My October 7 post
For weeks I agonized over what, if anything, this post should say. How does one commemorate a tragedy that isn’t over for millions of innocents on either side? How do I add to what friend-of-the-blog Boaz Barak and countless others have already written?
Do I review the grisly details of Black Shabbat, tell the stories of those murdered or still held hostage? Do I rage about the shocking intelligence and operational failures that allowed it to happen? Talk about the orders-of-magnitude spikes in antisemitic incidents all over the world in the past year, which finally answered the question of whether I was going to deal with “the burden of having been born Jewish” as a central concern of my life, rather than only a matter for holidays and history books and museums? Mourn the friends I’ve lost—not, interestingly, my Iranian friends (who were the first to ask after the safety of my Israeli family after October 7) or my other Gentile friends, but mostly my far-left Jewish former friends, the ones who now ludicrously argue that worldwide violence against Jews is justified, and will stop if only we give in and dismantle Israel? I wrote many drafts only to delete them.
The core problem was that there seemed to be nothing I could say that would move the needle, that wouldn’t just be a waste of electrons. From the many times I’d already waded into this minefield of minefields since October 7, 2023, I already knew exactly how it would play out:
- Those who support Israel’s continued existence (Jews and non-Jews) would applaud what I said—but they wouldn’t need to hear it anyway.
- Those who oppose Israel’s continued existence would send me hate mail, spam my comment section with threats and attacks under invented identities, and otherwise do what they could to make my life miserable.
- Everyone else would ignore my post, waiting for me to get back to quantum computing or AI.
What could I do to break through? What could I say to all the people who call themselves “anti-Israel but not antisemitic” that would actually move the conversation forward?
Finally I came up with something. Look: you say you despise Zionism, and consider October 7 to have been perfectly understandable (if somewhat distasteful) resistance by the oppressed? Fine, then.
I urge you to lobby your country to pass a law granting automatic refugee status and citizenship to any current citizen of Israel—as an ultimate insurance policy to incentivize Israel to take greater risks for peace, even with neighbors who openly proclaim the Jews’ extermination as their goal.
When the Jews of Europe faced annihilation in my grandparents’ time, not one country offered to rescue them in more than token numbers. That’s a central reason why, in 1947, the newly-formed UN voted to partition the former British Mandate for Palestine and give the Jews a piece of it: not only because of Jews’ historic connection to the land, predating the Islamic conquest of the Middle East by thousands of years, but also, crucially, because the survivors literally had nowhere else on earth to go.
So, you say you want the hated “settler-colonialists” to leave Palestine. Very well then: give them a place to go. All of them, not just the minority who are dual citizens or otherwise have options.
If the US or UK or Australia or France or Germany or any other country actually passed such an immigration law—well, I can’t determine how the Israelis would respond. I expect that tens of thousands of Israelis would quickly take your country up on its offer, while the majority wouldn’t. I expect that some Jewish and Israeli institutions would criticize you, seeing a desire for Israel’s end in your offer even if you were careful never to say as much.
But I can tell you how I’d respond, and I don’t think I’d be alone in this. I would move to the left on Israel/Palestine. For the first time, the Israeli Jews would plausibly no longer be in an existential struggle, a struggle not to be exterminated by neighbors who tried to exterminate them at every opportunity from 1929 to 1948 to 1967 to 1973 to 2002 to 2023. For the first time there’s be a viable backup plan.
As a direct consequence, I’d advocate that the Israelis take bigger gambles for peace: for example, that they unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank to allow a Palestinian state there, even at the risk that the West Bank turns into a much bigger Gaza, another Hamas staging-ground from which to invade Israel and destroy it. At least there’d be an insurance policy if that happened.
Many will ask: shouldn’t the Palestinians also be offered refuge in other lands? I say, by all means! But crucially, that’s not for me to advocate: if I did, I’d be accused of secretly plotting ethnic cleansing and Israeli expansionism. This is between the Palestinian people and all the other nations, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that for generations could’ve offered refuge to displaced Palestinians (as Israel offered refuge to the displaced Jews from Arab lands) but chose not to.
And what of all the world’s other oppressed peoples? I promise to praise and honor any nation that saves anyone from oppression or genocide by offering them refuge. But, particularly since last October, the left is obsessed with Israel, which it considers uniquely evil among all nations to have ever existed—so that’s the conflict about which I’m proposing a positive step.
And if the anti-Israel people throw the proposal back in my face, tell me it’s not their job: then at least we know where we stand. They’ve then told me, not merely that they want half the world’s Jews evicted from their homes, but that they’re totally unconcerned with what happens to them next—fully aware that the last time, the answer was pits full of corpses, piles of ash, plumes of black smoke.
And that’s the exact point where we reach the end of discussion and argument, such as can happen on blogs. The remaining disagreement can (alas) only be settled on the battlefield. For whatever it’s worth, though, the Jews famously outlasted the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans, Soviets, Nazis, and other continent-spanning empires that tried to destroy us. Whether via missiles, planes, ground invasions, or (yes) exploding pagers, I predict that we’ll survive this latest existential war too, against the Ayatollah regime and its proxies and its millions of Western dupes. Or at least, I predict that we’ll win in the physical world, even while our enemies continue to dominate Facebook and Twitter and the comments section of the Washington Post, where they’ll order Israelis to “GO BACK TO POLAND,” totally uninterested in whether Poland will take them. I can probably learn to live with that. At any rate, better offline victory and online defeat than the other way around.