Israel: An Idea That No Longer Makes Sense

People who support Israel, no matter what it does, tend to hang their hats on a series of familiar arguments. Israel, they say, is the only place Jews can live in security. Critics of Israel want to eliminate Israel. The abolition of Israel would render Israeli Jews homeless (ethnic cleansing), or they would be killed (genocide). Therefore, anyone who criticizes Israel -- any anti-Zionist, anyone appalled by Israel's oppression of the Palestinians -- is, by definition, antisemitic.

Let's take these assumptions one at a time, beginning with the shibboleth of Israel as Safe Haven. "I think without Israel, there's not a Jew in the world that's secure. I think Israel is essential," former President Joe Biden, a strident Zionist, said to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in 2023. He's wrong. Whatever good Israel provides to Jewish people, it does not include protecting them from physical harm.

Roughly half the world's Jews (7.2 million, three out of four Israelis) live in Israel compared to 8 million in other countries. Between 2015 and 2024, about 1,755 Jewish deaths in Israel were attributed to terrorism and armed conflict. Annualized, this comes to about 0.024% of Israel's Jewish population (1,755 deaths out of 7.2 million). During the same period, about 24 Jewish deaths outside Israel were attributed to antisemitic terrorism or hate crimes, averaging about 2.4 deaths per year. This is roughly 0.0003% of the global Jewish diaspora (24 deaths out of 8 million).

Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is quoted as having said: "We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go." Actually, statistics say, Jews ought to go anywhere but Israel. Jews in Israel are 73 times more likely to be murdered due to terrorism, hate crimes or armed conflict than in the diaspora. Hamas' Oct. 7 attack skews this heavily, but Israel is much riskier even in baseline years.

Pro-Israel lobbying groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League claim that the Palestinian rallying cry "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is genocidally antisemitic because "it calls for the establishment of a State of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the State of Israel and its people." In this telling, "State" and "people" are one and the same -- their fate, at least. Yet the ash heap of history is littered with nation-states that no longer exist, without genocidal consequences. Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Republic of Texas, South Vietnam, East Germany and the Soviet Union were erased; their peoples lived on.

It is entirely possible to imagine a Republic of Palestine where Jews, Arabs and other groups live peacefully side by side, in a democracy. As Edward Said pointed out, that's how it was for centuries in Ottoman Palestine. "Real peace," Said wrote in 1999, "can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state."

There are counterfactuals. The invasions and annexations of Armenia, Tibet and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic led to genocides. But those are exceptions, not the rule. The argument that the end of Israel as a Jewish state and a British-inspired settler colonial project would necessarily lead to ethnic cleansing or worse is ahistorical.

Besides, not everyone who backs the Palestinians is out to get Israel. Twenty percent to 35% of pro-Palestinian voters support a one-state solution that might effectively abolish Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Fifty percent to 60% want Israel to change its policies, with a two-state solution, ending settlements and/or improving human rights. Even if you think the fates of Israel and Israeli Jews are intertwined -- and that's a huge stretch -- equating criticism of Israel with a desire for a second Shoah is unfair.

The underpinnings of political support for Israel in the United States stem from its founding in 1948, a few years after the Holocaust. To many Americans, it made (and still makes) sense to create a homeland for a people uniquely persecuted for centuries. Few gave a passing thought to the Palestinians who already lived there. Fewer still asked why people who had nothing to do with World War II should give up their land, as opposed to, say, Germany.

Whatever logic justified U.S. support in 1948 for the creation of a Jewish ethnostate has evaporated after nearly a century of apartheid, injustice, brutality and war. Israel is dangerous for Jews who live there, and it's a toxic driver of global antisemitism everywhere else. Even if you don't care about the Palestinians -- if your only concern is for the Jews who survived the Holocaust -- Israel no longer makes sense.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.