The Israeli Occupation That Must End

Israel disrupts a long-established moral image of the Jew. For many Western observers, this is aesthetically offensive.

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

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

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Israel’s alleged occupation of Judea and Samaria and Gaza grabs the headlines but is nothing compared to its biggest occupation, which is that of the Western mind.

The Jewish state has no interest in this occupation, but the Western mind will not let it go, no matter how many stage hypnosis tricks Israel pulls to break itself free. Israel has psychologically occupied the Western imagination.

A country smaller than many American states, containing a fraction of the population of the Middle East and fighting conflicts that are nowhere near the world’s largest or bloodiest, commands an astonishing share of Western moral attention. It is discussed with an intensity normally reserved for superpowers, civilisational threats, and celebrities behaving badly in restaurants.

Governments issue statements. Universities convene panels and protests. Artists sign letters. Trade unions pass motions. Actors who cannot locate their own dignity suddenly locate “Palestine.”

Israeli military operations are global emotional events, and its elections are a referendum on humanity. Every Israeli minister’s idiotic remark is treated as a dispatch from the national soul.

Wars elsewhere may kill vastly more people, erase cities, uproot millions, and continue for years with scarcely a march, mural, or celebrity petition. Yet Israel mobilises the conscience industry in realtime.

The main reason they do this to Israel is because they are rabid running-dog antisemites. Everything else is a footnote, even though they lie and claim their concerns are humanitarian.

Humanitarian does not come close to explaining this phenomenon. If suffering were the animating concern, attention would follow suffering. If it were occupation, the world would maintain equal fervour for every disputed territory and conquered population. If it were violations of international law, dictatorships, militias and regional powers would receive scrutiny proportionate to their conduct.

They do not. They reserve their condemnation for Israel. It performs a psychological function for a Western culture increasingly uncertain of its history, ashamed of its power, and desperate to display moral purity without paying a serious price.

Condemning Israel is cheap virtue. It costs the activist nothing. No sacrifice is required, nor is any tyrant confronted. No dangerous ideology need be named, nor any minority within one’s own society challenged. There is no risk of retaliation from China, Iran, Russia, or one of too many armed, demented Islamist movements. Israel will not imprison the protester, murder the journalist or abduct the professor.

It may issue an irritated press release. Such courage.

Israel is the perfect object of Western moral aggression because it is powerful enough to blame and civilised enough to tolerate the blame. This is the essential arrangement. The activist can denounce a state as genocidal while relying upon the liberal order that allows the denunciation. The academic can compare Israel to the Nazis without fearing that Israeli agents will arrive at dawn. The politician can threaten sanctions, knowing that Israeli trade, diplomacy and institutional restraint will continue.

Israel is treated as uniquely monstrous partly because it is uniquely safe to abuse. The genuinely monstrous are less convenient. They do not attend conferences, submit legal briefs, investigate their soldiers, tolerate hostile newspapers, or permit organisations dedicated to their own delegitimization to operate openly. There is no criticism in the Western press anywhere near as ferocious as that found in some Hebrew-language mastheads.

Instead, they shoot people.

Western moral exhibitionism flourishes best when aimed at a democracy. That is why Israel’s occupation of the Western imagination has become so complete. It enables people to experience the fantasy of “resistance” without encountering anything remotely resembling danger.

They are brave precisely in a way that requires no bravery. They can imagine themselves “standing against power” while joining governments, universities, newspapers, cultural institutions, and international organisations in condemning the same tiny country.

Israel also provides Western societies with a way to displace their own historical guilt.

Europe spent centuries persecuting Jews, excluding them, expelling them, converting them, ghettoising them, and eventually industrialising their murder. Having failed catastrophically to protect Jews as a minority, parts of Europe now lecture Jews on the morality of possessing a state.

The transformation is impressive. The continent that rendered Jewish defencelessness fatal now treats Jewish self-defence as morally distasteful. It is almost as though Europe prefers Jews in their traditional role: vulnerable, eloquent, culturally productive, and dependent upon others’ goodwill. The dead Jew is mourned, while the armed Jew is interrogated. The Jew fleeing persecution is a victim. The Jew preventing persecution is an aggressor.

