A letter to my anti-Zionist friend

Our conversation last night was tough. We had managed to avoid the subject until now. But sure enough, the time to face our differences arrived. You were more surprised by my stance than I was by yours, which has always been far to my left. Thus you’d naturally gravitate toward the “liberal” anti-Israel consortium and the torrent of slander it has so deftly orchestrated. Too many of my non-Jewish friends succumbed to it as you have, as did even some Jewish ones. That no one in the circles you frequent questions such slanders is par for the course. Still, I was very much taken aback by the deep indignation stirred up in you by Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which you directed at me with unwavering conviction:

“…I am alarmed by the fact that you are unable to recognize that the vast majority of the media in the democratic world have understood Israel’s use of force as something completely disproportionate, cruel, and bordering on basic definitions of war crimes: a systematic barbarism.”

By night’s end, you literally accused me of blindness. I, in turn, accused you of hallucinations. But now that we’ve slept over it, perhaps my appeal to sounder reasoning will be better suited to this format. Please allow me here to dispel some of the fog of war upon which you project visions of Israeli crimes.

Listen, I am not blind. I’m perfectly aware that Israel’s military campaign against Hamas has devastated Gaza: Half of it is razed. There are tens of thousands of civilian casualties, plus hundreds of thousands displaced and destitute. The suffering is real. But the concern among both of us here is whether Israel’s campaign rises to the level of an earth-shattering crime. You say yes, as does the vast majority of the media in the democratic world. I say no—that even if the damage in Gaza may seem exceptional, it is because the circumstances of this war are themselves exceptional.

• The proportionality canard 

Your colleagues in the enlightened Left condemn the damage in Gaza as criminal by proclaiming it has been disproportionate, as if Hamas the spoiled-brat pulled off some nasty mischief and drew a far too severe punishment from the Big Bad IDF. Beyond the pedagogical challenge of weighing a punishment’s usefulness, this is not at all what’s addressed in international treaties by the question of proportionality in military operations. The requirement of proportionality does not address the justifiable dimensions of a response to an aggression, not in the Rome Statute, the Geneva Convention or customary international law. What this law requires is that the prospective advantage gained by a military operation be adjusted so as not to cause “excessive” civilian damage in relation to the military goals of a war. However, the law is not all that explicit as to what would be specifically “excessive”, because it can’t. Wars are messy. Plenty of legalistic ink has been spilled over this.

Nevertheless, let’s make a good faith effort to gage the IDF’s damage in Gaza beyond the headlines. In the case of the war in question, which, mind you, Hamas unilaterally provoked, Israel defined two goals: (1) To free the hostages and (2) To annihilate Hamas. The damage caused by the IDF’s operations on the way to achieving these two perfectly legitimate goals must also be considered in relation to the very particular conditions that Hamas designed and deployed on the battlefield to hinder the IDF’s objectives. The conditions established by Hamas are most clearly war crimes. But let’s set this nagging detail aside for a moment, and consider the IDF’s operations within the frame of the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of its campaign, which is a pertinent quantitative parameter to gage the purported “excessiveness” of the damage.

The IDF has claimed the ratio has been 1.5 to 2 civilians casualties per combatant. One should take this estimate with a grain of salt, of course. On the other hand, the calculation from Hamas is a bit hard to come by, but it can be inferred. The casualty reports from the Gaza Ministry of Health do not differentiate civilians from combatants, and their figures have shifted in the past. For instance, up to May 6, 2024 GMH had reported that over 72% of casualties were women and children, fueling the world’s uproar for months. On May 8, 2024, however, these casualty figures were quietly revised by GMH to 51% women & children. Its latest figures from August 2025 indicate 49% women & children casualties. If we take GMH’s latest report at its word, and include a similar proportion of noncombatant men casualties as there are women (20%) in their report, the total civilian casualty proportion would be a bit over 2/3 of the total, which remains at a bit over 2 civilians per combatant. It turns out, then, the figures suggested by the IDF and Hamas are not that far off from each other. How does this compare to other wars?

In 2022, one year before the October 7th pogrom, the UN itself reported that, worldwide, conflicts in densely populated areas average 9 civilians casualties per combatant (https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm). Such UN sanctioned figures suggest the casualty ratio in Gaza has been somewhere between 4 to 5 times lower than in comparable conflicts worldwide. Yes, that’s 4 to 5 times lower according to UN numbers. To call Israel’s campaign, in this particularly relevant sense, “excessive” is just plainly absurd.

