One of the great ironies of the anti-Israel, anti-Western, antisemitic upheaval unfolding right now is that Israel has never been stronger. And “Palestine” has never been further from being “free.” 

What do murderers of innocent people in Washington, D.C., or Columbia University graduates who burn useless diplomas in protest think Israel is going to do? Close up shop and hand Jerusalem to Hamas?   

Recommended Stories

• Congressional stock trading ban fosters rare bipartisanship
• Joe Biden was the perfect 'deep state' president
• How Trump’s crypto embrace took out Biden’s regulatory crackdown

Even seemingly rational leftists have embraced this delusional cause du jour. Not long ago, progressive writer Freddie DeBoer, commenting on a piece I wrote about the modern invention of “Palestine,” observed that when a true “democracy” emerges in Israel, “minarets will rise over Tel Aviv.”

They’re going to need some tall mosques, my friend, considering the highest skyscraper in Tel Aviv is 69 stories high. Another nine buildings are over 50 stories in Israel’s largest city. Nuclear powers with thriving modern metropolises tend to avoid being swept into the sea by jihadists.

Of course, every Arab Israeli already votes while enjoying all the legal protections afforded to a citizen of a free nation. The same cannot be said for their neighbors, including the Palestinian Authority, which is curiously spared the condemnation of “peace activists.”

Unlike the Gulf States, Israel’s wealth isn’t built on a natural resource but on human capital and ingenuity. A highly educated, diverse, and meritocratic workforce propels thriving entrepreneurship. In 2024, 10 products on Time’s “Best Inventions” list were from Israel. The country’s firms are regularly bought by international corporations for billions of dollars. Earlier this year, cybersecurity startup Wiz was acquired by Google for $32 billion. The Israeli stock market hit an all-time high this month.

Does that sound like a nation on the cusp of collapse?

I’ve been warned for decades that the world was going to isolate Israel over its “occupation” of Judea and Samaria. Far from it, Israel’s global relationships have significantly expanded over the past decade, most notably into Asia. The country, a socialistic mess before its free-market reforms of the 1990s, has never been more integrated into the global economy.

Those who believe Israel would immediately fall apart without the United States’s aid, which typically makes up about 1% of the country’s GDP, are fooling themselves.

Then, of course, there is the prevailing fiction we hear about the Middle East: Israelis and Arabs are engaged in a complex, never-ending, thousand-year conflict over faith and land. 

For one thing, the Palestinians’ is a relatively modern one, created by the Arab world, the Soviets, and their Western enablers as a cudgel against Jewish “colonizers.” Few movements have failed as miserably.

Indeed, the war between the Arab world and Israel is long over. The Jewish state has signed normalization and peace agreements with Egypt, initially its most ferocious and dangerous enemy, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and even Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis vacation in Dubai and Abu Dhabi every year. Sooner or later, Saudi Arabia will likely normalize relations with Israel, though the two almost surely already work together on security matters involving Iran.

And though we shouldn’t jump the gun, considering the history of that war-torn nation, even Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al Sharaa, has reportedly expressed openness to joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with Israel.

It is all this success, in fact, that precipitated the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.

“There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly,” the late Yahya Sinwar reportedly told followers, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sinwar — not to be confused with fellow psycho Mohamad Sinwar, who was recently eliminated by Israelis while hiding under a hospital — worried that the deal would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path.”

In recently discovered documents, it was revealed that days before the attack, Sinwar told his people that an “extraordinary act” was necessary to derail peace talks because it threatened to marginalize the Palestinian cause further.

The Abraham Accords only worked because the U.S. finally bypassed the intractable Palestinians, who have actively stood in the way of every peace agreement in the region since 1947.

“Our Arab brothers have abandoned us,” Palestinians grumbled at the time. 

It is true, Arabs have moved on. Israel’s war is now with the jihadi dictatorship of Iran, which has no rational geopolitical reason to be involved in the conflict. The theocratic Iranian state is willing to fight to the last Arab through proxy armies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza. This is why allowing the Twelver Shia extremist mullahs who rule over Iran to get their hands on nuclear weapons is a casus belli for Israel, as it should be for the world. 

So Westerners can still debate Israel’s “right to exist,” as if those living in their ancestral homeland, who emerged victorious from three major multiprong attacks from the Arab world, not to mention an endless series of terrorist threats over the past 70 or so years, care. But the chances of Israel not existing are up there with Germany or Mexico not existing. Until Palestinians and their allies come to terms with that reality, there can’t be peace.

Now, Israel is not without domestic problems. On some days, the parliamentary system resembles that of a Central American Banana Republic. Yet, in comparison to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Sudan, and Lebanon, it is a model of stability.

One day soon, the war in Gaza will end, and Israel will continue on its trajectory. The only thing that “pro-Palestinian” protesters who occupy buildings and bully Jews on U.S. campuses are accomplishing is the prolonged sacrifice of civilians. Recall that before Sinwar was eliminated, he told his flock that they “have the Israelis right where we want them” because civilians were “necessary sacrifices” to convince the West to turn on Israel. So, Israel is now finishing an ugly, protracted conflict with a guerrilla army that purposely ensconces itself in the civilian population.

WELCOME TO THE INTIFADA, AMERICA

Hamas is on its last legs. Hezbollah is weakened. Assad is gone.

Those rallying for the destruction of the Jewish state are engaged in a lost cause, and that is comforting.