It is difficult to discuss what is happening in Israel and Gaza without entering a tempest. I’m going to say upfront that the false equivalences uttered by Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley are deeply offensive coming from American legislators. The notion that the Israeli government is operating an apartheid regime is an outrage. And the guile that these politicians demonstrate in tossing around their accusations signals a new low in American politics. This time, on the Left.

There are immovable sides in this conflict, and there are teleological justifications that fortify the arguments of each combatant’s raison d'état, to be sure. I’m going to propose some theses of my own – ideas that I hope can cause some of my Progressive friends to think twice about why this particular tragedy continues to haunt the world and how irresponsible and dangerous it is for these American politicians to bring it to our shores at this moment.

The Middle East – the “cradle of civilization” – is shipwrecked on the shores of religion. But underneath this ancient region of endless tribal warring lies the cynical reality of power politics. Underneath lies Iran’s dream of a Shia Crescent to reclaim the ancient Fertile Crescent in the name of their own sense of Manifest Destiny. Underneath lies a sectarian war being fought within Islam for the only resource left in the Fertile Crescent: oil.

One of the of the ancient tribes that emerged from this region of the world were known as Israelites. Their religion, Judaism, emerged in ~600 BCE. The Israelites wrote some of the first manuals for constructing a complex civilization. The ideas contained in the two Abrahamic religions that followed, reflect the solutions that were necessary in order to develop and sustain intensive agriculture, trade, and hierarchical state-level societies within the fertile crescent following the Bronze Age Collapse and the advent of the Iron Age.

But today, the Middle East is merely a dusty, backward region of the world where political tribalism dominates in the emptiness that replaced the earlier fecundity of the region. This is now the place where potential human capital barely survives under the boot of monarchies who use religion to lend legitimacy to their imperial ambitions. Today, the major inheritors of the Fertile Crescent are Arabs and Iranians, two religious sects that fight to the death over such questions as, “Who is the rightful heir to the Prophet, Muhammad?” They live in a region of the world that is frozen in time, and they perpetuate their isolation with constant warfare and dreams of their former grandeur as imperial powers.

In the United Arab Emirates, copies of famous sky scrapers from the developed world are built as shrines to modernity, but these ersatz Xanadus sit on shifting sands. Massive glass buildings, knockoffs of architectural masterpieces from the developed world, are anachronisms in the scorching heat of the desert. Many were built without sewage disposal systems, thus requiring nightly caravans of honey dippers to snake their way out into the desert blackness to dump their loads of human waste. The UAE is a country built by slave labor. Young people from poorer countries are brought in from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, to provide labor. These immigrants have no rights, no decent housing, and must surrender their passports to the government upon arrival. Their meager earnings are sent back to their impoverished families. They cannot leave until their fees are paid to the human traffickers who brought them into the country. I have seen this with my own eyes.

In Saudi Arabia, the same medieval partnership between monarchs and religion permits women to be forced to live in a state of involuntary servitude, shut off from the world, denied basic civil rights, and always at the mercy of a brutal, misogynistic patriarchy. Led by a menacingly grinning Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the kingdom wages genocidal war on its neighbor, Yemen, and literally butchers foreign journalists it disagrees with - while claiming proprietary ownership of Islam’s holy sites.

And lest we forget, there is Syria, a murderous regime that regularly gasses its own people in order to retain power. A regime that is so brutal toward its own citizens that Israeli medics must open its northern border with Syria in order to provide critical medical care to Syrian victims of this regime.

And then there are the Palestinians, impoverished and immiserated for the same reasons their neighbors are. Their misery does not emanate from Israel, it emanates from their own monstrous leadership: Hamas. Hamas is a militant regime that is classified as a terrorist organization by Canada, the European Union, Israel, Japan and the United States. In Gaza, Hamas conceals the weaponry provided to it by Iran in buildings housing schools, hospitals and, yes, buildings housing western journalists. Hamas is a cancer that deserves no sympathy from the world. Its victims are its own people: Palestinians. Its missiles are built in Iran; its Charter calls for the death of Israel; and its youth have no civil society in which to live productive and fulfilling lives. Its youth are merely cannon fodder for a nihilist regime intent upon removing Israel from the Middle East.

The current Middle East is a place where dreams and reality mix. In the Palestinian Territories, dreams dominate. In Israel, visions of the Night Journey, the parting of the Red Sea, and Resurrection - coexist in an uneasy and precarious compromise. Because of this latest attack by Hamas, the Israeli government is the cynosure of all eyes, as it struggles to retain its founding identity amidst a sea of ~500,000,000 hostile Muslims who seek its total destruction.

Israel is a technological leader in the world, just as America is. It is modern and highly sophisticated. It is cosmopolitan and fueled by a young generation of forward-thinking progressives. But its leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu has been a disaster for Israel, just as the American leadership of Donald Trump and the Republican Party has been a disaster for the United States. America has caged immigrant children at our border with Mexico; our highly militarized police forces regularly murder African American citizens across the nation; and there are enough guns on American streets to overthrow our highly compromised government.

And as Israel struggles to retain its soul, America struggles equally to secure its own identity as a functioning democracy. Our own code of ethics is now torn apart in 50 different ways. But our pluralism is mirrored by Israel’s pluralism. Our legislature is diverse, and Israel’s Knesset is as well. Arabs make up approximately 20% of Israel’s population. Arabs sit as MPs on Israel’s Knesset.

The brilliant Bari Weiss quoted Richie Torres, Democratic member of Congress from New York, in her recent article entitled: The Bad Optics of Fighting for Your Life https://bariweiss.substack.com/.../the-bad-optics-of... :

“With sovereignty and security comes the inherent right of self-defense, a right that every state including our own takes for granted. Why should Israel be an exception to the rule? Why should Israel be held to a deadly double standard in a moment of terror? It is unreasonable to expect a nation state to be the passive target of hundreds of rockets, and then forfeit the right to defend itself amid a constant stream of terror. No right-minded person would impose that kind of self-destructive burden on any other country. What is under siege is not only Israel, what is under siege is truth itself. Circulating on social media in particular is a vicious lie, a lie that deceptively re-frames the terrorism of Hamas as self-defense and deceptively re-frames the self-defense of Israel as terrorism.”
Weiss ends with this: “The truth needs people who are willing to stand up for it. It needs people willing to publicly resist moral perversion and nihilism. People willing to fight for a sane future.”

I couldn’t agree with her more.