Israel might have to become a pariah state. So be it.

“Being weak towards your enemies (Iran) and harsh towards your allies (Israel) is a strategy that has never proven itself.”

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

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In the opening pages of “The Inheritors,” Eve Fairbanks describes South Africa as a country that offers a glimpse of the turmoil that awaits the West as it comes to terms with its history of colonization, slavery, and segregation.

Indeed, there are uncomfortable parallels between the West in 2024 and South Africa in the dying days of “White rule.” Granted, the West is by no means an apartheid civilization. But it is striking to see the West look so much like the failing state that was late-apartheid South Africa.

First there is the explosion of protest against racial injustice. Like many social movements before and since, the present-day West and late-apartheid South Africa have in common a complex fusion of a majority of non-violent protesters with violent radicals, outside agitators, and opportunistic looters.

They also share the morally unambiguous objective of ending systemic racism, and they were both propelled by a cascade of political and economic events that pushed this objective from socially marginal to the center of debate. In the West, these events include divisive premierships and the COVID-19 crisis. In South Africa, they included the 1976 Soweto uprising, a global commodities slump that shook the South African economy, and the end of the Cold War.

All this speaks to another, broader historical alignment between the West and South Africa: the collapse of “White rule.” To be sure, the end of apartheid in South Africa was preceded by decades (if not centuries) of institutionalized White minority rule, while in the West, White Christians have only recently become a minority. But the threat of losing power to people of color is a striking common thread.

The issue here, though, is not so much about people’s skin color in and of itself. It is about the real and perceived injustices that skin color implies, sometimes genuinely and oftentimes superficially and inaccurately.

For many “people of color,” they are trying to impose their interpretation of “justice” onto Western institutions across government, education, academia, media, and culture — including but certainly not limited to the oversimplified, black and white (no pun intended) “oppressor-oppressed” mindset.

As more and more Western institutions are employing “people of color” — which is, of course, perfectly fine, so long as they are truly qualified for the positions — more and more Western institutions now explicitly or implicitly promote the narrative that the Jews are part of the “oppressor class.” And, by extension, that Israel is at fault no matter what it does, such as achieving what appears to be an all-time low 1.5-to-1 ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties.

No reasonable person is pretending like innocent people are not dying (like they do in every war, even when the most professional and ethical armies are involved), but the people who increasingly run Western institutions are completely ignoring the Palestinians’ rampant war crimes, including:

• Combatants dressed in civilian clothes

• Commandeering aid trucks at gunpoint

• Using cover of civilian areas to attack Israel and the IDF

• Withholding and stealing food from Gazans

• Refusing to release more than 100 hostages, including a 1-year-old boy, women, and the elderly

What’s more, Western politicians (including “the leader of the free world,” U.S. President Joe Biden) are treating this war against Israel as if it was another political point of compromise, and not the primary reality: Hamas is a terrorist organization and they need to unconditionally give all the hostages back and give up governing power of Gaza. Period.

As it stands, this progressively new version of “the West” puts it at odds with Israel, a country that lives on the border of “the East” but has far more in common with long-held traditions in “the West” — namely, democratic values.

Still, many politicians in Western countries — such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France — have begun calling for an arms embargo against Israel in its response to the Hamas-led October 7th massacres. Their basis for this call is not rooted in fact or data, but based on some spectrum that includes incompetence, gullibility, populism, bribes (from Qatari and Iranian sources), and antisemitism.

Just so you understand how ludicrous these calls are, the head of Hezbollah just gave a speech in which he bragged that Israel will soon be defeated via the pressure that the West is placing on the Jewish state. In other words, a terrorist organization designated by the West is cheering on the West.

Here is another observation: Those who understand how militaries and wars work are the biggest defenders of Israel, while those who do not know the first thing about militaries and war are Israel’s biggest critics.

I know, I know, many “progressives” believe that we should live in a world totally free of militaries and thus wars, which in theory would be nice, but in reality this line of thinking is a self-defeating death sentence.

Hence why “optics” are a feature of “progressive” ideology. Utopian, empathetic narratives trump harsh truths and ugly realities. Magical thinking and socioeconomic illiteracy pass for “policy.” For example, they describe master plans to grow the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out”— which is, if one pauses to reflect on it, an alarming concept.

With regard to foreign policy, future historians may well point to the last 12 years of Western weaknesses (both internal and external) that triggered the downfall of the West, including:

• Overly liberal immigration policies

• No guard rails for individual freedoms, such as freedom of speech, such that it is conflated with hate speech

• In 2012, then U.S.-President Barack Obama set a “red line” with Syria on the use of chemical weapons in its civil war. A year later, the Syrian president gassed and killed 1,400 civilians. The West did nothing.

• In 2014, Russia invaded Crimea. The West did nothing.

• In 2015, the West signed the dismal, no-good Iranian nuclear deal, positioning Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and providing it with billions of dollars that it ultimately uses for Islamic-inspired terrorism and war which destabilize the Middle East and incite Western-despising terrorism across the world.

