The ’I don’t support Israel’ conversation needs to stop.

The real problem isn’t Israel or Zionism. It’s whether Western civilization still matters.

photo: Taylor Brandon/Unsplash

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At some point over the last few decades, “I don’t support Israel” became a makeshift virtue badge, a way for people to signal solidarity without ever interrogating what they were actually defending.

But the truth is simple: This conversation has never really been about supporting Israel. It’s about supporting the core values that built the West — values Israel embodies more consistently and courageously than almost any other nation under siege.

When people, particularly in the West, say “I support Israel,” what they are really saying, whether they realize it or not, is that they support the basic moral framework that makes free societies possible. When Westerners say, “I don’t support Israel,” what they are really saying is that they reject the very values that make their own freedoms possible, even as they continue to benefit from them.

So what are those values? They include the rule of law, individual rights, religious freedom, equality before the state, protection for minorities, democratic accountability, and the belief that ideas win through debate — not intimidation, mob pressure, or violence. These are the values that allow pluralistic societies to function. They are the values that make it possible for people from every background to live with personal autonomy. They are the values that millions of immigrants seek when they leave societies plagued by corruption, repression, or theocracy and come to the West for a better life.

Of course, none of this means the West is spotless. Every civilization has dark chapters, including across the West. But the crucial point that grievance culture ignores is this: The West did not invent any of these evils. Slavery predates the West by thousands of years. Racism, tribalism, conquest, and oppression were the default state of human history across every continent. These weren’t Western inventions; they were human ones. What made the West different was not that it participated in humanity’s oldest sins, but that it eventually developed the moral and philosophical tools to challenge them.

It was in the West that abolition movements grew powerful enough to eradicate the global slave trade; it was in the West that the idea of universal human rights was first articulated; it was in Western democracies that individuals gained freedoms unimaginable in the ancient or medieval world. If anything, the West’s willingness to confront its failures is proof of its strength, not a reason to tear it down. No civilization has written more laws, built more institutions, or fought more internal battles to correct its own injustices.

Grievance culture depends on a myth: that Western flaws are uniquely monstrous and therefore uniquely disqualifying. It ignores the fact that every society on earth, including those now held up as moral counterexamples, committed similar or worse wrongs without ever developing the means or the desire to undo them. This doesn’t excuse Western history; it contextualizes it. It shows that moral progress is hard-won and far from universal—and that Western values, precisely because they enabled that progress, are worth defending rather than dismantling.

To pretend the West is singularly guilty is not moral clarity; it’s illiteracy, and I’m being kind. The real story of the West is not perfection, but aspiration: the ongoing struggle to overcome the very injustices that once defined human civilization. That struggle, not the sins it fought against, is what makes the West exceptional.

And yes, some of the West’s old injustices still linger. But the way these shortcomings are weaponized today depends on a dishonest comparison. If the West is measured against a utopia — an imagined society with perfect virtue, perfect equality, perfect justice — then of course it looks like a disappointment. Any real society would. Utopia doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth, and it never has. Judging the West against the standards of a fantasy is an easy way to declare it a failure without ever engaging with reality.

But if we compare the West to the actual world we live in — to the limited educational opportunities and deficient health care systems in the Global South, to authoritarian Russia and China and India, to repressive theocracies in the Middle East — the picture becomes unmistakably clear. The West is not perfect, but it is easily the best place on Earth for the average person to live. Freedom of speech, independent courts, rights for women and minorities, protections for dissent, and access to opportunity are not global norms; they are Western achievements.

This is why so many millions of people flee toward the West and not away from it. They come because even with its flaws, the West offers stability, dignity, opportunity, and rights that simply do not exist in most of the world. The proof is in the behavior of human beings, not in the slogans of activists: People vote with their feet, and they overwhelmingly choose the West. That fact alone should end the debate about whether Western values are worth defending. They are not merely preferable; they are the best framework humanity has ever built for ordinary people trying to live free, meaningful, self-directed lives.

And yet, this is the part that so many Westerners stupidly ignore: If you choose to live in the West, you are choosing its value system. That doesn’t mean abandoning your cultural identity or customs. The West, at its best, invites immigrants to honor them alongside the shared civic norms that hold a diverse society together. Western multiculturalism isn’t about dissolving into one homogenous blob; it’s about the remarkable experiment of many cultures coexisting under a common set of freedoms — but still buying into a common culture. You don’t have to stop being who you are to participate. You just have to respect the system that allows everyone else to do the same. It’s actually a pretty simple concept.

Israel is one of the few countries that truly lives out this ideal in the hardest possible circumstances, while surrounded by neighbors who openly reject every one of these principles. The two million Israeli Arab citizens vote, serve in parliament, have access to independent courts, and live under constitutional protections that do not exist anywhere else in the region. Religious minorities, outspoken critics of the government — all enjoy rights in Israel that would be unthinkable in virtually any other Middle Eastern and North African country.

And, no, we don’t need to remind people that “Israel isn’t perfect.” What a bunch of rubbish. When people say, “Israel isn’t perfect,” as if they’ve just delivered a profound moral insight, it’s hard not to laugh. Because it’s as if perfection is the standard by which any nation has ever been judged. Nobody demands that kind of disclaimer when talking about France or Canada or Japan or Brazil. Nobody prefaces their support for Ukraine with, “Well, obviously Ukraine isn’t perfect.” Only Israel is subjected to this ritualized, preemptive apology, as though its right to exist or defend itself hinges on a universal acknowledgment of its flaws.

