Here and many other places, I’ve made the point that the Israeli – Arab fighting is a forever thing. It is what they do and that’s never going to change. I recall reading an old newspaper from the 40′s that had a headline about hopes for peace in the Levant. It was ridiculous then and it is ridiculous now.

Every president in my lifetime has taken a crack at making peace over there and all of them have failed. My bet is I live long enough to see the Jews and Persians exchange nukes. The Persians lob a small nuke into Tel Aviv and the Jews wipe out Tehran. The Arabs will quietly applaud, then go back to fighting the Jews.

As far as which side to take, I’m fine with backing the Jews. The Israelis are a civilized people with many connections to the West. While we are nominally Christian, a great many Americans have strong feelings toward Israel and the Jewish people for religious reasons. The support should be limited, of course, but the Jews don’t need a lot of support to defend themselves.

I’ve never bought into the argument that our support for Israel is why the Muslims hate us. The Muslims were a pain in our side as far back as the Barbary Wars. The people of that region have been hostile to their neighbors for as long as they have had neighbors.The best best way to deal with Arabs is to leave them alone, as much as possible.

There’s a brand of crank that can’t accept this. It used to be a paleo thing, but it manifest all over these days. On the Left it is driven by hatred of Evangelicals, who have a deep affection for Israel. Blacks like President Obama just hate Jews for historic reasons and that results in an anti-Israel bias. Libertarians with their child like view of the world think the world will just go away if we go away.

For reasons I don’t know Ron Unz seems to featuring a lot of Israel bashing. Maybe Unz hates Jews, I don’t know. Really smart guys often fall for crackpot theories. High IQ combined with very broad mindedness can be dangerous. I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m just seeing some patterns in the Israel-bashing.

The first thing you see with the Israel-bashers is an obsession with civilian deaths in the territories. This is a good example Unz published recently.

Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that the Arabs had gotten the better of the Israelis in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and after years of conflict, all that was left of Israel was the Gaza strip.

Assume for a moment that instead of Palestinians, over 1.8 million Jews were crammed into the 11 mile Gaza strip and the state of Palestine, subsidized and supported by a superpower, was administering the calories to the Jews in Gaza, keeping them to a limit of 2,300 a day.

Imagine that instead of Palestinian children, it was Jewish children living under a Palestinian embargo that denied them toys, books, music and until a few years ago, even pasta. How do you think the world would react?

This sort of moral equivalence is common amongst the paleos. They create a framework that is seeded with half-truths and magical assumptions so they can cast the Jews in the worst possible light. In this case, the writer takes the fact the Jews actually provide most of the food to the Palestinians and phrases it as “keeping them to a limit of 2,300 a day.” Just for the record, that’s more calories than Arabs enjoy all over the Arab world.

The bit about denying the Palestinian kid “them toys, books, music and until a few years ago, even pasta” is half the story. The other half has something to do with the Arabs smuggling in rockets and bombs that they use to blow up civilians. The Arabs also like to use children as human shields for their rocket batteries.

But, the whole thing is just an egregious bit of moral obtuseness. We know what would happen if the Arabs ever beat the Jews. They would murder all of the Jews that did not flee to America. We know that because the Arabs have been saying it for fifty years. It is the official goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLA.

These cranks also suffer from the “pushing old ladies” problem. That is, they look at one guy who pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus and another guy who pushed an old lady in front of a bus. They conclude both guys just like to push old ladies. Motivation is important, but not to dim bulbs like this guy.

The most recent fighting in Gaza was in fact started by Israel, which exploited the pretext of a kidnapping on the West Bank that it knew was not carried out by Hamas to use its armed forces to eliminate that group from power. It made mass arrests and killed some Palestinians on the West Bank before the Gazans responded with a barrage of homemade missiles, a weapon so ineffective that to this date it has only succeeded in killing one Israeli civilian. Israel has destroyed hundreds of homes in Gaza, devastated its infrastructure, and has killed nearly two thousand civilians who had no place to flee to.

The Palestinians have had many chances to make peace with Israel. They have refused all of them. Further, groups like Hamas target civilians in order to kill civilians. Israel kills civilians when going after Hamas. Maybe Israel could be more careful, but they are under no obligation to do so.

That’s the key feature of the Israeli bashers. They setup a moral code for one side and a different moral code for the other. Israel, could kill all of the men and sell the women and children into bondage. That’s how tribal warfare works. They at least make some effort to guard the people they are feeding and clothing. Those people make no effort to respond in kind.

Then you have the comparisons to Hitler’s Germany. This is a favorite of the cranks and one they picked up from the Left. Hilariously, they think “fascism’ is an abracadabra word that makes their antagonists disappear. Instead, they come off sounding like idiots.

Fascism is generally linked to ultra-right wing politics or attitudes. A fascist is a totalitarian who supports an all-powerful and centralized state that can do no wrong precisely because it is the government. Fascism views political violence, war, and imperialism as a means to achieve national rejuvenation, and it asserts that stronger nations have the right to expand their territory by displacing weaker nations.

There are common themes that generally surface when one speaks of fascist style states. All fascist regimes have an assertive ultra-nationalism that frequently feeds off a sense of victimhood. This need to assert a frequently mythical notion of national power and greatness, often through war or imperial expansion, generally produces a militarization of society as well as a rewriting of history to support the new agenda. Fascist government frequently evolve into police states to suppress dissent and maintain the regime.

Both Israel and the United States are increasingly characterized as police states where authority trumps liberties. They both claim victimhood from terrorism and have used that as an excuse to maintain aggressive foreign policies that emphasize the use of force as a first option. Both spend far more proportionately on “defense” than other developed countries and both are actively engaged in proxy and shooting wars around the world. Israel exploits its alleged victimhood to occupy Palestinian land and kill Arabs while the United States does the same to justify its continued presence in Afghanistan and its threats to use military force against nations like Iran and Syria.

The only thing this guy does here is prove he knows very little about fascism. Sure, Hitler used anger at the treaty of Versailles as a political tool. That’s a tiny bit of the story. Putting that aside, it leaves out one rather important point. Exactly two Arab countries acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. You get to be the victim in the story when the other guy wants you dead and will not consider another option.

Israel is not blameless for what happens in happens in their fight with the Arabs. Countries are run by people and people do and say dumb things. Often, they do what looks like the right thing and they get a terrible result. You can’t blame Israelis, however, from overlooking their own mistakes and focusing on those of their enemies. That’s human nature.

That’s the key with the Israeli bashers. They don’t allow for normal human failure when it comes to Israel. They have no trouble finding the humanity in the Arabs. They can’t imagine it with the Jews. In the end, they are that which they claim of Israel and Israel’s supporters. Worse, they excuse what the Arabs have done and that moves them into the antisemitism camp.

That’s what makes stories like this one so important. They clarify the differences, but they also expose the Israel-bashers. We don’t have Jews beheading innocent westerners on youtube. There’s a reason for it and it is the same reason Israel is the moral superior in the fight. It’s why good people can overlook the sins of the Jews and come to their aid.