The other day, while the civilized world was celebrating the ceasefire brokered by President Trump, ending the current hostilities between Israel and its neighbors in Gaza, the folks at the New York Times were wondering what Israel could possibly do to “repair its ties to Americans.” According to the Times-and the smart set it represents-Israel’s “conduct” of the war has likely “cost it the support of an entire generation of U. S. voters.” Israel, you see, did its best to destroy its enemies-in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, and in Yemen. It destroyed Hamas’s leadership and its ability to conduct operations. It ended Hezbollah’s four-decade reign of terror. It set the Iranian nuclear program back by years, if not decades. And it, by and large, made the Persian Gulf safe for trade and travel again. I won’t go so far as to say that it accomplished all of its goals and won a decisive victory. Some of the very smartest analysts of the Middle East I know and respect think that the deal Israel agreed to is problematic at best. Nevertheless, the war didn’t go the way much of the American Left would have liked, and so its media mouthpieces think it did ugly and horrific things. Ironically, despite the fact that Israel’s “conduct” of the war was, by most honest accounts, as just and as conscientious as any such efforts could be, the New York Times isn’t necessarily wrong about Israel’s support in the United States. That support has suffered, and it is unlikely to be easily restored. For reasons that the Times and the rest of the American ruling class seem hellbent on pretending don’t exist, Israel may indeed have lost the support of an entire generation of Americans-if not more. In a now-deleted exchange on Twitter/X, the British-American political commentator and Islamist apologist Mehdi Hasan gave the giveaway. Angry about the terms of the ceasefire and the fact that he will no longer be able to prattle on endlessly about genocide and other inanities, Hasan lashed out at the American journalist Eli Lake. In response to a tweet by Lake noting how quickly Gaza seemed to recover from its terrible ordeal, Hasan complained, “One of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of the previous genocides-Rwanda, even the Holocaust-is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over. They were shunned/deradicalized/prosecuted.” This was quite a statement-even for Hasan, a noted, radical Israel-hater. Not only did he compare Gaza to the Holocaust and Eli Lake to the Nazis, but he also suggested that people like Lake should be prosecuted and shunned, even though Lake had nothing whatsoever to do with the war, its conduct, its conclusion, or the losses Hasan’s Islamist allies suffered.
