Hating Israel Fatigue

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Hamas or Israeli Values?

Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel.

Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy.

As far as tolerance goes, in the entire region, only in Israel is it legal to criticize political or religious figures. Only there can one choose to adopt an openly gay or trans lifestyle. Only there can an apostate renounce one’s religion or urge others to do the same. And only there can Christians establish a new church almost anywhere they choose.

Some of Israel’s fiercest feminist critics who wear miniskirts and halter tops, some of its most severe gay opponents, and some of its more virulent trans adversaries would in all likelihood be summarily arrested in most Middle Eastern countries if they dared to speak, act, or wear clothes as they do in the West—except, of course, in democratic and free Israel.

In terms of protest, scream publicly in Tel Aviv, “I no longer believe in the Jewish faith, and I hate the current government of Israel”—and there is little chance of being arrested.

Chant the same publicly in any Muslim country in the Middle East—“I no longer believe in Islam, and I hate our current government”—and the loud critic would be either jailed or beaten by a street mob or worse.

The New, Old Hatred

On the Left—whether that is defined as the ossifying Democratic Party or the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, or both—it is now a general rule that no candidate can win a primary election in a blue state if the candidate is on record supporting Israel.

In practice, no Jewish American can now be nominated on any national Democratic Party ticket.

Once extreme but now mainstream Democratic candidates, officeholders, and influencers, from Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and podcaster Hasan Piker, call for the virtual end of Israel as we currently know it. Most Democrat candidates prefer to be seen on the stump with the antisemitic, America-trashing Hasan Piker rather than with their own Senate Minority Leader, Senator Chuck Schumer.

On campuses, left-wing students, along with foreign student visitors from the Middle East, openly cheered on the Hamas massacre of 1,200 civilians and soldiers (including 46 Americans) on October 7, 2023.

Some 80 percent of the once pro-Israel Democrats now view Israel unfavorably. Their hatred explains why once strong nationwide support for Israel has fallen from about 80 percent to 60 percent.

On the extreme Right, not a day goes without podcasters Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, or Candace Owens charging Israel and its supporters with some nefarious conspiracies, from secretly directing U.S. policy in the Middle East and suppressing the Epstein files, to orchestrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk and having advanced knowledge of, or at least a hand in, the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now orphaned, but once hyper-MAGA, politicos like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Kent, and Thomas Massie blame much of their own estrangement from the Trump administration and their now inert political careers on the influence of Jewish money and pro-Zionist Jews.

On examination, their accusations make no sense. But they do reveal a sudden recrudescence of a reductionist and ancient hatred.

Irrational, Unhinged Venom

Is America really a captive of Jewish influence?

Since its founding, Israel has contributed about $300 million, adjusted for inflation, to U.S. universities and nonprofits.

In contrast, the Gulf states alone have given more than $12 billion.

Our chief rival, a hostile China, has donated more than $6 billion. Yet somehow Israel is accused of buying and leveraging U.S. institutions.

Members and close associates of the Bush, Biden, and Trump families have partnered in lucrative investments with rich Gulf-state entities. Yet we hear that pro-Israel American lobbying groups like AIPAC—whose money comes exclusively from American citizens or residents—pose an existential threat to the U.S.

Since the beginning of the Ukraine War in February 2022, the U.S. has sent Ukraine nearly $200 billion in aggregate military and economic aid.

That sum is about 10 times the amount given to Israel in the same period, during which Israel was likewise at war. In that same timeframe, Israeli cities were targeted by more than 30,000 drones and missiles launched from terrorist entities in Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, and Yemen.

Characteristic of the current revulsion toward Israel and its supporters, Jews especially, is a barrage of untrue, selective, and hypocritical charges.

Israel is accused of “genocide” for waging war against Gaza, from which the October 7 massacre was launched, and killing tens of thousands of civilians—according to Hamas’s manipulated figures.

What is conveniently left out of those numbers: 1) Israel counters that some 20,000 or more of the fatalities were Hamas fighters, with thousands more abettors; 2) the total death figures are supplied to Western authorities solely by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization or its prejudicial UN affiliates; 3) Hamas deliberately uses its own civilians as shields, both above ground and in its massive billion-dollar tunnel labyrinth, paid for by misappropriated aid funding from naive Western groups and a corrupt UN.

The tunnels’ entries and exits were located, by design, beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. That choice was itself a damning indictment: Hamas expected Israel to be far more careful to avoid collateral damage to Gazan civilians than Hamas itself, which deliberately put them in the line of fire to save its own fighters.

