It is illegal to be pro-Israel.
Welcome to the year 2025, where spiritual leaders help fund terrorists and European bureaucrats hallucinate Israeli Club Meds in the rubble of Hamas bunkers.
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We’ve been thinking about Israel all wrong.
I saw a photo of a sticker slapped on a lamp post the other day. It said:
“How to spot colonizers: 67 countries speak English, 21 countries speak Spanish, 29 speak French, 22 speak Arabic. Only one speaks Hebrew.”
And that, in one sentence, says it all. Hebrew — an ancient language, revived from near extinction by Jews returning to their indigenous homeland — spoken in only one country on Earth. That country is Israel.
So tell me again, who exactly is the colonizer?
The war against Israel today isn’t just being fought on the battlefield. It’s being fought on college campuses, in the media, on social media, and in the streets. The battleground is not just land; it’s truth. And increasingly, it feels like it’s illegal to be pro-Israel.
Protesters chant slogans they don’t understand, wave flags they couldn’t locate on a map, and parrot hashtags that conflate wildly different concepts like decolonization and jihad. But their ignorance isn’t harmless. It’s lethal.
What so many anti-Israel protesters fail to grasp is this: October 7th wasn’t uniquely horrific because of how many people were killed. It was uniquely horrific because of how they were killed — and why.
Babies burned alive. Families slaughtered in their beds. Teenagers raped and then executed on camera. It was not a tragedy of numbers. It was a tragedy of intent, a bloodbath meant to terrorize, humiliate, and make a point. A point that Israel has no right to exist.
And yet, Israel is the one on trial (literally).
While Hamas leaders lounge in undisclosed locations plotting their next war crime, Israel’s elected officials are being threatened with arrest by the International Criminal Court — an institution whose own chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, is now under investigation after multiple allegations of sexual coercion against a staff member.
According to the Wall Street Journal, these allegations raise serious questions about whether his decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was an act of justice — or a strategic deflection.
This is the moral theater of our times: where alleged sexual predators with gavels go after the leaders of the only country in the Middle East that protects women, minorities, and the rule of law.
And if that wasn’t absurd enough, in his very first Sunday blessing, the newly anointed Pope Leo XIV called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza — and the delivery of humanitarian aid into the Strip, so that it can continue to be stolen by Hamas. Apparently, holiness now means helping terrorists restock.
Not to be outdone, former European Commission vice president Josep Borrell recently declared that Israel is “ethnically cleansing Gaza” to build a beachfront paradise, and claimed the explosive force dropped on Gaza is three times greater than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
“We are witnessing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of World War II,” Borrell said while accepting a human rights award, of course, “for the sole purpose of creating a splendid holiday destination once the millions of tons of Gaza’s rubble are cleared and the Palestinians are either gone or dead.”
Yes, you heard that right: The Jewish state, 80 years after Auschwitz, is being accused of launching a genocidal war because it really wants a resort. It takes a special kind of moral inversion to look at a war started by a genocidal terror group, and conclude that the Jews are in it for the real estate.
And with no trace of self-awareness, Borrell even referenced the Babyn Yar massacre (where nearly 34,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis in 1941), saying: “We use a double standard when judging crimes against humanity, depending on who commits them.”
Yes, Josep — and you just proved it.
But then, astonishingly, he turned that into a justification for blaming the Jews anyway: “Eliminating human beings because they belong to an ethnic group is one of the greatest atrocities humanity has committed, and the Jews paid an enormous price. It was not the Palestinians who killed the Jews, and we do not have the right to pass on our responsibility or make them pay to ease our guilt.”
In other words: Yes, the Holocaust was bad, but don’t expect us to support the Jewish state if that means confronting today’s Islamist fascists. Welcome to the year 2025, where spiritual leaders help fund terrorists and European bureaucrats hallucinate Israeli Club Meds in the rubble of Hamas bunkers.