• In 2021, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan in a sloppy withdrawal leading to the collapse of the country, effectively handing weapons and control to the Taliban.

• In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, the West has slow-walked military support to Ukraine, failing to help the Ukrainians win the war.

• Now, the West is holding back Israel from defeating Hamas in Gaza, and quickly abandoning more than 100 abductees because of “the Palestinians” (who have never done anything, nor promise to do anything, for the benefit of the West).

That is to say: The West has been signaling weakness after weakness to its enemies, both abroad and within its very own countries.

“Being weak towards your enemies (Iran) and harsh towards your allies (Israel) is a strategy that has never proven itself,” wrote Amichai Chikli, an Israeli minister.

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Turns out, an ultra-conservative political group in Iran recently said that slain Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi was involved in the planning and execution of the October 7th Hamas-led massacres in Israel. Hence why the IDF just assassinated him in an Iranian consulate building in Damascus, Syria — and why it is so obvious that Iran and even Qatar were significantly involved in October 7th, despite so many Western politicians trying to lie to us that they were not.

While the West sits on its hands about the Iranians and the Qataris, Israel’s war in Gaza is an attempt at cleaning up its mistakes of failed policies across some three decades of dealing with the Strip, a tentacle of the Iranian and Qatari octopus. Another tentacle, Hezbollah in Lebanon, could be next. We can call it a “better late than never” attitude, which is still too early to analyze for its effectiveness, or lack thereof.

On the other hand, the West’s increasingly predominant approach to their recent blunders, both in foreign policy and otherwise, has become some combination of lying, cover-ups, bribery, lack of accountability, cockiness, incompetence and, of course, optics — all of which endangers the West’s global dominance in the good sense of the word. That is, in protecting individual freedoms, rights, liberties, and other inherently Western values.

Even the not-so-sharp Boris Johnson knows this to be true. The former British prime minister sharply criticized the growing calls in his country to stop the sale of weapons to the IDF, writing:

“If you want an example of the death wish of Western civilization, I give you the current proposal from members of the British establishment that this country should ban arms sales to Israel.”¹

“We are being asked to shun the Israelis, to mount a total moral repudiation of Israel — when that country has only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since World War II; and when 130 hostages, including, for heaven’s sake, a baby, are being kept in dungeons in Gaza by their jihadi captors; and when the release of those hostages, it cannot be stated too often, would mean the immediate withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces and the end of the conflict.”

“How can we get things so wrong, so upside down? What has come over us?”

And as one social media user noted:

“If ‘murderous terrorists must enjoy impunity if they hide behind civilians’ becomes American doctrine, woe unto all of us.”²

Ultimately, the world has become a much more dangerous place because the West is failing to show up without reservations and pull unapologetic punches. One social media user described her experience as a Jew in the Soviet Union, and it should be a stark, urgent warning to all Jews across the world, that we must elect leaders who are keen on dominantly restoring the West’s strengths in our world. She wrote:

“I grew up in the Soviet Union. I was terrified to talk about me being Jewish. I was physically beaten up multiple times for being Jewish. There was one entire year when I was not allowed by anyone in my entire grade to speak to me. Because I was Jewish.”³

In Israel, we understand these sentiments all too well. And thus, we know that these trends in the West need to stop now or, dare I say, hell is coming. The world is a much safer place when the West leads, and it can quickly become a living hell when the West fails to do so.

Most Israelis — and by extension, most Jews — realize that now is the time to show strength, solidarity, and leadership, and to follow through on our commitments to our allies and the world order. We owe nothing less to our children, especially after much of the world watched as six million Jews were exterminated for the crime of being Jews.

In another falsified “never again” moment, much of the world is now watching as we were once again brutally massacred on October 7th — for being Jews. And yet, there are so many people in the West who are now attempting to impose ultimatums solely on Israel, because we are Jews, or who are simply “going about their business” because it does not directly affect them.

Don’t they know that every empire which opposed us, disappeared?

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We are witnessing the decline and decimation of the West in real-time, from within Western institutions. Just as strength enhances deterrence, weakness enables more bad actors, and the latter is what the West continues to demonstrate as Iran and Qatar jump in joy.

This Israel-Hamas war is just a small chapter within the growing encyclopedia of the Islamic war against the West — a war in which a growing number of Western “leaders” are incompetent, or even worse, complicit. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Antony Blinken, Emmanuel Macron, Penny Wong, and David Cameron are a few names that immediately come to mind.

When the dust inevitably settles, you can thank Israel for getting the job done and not giving up on the West, as most of us know and love it. But in doing so, the Jewish state might have to become a “pariah state” not least to survive.

So be it.

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1. “BORIS JOHNSON: It would be insane for Britain to ban arms sales to Israel. The sooner we denounce the idea, the better.” Daily Mail.

2. Kamel Amin Thaabet on X

3. Olia on X