Hamas’s logic was clear: the Israelis may spare us because they value Gazan lives more than we terrorists do, who use them as human shields.

Selective Venom

Hating Israel is a selective syndrome.

Israel’s critics conveniently ignore the genocidal efforts of Islamic terrorists in Nigeria who have killed thousands of innocents.

Did any of our protesting students cite the genocidal former Somali dictatorship of Siad Barre, which killed more than 200,000 fellow Muslim Somalis?

Do they remember the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11 by the Islamists of al-Qaeda?

Did the protesters at Stanford, Harvard, or Columbia ever blast the Sudanese Islamic killers who butchered more than 60,000?

Unlike the IDF, Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel, never phoned or texted Kurdish civilian apartment dwellers or small villages during its urban anti-insurgent operations, urging them to evacuate before the terrorists hiding among them were targeted.

John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, has found that in urban combat operations the combatant-to-civilian fatality ratio in Gaza runs between 1:1 and 1:2—far lower than the 1:9 ratio used by the UN.

Scholars have noted that the U.S. bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II—campaigns that by early 1945 were destroying the Axis wartime economies and shortening the war—as well as the bombing of urban areas in North Korea and Vietnam, killed far more civilians.

We should remember that more than 2,000 Gazan civilians enthusiastically joined the October 7 murderers, drawn by the gleeful news of easy opportunities to kill, rape, and steal from mostly unarmed Israeli women and children.

When Israeli hostages were bound and brought back to Gaza, even the Hamas terrorists had to protect their captives from Gazan civilian mobs who, in a bloodthirsty frenzy, tried to dismember them in the street.

Hypocrisies and Libels

Many other countries and peoples far better fit the left-wing/Islamist slur “settler colonialists” or “apartheidists” than do Israelis, who can claim that Jews have lived in their present-day homeland for at least 3,500 years.

In the parlance of the current Left, Arab Muslims “stole” their present homelands in the Middle East and North Africa from Romans and Greeks, who had predated them by some 800 years.

No one dares call President Xi of Communist China a “settler colonialist” for absorbing and colonizing Tibet after World War II.

Is China an “apartheid state” for putting a million Muslim Uyghurs in veritable concentration camps? What about Qatar? Should not such an “apartheid” nation be condemned on American campuses for ordering Christians to worship only in a few officially registered Christian churches, physically segregated and confined to a single, patrolled government enclave, Mesaimeer?

Who are the real apartheidists of Uganda—the hyper-rich Indian colonial overclass that chooses to cluster and segregate in upscale, separate neighborhoods, or the Ugandan majority who likely prefers they do?

No one accuses Zohran Mamdani (who promises to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal” if he sets foot in New York City) of being a late-arriving “settler colonialist” from Uganda, part of the “one-percenter” Indian community that somehow still controls 60–65 percent of that nation’s wealth.

As for the charge of “war criminal,” why does Mamdani not arrest any of Iran’s UN delegation who venture to New York, given that their government butchered more than 40,000 of its own citizens as recently as a few months ago? Does he define “war criminals” as Jews only?

Would Mamdani have arrested Rep. Ilhan Omar’s own late father, a former Somali colonel in the genocidal Siad Barre military? Remember, he fled to the United States to escape the revenge of his victims and to find sanctuary for his family in Minnesota.

As for “occupied lands” and “ethnic cleansing,” those charges better fit Azerbaijan, which just ethnically cleansed 150,000 Armenians. Does Harvard protest that atrocity, or Vladimir Putin’s rounding up of people from Russia’s own ethnic minority regions in Siberia to be wiped out and used as cannon fodder in Ukraine? Does Muslim Turkey get a pass for ethnically cleansing northern Cyprus of its ancient and indigenous Greek population and sending “settler colonialists” from Turkey to replace them?

Is tiny European Denmark a “colonialist” power for owning the underdeveloped, impoverished, vast, and far-distant North American territory of Greenland?

Are socialist Spain and its neo-communist prime minister Pedro Sánchez “settler colonialists” for retaining by force Spanish colonial enclaves on the Moroccan coast?

True and False Middle Eastern Friends

Survey the Middle East as allies—and weep.

One cannot find a single country that is more pro-American or pro-Western than Israel.

Iran has been a terrorist monstrosity for half a century; it has killed thousands of Americans with shaped charges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Syria was run by a genocidal Assad-kleptocratic regime for decades.

Qatar hosts the rabid anti-American propaganda organ Al Jazeera that hosted all sorts of anti-American terrorists.

Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.

Our “ally” Turkey cannot be trusted with American weapons, still less with American nuclear weapons, for fear it will share our technology with Russia, Iran, or China.

