There's been a lot of talk since the attack about how tolerating anti-Zionism or anti-Israel speech, even angry and scary speech, was the same as anti-Semitism. I suspect some people do hate Jews and hate Israel because it's an easy and very visible target whatever it does. But Israel has also done some things very much worth pushing back against.
I'm part Jewish myself, so seeing that hatred has been very painful and scary this week. One thing I keep coming back to, though, is that being safe and fighting anti-Semitism cannot be the same as papering over what Israel's done wrong, and Jewish safety certainly can't be bought at another people's expense, any more than *their* safety can come at the cost of our own. God doesn't trade lives like that, and we have to find a way to fight for both.
If any state in the world other than Israel were committing the atrocities the Israeli government has committed in Gaza, most people would have no trouble whatsoever labeling them as clear breaches of international law and attempted ethnic cleansing (not going to use the loaded g-word here…). Despite the tragic history of Jewish persecution and antisemitism, the state of Israel is a nation-state in the same way that Rwanda, Denmark, Russia etc. are, and as such can and should be judged for its government’s conduct by the same standards that apply to any other nation-state. The tragic history of the Jewish people doesn’t bestow upon the state of Israel a get out of jail free card.
I take issue only with this premise, " ... and if [Israel] is going to remain Jewish and democratic ..."
First of all, Israel has never been democratic. It's been "democratic" in the way aparteid South Africa or the United States prior to the 1960's was "democratic."
Second, it is fundamentally inconsistent for any religious state to be truly democratic in the sense that constitutional democracies are democratic. By definition a religious state favours members of one religion over another. That is fundamentally inconsistent with being a liberal democracy.
Please read about Israel instead of learning about it from tiktok. Israel is a democracy and it is the only one with multiethnic representation in the ME. Arab, muslim and christian citizens of Israel (20% of the population) all have the right to vote in Israel. What you are indicating is that Israel should annex the west bank and gaza and incorporate them into Israel, which they don't want nor does Israeli society.
I know exactly what you mean. It's always so ridiculous when people say that Harry Truman was elected legitimately when you had 70+ million disenfranchised Japanese in 1948.
You can't deny that the overwhelming number of the converts to the "globalized intifada" have adopted Hamas's formulation of Palestinian statehood, whose prerequisite is the elimination of all Jews "from the river to the sea". They do not believe Israel has a right to exist, and the globalization movement means to intimidate and strike at Jews wherever they are, until they are forced to abandon support for Israel. The proof is that they will not accept the legitimacy of any Jew among them unless that person explicitly denounces Israel's right to exist. Advocating for a 2 state solution is a non-starter within the movement.
As an aside, is there any Palestinian in leadership who stands by a 2 state solution?
To be clear, Netentyahu is probably doing more to endanger Jews worldwide than the Aussie PM could ever do. Bibi needs to look in the mirror when making these accusations.
My remark will not be nuanced, I apologize. If Trump or Netanyahu espouse a given view, be on the other side. This is a flawless moral compass. Trump is a madman, Netanyahu a thug.
You would say that, Will. It's tough to admit that Palestinianism and violent jihadism are joined at the hip. Maybe it's even unfair to at least some Palestinians so to surmise. But face it, for 80 years, Palestinian *identity* has been virtually inseparable from classical antisemitism. The whole Palestinian national movement had no original vision but fed perversely on Zionism. An unpleasant reality, but it is what it is.
This is fundamentally untrue. Palestinian identity wasn't tied to any specific religion until Europeans began colonizing the area and petitioning for a Jewish state. Before mass European immigration, local Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a Palestinian Arab identity.
Your perspective is nothing but the propaganda that those European immigrants spread to justify their displacement of the indigenous population.
There’s one massive problem with your argument, Will: Every single time the Palestinians have been offered a state from 1937 on, they have rejected the offer with violence, including the Bill Clinton-negotiated summit you cite at the beginning of your post.
When Israel withdrew every one of its citizens, including the deceased, from Gaza, the Palestinians were given the opportunity to show what they could do with a state of their own. It could’ve been a model for the West Bank. They were given greenhouses to support their economy. They have lovely beaches to promote tourism. They could’ve been Singapore, a tiny nation with great wealth and status. They chose to be Sudan instead by electing terrorists and destroying any prospects they had for peace and prosperity. (Only the terrorist leaders and their allies have prospered.)
