A Brutal Reality Check
And the sheer stupidity of campus anti-Zionism
The campus antics and street theater performances of the anti-Zionist, i.e. antisemitic, Left need not be taken seriously as expressions of support for the Palestinians of Gaza. Those keffiyeh-wearing goons are far more interested in flouting authority, smashing things up and harassing Jews than they are in the Palestinian cause—which is for them just a convenient pretext for bad behavior and po-mo virtue signaling. What they’re doing, indeed, undermines the Palestinian cause by reminding people what it actually embodies. They parade the Palestinian flag; it might as well be the Nazi Blood Banner.
There exists, however, a group of people who’ve demonstrated great and genuine concern for the plight, as they saw it, of the Palestinian people.
On October 7, 2023, there were twenty-one agricultural communities along the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, mostly kibbutzim whose populations were secular and politically left wing. These progressive Jews desired to live their belief that reconciliation between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs was possible. So they built their homes hard by the barriers on that stretch of the Green Line, as it’s called, separating Israel and Gaza. They reached across those barriers, extending the hand of friendship, disregarding the fact that Gaza was controlled by a genocidal death cult pledged to the eradication of the Jews.
Prior to October 7, Irit Lahav was a resident of one of those communities, the Nir Oz Kibbutz. She was a peace activist who fervently believed that reconciliation between the estranged peoples was possible. Lahav belonged to a volunteer group, called The Road to Recovery, that transported Palestinians needing medical treatment from Gaza to hospitals in Israel. She was an advocate for territorial compromises on the part of Israel to facilitate a peace settlement.
Lahav drew a distinction between Hamas and ordinary Palestinians. “I used to think Palestinians were good people, like you and me,” she explained. “That Hamas were thugs who got in the way of the population’s desire for a good life: a pretty home, a good car, a good job, a nice yard; good schools for the children.” Her attitude typified the views of the secular, progressive Jews of the Green Line kibbutzim. They had no illusions about Hamas—but many about the Palestinians.
And on October 7, those decent, well-meaning Jews, committed to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence, received a brutal reality check.
At the Nahal Oz Kibbutz and a nearby Israeli Defense Force base, some sixty soldiers and a dozen residents of the kibbutz were killed when Hamas terrorists breached the barriers and poured into Israel. For all that, Nahal Oz got off lightly, because IDF reinforcements arrived there relatively early in the battle. Farther south at the Nir Oz Kibbutz, Irit Lahav’s former home, forty-six people were killed and seventy-one were abducted and taken to Gaza as hostages. Throughout the area, Hamas terrorists and hundreds of ordinary Palestinians who followed them into Israel engaged in an orgy of pillage, rape, torture and mass murder.
In this way, the Palestinian Arabs paid back the Jews who’d made their homes along the Green Line in hopes of furthering the cause of peace. “All of the people of Gaza, all of them, hate us to a degree where they would murder babies and pillage our property with zero compunction,” Irit Lahav says now. She still believes in an eventual two-state solution, but doubts that it would foster genuine reconciliation. “We will live here, they will live there, with a robust fence and harsh military retaliation for any violation of the peace.”
There are some among the survivors of October 7 who maintain their commitment to the dream of peace and reconciliation. But for many others, the Hamas pogrom has called into question their most deeply held convictions. There is pain in that: an extra turn of the screw on people already grieving for the loss of loved ones, friends, their homes, their communities. But there is this to be said for the Jews of the Green Line: If they were deceived, they were sincere, and their vision of a better future for both Jews and Arabs in the land the Romans named Palestine was a noble one. But now it lies in pieces on the ground.
And our American campus fascists with their Palestinian flags are glad of that. No more than the Hamas barbarians whom they valorize do they wish to see a peaceful resolution of the long-running conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews. On the contrary, they want a fight to the finish, with Israel sponged from the map and a Palestinian state built on the rubble, Judenfrei from the river to the sea.
True, there’s an element of comedy in their activism: the ersatz bravado, the lists of absurd demands, the assumption of victim status, the surreal sense of entitlement. Who could forbear to laugh out loud at the video of the arrest of a professor of economics at Emory University by Atlanta PD officers. First she struck one of the cops. Then she resisted arrest, screaming “I hardly did anything! I’m a professor!” Bystanders yelled at the cops, calling them fascists. Truly, it requires a radical lack of self-awareness to whine and cry about police brutality and toss around charges of fascism when one has just been demonstrating in support of terrorism and genocide.
But when I compare that stupid woman’s hissy fit with the sorrowful, bitter testimony of Irit Lahav and other survivors of October 7, the smile slips from my lips.
I’m sure some of our baby fascists likely fantasize about “decolonizing” America as well — I.e., cleansing the land of “whiteness” from sea to shining sea. It’s basically a kind of genocidal dream wrapped up in the garb of “social justice”. The reality is the schools (elementary & high schools even) have been teaching a form of vile race hatred against the “colonists” aka whites for about a decade or more now and it’s seeped into the Left and become malignant. They’ve been primed to dehumanize the “colonizers” to such an extent that they literally support Islamic terror & mass murder now. This is a dangerous development. I would even go so far to say it’s a kind of Manson Family moment. And I predict one or some of their number will eventually go rogue just like some of the Family did. Instead of “Pig” though they’ll write “Zionist” in blood. I hope not, but this whole thing looks pretty damn ugly.
Btw ~ I did not know these border kibbutzim were peaceniks. I use that word crudely to get to the point and mean no disrespect. But what it shows is, as the woman in your story testifies, the so called Palestinians really have no desire for peace. None. They (or far too many of them) would just as well murder the Jews in their beds, or far worse. From the river to the sea, etc. Like I said, it’s ugly.
One of the problems is that our baby fascists have been spoiled and pampered. Permanent cancellation of their student status, denial of all future government educational loans, and some jail time would be much more educational for them than a course in the Metaphysics of Taylor Swift or in the socialization process of adolescent girls in Medieval Spain.