American diplomats have been butchered in Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Sudan.

We have waged war against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

The USS Cole was nearly sunk in Yemen, which continues to fire missiles at American ships.

Pakistan sheltered a mass murderer: Osama bin Laden.

And on and on.

The United States and Europe have suffered more than 200 major terrorist attacks from Muslim jihadists, both as immigrants and foreign residents, often with support from radical Islamists in the Middle East.

So it seems surreal to turn instead on our only time-tested ally, Israel. The new tolerance for hating Jews explains why they are now targets for more than 50 percent of all hate crimes reported in Mamdani’s New York. Armed guards now protect most synagogues in America from antisemitic terrorists, who turn out most often to be Muslim residents who, or whose forebears, originally stem from the Middle East.

American tourists were kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai, while American oil-company employees were murdered in Algeria.

After 9/11, few American tourists felt safe in the Middle East. But none feared Israeli or Jewish terrorists.

The October 7 Hatred Surge

Three recent chapters in the long history of antisemitism remain inexplicable.

First, hatred of Jews and Israel peaked immediately after the greatest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—weeks before Israel entered Gaza, and only after Hamas refused to surrender the masterminds of the slaughter or the 251 hostages. The Jewish crime, apparently, was being so easily murdered by Hamas.

The clearest sign of that Pavlovian hatred was the jubilation on the far Left and among Islamists—and the strange new alliance these seemingly disparate groups were already forming—over the ease with which so many mostly unarmed Jewish civilians had been butchered and the prospect of even more killing to follow.

The ghoulish celebrants were not concerned about mass murder, torture, or mutilation of the women, children, and elderly. Instead, they grew ecstatic at the prospect of still more medievalism and blood to come.

Hamas, the darling of American campuses and Muslim communities, issued Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase books to the invaders with instructions for the rapist-killers on how to say in Hebrew, “Take off your pants,” “Take off your clothes,” “Raise your hands and spread your legs.”

Second, none of the Israel-haters ever offers any alternative course that the Israelis should have taken to retrieve the hostages and punish the murderers.

Much less do they imagine what other nations might have done—the United States, France, or the United Kingdom—had terrorists conducted such a mass slaughter at numbers proportional to their far larger populations.

I doubt any other nation would have petitioned the beloved International Criminal Court to bring the Hamas killers to justice.

Its chief prosecutor, the Israel-hating Karim Khan, refused even to examine Israeli evidence and instead rushed to condemn Prime Minister Netanyahu as an international war criminal.

Perhaps Khan’s hatred of Israel was aimed at hiding the fact that the now-fired Khan was being accused by his own legal team of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. Who will police the police? Will Mayor Mamdani arrest the ICC predator if he lands at JFK Airport in New York City?

Third, when 6,000 Hamas terrorists and Gazan “civilians” invaded Israel, it was during an agreed-on peace. Indeed, take away October 7, and Israel would never have entered Gaza; indeed, even after the slaughter that took place on that day, Israeli officers dreaded walking into such a subterranean ambush. And prior to the mass murder, it was Israel, not the Muslim nation and adjacent Arab neighbor Egypt, that had supplied almost all of Gaza’s water, electricity, fuels, and telecommunications.

For years Israel had invited 20,000 Gazans to work inside Israel at two to three times the wages available in Gaza. Gaza itself had been “ethnically cleansed” of all Jews in 2005 by the Israeli government under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was generally considered a “hawk.” Any valuable infrastructure they left behind was immediately looted and destroyed. After the departure of all the Jews from Gaza, the grifting Hamas government shook down roughly $20 billion of the more than $40 billion in international aid given to the Palestinians in general.

Had Hamas simply sought to create a multiparty democracy, held regular elections, created a bill of rights, and adopted a Western economy, it would have garnered hundreds of billions of dollars more in foreign investment. And its privileged seaside location could have made it the next tourist hub like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Oman.

Instead, the nihilist Hamas preferred to make Gaza an impoverished, violent, and pariah terrorist enclave, to rip off its own people, and to expose Gazan civilians to death on a regular basis to save its fighters’ skins and further its fanatical cause.

Hamas was never dedicated to bettering the daily lives of its own population, developing Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline or putting its enormous foreign aid to productive use. Instead, it had only a single homicidal agenda: to kill as many Jews as possible and to destroy the state of Israel.

Hating Israel while championing Hamas and its thousands of terrorist killers is a referendum not on Israel and its supporters, but a window into the mind of a sick, sick West—and an even sicker Middle East.