Two years after Hamas triggered the war that savaged their homeland, using their citizenry in a brutal, cynical information warfare campaign of human sacrifice, the majority of Palestinians still support October 7 and Hamas. You can’t coexist with that. Even moderate and progressive Israelis know that now.
There is a chance for coexistence, but it will have to be with the kind of deradicalization that the Saudis and UAE have undertaken. Hamas has to go, but so does UNRWA.
This is fundamentally untrue. The Palestinians have never been offered a state. In 1937, they weren't offered a state; they were told that they had to surrender huge swaths of territory to European immigrants.
The Clinton summit didn't offer them a state; it provided them talks about possibly one day having a state, if they agreed to terms dictated exclusively by Israel.
In other words, what the Palestinians have been "offered" since 1937 is what Putin is offering Ukraine in 2025: Take what we let you have, or else.
I would agree that there is not necessarily a direct causal connection between support for Palestinian statehood and the commission of the atrocity in Bondi. That seems obvious. However, the recognition of a Palestinian state is, i think, unwarranted and premature at best, especially considering that Hamas refuses to disarm. Support and encouragement of whatever serves as the Palestinian state at this point, coupled with the unrelenting and misguided accusations of genocide by (rather than on, as perpetrated by Hamas) Israel, contribute to increasing acceptance of antisemiticism. This is not to say that an entire society is responsible for acts of terror. But when does tolerance of hatred increase the probability that acts of hatred will increase, and how can we maintain freedom of thought and expression while ensuring safety when the objective of some philosophies is to kill others?
I'll grant that an attack inspired by ISIS is likely not connected with Palestinian nationalism. However, you make an unjustified conflation. You correctly note that a Palestinian state should not be ruled out. Unfortunately, you conflate ruling out a Palestinian state with any objection to immediate recognition of such a state with no enforceable condition that would exclude Hamas from its governance, let alone any other party, such as Fatah, that is only interested in that state as an instrument to help eradicate Israel.
I obviously live in a bubble. Every Jew I've ever talked to over the past several decades about the two-state solution agrees that this is the only permanent solution.
TL;DR - Living in harmony: the only way.
However. Everyone also agrees that there is a global movement for antisemitism that sees the 2-state solution as a stepping stone to eradicating all Jews, everywhere.
I probably have to say this again, even more clearly: SOME people who are antisemitic want to co-opt the perfectly reasonable goal of the 2-state solution. (Not even all the antisemites want this!)
To deny that this faction is gaining power is truly terrifying.
(An analogy may be helpful: In the US, this would be along the lines of understanding we should tighten our borders, but the regime in charge of doing that instead uses it as a launching point for persecution.)
Both are true: (1) Palestinians must have statehood, and (2) that statehood needs to be rigorously marshaled in (not by Israel).
Another good piece by Will. I hadn’t seen these comments, and believe that politicians saying that the Australians conditional support of Palestinian statehood was responsible for the Bondi Beach shooting are almost at the same low level as leftists who have blamed the Israeli governments actions in Gaza for the murders.
I will say that leftist, center-left, and liberal governments do deserve scrutiny for allowing anti-semitism to fester post 10/7. At this point, even if you believe that the Gaza War is a war of aggression or genocide (which I don’t), the hatred that Jews have gotten goes beyond what other groups have seen in similar circumstances (eg Russians today, Serbs in the 90s, Saudis post 9/11, etc.).
Thanks for the piece, Will. There is much we don’t know about the horrible attack, but the motivations appear, so far, not to be related to either Palestine or Australian government positions. The connections to ISIS and radicalization in that direction are a rejection of Australia and its liberal democracy as well as taking their violence out on the Jewish community. People radicalizing on the parts of the internet where these groups are active may not even know what the Australian government position is. The comments from the Israeli government are opportunistic, crass and allow Netanyahu to once again play the victim/aggressor role he loves. It is too easy to see everything through the Palestinian conflict, but that lens only explains so much — and in this case probably very little — but if we don’t look beyond that, we will miss why people commit these acts of terror to begin with, and what drives them. There is also the rush to assume and paint all Muslims as motivated by the same issues when this is not the case: these are complex societies with very different histories. In the same way we should fight antisemitism, we also need to be aware of Islamophobia and the racism meted out to people from the Arab world as well.