And yet, the Left-wing intelligentsia claims Israel hasn’t conducted the war properly… As if your colleagues could tell us the proper way to wage war against a militia of tens of thousands of Islamofascist terrorists entrenched in tunnels beneath densely populated areas where schools, hospitals, and mosques have been turned into arsenals or command centers, where residents of every building became human shields for the terrorists’ infrastructure, and where every structure left behind has been thoroughly booby-trapped. Unlike the IDF, Hamas doesn’t adhere to any regulations of military conduct (NONE!) And, to boot, the terrorists guarded themselves behind 250 Israelis kidnapped through one of the most savage pogroms in memory. I trust you’re aware of all of the above, but please try to keep a tally of Hamas’s effective war-crimes in the list.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you could find such a frightfully complex scenario anywhere else in the history of warfare. Frankly, those who have lectured Israel on military tactics and strategy are fools. For the IDF, the challenge posed by this campaign was, from the outset, beyond compare. Undoubtedly the campaign has had failures and mistakes, with unexpected collateral damage, but these should be sensibly considered within the circumstances that Hamas dictated in Gaza. And despite these failures and mistakes, I’d venture to claim, as argued above, the IDF’s campaign has been nothing less than exemplary in its caution, avoiding or reducing civilian casualties.

• Reports from the ground (or lack thereof)

While you acknowledged that information coming out of Gaza may not be reliable, you denounced the IDF’s refusal to allow the international press into Gaza for the lack of evidence against—or eventually for—the Israelis. This is yet another huge canard that inverts the blame entirely. Hamas controls the information coming out of Gaza. It has done so since 2006, and still does. If independent journalists were to report from where the immediate harm occurs, that’d be from Hamas-controlled areas. But any journalist reporting critically from Hamas’s territory is expelled or extorted, or, if Palestinian, summarily rid-of. For its part, the IDF already faces way too many challenges on the Gaza ground without the charge of ensuring the safety of foreign journalists in areas under its control. But there are additional reasons not to bring the “independent press” to report under the IDF’s protection. Just as Hamas violently keeps a tight grip on what’s reported from Gaza, the information economy channeled by the anti-Israel global media consortium discourages (to put it mildly) reports that challenge the narrative consensus you defend. And for this reason we would get hardly any, if at all, disinterested reports from international journalists under the protection of the IDF.

You complain of a lack of evidence. But there is more than enough evidence. Just not the one you’re looking for. Tell me, how many examples of manipulated or decontextualized photos do we have to present to you? How many instances of fabricated figures? How many alarmist press reports that are later dismissed? How many revelations of false testimonies from Hamas operatives posing as civilians/ press/doctors? If Israeli crimes were as gross as you maintain, why would Hamas see the need to produce and spread such fakes at all? I fear there might not be enough evidence in the world to make you see the farce in which you participate and which you, in turn, help spread around the planet with such hubris.

• Beware rabble rousers and experts joining hands.

Indeed, it is astonishing how confidently anti-Israel rabble-rousers proclaim war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, famine… Each of these calumnies is repeated endlessly, and each time the evidence falls short, followed by the protests wearing down, that is, until a fresh anti-Israel scandal can be concocted. But by constantly hammering down the false accusations, they have stuck. The canny success of this scheme would have made Goebbels proud.

You profess to support your accusatory views on information you gather from a consensus of expert sources. I can’t help but be reminded of past occasions when some consensus of experts joined the rabble rousers to rule against my people—such as when the English expelled the Jews in 1290, or when the Spanish in 1478 came up with their Holy Inquisition, or in 1936 in Germany when… well, you get the picture: to every age its experts.

The ongoing consensus of experts against Israel didn’t come together on October 7th. The “liberal” chapter of the anti-Israel cabal has included, for decades, the majority of the media in the democratic world you allude to and place your trust in—including (but not limited to) the NYT, Washington Post, LA Times, The Guardian, Liberation, Le Monde, El Pais, BBC, AFP, AP, Reuters. Add to them Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, the whole of the UN, and you may begin to get a sense of the spread of longstanding anti-Israel animus in the democratic world. It just so happened that, paradox of paradoxes, the October 7th pogrom effectively unleashed the media’s persecution of Israel and made it plainly manifest. Those who don’t see it is because they just refuse to see it. And yes, way too many choose not to.

I repeat, I’m not turning away from the terrible damage and suffering in Gaza. Wars are awful. They’ve always been. What I’m attempting here is bring you to face the majority of the media in the democratic world manipulating, exaggerating, and distorting the damage to paint Israel as criminal before our too gullible world. In another, slightly more level-headed world, it would be the media’s slanderous campaign that’d be denounced as criminal.

My friend— I remain puzzled why an art-critic of such high standing, with many decades of experience, someone qualified to read between the lines, decipher dishonest codes, deconstruct demagogic discourses, dismantle the architecture of power, has allowed himself to be swayed by the avalanche of pernicious disinformation against Israel. I am saddened that a dear friend, so intelligent and cultured, has plunged into the mental swamp of anti-Zionism. I’ve responded to your claims because I trust that you are capable of pulling yourself out of the swamp, if you only wished to. If you need, I’m here to help.

You tell me.