Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson A common theme in writing about the Middle East is the separation between Hamas and the population of Gaza. Polls are quoted that show prior to October 7 Hamas was increasingly unpopular, allegedly because it was corrupt and had hijacked billions of dollars of foreign and international aid to divert it to […]

Victor Davis Hanson Much of the nation was shocked at what followed on campus after October 7. Professors on campuses throughout the United States were not shy in expressing their joy on hearing that Jews were murdered—“exhilarated” in the words of one Cornell professor. Some professors called for identifying and then following Jewish children, some

Victor Davis Hanson The support for the Hamas murderers of October 7 and visceral hatred of Israel displayed by the likely majority of the campus student body and faculty of our most elite institutions have put into jeopardy the entire Democratic coalition. Who actually is screaming, “Beat the fu—ing Jew” at UCLA? Or barricading Jewish

Victor Davis Hanson Things at home and abroad are bleak. Israel, alone in the world, struggles to destroy Hamas for murdering the greatest number of Jews in one day since the Holocaust. Yet in every major American city and on most elite campuses, Middle Eastern students and their leftist woke friends damn Israel. And they

Victor Davis Hanson The U.S. What is the American interest in the Gazan war? It is clearly threefold. One, America seeks to protect the only constitutional government in the Middle East from its myriad of Iranian terrorist proxies. Our role then is to provide Israel with enough weapons to replenish its stocks and survive, share

Victor Davis Hanson Russia Russia will not intervene to save Hamas or Hezbollah. It is broke, tied down in Ukraine, and despises Islam, as we saw when it flattened Chechnya. However, Putin also does all he can to weaken the U.S. So expect Russia to favor the terrorists, make it difficult for the IDF to

Victor Davis Hanson Qatar Like Turkey, by any classical definition, Qatar is belligerent and anti-American. It hosts the anti-Western propaganda megaphone of the Middle East Al Jazeera. It also courts the Hamas apparat, including those who helped plan the October 7 massacres. It is the financial conduit for most radical, anti-western terror groups. Yet Qatar

Victor Davis Hanson Then we come to the increasingly unambiguous role of Turkey. Ostensibly, Turkey is a critical U.S. and NATO ally. It possesses NATO’s largest military aside from America’s, and its geographical location is critical for NATO security concerns—controlling the historical Bosporus with its opening to the Black Sea and situated in the heart

Victor Davis Hanson Iran Iran believes in defense-in-depth. Such a strategy puts its well-armed pawns Hezbollah and Hamas on the front lines as a buffer between Tehran and the infidels: the Arabs take the risk and casualties, and the Iranians thereby hope they inflict some damage on Israel or the U.S. while avoiding a deadly

Hamas Hamas was quite clever in lying to the IDF, Mossad, and the Israeli government that it was finally resigned to fostering its own internal development. Its guest workers inside Israel—sometimes 20,000 a day—supposedly were emissaries of goodwill and would spike prosperity in Gaza. Hamas talked of its rivalries with the Palestinian Authority and for