushed aside questions about former President Donald Trump’s alarming vow to purge his political opponents, which he referred to as “vermin” in a Veterans’ Day message over the weekend.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a multi-pronged invasion of Israel, killing more than 1400, injuring nearly 7000 more, and taking 239 hostages. This military incursion clearly establishes that Hamas poses a threat to Israel's security. There is no question that Israel, like it or not an existing country, has the right to eliminate that threat.
There is no question, however, that Israel has long since left "self defense" in the rubble. According to ABC:
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says at least 10,800 people have been killed in Gaza amid Israel's retaliatory campaign and effort to root out Hamas. More than 26,000 have been injured, the ministry says, with almost 1.5 million people displaced, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. As of Nov. 3, 67% of all deaths in Gaza were made up of women and children while thousands more have been injured, according to several U.N. agencies, including the UNRWA.
This is retaliation not defense.
The Israeli military campaign has targeted hospitals on the pretext that Hamas uses them as strategic bases. When Russia did the same thing in Ukraine, with essentially the same justification, the US and NATO rightly condemned it as a war crime. Now, however, when members of congress, college students, protesters call Israel's actions criminal, they are vilified as "anti semitic". Leaving aside for now the inconvenient fact that Arabs are also "semites", this is a collective gas lighting that is unfortunately well-known in American political history. Let's be clear: Jews are members of an ethnic group. I'm a Jew. Israel is a country. It is a country established in a cynical diplomatic game by England to garner support for the British war effort (WWI) by Jewish populations around the world. If Jews would help Britain defeat the Turkish empire, they (Britain) would give them (Jews) land currently lived in by some other people, neither British, Turkish, nor, for the most part, Jewish. Did Great Britain propose to establish a Jewish homeland in Sussex? They did not. They proposed to give somebody else's land to some people they would just as soon not have living in England. So I submit that the state of Israel is itself existentially anti semitic but here we are.
Israel is a nation. I am an American, not an Israeli. As a Jewish American, I am offended that the US is supporting the retaliatory and illegally indiscriminate destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure. I am offended that my being offended is considered anti semitic. Israel, North Korea, Russia: they're all COUNTRIES. They all brutalize sectors of their populations and they all deserve to be called out for it.