Only Israel can be attacked by terrorist armies on seven fronts — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, terror cells in the West Bank, and lone wolves abroad — and still be labeled the aggressor by the United Nations and its organs. What other country is asked to offer its throat politely to the knife in the name of “restraint”?
Many Palestinians and their Western sympathizers seem to believe that their wars don’t count as wars because they feel oppressed. But being oppressed doesn’t grant you diplomatic immunity from moral accountability. If anything, 77 years of Israel being unreasonably reasonable has taught them that terrorism pays. That if they scream loudly enough, burn flags intensely enough, and cry “genocide” long enough, the world will cave.
And the world has.
To the point that now, the Palestinian cause has been distorted into a trendy all-purpose activism badge. “From the River to the Sea” has become a litmus test of progressive purity, even as it calls for the annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state. But no, the Palestinian cause is not every cause. That’s like saying alcohol is for every age.
It’s not human rights activism. It’s not a liberation movement.
“This is the most corrupt revolution led by the most dangerous con artists of all-time,” said Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas founder. If anyone would know, it’s him.
What we’re witnessing is not an uprising of “the oppressed.” It’s a theater of the absurd, where lies wear the costume of justice, and truth is shouted down as hate speech. Nothing says cult like rallying millions to believe in a completely fabricated narrative of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” — one that blames Israel for a war Hamas started and Hezbollah eagerly joined.
Let’s be clear: This is not the U.S. in Iraq. This is not a question of “occupation.” This is not about statehood. The reason there isn’t a Palestinian state today is not because of Israel. It’s because every time the Palestinians were offered one, they said no.
It is not most Israelis who reject a two-state solution. It is most Palestinians who do. And so, Israel is simply giving them what they have consistently asked for: a one-state reality or the current status quo. That’s not occupation; that’s a reaction.
Meanwhile, Western “progressives” are busy contorting themselves into philosophical pretzels over the word proportionality. But let’s examine that word. Because Arabs and Westerners understand it very differently.
In Arab culture, proportionality traces back to “blood for blood” tribal justice from the Jahiliya — the pre-Islamic era where if one person was killed, any member of the killer’s family could be hunted down and murdered in return. Even Muhammad called this barbaric and sought to end it. In the West, proportionality is about deterrence. It’s based on intention and logic. What punishment will make future crimes less likely? What will prevent the next October 7th?
So here’s the question: Why are so many Western liberals abandoning their own cultural understanding of proportionality and siding with the worldview of the Jahiliya? Is it guilt? Is it cowardice? Is it just trend-chasing performative rage?
Whatever it is, it’s not progressive. It’s not enlightened. And it’s certainly not just.
Israel, today, has become the world’s scapegoat, a modern-day Job1 being blamed for its own suffering. A nation of Holocaust survivors, accused of becoming Nazis. A country whose military drops leaflets, sends texts, makes phone calls, and delays missions to avoid civilian casualties — called genocidal by people who’ve never heard of Hamas’ charter, which calls for the murder of Jews everywhere.
When it becomes illegal — culturally, socially, professionally — to say the only democracy in the Middle East has a right to defend itself, we’ve lost the plot.
Job is a biblical figure who appears most prominently as the titular character of the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). In that biblical text, Job is described as a righteous, God-fearing, and prosperous man.
Joshua, you’re a gifted writer and it’s amazing how spot on your analysis is. Your analogies are remarkably telling. In a sense it’s unfortunate that your remarkable writing is wasted on moronic “progressives” who are as barbarous as radical Islam. I’m an old disabled Jew who lives in the U.S. but my heart and soul lives in Israel. Am Yisrael Chai.
Palestine was the moniker applied by the British Empire to Judea. Everyone there was a Palestinian in but the Arab traders left over from the Ottoman Empire refused the moniker publicly. It was a calculation of Arafat to get a people to call themselves that name which the PLO indicated was a falsehood attempt to reconquer the area. It is imperative NOT to give in to this misnomer. I call Arabs living in Gaza Gazans. Lets all do this.