APOLOGIA: Chapter 2 of Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments

March 25, 2024

Chapter 2 of Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments

Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War

Note to readers: See previous APOLOGIA post for Chapter 1. (Also, Table of Contents with links is listed below. Or download pdf of the whole book here.)

Note to critics: Please read the whole of my little book (including notes) before offering criticism. Thanks.

Chapter 2: Israel is a powerful state and thus the oppressor?

Objection: Compared to Gaza, Israel is the more powerful state, so, clearly, Israel is the oppressor.

Reply: Israel is the more powerful state, yes, but not the oppressor. Israel’s actions are responses to Gaza’s actions. The goal of Gaza (led by Hamas), according to its charter, is to exterminate Jews via violence.¹ So Israel is defending against Gaza. Defending against someone who is trying to kill you is not an act of oppression. Rather, it is an act of self-preservation, an act of resistance against an oppressive force. It is an act of self-defence.

In other words, the oppressor-oppressed ideology (a presently popular view among university students that strong nations are ipso facto oppressors and weak nations are ipso facto oppressed) does not adequately capture the goings-on in the Israel-Gaza conflict. The ideologies on the ground need to be taken into account, and given primacy.

American historian Jeffrey Herf says the following about the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel:

Its barbarity may be shocking to many observers, but it will not have surprised those familiar with the ideology of the perpetrators. This latest outburst of violence is the logical outcome of the Jew-hatred that Hamas has openly expressed since 1988, and it rests on a strand of Islamic antisemitism that emerged in the early 20th century and fueled the Arab war of rejection in 1948. The ideology that inflames the Hamas leadership was the product of the fateful fusion of Nazism and Islamism in the 1930s and 1940s, and it has always rejected the legitimacy of a Jewish state (or indeed any polity that isn’t explicitly Islamist) anywhere in what, before 1948, had been British Mandate Palestine….

The mass murder of October 7th was the most recent chapter in the Islamists’ long war against the Jews, Israel, and the values and institutions of Western democracy. It is important that intellectuals, analysts, journalists, politicians, policy experts, and government officials speak the truth about the connection between Hamas’s antisemitic ideology and its practice of indiscriminate bloodshed. Only by squarely facing what the leaders, clerics, and cadres of Hamas have said for years, can we begin to understand why its operatives perpetrated this most recent and most murderous of its assaults on Israel and its citizens.²

Whereas Israel operates in accordance with a worldview in which all people, whether powerful or weak, Jewish or not, have intrinsic worth (because made in the image of God), Gaza operates according to a worldview in which some people—Jews—do not have intrinsic worth and should be destroyed.³

All this to say: When we take into account the ideological antisemitic motivations and actions of Gaza (led my Hamas), it is clear that Gaza (led by Hamas) is the oppressor, not Israel.^4,5

NOTES

1. See Jeffrey Herf, “Why They Fight: Hamas’ Too-Little-Known Fascist Charter,” which is chapter 12 in Jeffrey Herf, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (London and New York: Routledge, 2024).

2. Jeffrey Herf, The Ideology of Mass Murder: Hamas and the origins of the October 7th attacks, Quillette, October 10, 2023. Herf is author of Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

3. Like ISIS, Hamas takes Islam very seriously. For a look at Islam’s view of Jews—which is negative, to say the least—see Mark A. Gabriel, Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle (Lake Mary, Florida: Charisma House, 2003). Gabriel has a PhD in Islamic history from (and was a professor of Islamic history at) Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt. Also see R. C. Sproul and Abdul Saleeb, The Dark Side of Islam (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003). I should also point out that for Islamists (i.e., fundamentalist-extremist Muslims such as those in ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. who are serious about Islam and follow the violent example and teachings of its prophet Mohammad who kills and encourages the killing of Jews), Islam is the true religion. And because Islam is the true religion, it renders Judaism (and Christianity) obsolete. The idea, then, of a Jewish state simply cannot be the case—it is anathema to Islam. For further thought, see Mordecai Kedar, Arabs and Muslims Will Not Accept Israel as the Jewish State, The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, January 18, 2018. In addition, for Islamists any lands that were previously conquered by Mohammad and/or his caliphs but were lost in subsequent wars remain part of the Islamic caliphate or empire and must be reconquered. The region in which the state of Israel is located is such a land. See Robert Spencer et al., Islam: What the West Needs to Know, DVD (98 minutes), produced and directed by Gregory M. Davis and Bryan Daly (Lorain, Ohio: Quixotic Media Productions 2006). (See comments at 51:25–52:36 by Serge Trifkovic.)

4. It should also be noticed that Gaza (led by Hamas) is part of a much larger and hugely powerful Islamist group—Iran and its proxies, i.e., Hamas, Hezbollah, and others—which is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. Again, Israel is not the oppressor. Rather, Israel is being oppressed.

5. Please note that my pointing to Islam’s negative view of Jews and my call for careful thinking about Islam (especially careful thinking about its founder Mohammad who encourages the killing of Jews and whom Islamists take very seriously as a model for their violent behaviour) are not instances of Islamophobia. Rather, these are reasonable, evidence-based concerns. For more on this topic see appendices 1 and 2 of this book. See too Douglas Murray’s booklet Islamophilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady (Amazon KDP, 2020). Murray presents considerable evidence for the unfortunate fact that many influential people in the West (including a U.S. president as well as film-stars and pop-stars) have an irrational and misguided love for Islam.

Table of Contents (links)

Introduction

Chapter 1. Israel is engaging in colonial retaliation?

Chapter 2. Israel is a powerful state and thus the oppressor?

Chapter 3. Israel is not a legitimate state?

Chapter 4. Israel occupies Gaza?

Chapter 5. Gaza is like a Jewish ghetto?

Chapter 6. What about Gabor Maté?

Chapter 7. What about Gabor Maté, again?

Chapter 8. Israel targets a hospital?

Chapter 9. Israel’s attack on Gaza is as bad (or worse) as Gaza’s attack on Israel?

Chapter 10. Israel is wrong to cause Gaza to suffer?