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stephenkmacksd.com/

May 20, 2026

Editor: Can the reader even be surprised by Bret Stephens … what to name it but Zionist Apolgetics, mauled and debased to support a kind of riff on Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, in a key remineient of Benjamin Netanyahu’s murderious onslaught against his neighbors. Bret Stephens as political provacateur that also has a certain kinship with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde? Or is this just an instance of… or my own detetestation of Stephens, as a ersatz political moralist wallowing in Jewish Victimhood, under the klieg lights of the NYT?

Editor: Stephens intervention is World Historical?

There are powerful reasons to dislike, even despise, Israel’s current leadership: the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who repeatedly puts his political interests ahead of the national one; the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who hung a portrait in his living room of the Jewish mass murderer Baruch Goldstein; radical settlers who, to little apparent pushback from this government, abuse, terrorize and sometimes kill their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank.

There are also reasons (less persuasive to me, but subject to opinion) to object to the way Israel went to war in Gaza, with its heavy toll in civilian lives and a result that left Hamas in power. The same goes for Israel’s strategy toward Iran, which so far has gotten rid of neither the regime nor its nuclear program. Not least, there’s Israel’s overall approach to the Palestinians, which has resigned itself to a bleak and interminable status quo.

Valid or not, these sorts of objections to Israel are criticism, not hate. It is not a country of saints. As is true of every other country, the United States not least, plenty of sins past and present can be laid at Israel’s door. They include allegations, by Israelis and others, regarding cases of abuse of prisoners in Israeli jails. Those cases should be thoroughly investigated, just as in the United States the 8,628 allegations of staff-committed sexual misconduct victimizing adult inmates tallied in 2020 alone by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics need to be deeply investigated.

Editor: Here is where Stephens actual political self is manifested!

Yet this kind of good-faith criticism of Israeli leaders and policy has for years been giving way to something darker. It’s a hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country. It’s a belief that Israelis are perpetually out for the blood of their enemies, even when it comes at the cost of the blood of their friends. It’s the sense that it’s socially acceptable to boycott, assail and sometimes assault Israelis for the supposed sins of their government. It’s a conviction that Israel, alone among the nations, was a mistake to begin with and has no right to exist now.

Editor: It takes patience to cover the Stephens self-assigned mandate thus quotation is an instructive tool!

More broadly, the fashionable frenzy that is today’s loathing of Israel, coming from the far right but especially from the far and not-so-far left, is a sign of the degradation of the West.

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I’ve been closely covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 25 years. It’s given me something of a front-row seat to this degradation.

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I remember the story of Muhammad al-Durrah, the Palestinian boy who in 2000 became a global icon of Palestinian martyrdom and Israeli perfidy after allegedly being shot dead by Israeli troops — and then James Fallows presented a detailed and dispositive case in The Atlantic that the fatal bullet could not have been Israeli.

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Editor: The final paragraphs of Stephens diatribe does not mention the on going Gaza Genocide, nor the attacks by Israel on Lebanon that are ongoing!

How is it that hatred of one country can wind up doing more damage to the haters than the hated?

All prejudice, mindless or deliberate, is mind-warping; obsessive prejudice, of the kind Israel disproportionately attracts, is even more so. There are today millions of people around the world who, with considerable media and academic assistance, have convinced themselves that the major, if not sole, cause of injustice in the Middle East and even the world is Israel’s occupation of parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

As a result, this obsession has contributed to the relative neglect of the region’s other fundamental problems, above all the abiding grip of authoritarian politics in places like Cairo and Ankara and totalitarian religious fundamentalism in Gaza and Tehran. When was the last time you heard of an American campus protest against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey (a NATO ally and longtime beneficiary of U.S. security guarantees), or the genocide in Sudan? Why is this year’s arts biennale in Venice being roiled by the inclusion of Israel, but not of China? Why has the recent report detailing the extensive documentation of systematic use of rape and sexual torture by Hamas and its collaborators received little attention?

These aren’t just questions of hypocrisy or double standards. They are evidence of minds that have lost the capacity to think dispassionately and critically. What we should really be worried about isn’t the future of Israel; it’s the fate of the West.

Moral judgments should be made about Israel according to the same standards by which we judge other countries faced with similar circumstances. It’s when Israel is demanded to be a saint — and then, as it invariably falls short, is damned as the worst sinner — that we lose our sense of perspective and proportion.

“Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world,” observed the philosopher Eric Hoffer in 1968. That remains true today. Hatred of Israel has become the sty in Western eyes that, as it grows larger, risks making too many people blind.

Editor: Recall that Eric Hoffer was the only Public Intelectual that LBJ could muster, as an apologist for the Vietnam War. Like Hoffer Stephens wallows in the self-serving ahistorical!

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