Will! I enjoy your writing and podcast appearances enormously. You're a smart person in a crowd of smart people.
I suppose history is always somewhat subjective and open to interpretation, and I'd been largely disengaged from Israel/Palestine since the early '80's, when Likud leadership seemed to take Israel in a direction I wasn't happy to see, and in parallel at a time when the world seemed safer for Jews. That perspective shifted dramtically after Oct. 7, and the obscene reaction to it on the left, of which I still somehow consider myself a part.
Maybe I'm reading the "wrong" things. Broadly speaking, it seems Palestinians have always held the destruction of Israel as the central objective, with religious ideology as the central motivator, not the building of a safe and stable state, geographically alongside it's neighbor, Israel, a proposition that Palestinian leadership has repeatedly rejected, back to the original partition plan, which was indeed rejected by the entire Arab world, a rejection which led to repeated war and a permanent refugee crisis, which itself seems to have largely ovetaken Palestinian identity entirely.
I sincerely wish for a two-state solution. But things seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with "from the river to the sea" becoming ever more acceptable an idea on the left. It's hard not to see how these attitudes don't lead directly to a relatively new anti-semetism, with a happy home on the left.
Israel will need a demonstratedly sincere partner to talk to before that dream can be realized.
The recent piece by David Frum entitled “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach” comes to mind too, yet it goes unnamed here. While I’ve found myself in agreement with him more these days than in prior years of my life, that suggestion by him of a connection between them does us all a disservice and helps to drive a deeper wedge.
There's been a lot of talk since the attack about how tolerating anti-Zionism or anti-Israel speech, even angry and scary speech, was the same as anti-Semitism. I suspect some people do hate Jews and hate Israel because it's an easy and very visible target whatever it does. But Israel has also done some things very much worth pushing back against.
I'm part Jewish myself, so seeing that hatred has been very painful and scary this week. One thing I keep coming back to, though, is that being safe and fighting anti-Semitism cannot be the same as papering over what Israel's done wrong, and Jewish safety certainly can't be bought at another people's expense, any more than *their* safety can come at the cost of our own. God doesn't trade lives like that, and we have to find a way to fight for both.
If any state in the world other than Israel were committing the atrocities the Israeli government has committed in Gaza, most people would have no trouble whatsoever labeling them as clear breaches of international law and attempted ethnic cleansing (not going to use the loaded g-word here…). Despite the tragic history of Jewish persecution and antisemitism, the state of Israel is a nation-state in the same way that Rwanda, Denmark, Russia etc. are, and as such can and should be judged for its government’s conduct by the same standards that apply to any other nation-state. The tragic history of the Jewish people doesn’t bestow upon the state of Israel a get out of jail free card.
I take issue only with this premise, " ... and if [Israel] is going to remain Jewish and democratic ..."
First of all, Israel has never been democratic. It's been "democratic" in the way aparteid South Africa or the United States prior to the 1960's was "democratic."
Second, it is fundamentally inconsistent for any religious state to be truly democratic in the sense that constitutional democracies are democratic. By definition a religious state favours members of one religion over another. That is fundamentally inconsistent with being a liberal democracy.
Please read about Israel instead of learning about it from tiktok. Israel is a democracy and it is the only one with multiethnic representation in the ME. Arab, muslim and christian citizens of Israel (20% of the population) all have the right to vote in Israel. What you are indicating is that Israel should annex the west bank and gaza and incorporate them into Israel, which they don't want nor does Israeli society.
Sigh.
Israel considers the West Bank and Gaza to be part of Israel.
Palestinians who live there have no democratic right to representation in the Knesset which effectively controls their lives.
Well, that was a fast way of destroying your argument.
I know exactly what you mean. It's always so ridiculous when people say that Harry Truman was elected legitimately when you had 70+ million disenfranchised Japanese in 1948.
