Victor Davis Hanson: Israel’s Critics Have a History Problem

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

We’re hearing a lot of charges since Oct. 7th that Israel has committed a litany of war crimes. Let’s examine them very carefully because I think they tell us more about the accuser than they do the accused. 

We’re told by a lot of representatives in our own Congress, mostly on the Democratic side. Not all. Tucker Carlson, for example, Candace Owens, but also Zohran Mamdani and others have said that Israel is an apartheid state. In other words, it has racial enclaves.  

But there’s nothing in the Israeli constitution that requires you to be Jewish. In fact, there’s two million Arabs living freely, voting freely inside Israel. 

In contrast, of the 22 member Arab nations, almost all of them require Islam as the national religion.  

And of the 30 Muslim countries, Arab and non-Arab alike, about 23 of them make it a crime to be an apostate from Islam. Does anybody ever say that these are apartheid states?  

Do you really believe that if you were of a trans community, you could start a movement in Iran? Could you have a Mormon chapter on the West Bank? Could you build a new cathedral of Christian worship in Istanbul today under [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan? You think there’s a gay rights parade going on in Gaza? No, no, these are apartheid. They eliminate and marginalize communities. 

Let’s look at another charge that we hear: settler colonialist. This means that Israel, uh, were interlopers.  

Let me ask you something. In modern-day Israel, we have archaeological and linguistic evidence that Jews were living there 3,500 to 4,000 years ago. People who spoke early Hebrew, who practiced the Jewish faith, and lived on the land that is now Israel. 

If you want to talk about settler colonials, where did the Arabs come from? They swept in from Asia into the Middle East and North Africa and, as settler colonialists, conquered Byzantine and earlier Roman territories that had been Western for 700 years. 

The greatest church in Christendom was Hagia Sophia, built in the sixth century A.D. by the Emperor Justinian. It was the largest and most revered church in Christendom for 1,000 years. And yet, in the 15th century, settler colonialists under the sultan came in and conquered and settled and took over Asia Minor from the Byzantines. And they slapped minarets on and culturally appropriated a Christian church and turned it into a mosque. They were settler colonialists. 

Mamdani’s family are settler colonials. They were part of a British imperial project at the turn of the 19th to 20th century that put settlers from other areas of the British Empire into Africa to help advance their colonial control of the indigenous people.  

And even today, Mamdani’s 1% Indian community controls 65% of the GDP of Uganda. Settler colonialist. 

I could go on, but this is a ridiculous charge to lodge against Israel when, of all of these settler colonial powers, it has the longest pedigree in one place. 

Now we hear about ethnically cleansing, ethnic cleansing. We’re told that the Israelis ethnically cleansed the Gazans and often people in the West Bank. I don’t know quite what that means, but before I try to translate it, we do know there’s a lot of ethnic cleansers. 

Mr. Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, has threatened to send missiles both into Athens and into Israel. His government, not his own, but the Turkish government, of which he is a continual successor, ethnically cleansed all of the Greeks from Northern Cyprus and occupied it, and then sent settler colonialists from Turkey. I haven’t heard anybody complain about that.  

Is there a protest I missed at Columbia? Did Ilhan Omar forget that, or does she just give a pass to a fellow Muslim country? 

While Oct. 7th was transpiring, far away in Muslim Azerbaijan, they were ethnically cleansing 150,000 Armenians from their ancestral home of nearly 1,000 years in the Nagorno-Karabakh Corridor. I didn’t hear a word from Ilhan Omar. I didn’t hear a word from [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. I didn’t hear a word from Zohran Mamdani. 

And then we come to genocide. Genocide. The Israelis, they say, committed genocide. And believe me, people who commit genocide, we know who they are, and they don’t vaccinate the targeted population. They don’t send food. They don’t allow medical doctors and suppliers to go into the targeted genocidal people. 

But more importantly, when Israel was formed by 1950, there were 170,000 Arabs still in Israel. They comprised 12% of the population. Fast-forward to 2026. Guess what? Genocidal Israel saw the population of Arabs, who are now Israeli citizens, increase to two million, and the percentage of non-Jews in Israel who were Arab Muslims increased from 12% to 20%. 

Genocidal regimes don’t take the targeted victim and then increase the population, both in real numbers and percentages vis-à-vis their own demographics. They just don’t do that. 

And if you talk about ethnic cleansing, Hasan Piker, a fierce podcaster and critic of Israel, was born in the United States, but he grew up in Turkey. His parents are Turkish immigrants. Turkey probably is the most genocidal regime of the last two centuries. It wiped out almost a million Armenians in the Armenian genocide. It went into Ionia in 1922 and destroyed, burned down, the Greek city of Smyrna, an ancient city that had a 2,500-year Greek pedigree, and then ethnically cleansed a million Greeks off the entire coast of Ionia. That’s genocidal. 

Mao Zedong killed 50, 60 million of his own people. That’s genocidal, and yet we never hear of any of that. 

When you talk about war criminals, Zohran Mamdani wants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he sets foot in New York. Why not arrest the Chinese delegation? They hold one million Uyghur Muslims in labor camps, and they’re the inheritors of a government that killed 60 or 70 million of its own people.  

I don’t think they’re going to be arrested. 

Members of Mamdani’s own staff were planning to meet the Iranian delegation. They slaughtered 30, 40, 50 thousand of their own Iranian people not too long ago. Were they going to be targeted for arrest? I don’t think so. 

Were the Azerbaijanis going to be targeted for arrest for ethnic cleansing? No. 

How about the Muslims of Nigeria who are killing thousands of Nigerian Christians? Are they targeted when they come to New York? No. 

So what’s going on? 

Well, first of all, much of this rhetoric, most of this rhetoric, comes from young people who are in the universities, and they’re both ignorant and arrogant. They don’t take history. They don’t take languages. They know nothing of the Middle East other than what they are told by Middle East propaganda departments. 

And first- and second-generation immigrants from the Middle East who fled horrific conditions came to the United States, were generously treated by their host, and offered prosperity, freedom, and security. And in exchange for all of that, they were ridiculed and called all sorts of names and damned for their support of Israel. 

In other words, this is sort of a joke.

And I would go further and say it’s a projectionist experience. The degree to which someone in the leftist-Islamist, this new coalition, accuses Israel of being an apartheid nation, a settler colonialist nation, an ethnically cleansing nation, a genocidal nation, and a war criminal nation suggests that the nations they come from, whether it’s Ilhan Omar’s own family, her father was a colonel in the Siad Barre genocidal regime, whether it’s that or people who come from Turkey, which has a long history of genocide, it’s a projectionist experience. 

They project their own sins onto tiny democratic and free Israel.

Why? I don’t know, but I have a suspicion it’s because Israel is predominantly made up of Jews. 

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