It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t Israel that destroyed the hospital.
Tomorrow it will be a different hospital where there isn’t video showing that the real villains are terrorists who don’t care if their rockets fail and fall back on their own civilians; where there isn’t audio of terrorists acknowledging what they did. Or it will be a mosque that Hamas uses to store weapons, or a school that Hamas uses as a command center, or a residential building roof that Hamas uses to launch missiles.
Or it will be a missing child who must have been kidnapped by the Jews to use his blood for the Passover service, for which the Jews must be expelled; or it will be a plague caused by the dirty Jews, for which the Jews must be burned at the stake; or it will be a lost war because the wandering, disloyal Jews stabbed the nation in the back, for which the Jews must be massacred; or it will be failed crops or famine or a collapsed bank or any other calamity that doesn’t have a ready explanation . . . until one is found in the Jews.
It will always be the Jews’ fault.
It doesn’t matter which side of which line on a map Jews live in their ancient, historic, and never-abandoned homeland. Three weeks ago, they were murdered within the boundaries of the Jewish state as drawn by the United Nations in 1947. Before that they were murdered in a synagogue in Jerusalem, a disco in Tel Aviv, a restaurant in Haifa, in dozens of terror attacks before Israel even occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and in a massacre in Hebron in 1929 nearly 20 years before the establishment of Israel itself.
And not just in Israel, but in Munich at the Olympic Village, off the coast of Syria on a cruise ship, at a Jewish community center in Argentina . . . the list goes on. Even living in Boston isn’t a defense, because enough lines can be drawn on a map to show that not just Middle East and even world peace have been thwarted by the Jews, but we are also responsible for white supremacy, police brutality, supposed American colonialism, and many other of the world’s ills.
It will always be the Jews’ fault.
It doesn’t matter that the Palestinians have always prioritized the destruction of the Jewish state over the establishment of their own — first in rejecting the UN partition plan in 1947, which would have established a Palestinian state side-by-side with a Jewish state; then in refusing to establish a Palestinian state in the Arab-occupied West Bank in the 20 years between Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and the Six Day War in 1967.
Or in rejecting any number of American mediated resolutions that would have produced a Palestinian state (but, of course, also a Jewish one); and then in electing Hamas and refusing to even attempt to build an autonomous civil society in Gaza after Israel completely withdrew both its forces and every last Jew living there in 2005.
It will always be the Jews’ fault.
It doesn’t matter that Israel follows the laws of war at least as scrupulously as does the United States and other Western countries; that in previous conflicts Israel went so far as to warn residents of buildings that Hamas was using for military purposes that a strike was imminent by “knocking on the roof” with unarmed or low-power projectiles, or by distributing mass texts and robocalls.
Or that in Israel’s free and open society citizens, journalists, and advocacy organizations are relentless in critiquing any perceived failure of the Israel Defense Forces to follow the laws of war; or that Israeli soldiers, like from the United States and our allies, have been prosecuted by the IDF itself when violations of the laws of war have been investigated and established.
It will always be the Jews’ fault.
And the reason it will always be the Jews’ fault is because what animates the Palestinian national movement isn’t statehood, territory, or political freedom, economic opportunity, and physical security for the Palestinian people, but rather hatred for the Jews.
It’s the antisemitism, stupid.
And so it will always be the Jews’ fault.
If you love Israel and care about the Jewish people, spend less time litigating what will be an avalanche of antisemitic propaganda; less time fretting about whether it really might be the Jews’ fault after all; and give all of your time and energy and resources to supporting Israel’s war efforts — unapologetically and unreservedly.
Lancman, a former Queens assemblyman and councilman, is the director of corporate initiatives & senior counsel at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
Rory Lancman
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