Let's see.
Item one: Hamas massacres, rapes and takes hostages of civilians at a social event
Item two: Governments around the world recognize a Palestinian state.
Conclusion (pace Saletan): Promoting a Palestinian state rewards terrorism.
Spot on analysis Will. Thank you.
You can't deny that the overwhelming number of the converts to the "globalized intifada" have adopted Hamas's formulation of Palestinian statehood, whose prerequisite is the elimination of all Jews "from the river to the sea". They do not believe Israel has a right to exist, and the globalization movement means to intimidate and strike at Jews wherever they are, until they are forced to abandon support for Israel. The proof is that they will not accept the legitimacy of any Jew among them unless that person explicitly denounces Israel's right to exist. Advocating for a 2 state solution is a non-starter within the movement.
As an aside, is there any Palestinian in leadership who stands by a 2 state solution?
To be clear, Netentyahu is probably doing more to endanger Jews worldwide than the Aussie PM could ever do. Bibi needs to look in the mirror when making these accusations.
My remark will not be nuanced, I apologize. If Trump or Netanyahu espouse a given view, be on the other side. This is a flawless moral compass. Trump is a madman, Netanyahu a thug.
You would say that, Will. It's tough to admit that Palestinianism and violent jihadism are joined at the hip. Maybe it's even unfair to at least some Palestinians so to surmise. But face it, for 80 years, Palestinian *identity* has been virtually inseparable from classical antisemitism. The whole Palestinian national movement had no original vision but fed perversely on Zionism. An unpleasant reality, but it is what it is.
This is fundamentally untrue. Palestinian identity wasn't tied to any specific religion until Europeans began colonizing the area and petitioning for a Jewish state. Before mass European immigration, local Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a Palestinian Arab identity.
Your perspective is nothing but the propaganda that those European immigrants spread to justify their displacement of the indigenous population.
There’s one massive problem with your argument, Will: Every single time the Palestinians have been offered a state from 1937 on, they have rejected the offer with violence, including the Bill Clinton-negotiated summit you cite at the beginning of your post.
When Israel withdrew every one of its citizens, including the deceased, from Gaza, the Palestinians were given the opportunity to show what they could do with a state of their own. It could’ve been a model for the West Bank. They were given greenhouses to support their economy. They have lovely beaches to promote tourism. They could’ve been Singapore, a tiny nation with great wealth and status. They chose to be Sudan instead by electing terrorists and destroying any prospects they had for peace and prosperity. (Only the terrorist leaders and their allies have prospered.)
Two years after Hamas triggered the war that savaged their homeland, using their citizenry in a brutal, cynical information warfare campaign of human sacrifice, the majority of Palestinians still support October 7 and Hamas. You can’t coexist with that. Even moderate and progressive Israelis know that now.
There is a chance for coexistence, but it will have to be with the kind of deradicalization that the Saudis and UAE have undertaken. Hamas has to go, but so does UNRWA.
This is fundamentally untrue. The Palestinians have never been offered a state. In 1937, they weren't offered a state; they were told that they had to surrender huge swaths of territory to European immigrants.
The Clinton summit didn't offer them a state; it provided them talks about possibly one day having a state, if they agreed to terms dictated exclusively by Israel.
In other words, what the Palestinians have been "offered" since 1937 is what Putin is offering Ukraine in 2025: Take what we let you have, or else.
I would agree that there is not necessarily a direct causal connection between support for Palestinian statehood and the commission of the atrocity in Bondi. That seems obvious. However, the recognition of a Palestinian state is, i think, unwarranted and premature at best, especially considering that Hamas refuses to disarm. Support and encouragement of whatever serves as the Palestinian state at this point, coupled with the unrelenting and misguided accusations of genocide by (rather than on, as perpetrated by Hamas) Israel, contribute to increasing acceptance of antisemiticism. This is not to say that an entire society is responsible for acts of terror. But when does tolerance of hatred increase the probability that acts of hatred will increase, and how can we maintain freedom of thought and expression while ensuring safety when the objective of some philosophies is to kill others?
