The rise of anti-Israel sentiment in America is not only troubling, it is intellectually bankrupt. The individuals who find themselves in the anti-Israel camp, whether on the radical Left or among the newly confused factions of the Right, reveal a staggering ignorance of history, geopolitics, and basic moral clarity. Their positions are not principled dissent, but evidence of a worldview detached from reality and untethered from the foundations of Western civilization.
I speak from personal experience, not academic theory. I grew up in Egypt and lived in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. I witnessed firsthand the machinery of indoctrination that saturates the region, a relentless, daily campaign that portrays Israel not merely as an adversary, but as something less than human. The dehumanization is that absolute. It is taught in schools, pushed by state propaganda, reinforced in mosques, and absorbed in the culture like oxygen. Anyone in America who parrots anti-Israel hysteria is, knowingly or not, channeling a worldview designed by dictators, jihadists, and tyrants.
For these people, Israel is not a nation to be understood but an object onto which they project their ideological illusions. Much of this hostility is manufactured in the echo chambers of universities and online movements where self-anointed intellectuals dispense their opinions like untreated sewage, loud, messy, and devoid of substance. The result is a generation incapable of distinguishing civilization from barbarism.
The historical record, stretching back over 4,000 years, is not ambiguous. Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the birthplace of the faith that shaped Western morality, and the sole liberal democracy in a region dominated by authoritarianism, sectarian violence, and radical political theologies. While Israel protects the rights of Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, its neighbors are ruled by regimes that imprison dissidents, suppress women, persecute minorities, and elevate violence as a religious calling.
Israel’s neighbors are almost uniformly dictatorships. Egypt has had four presidents since 1956 (five if we include the one year the Muslim Brotherhood leader held office). Jordan and Saudi Arabia are absolute monarchies where dissent is met with prison, exile, or the sword. Syria is now ruled by a militant jihadist who appeals to the West only long enough to secure money and recognition before planning their next attack on Israel and the free world. Iran is controlled by Islamist zealots who openly declare their intention to annihilate the Christian and Western world. These are not speculations; they are stated goals, repeated in speeches, sermons, and policy.
This region, over 500 million people living under political systems fundamentally hostile to Western values, has produced some of the most violent and destabilizing movements on earth. These are societies where powerful factions openly glorify the annihilation of Western civilization, where the ticket to paradise is achieved not through virtue but through killing the “infidel,” where American soldiers have been targeted, embassies bombed, and commercial shipping disrupted in the Red Sea. If they had the operational capacity, some of these groups would carry out a 9/11-scale attack every week.
Israel stands in the middle of this storm as the lone representative of Western civilization and the only functioning democracy in the entire region. Its citizens, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. They enjoy due process, free elections, religious liberty, civil rights, and economic opportunity. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the three major faiths not only coexist but are protected by law. It is the one place where you can walk through a city and see churches, mosques, and synagogues standing not in conflict, but under the same legal shield of freedom.
This reality alone should settle the debate. But for the anti-Israel crowd, facts are not only obstacles; they are irritants. These critics consistently get reality wrong because their worldview is not built on truth but on ideology, a soft, shapeless ideology that collapses when confronted with the moral demands of real history. The Left attacks Israel because it represents the Judeo-Christian values it seeks to dismantle. The confused isolationist Right attacks Israel because it has forgotten what civilization requires to survive.
Both groups fail the test of moral seriousness.
Supporting Israel is not an act of blind loyalty; it is a sober defense of civilization itself. Israel stands on the front lines against the very forces that target America, Europe, and every free society. We share mutual interests, mutual values, and mutual enemies. A world where Israel collapses is not a world of peace, it is a world where the enemies of freedom grow stronger, bolder, and closer to our shores.
Standing with Israel is standing with freedom. It is standing with the only democracy in a region where tyranny is the norm, with the only nation that protects religious liberty in a territory defined by religious extremism, and with the only society that reflects the moral and political architecture of the West.
To oppose Israel today is to align oneself, knowingly or not, with the enemies of the free world. And the intelligent mind, the morally grounded mind, rejects such folly outright.