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If outrage, grief, and concern were the civilized world’s reaction to the killing of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, total indifference by the same types seems to be the response to the death of more than 41,000 Gazans, most of them women and children. Here in New York the headline is one and the same, “Israel Under Attack,” never mind the bodies of innocents piling up both in Gaza and now Lebanon.

I know, I know, Hamas started it and Hezbollah deserves it, but we are supposedly civilized people who don’t gloat while innocents are slaughtered. Well, are we that civilized? Back in the ’60s we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did on Germany in the ’40s, including Agent Orange, and in Iraq we killed close to half a million Iraqis before “mission accomplished” was announced. Yet the mission was never accomplished, and the neo-cons who moved heaven and earth to start the war are still around urging Israel to kill more people. Yet no one with a moral conscience can ignore the barbarity of those thousands of dead women and children, no matter the Israeli lobby’s Circe-like spells. The latter has succeeded in linking anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism into one and the same, thus any criticism of Israel is now seen, at least here in America, as anti-Semitic.

Israel possesses a mystical ability to always come out of any conflict as the victim, hence I will now recount to you a brief history of victimhood that for once is not an Israeli fable. In 1922 the League of Nations approved the British Mandate, which facilitated Zionist immigration to Palestine. Waves of Jewish settlers arrived and purchased land while using exclusively Jewish labor. They also armed themselves and incrementally dispossessed Palestinians, particularly in rural areas. The rich Rothschild clan had financed many of the settlers, whereas those they dispossessed had been cultivating the land for generations.

The 1936–1939 Great Revolt was a Palestinian uprising against the mandate and Zionist immigration. But it was not to be. Zionists insisted that Palestine was theirs, “all of it, unassailable and eternal.” In 1948, the year Israel declared itself a nation, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Zionist militias, and this catastrophe continued after the 1967 six-day war that saw Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights all captured by Israel. When I was based in Jordan back in 1969, I saw the camps the disenfranchised had been living in since ’48, and now, after seventy years, the third and fourth generation are still refugees in overcrowded and dirt-poor camps.

So I ask you, dear Takimag readers: Is it anti-Semitic to see the Palestinian point of view and for one’s heart to bleed for those whose houses are regularly blown up by the Israeli army, or whose sons are murdered by hardcore Israeli settlers? Are Palestinian lives the same as those of flies or mosquitoes we kill while swatting them away? Why is ethnic cleansing tolerated when practiced by Israelis on the West Bank? How can 41,000 deaths be acceptable as revenge for the 1,200 Israelis slaughtered by Hamas? Why is there no outcry over the regular torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons? How can the civilized world tolerate Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s security chief, who openly steers a policy of humiliation of Palestinian prisoners and tramples on their basic rights?

Another question is whether Israel is entitled to kill as many as it has and will in the future because of the threats issued by Hezbollah and Hamas. There are those who will say yes, but until October 7 of last year, they were just that—threats, and empty ones at that. In reality, what Netanyahu seeks is a war with Iran, as long as Uncle Sam is very much involved. The neo-cons conned George W. Bush to go to war against a “nuclear-armed” Saddam, and Bibi thinks this time it will be even easier to get the good uncle to attack the ayatollahs. This is the long-term plan, but for the moment killing the Lebanese and what’s left in Gaza is the policy. The 2,000-pound American-supplied bombs falling on defenseless women and children cannot make any of us very proud, but leave it to the Israeli lobby to take care of any bad publicity. If any, it is simply anti-Semitism, dear readers.

In the meantime, American law and policy have long forbidden the transfer of weapons to nations engaged in gross violations of human rights, such as the ones in Gaza where children are regularly shot in the head, newborns and their mothers are starved because of blocked food aid, and a health system has been destroyed. Israel and the U.S. have together turned Gaza into a wilderness, yet most people in America are unaware of this crime. Hypocrisy alerts go off nonstop when American diplomats hail the international rule-based order. American weapons and Israel will continue to shatter lives. It’s a bloody shame, and we are all responsible.