It is hard to psychoanalyse countries, as opposed to people, but the whole hypocritical spectacle is surely some kind of nostalgia disguised as ethics.

Israel disrupts a long-established moral image of the Jew. It insists that Jewish history did not culminate in permanent victimhood but created soldiers, borders, intelligence agencies, aircraft, and the capacity to impose consequences upon enemies.

For many Western observers, this is aesthetically offensive. They prefer the Jew as moral witness, not political actor. They admire Jewish suffering when it can be placed in glass cases, accompanied by somber music, and safely separated from current policy. They are less comfortable when Jews draw practical conclusions from that suffering. “Never again” is moving at a memorial service but becomes problematic when treated as a defence doctrine.

Israel’s enemies understand this discomfort better than the West and exploit it ruthlessly. They frame the conflict through the moral vocabulary most likely to inflame Western guilt: “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “indigenous rights,” “white supremacy,” and “genocide.” Western leaders are mainly little more than puppets. Jerusalem’s foes do not choose this language for descriptive accuracy but for emotional utility.

The West places Israel inside the West’s private chamber of shame. Once Israel is labelled colonial, every Jewish town becomes a “settlement.” Once it is labelled apartheid, every security measure becomes “racial domination.” Once it is labelled “genocidal,” every civilian death becomes proof of intention. The argument is now disconnected from anything Israel actually did. It concerns which Western sin Israel can be made to symbolise.

This is why evidence rarely ends the debate. Facts cannot refute symbols. They are sustained by emotional need.

Israel is made to carry the West’s accumulated guilt because much of the West can no longer distinguish between remorse and self-hatred. Rather than studying history carefully, it converts history into a morality play featuring permanent categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.”

Israel then creates a problem. Jews were the West’s archetypal victims. Yet in Israel, Jews possess power. The theory cannot accommodate a people who have been persecuted but can now defend themselves, even against incredible odds. The categories must therefore be rearranged. Jews become “white,” Israel becomes “colonial,” and Palestinianism becomes “indigenous liberation.”

The hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries disappear from the narrative because their existence interferes with the script. Jewish historical ties to the Land of Israel become mythology. Arab rejectionism becomes “resistance.” A complex regional conflict is squeezed into a template imported from a different continent and historical experience.

It is a world where facts have been evicted like a delinquent tenant. The Western imagination has no room for them.

This obsession also allows people to avoid more troubling realities closer to home. European states confronting social fragmentation, religious extremism, declining confidence, and demographic anxiety can instead discuss Israel. American campuses incapable of protecting Jewish students can organise seminars on Israeli power. Governments failing to integrate minorities or combat antisemitism can announce recognition of a Palestinian state.

Israel becomes a giant moral diversion. The further a society declines, the more energetically it may denounce the Jewish state. No other country is interpreted so metaphysically.

When France acts badly, France has acted badly. When Britain makes a disastrous decision, Britain has made a disastrous decision. When Israel errs, Zionism is “exposed.” The mistake becomes ontology, and the incident becomes essence.

The disproportionate attention aimed at Israel also harms the Palestinians. It encourages the erroneous belief that international outrage can substitute for political realism. Every protest, resolution, and accusation reinforces the fantasy that Israel can be isolated into disappearance, that pressure will achieve what war and rejectionism failed to achieve, and that Palestinian leaders need not make difficult compromises because Western activists will maintain maximalist hopes on their behalf.

All of this is fantasy. The nuclear-armed Jewish state is going nowhere. The fantasy that Palestinians can destroy Israel rewards theatre over nation-building, prizes slogans over institutions, grievance over competence, and victimhood over responsibility.

Palestinians become permanent symbols in someone else’s moral drama. Their suffering is displayed, their rage romanticised, and their political failures excused. What they are rarely offered is the dignity of adult expectations.

So Israel’s occupation of the Western imagination traps everyone. It traps Westerners inside a feverish morality play that makes them less capable of understanding power, war and responsibility. It traps Palestinians inside a culture of international indulgence that transforms every failure into further evidence of victimhood. And it traps Israelis inside a global argument in which their state is not judged as a country but prosecuted as a symbol.

This is the occupation that must end.

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