I'll grant that an attack inspired by ISIS is likely not connected with Palestinian nationalism. However, you make an unjustified conflation. You correctly note that a Palestinian state should not be ruled out. Unfortunately, you conflate ruling out a Palestinian state with any objection to immediate recognition of such a state with no enforceable condition that would exclude Hamas from its governance, let alone any other party, such as Fatah, that is only interested in that state as an instrument to help eradicate Israel.
I obviously live in a bubble. Every Jew I've ever talked to over the past several decades about the two-state solution agrees that this is the only permanent solution.
TL;DR - Living in harmony: the only way.
However. Everyone also agrees that there is a global movement for antisemitism that sees the 2-state solution as a stepping stone to eradicating all Jews, everywhere.
I probably have to say this again, even more clearly: SOME people who are antisemitic want to co-opt the perfectly reasonable goal of the 2-state solution. (Not even all the antisemites want this!)
To deny that this faction is gaining power is truly terrifying.
(An analogy may be helpful: In the US, this would be along the lines of understanding we should tighten our borders, but the regime in charge of doing that instead uses it as a launching point for persecution.)
Both are true: (1) Palestinians must have statehood, and (2) that statehood needs to be rigorously marshaled in (not by Israel).
Another good piece by Will. I hadn’t seen these comments, and believe that politicians saying that the Australians conditional support of Palestinian statehood was responsible for the Bondi Beach shooting are almost at the same low level as leftists who have blamed the Israeli governments actions in Gaza for the murders.
I will say that leftist, center-left, and liberal governments do deserve scrutiny for allowing anti-semitism to fester post 10/7. At this point, even if you believe that the Gaza War is a war of aggression or genocide (which I don’t), the hatred that Jews have gotten goes beyond what other groups have seen in similar circumstances (eg Russians today, Serbs in the 90s, Saudis post 9/11, etc.).
Thanks for the piece, Will. There is much we don’t know about the horrible attack, but the motivations appear, so far, not to be related to either Palestine or Australian government positions. The connections to ISIS and radicalization in that direction are a rejection of Australia and its liberal democracy as well as taking their violence out on the Jewish community. People radicalizing on the parts of the internet where these groups are active may not even know what the Australian government position is. The comments from the Israeli government are opportunistic, crass and allow Netanyahu to once again play the victim/aggressor role he loves. It is too easy to see everything through the Palestinian conflict, but that lens only explains so much — and in this case probably very little — but if we don’t look beyond that, we will miss why people commit these acts of terror to begin with, and what drives them. There is also the rush to assume and paint all Muslims as motivated by the same issues when this is not the case: these are complex societies with very different histories. In the same way we should fight antisemitism, we also need to be aware of Islamophobia and the racism meted out to people from the Arab world as well.
Will! I enjoy your writing and podcast appearances enormously. You're a smart person in a crowd of smart people.
I suppose history is always somewhat subjective and open to interpretation, and I'd been largely disengaged from Israel/Palestine since the early '80's, when Likud leadership seemed to take Israel in a direction I wasn't happy to see, and in parallel at a time when the world seemed safer for Jews. That perspective shifted dramtically after Oct. 7, and the obscene reaction to it on the left, of which I still somehow consider myself a part.
Maybe I'm reading the "wrong" things. Broadly speaking, it seems Palestinians have always held the destruction of Israel as the central objective, with religious ideology as the central motivator, not the building of a safe and stable state, geographically alongside it's neighbor, Israel, a proposition that Palestinian leadership has repeatedly rejected, back to the original partition plan, which was indeed rejected by the entire Arab world, a rejection which led to repeated war and a permanent refugee crisis, which itself seems to have largely ovetaken Palestinian identity entirely.
I sincerely wish for a two-state solution. But things seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with "from the river to the sea" becoming ever more acceptable an idea on the left. It's hard not to see how these attitudes don't lead directly to a relatively new anti-semetism, with a happy home on the left.
Israel will need a demonstratedly sincere partner to talk to before that dream can be realized.
The recent piece by David Frum entitled “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach” comes to mind too, yet it goes unnamed here. While I’ve found myself in agreement with him more these days than in prior years of my life, that suggestion by him of a connection between them does us all a disservice and helps to drive a deeper wedge.