Netanyahu lets journalists blame him for Oct. 7 — Iran kills citizens for honking horns. Guess who ‘progressives’ back?

A common narrative claims that before 1948, the Middle East was an interfaith paradise where religious minorities enjoyed full equality. This argument exists mainly to frame Israel’s founding as the single cause of sectarian strife across the region. By depicting the pre-modern Middle East as an idyllic garden of mutual respect, critics present Jewish statehood not as an act of historical self-defense, but as an unnatural rupture that destroyed an organic peace.The historical record tells a very different story. Non-Muslims lived under Islamic rule as “dhimmis,” second-class subjects whose safety was always conditional and purchased through submission. Under the Pact of Umar and centuries of Ottoman rule, Jews paid the extortionate jizya poll tax. They were forbidden to bear arms, their legal testimony carried little weight against a Muslim’s, and strict sumptuary laws enforced their lower social caste. Jews were barred from riding horses, building synagogues taller than mosques, or speaking in ways that offended Islamic sensibilities. In Yemen, the Orphans’ Decree mandated the abduction and forced conversion of Jewish orphans. Tolerance was never an unalienable right; it was a revocable lease held at the whim of the ruler.Stepping outside those boundaries invited quick violence. The 1066 Granada massacre occurred after a Jewish vizier gained political office, breaching the religious hierarchy and triggering the slaughter of thousands. During the 1834 looting of Safed, rebels waged a monthlong campaign of murder, plunder, and rape against an unarmed Jewish population that had no means to defend itself. The 1929 Hebron massacre followed the same dynamic. Although stoked by Arab nationalist propaganda, the mobs avoided armed Zionist kibbutzim and attacked the traditional, non-Zionist religious community that had lived in Hebron for centuries, butchering more than 60 defenseless people. The pattern repeated from Damascus in 1840 to the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad. The so-called harmony of the pre-modern era was really just the quiet compliance of people who understood the danger of pushing back. Western critics regularly skip this history, creating a severe double standard when judging the region today. Israel faces intense condemnation, yet few critics acknowledge the legal and political freedoms that actually exist there. Even during major wars, Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretz runs front-page attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the military, openly accusing leadership of strategic incompetence and moral failure.The day after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, Haaretz’s editorial board declared Netanyahu directly responsible for the catastrophe — a degree of press freedom unthinkable in any of the region’s dictatorships. Domestic reporters investigate state corruption without fearing midnight arrests. Arab citizens vote, lead their own political parties, and serve as coalition partners in governing cabinets. Arab judges sit on the Israeli Supreme Court, adjudicating state policy and sentencing former prime ministers and presidents to prison. Inside Israel proper, adversarial journalism and raucous public opposition are standard civic practices.Israel treats its Arab citizens better than they are dealt with in many neighboring countries. The emigration rate of such individuals is miniscule. They are too busy being policemen, politicians, professors, and entrepreneurs, to engage in movements abroad. They are armed, as members of the IDF and the constabulary. Yet, Israel is widely accused, in the West, of behaving toward minorities badly. You want evidence for that claim? Just tune in to virtually any of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speeches. Many of them bitterly accuse the only civilized country in the Middle East of wrongdoing.Now compare that with Iran, the primary regime funding and directing the war against Israel. Opposition in Iran routinely meets lethal force. There is no free press, no independent judiciary, and no right to petition the supreme leader. Ordinary criticism of the regime is enough to draw a prison sentence, and when authorities assemble sufficient evidence against a critic, the penalty can be execution. Political dissidents are tortured in Evin Prison, and protesters are hanged from cranes. During the 2022 demonstrations following Mahsa Amini’s death, twenty-seven-year-old Mehran Samak honked his car horn in Bandar Anzali to celebrate the hated national (Mullah) team’s World Cup defeat to the United States. In response, state security forces shot him dead through his car window.The contrast between the two societies could not be starker. Israeli citizens can freely publish blistering takedowns of their wartime prime minister on morning newsstands, while the theocratic regime underwriting Israel’s regional enemies executes its own young citizens for harmless street noise.Western commentators often quote critical Israeli reporting to argue for dismantling the Jewish state. They happily rely on the legal protections of a vibrant democratic press to build their indictment, all while giving surrounding dictatorships a total pass on human rights. It is a grotesque paradox: using the institutional liberties of a free society as supposed proof of its illegitimacy, while ignoring the absolute terror and state murder required to keep its rivals in power.Zionism started from the simple premise that the Jewish people could no longer trust their survival to foreign rulers whose tolerance was always temporary. Nothing that has happened in the modern Middle East has proven that foundational premise wrong.ISRAEL’S SIN WAS BUILDING A SHIELD INSTEAD OF DIGGING GRAVESAnd how do the “progressives” (actually regressives) respond to all of this? Mamdani is only the tip of the iceberg. His Democratic Socialists of America cohorts pile on every chance they get. On Oct. 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas atrocity, some 30 Harvard clubs blamed that event on Israel. Our favorite in this regard is Queers for Palestine. Were they to show up in Gaza, they would be summarily executed.Go figure.Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Hushang Manuchehri is an independent writer.