A tale of two wars

Within 20 months two countries were savagely attacked by forces committed to their annihilation. Yet these countries, Ukraine and Israel, have been treated very differently — geopolitically, in the media, and on college campuses.

Discounting the pro-Russian axis of powers, China, Iran and North Korea, the West has almost uniformly supported Ukraine’s struggle. After all, a nation should not be attacked without provocation, particularly in violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which purportedly protected Ukraine’s sovereignty as it relinquished its nuclear weapons. The signatories included Ukraine, Great Britain, the United States, and ironically Russia.

Then, of course, there’s self-interest. If Ukraine can be attacked with impunity, which country will be next? And Article 5 of NATO compels its members to defend any of them from attack, in this case from Russia. Accordingly, after decades of slumber, relying on the U.S. security umbrella, NATO countries are rearming, even reaching, and in some cases exceeding, the 2% of GDP defense threshold required for NATO membership. President Trump has been correct in hectoring Europe to step up in its responsibility for defense. And most have responded.

But the isolationist wing of the Republican party, led by JD Vance, has shamefully manufactured some degree of equivalence of responsibility between Ukraine and Russia, and humiliated President Zelensky in the process.

Now that the president has been played by Russia during these “phantom” negotiations, he should call Putin’s bluff and apply secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and resume re-arming Ukraine.

After suffering the worst catastrophe since the Holocaust and with 250 hostages kidnapped, Israel received the world’s sympathy for about 72 hours. Then the narrative began changing. Forces on elite campuses, almost in synchronization with the October 7 attacks, began blaming the victim or the “occupier,” even though Israel left Gaza in 2005. This chain of events didn’t happen overnight.

Two years after the surprise attack on Israel, inflicting the most casualties ever suffered by the IDF, in 1975 the U.N. passed its infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism. So the establishment of the only Jewish and democratic state amidst 22 totalitarian Arab countries, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was cast as a “white colonial state” forcibly foisted among formerly colonized countries.

And with the radicalization of college campuses since the 1960s, with former members of SDS and other radical groups among the faculty ranks, this narrative of Israel as a colonial occupier gathered strength. In ensuing decades, with hundreds of millions of dollars “invested” by Qatar and other Arab countries, Middle Eastern departments were established educating impressionable young people about the evils of Zionism.

So, shockingly, at Harvard and other elite schools, on October 8 they launched their own offensive of hate, with encampments seemingly sprouting at numerous sites with the omnipresent chants by masked Western students wearing keffiyehs of global intifada and “from the river to the sea.” Many if not most of these students were naifs captured by the “revolutionary moment.” But they were led by professional and well-funded provocateurs and fellow-traveler faculty.

While Israel was fighting a seven-front war and trying to rescue the hostages, the sympathy exhibited in the early days ended. Responding to the events on the campus and what they saw reported in the media propelled leading politicians and opinion molders into pushing Israel to end the war.

The media, with some exceptions, has failed miserably in its mission of uncovering the truth. They were almost like stenographers repeating the lies of the so-called Gaza Health Ministry, controlled by Hamas. Would they have believed the German Health Ministry during World War II?

And Al Jazeera, wholly owned by Qatar, which finances Hamas and hosts its leaders, spreads blood libels against Israel, which uncovered Hamas connections among some of their so-called journalists. So the New York Times falsely blamed Israel in its headlines of killing 500 in a hospital attack. The truth was a much lower number of casualties that was caused by an errant Hamas missile. The Times later retracted the story in less conspicuous fashion.

Or last week, the esteemed Washington Post wrote that “at least 31 people were killed … in Southern Gaza … when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds making their way to collect aid.” This story was false, as revealed by neutral observers and confirmed by the U.S. Embassy. Shouldn’t journalists do their own fact-checking?

This reminds me of when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, when the press reported more than 100,000 displaced Lebanese, when the number of residents living in the path of the invasion was far lower. Who was their source? The head of the Lebanese Red Crescent, Yassir Arafat’s brother.

In the aftermath of the killings of diplomats and burning of pro-Israel demonstrators, there’s a dichotomy being drawn between hating Zionists but not Jews. Zionism stands for the establishment of the State of Israel with eight million Jews and two million Arabs. If anti-Zionists seek the elimination of Israel, then it’s genocidal. Not the nonsensical chants of genocide hurled against Israel, when the IDF has done the best job of any army in urban combat trying to protect civilians against a cowardly enemy who hides behind them.

And the media has gone overboard, routinely and falsely characterizing Israel as genocidal. If any party is genocidal, it is Hamas, which codifies genocide against Jews in its covenant. Or Russia, which has, according to the latest reports, inflicted 500,000 Ukrainian casualties and has its own 900,000 casualties, numbers that dwarf by many multitudes the 50,000 casualties claimed by the “Gaza Health Ministry.”

I look in vain for the hordes of protesters on elite campuses decrying Russia’s attempt to eliminate Ukraine.

So we have two wars with different narratives when the true narrative should be in defense of the victims against their genocidal attackers.

Max Kleinman of Fairfield was the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest from 1995 to 2014. He is the president of the Fifth Commandment Foundation and consultant for the Jewish Community Legacy Project.

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