By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
President Trump took a rhetorical victory lap in front of
the Israeli parliament Monday. Ignoring his patented departures from the
teleprompter, which violated all sorts of valuable norms, it was a speech Trump
deserved to give. The ending of the war—even if it’s just a ceasefire—and the release
of Israel’s last living hostages is, by itself, a monumental diplomatic
accomplishment, and Trump deserves to take a bow.
Much of Trump’s prepared text was forward-looking,
calling for a new “golden age” for the Middle East to mirror the one allegedly
unfolding here in America. I’m generally skeptical about “golden ages,” here or
abroad, and especially leery about any talk about “everlasting peace” in a
region that has known “peace” for only a handful of years since the fall of the
Ottoman Empire.
So, by all means, let’s be forward-looking about building
peace.
But that project requires some honesty about how we got
here.
Where to begin that story chronologically is the subject
of Ph.D. dissertations. But conceptually it begins with a very basic
observation. From its founding, Israel and its enemies have had irreconcilable
positions. Israel insists that it has a right to exist. Its enemies take the
opposite position.
For clarity’s sake at least, I think it is fair to
distinguish between critics or opponents of Israel and its enemies. Many
critics merely want a two-state solution or more autonomy and security for
Palestinians. Israel’s enemies, meanwhile, want the “Zionist entity” to be
erased. “From the river to the sea,” as the saying goes, they want the Israeli
“colonizers” to die or be expelled from the region. That is the stated position
of Iran and its various proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It
is also by extension the position of their supporters, whether they fully
realize it or not.
In such a zero-sum conflict, these positions are
axiomatically non-negotiable. One side has to lose for the other to win. But
here’s where things get messy conceptually: Many of Israel’s enemies are
treated as mere opponents and critics, and vice versa. The distinction gets
blurred by friends and foes alike.
The linguistic legerdemain of “anti-Zionism” is treated
as a legitimate, respectable perspective, as if anti-Zionism somehow means
something other than a desire to end Israel’s existence as a sovereign Jewish
nation-state. But that’s literally what anti-Zionism means. Zionism is simply
the idea that Jews should have their own country in their historic homeland.
Under the umbrella of the United Nations, there is an alphabet
soup
of organizations,
programs,
and committees that are dedicated
to a one-sided effort to combat the Zionist project and rectify the problem of
Israel’s existence. The U.N. Relief Works Agency (UNRWA)
bequeaths to Palestinians a unique “hereditary” refugee status, not accorded to
any of the hundreds of millions of refugee populations since the end of WWII.
UNRWA school teachers—some of whom are, or were, members of
Hamas—indoctrinate children into hatred of, and “resistance” to, Israelis.
The Human Rights Council has a long history
of having an obsessive, institutionalized, structurally antisemitic double
standard for Israel alone.
Western media outlets rely on these agencies to frame the
discussion of Israel, keeping the idea alive that the only real solution is to
do something about Zionism, as if Israel’s survival remains provisional, even
though modern Israel is older than dozens of other nations.
Throughout the Gaza war, claims from the Hamas-controlled
Gaza health ministry were greeted with reflexive credulity, as were charges of
“genocide”—against Israel. Claims that Gaza was enduring mass starvation were
not subjected to the journalistic skepticism reserved for Israel or the Trump
White House, but with enthusiastic credulity. Watching the celebrations in Gaza
this week, did you see a lot of emaciated Palestinians? Will the press search
for them now?
Over the last two years, campus
protesters
and social media influencers
lionized
Hamas
terrorists
as freedom fighters.
The protesters
were often
treated
in the press and by school
administrators
as noble and heroic champions of free
speech or human
rights,
despite the fact they were providing cover for an Islamist organization that
murders Palestinian political dissenters and
homosexuals, persecutes Christians, and repeatedly affirms its commitment to
the genocidal destruction of Israel. Would pro-KKK groups get the same
treatment?
I think many of the accusations that Israel is committed
to genocide can best be understood as a mix of projection of—and distraction
from—its enemies’ open support for genocide.
If a lasting, never mind everlasting, peace is possible,
it will only be when Israel’s existence is accepted as an everlasting
non-negotiable fact. Once that happens, disputes about borders, Palestinian
rights, and autonomy can be negotiated on a non-zero-sum basis.
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