Israel is real — and that makes it an easy target.

The amorphous nature of Palestinian statehood allows the world to view atrocious Palestinian violence as not quite real — sort of imaginary, like the state of "Palestine" itself.

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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/israel-is-real-easy-target

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There is a great deal of discussion about “erasure” and related themes around the supposedly inability of Israelis and their overseas allies to see (figuratively or literally) Palestinians and their problems.

An immense amount of hay has been baled based on Golda Meir’s 1976 offhanded remark: “There is no Palestinian people.” (Adding insult to injury, this is generally misrepresented as Meir saying, “There are no Palestinians.”)

It is a symptom of the dishonesty in the anti-Israel movement that her clarifications (almost instantaneous and published in The New York Times) are completely ignored, while her impolitic choice of words have been exploited for half a century.

What she meant, of course, was that, until the mid-1960s, the Arab people in the region did not identify as “Palestinians” separate and apart from the larger Arab peoples in the region, particularly Jordanians. Indeed, anyone who lived in the region was called “Palestinian” until 1948, when the Palestinian Jews became “Israelis.”

(Tell this to the throngs of historical illiterates who plaster social media with images of pre-1948 Jewish stamps, Jewish coins, Jewish flags, Jewish sports uniforms, and other paraphernalia with “Palestine” imprinted on them to “prove” that Palestine preexisted Israel. Ugh. The only thing more humiliating that their ignorance is their ignorance of their ignorance.)

The facts, of course, matter little if there are points to be scored against Israel.

More legitimately perhaps, the Israeli writer Ari Shavit tells about how his great-grandfather visited the Holy Land and seems not to have seen the Arabs around him — even as they carried his luggage and drove his carriages.

Certainly, there is legitimacy in the idea that Israelis may not devote the attention to the concerns of Palestinians that they do to their own quotidian (and existential) demands. We all focus more on our day-to-day demands than we do on the needs of other peoples — but it is a particular characteristic of humankind that we pathologize universal characteristics and project them onto Jews.

The idea that Israelis and their overseas allies “erase,” don’t see, or ignore the legitimate needs of Palestinians may be partly true — but it is also an extraordinary act of hypocrisy, given that a significant segment of the Palestinian (and larger Arab and Muslim) body politic seeks a literal erasure of Israelis (and, in too many cases, Jews).

The Palestinian movement seeks to literally erase Israel — “From the river to the sea!” — and, with only the weakest plausible deniability, to erase Jews . You know: “Intifada! Revolution! There is only one solution!”

Would the “solution” of which they chant be … final?

More than this, Palestinians and most of the Arab and wider Muslim world have already erased Israel — from school textbooks, from maps, and from public discourse, in which the name “Israel” is so unutterable that it known as “the Zionist entity,” among other epithets.

Moreover, if Israelis and their allies diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian needs and aspirations, how do you characterize the behavior of Palestinians and their allies?

Overwhelmingly, world opinion declares that, even in the face of kidnappings, mass murder, rapes, beheadings and human immolations, Israelis have no right to defend themselves. (And cut the crap — that is precisely what “Ceasefire now!” and the broader opposition to Israel’s war with Hamas means.) When Israeli lives are literally erased, the world brays that the survivors should lie down and take it.

So let’s not get carried away with accusations of “erasure.”

And yet, how is it that seemingly intelligent people could accuse Israelis of erasure, something that they themselves are so demonstrably guilty?

Again, projection is a core characteristic of the world’s approach to anything involving Jews. For that which we detest in ourselves (or fear, or are challenged by, or are in other ways troubled by) we seek a scapegoat. Historically, probably, no people have played the scapegoat more frequently than Jews. In the world today, no country plays the scapegoat more frequently than Israel.

However, something else is at play. It is characteristic of the global narrative that Israel can be accused of “atrocities,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” every time a soldier turns the ignition in a military vehicle.

And yet, Palestinian terrorists — on behalf of the government of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran — can rape, behead, immolate, kidnap, and mass murder civilians and literally call for genocide, and the world’s reaction is, essentially: “Fish gotta swim.”

It is always folly to attempt to justify the irrational using rationality. But there is an explanation of sorts.

Zionism is not just an idea in principle. It is an idea in practice. Real-world things can be measured, analyzed, criticized and condemned.

Palestinianism is theoretical. Even though Palestinians are a real people with real world problems, their country is, despite increasing recognitions, not quite a country. More to the point, overseas activists treat Palestinians as a theoretical construct, as a metaphor of Developing World People, as the epitome of “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color,” as the definition of lack of privilege standing up to privilege.

Arguably, it is the Palestinians’ overseas “friends” who do not really see Palestinians.

They certainly seem to find Palestinian crimes invisible.

The world accuses and summarily convicts Israel of the most egregious offenses, while forgiving Palestinian perpetrators their sins based on a range of extenuating circumstances, including, basically, innocence by reason of insanity, crimes of passion, justifiable homicide, self-defense — the list goes on.

Part of this is possible based on the immoral and inhumane idea that an oppressed people are justified in resisting “by any means necessary.”

When “any means necessary” includes immolating babies in their mother’s arms, beheadings, rapes, kidnappings, and mass murder, we can see clearly the moral implications of this iniquitous ideology.

Whatever the reason, the world allows Palestinians to get away with murder (and rape and human immolations and beheadings and kidnappings) while granting Israelis not a modicum of justification when they respond to defend their civilians.

Western observers and activists somehow feel no need to hold Palestinian governments, terror organizations or individual criminals to account. It is as if, contra the recognition that Israel is a real thing, the amorphous nature of Palestinian statehood makes everything about it, including some of contemporary civilization’s most atrocious violence, not exactly real, sort of imaginary, like the state of “Palestine” itself, from which the violence emerges.

Overseas “allies” of the Palestinians accuse Israel, Israelis, and their overseas allies of “erasing” Palestinians.

But, by treating Palestinian crimes as if they are somehow not the monstrous barbarisms that they are, by diminishing the humanity of Palestinians by inferring that they lack the self-restraint not to rape, immolate and behead when provoked, by infantalizing Palestinian mass murderers as though their crimes are mere tantrums that are understandable under the circumstance, it is “pro-Palestinian” activists who diminish, dehumanize, degrade, and erase Palestinians.

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