Posted by Geoffrey Clarfield
I just got back from Kenya and I am now in Israel. I met Victor for lunch recently. What a talented young man. He is a Douglas Murray in the making. I am posting this from his substack Satya as he has distilled things to their essence.
In today’s moral universe, rockets are contextual, militias are expressive, and the real scandal is the country that insists on staying alive.
There are bad arguments. There are weak arguments. And then there are arguments so gloriously detached from reality that they ought to be preserved in a museum—preferably next to medieval maps where dragons lurk at the edges of the known world.
The claim that Israel is the great destabilizer of the Middle East belongs firmly in that category.
Let us begin with this masterpiece.
The Blame Game
We are told—often with great moral seriousness—that Israel is the chief source of instability in the Middle East. This is an intriguing diagnosis of a region that has, over the past half-century, produced civil wars, sectarian bloodbaths, failed states, proxy militias, and enough ideological extremism to keep historians employed for centuries.
And yet, the culprit—apparently—is a country roughly the size of Wales.
This is rather like surveying a city engulfed in flames and concluding that the fire brigade is the real problem. After all, wherever they go, there are fires. Suspicious, no?
Israel, in this telling, is not responding to instability—it is causing it. Rockets fall, and Israel dares to intercept them. Militias mobilize, and Israel has the audacity to resist them. One begins to see the pattern: Israel keeps ruining everyone else’s perfectly good attempts at chaos.
The Curious Case of the “Colonial Implant”
Then we arrive at the fashionable claim that Israel is a “colonial project.”
Now, colonialism usually involves a distant empire sending its people to extract resources from a foreign land. The British in India. The French in Algeria. You know—the usual suspects. But Israel is a colonial project of a rather unusual kind. There is no empire. No mother country. No extraction economy. No plan to pack up and leave.
Instead, we have people returning—often from exile, persecution, or worse—to the one place in the world where their history, language, and identity actually began.
The Jews, uniquely in human history, are accused of colonizing the one place on earth where their history, language, religion, and identity actually originate. It is colonialism so unusual that it involves returning to your ancestral home and then being told you are an intruder in it.
It is the only colonial project in history where the “colonizers” are told to go back to where they came from—only to discover that this is where they came from.
Reality, Still Uninvited
The truth—less fashionable, but far more accurate—is that the Middle East’s instability is driven by a complex web of political, religious, and ideological forces.
Israel exists within that environment. It did not create it
Read it all here
