n.b., Prof Emeritus Schaefer sent us this article in November of 2024.
I regret having to observe that Juan Cortes’s essay advocating a cutoff of American support for Israel is sadly misinformed. To begin with, his criticism of Israel’s current war of self-defense against attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran lacks any historical context.
First, one must understand how the state of Israel came to be born. The nations of Israel and Jordan, along with adjacent territories, grew out of what was originally part of the Ottoman Empire. Following World War I, Britain established a “mandate” over these territories (as did France over what later became Lebanon and Syria). pledging in its 1917 Balfour Declaration to establish a Jewish state in part of the land. The Jews, having had a continuous presence in what came to be called “Palestine” since antiquity, migrated to the territory, coming especially from Europe, acquiring land by purchase from its inhabitants, not by force. Yet the Jews were assaulted in a series of violent pogroms by local Arab groups, led by a Mufti who became an ally of Adolf Hitler during World War II (and was unsuccessfully pursued as a war criminal by the Western allies after the war). The land’s Jewish population nonetheless grew, especially as those who were able to flee the Nazis’ endeavor at extermination found refuge there.
In 1947 the Jews were authorized by the United Nations to establish a state of their own on a very small territory. But rather than accept its existence, the surrounding Arab nations launched an attack to destroy the new state as soon as it was declared in 1948.
While Israel won its war of independence, Arab nations never accepted its legitimacy. During the 1950s, Egypt, under its socialist dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, repeatedly launched irregular “fedayeen” attacks against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, Jordan, which held the historic Old City of Jerusalem, where Jews’ most sacred sites were located, destroyed them, and used the Jewish New City for target practice, compelling its partial depopulation.
In 1956 the nations of Britain, France, and Israel launched the Suez war in order to liberate the Suez Canal, critical to world commerce, from Nasser’s control. But they were compelled to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration, eager to improve its image in the so-called “Third World.” Then in 1967 Nasser and leaders of four other Arab nations prepared to launch a war of total destruction against Israel. But again, Israel won (with no American aid, I add). It was as a result of that war that Israel gained control of the Old City of Jerusalem, along with the “Palestinian” territories of the West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza, and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. Rather than wishing to retain those territories, Israel repeatedly sought to surrender them (except for Jerusalem’s Old City), in return for a guarantee of peace from its neighbors. But none of them would agree to recognize the Jewish state. Instead, in 1973 they launched the Yom Kippur War (on Judaism’s holiest day), in which Israel averted destruction only with American assistance. And finally, during the Carter administration, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, finally agreed to grant peace and recognition to Israel, in return for the return of the Sinai (which had contained the only oil wells in Jewish-controlled territory). (For his pains, Sadat was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot.)
In the Oslo Accords of 1992, arranged through negotiations with U.S. representatives, Yasser Arafat, leader of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, which governed the West Bank and Gaza (under Israeli supervision), agreed to a “framework” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But instead of leading to actual peace, the Accords culminated in two “intifadas” (violent uprisings), in which Palestinian suicide bombers murdered thousands of Israeli civilians. (In the last days of the Clinton administration, in negotiations at the Israeli town of Taba, Israel agreed to grant Arafat control over all the Palestinian lands (including minor “land swaps”) in return for peace, but the PLO leader refused (doubtless fearing the fate of Sadat had he agreed). President Clinton specifically blamed Arafat for the failure of the negotiations.
In 2006, Israel took another step for peace, withdrawing all its settlers and troops from Gaza, hoping that the Gazans would now devote themselves to peaceful economic development. But PLO rule over Gaza was shortly replaced by that of the even more terroristic Hamas, whose leaders (including over 1,000 violent prisoners released from Israeli jails in return for one young captured Israeli soldier) soon set about plotting what became the attacks of October 7, 2023, in which over 1,200 Israeli civilians were murdered – with women raped before being tortured to death; babies decapitated; children murdered in front of their parents, and vice versa; and some 251 civilians (including American and Thai citizens) seized as hostages.
Following the October 7 attacks, Israel has had no choice but to set out to destroy Hamas so as to preserve itself against future attacks – just as the United States or any other nation would have done in a similar situation. It has also sought desperately to rescue the hostages. But it has been hampered in its ability to strike at Hamas by the latter’s devilish strategy – in violation of both international law and elemental morality – of concealing nearly all its military facilities underneath or inside of schools, hospitals, and private houses, giving Israel no choice but to attack those facilities at considerable and deeply regrettable cost in civilian lives (even as it has made every effort to minimize such casualties). All this was by the design of the Hamas leader, ex-Israeli terrorist prisoner Yayah Sinwar, who intended to bring about a massive war of Arab vengeance in which the nation of Israel would finally be obliterated. Hamas is in fact a death cult, whose members taunt Israelis with their slogan, “You want to live, and we want to die.” (Nor is Israel responsible for any shortage of humanitarian assistance in Gaza; instead, much of the arriving goods are confiscated by Hamas before they reach the civilian population.)
But behind Hamas and Hezbollah stands a far more powerful, sworn enemy of Israel, the theocracy of Iran, whose leaders, ever since their 1979 seizure of power, have sworn to destroy the “little Satan” (Israel) before taking on the “big Satan” (the United States) in a final battle for global supremacy. Iran has been the “target” of Israeli strikes, as Mr. Cortes puts it, only because it has funded Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism to the tune of billions, while more recently launching a series of missile attacks directly at Israel (rather than just funding Hezbollah’s rockets). Does Mr. Cortes really expect Israel to remain passive in response to these attacks – any more than the United States would if such attacks were directed at this country? How can he justify Iran’s latest attacks on Israel as “retaliation” – when it is Iran that has been consistently attacking Israel, directly and by proxy, ever since the fanatical mullahs established their rule?
Despite Pope Francis’s equation of all war with terrorism, as cited by Cortes, the Catholic theological tradition has long maintained a distinction between just and unjust wars. What could be more just than a defensive war aimed at national survival? And whereas just-war theory emphasizes the need to minimize civilian casualties in war – a rule with which Israel has taken extraordinary efforts to comply – Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran have aimed at the opposite.
Despite Iran’s continued endeavor to develop nuclear weapons capable of striking the U.S. as well as Israel – an enterprise which the Obama and Biden administration’s policies of appeasement did nothing to halt – Cortes is for some reason unable to comprehend why it would be in America’s own interest to fortify Israel’s capacity to mitigate that threat. In fact, when he laments how much “American blood” has been drained in the Middle East in recent decades (referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), he seems unaware of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on this country that provoked the former, and the suspicions held by leaders of both American political parties that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, whose previous nuclear plant in Syria had been destroyed by Israel, was himself engaged in restoring his “unconventional weapons” capacity (including chemical and biological warfare) that led to our overthrow of his bloodthirsty tyranny. Both such attacks were launched for America’s sake, not that of Israel. But it should be noted that in recent decades, America has enjoyed a mutually beneficial economic and military relationship with Israel, in which our own defensive capacities (including missile defense) have been fortified by Israeli technological advancements.
Most distressing to me, as a Jew, is Cortes’s comparison of Israeli’s response to the terrorist attacks against it as “genocide.” We Jews know well – just as other Americans should – what genocide looks like. Its exemplar (and the origin of the term) was Hitler’s slaughter of half the world’s Jewish population, by mass shootings and in gas chambers, for no reason other than sheer hatred. To equate Israel’s endeavor to defend itself with such a crime is, quite simply, obscene.
I urge Mr. Cortes to pursue further education regarding the history of Israel, of the Middle East, and of anti-Semitism before writing further on such topics.