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

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:38)
We're told by a lot of representatives in our own Congress, Zeron Magdami and others have said that Israel is an apartheid state. We hear settler colonialists. If you want to talk about settler colonialists, 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.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson with the Daily Signal. We're hearing a lot of charges since October 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, Candice Owens, but also Zoran Mondami and others have said that Israel is an apartheid state. In other words, it has racial enclaves. But there is 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 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 Erdogan? 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 were interlopers. Let me ask you something. Israel, modern-day Israel, we have archaeological and linguistic evidence that Jews were living there 3500 to 4000 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 a settler-colonialist conquered Byzantine and earlier Roman territories that had been Western for 700 years.
The greatest church in Christendom was Hagia Sophia, built in the 6th century AD by the emperor Justinian. It was the largest and most revered church in Christendom for a thousand years. And yet in the 15th century, a settler-colonialist under the sultan came in and conquered and settled and took over Asia Minor from the Byzantines. And they slapped minarets and appropriated, culturally appropriated a Christian church and turned it into a mosque. They were settler-colonialists. Mondami's family are settler-colonials. They were part of a British imperial project at the turn of the 19th to 20th century who put settlers from other areas of the British Empire into Africa to help advance their colonial control of the indigenous people. And even today, Mondami, 1% Indian community controls 65% of the GDP of Uganda, settler-colonialists. 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. Erdogan, 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 to, 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 Ilyin Omar forget that, or she just gives a pass to a fellow Muslim country? While October 7th was transpiring, far away in Muslim Azerbaijan, they were ethnically cleansing 150,000 Armenians from their ancestral home of nearly a thousand years in the Nagorno-Karabakh corridor. I didn't hear a word from Ilyin Omar. I didn't hear a word from AOC. I didn't hear a word for Zoran Mondami. And then we come to genocide. Genocide. The Israelis say they committed genocide. Believe me, people who commit genocide, we know. 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 was 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 were now Israeli citizens, increase to 2 million, and the percentage of non-Jews in Israel, who were Arab Muslims, increased from 12% to 20%.