The real question is this: Does Israel, like the West more broadly, aspire toward values that protect human dignity, pluralism, and individual rights? Absolutely. Does it have institutions capable of self-correction, such as courts, elections, a free press, and opposition parties? Yes, and far more robustly than most of the world. That’s the conversation that matters, not whether a country at war is sufficiently flawless to satisfy the moral vanity of people who treat politics like a high school sporting event.

The obsession with demanding that Israel confess its imperfections is also a dodge — a way for critics to shift the burden of proof onto Israel while excusing or ignoring the brutality of its enemies. It’s a moral trick: hold Israel to an impossible standard while holding Hamas and its chief sponsors in Iran and Qatar to no standard at all. It’s the same broken logic that pretends Western nations need to apologize for existing before being allowed to defend themselves.

Hence why the West is in a moment of profound confusion, where moral relativism, ideological extremism, and the fear of being labeled “controversial” have many people retreating from their own principles. Israel, in this moment, exposes that crisis with painful clarity. If you cannot say which side stands for individual liberty and which side glorifies death and destruction, the issue isn’t Israel. The issue is you.

“But Israel leveled half of Gaza after October 7th,” the haters claim. And maybe that’s a good thing, because here’s the uncomfortable truth that so many Westerners keeps avoiding: Maybe the real message that needs to be sent — not just to Hamas, but to Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, and every other group or state testing the free world — is that democracies will not roll over when attacked. A society that will not defend itself will not survive. Pretending otherwise is a dangerous fantasy. The moral responsibility for war always lies with the aggressor, not with the nation protecting its citizens from slaughter.

“Okay, fine, but disproportionate force is unfair to the everyday citizens,” they’ll rebut — revealing, again, a fundamental misunderstanding of both ethics and warfare. “Disproportionate” is a meaningless term when applied by people whose entire analysis comes from a handful of videos on social media. In practice, what they’re really arguing is that the aggressor should get to decide the limits of the defender’s response, a position as illogical as it is immoral. It’s a way of saying, “You may defend yourself, but only in the ways your enemy finds convenient.” No serious society can accept that. No one would apply that standard to their own nation, their own home, or their own family.

In the real world, the responsibility for civilian suffering lies with the party that initiates aggression and embeds itself among civilians, not with the democracy forced to stop them. And Israel, more than almost any country in modern history, has repeatedly demonstrated a sincere desire for coexistence — through peace offers, withdrawals, and policies rooted in the Western belief that different peoples can live side by side with dignity. But coexistence requires two sides. If one side chooses terror, hostage-taking, human shields, and genocidal behavior, then it is that side that has chosen the rules of engagement.

When your enemy decides to “play dirty,” the defender does not gain moral points for losing politely. A state’s first obligation is to protect its own citizens, not to compensate for the recklessness or cruelty of its adversaries. The moral duty to safeguard civilians in Gaza rests first and foremost with the authorities who rule Gaza — not with Israel, and not with the West. Expecting Israel to absorb attacks or fight with one hand tied behind its back is not humanitarianism; it is a demand for national suicide dressed up as moral concern.

Calling this “self-defense” isn’t spin; it’s the most basic definition of the term. Every country has the right, indeed the obligation, to neutralize forces that seek its destruction and implement credible deterrence against future threats. If Westerners cannot say that plainly, if we cannot recognize that protecting free societies sometimes requires brute force, then it has lost not only its moral compass, but also its will to continue existing as a civilization.

The critics may not like this, but the alternative to a society willing to defend itself is not peace; it’s surrender. And surrender means going backwards to socialism, communism, totalitarianism, and theocracies. That’s the irony of the so-called “progressives” — so many of their core policies would actually take us backward, not forward. Being well-intentioned, in this regard, is meaningless.

And here’s what else needs to be said: Western societies are struggling not because their values are weak, but because too many people have stopped believing they’re worth defending. You can’t enjoy all the benefits of freedom while sneering at the civilization that gave it to you. You can’t demand limitless rights while refusing to acknowledge the responsibilities that come with them. And you certainly can’t condemn Israel for fighting enemies who reject basic human rights while benefiting from the very freedoms those enemies would strip from you in a heartbeat.

This is why the entire framing of “supporting Israel” is inadequate. It reduces a civilizational question to a geopolitical slogan. The real divide today is not Israel versus “Palestine.” It’s free societies versus unfree ones. It’s cultures that believe in human dignity versus ideologies that sanctify brutality. It’s the West’s imperfect but noble commitment to liberty versus forces that have no interest in coexistence, pluralism, or peace.

Supporting Israel, then, is simply supporting the continuation of a world where free people can live without fear of annihilation for the crime of existing. It is supporting the idea that democracies have the right to defend themselves. It is supporting the principle that human life, every human life, has inherent worth. And it is supporting the belief that values matter more than performative hashtags.

In other words, one cannot support the free world and oppose Israel at the same time. It is logically impossible. To say you love or appreciate or support “the free world” while rejecting the one free society in the Middle East is like saying you believe in environmentalism — but hate trees. It’s wildly incoherent.

Opposing Israel, meanwhile, means siding (directly or indirectly) with forces that loathe every value Western societies depend on: open debate, equal rights, democratic governance, and the belief that life has sanctity outside the control of a ruling ideology. You can’t celebrate freedom while cheering against the people defending it on the world’s most hostile frontier.

In the end, the idea that you can pick and choose which democracies deserve support is a luxury belief. It’s moral cosplay. A free world that abandons its free allies is not a free world for long. Israel’s fight is the West’s fight, not because of sentimentality, but because the enemies of Israel and the enemies of the West are the same enemies — and their hatred is rooted in the same rejection of freedom.

To stand for the West is to stand for Israel. And to abandon Israel is to abandon the very values people in the West insist they hold dear.

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