Opinion | Does Israel have a right to exist?

August 17, 2024

“Have you read ‘The Looming Tower’ by Lawrence Wright?”

For more than two decades, I have posed these two questions to dozens and dozens of first-time guests on my radio show. I call them “history GPS questions,” so the audience can get a sense of where people are coming from if they’re seeking elective office or in some way hoping to politically influence listeners.

I will now have to add a third question: “Do you affirm the state of Israel’s right to exist?“

Since Israel declared independence in 1948 and was admitted to the United Nations the following year, the world has been bound by international law to recognize the Jewish state’s right to exist. But as of 2020, 28 of the 193 U.N. member states do not recognize Israeli sovereignty. The Muslim world accounts for 25 of the 28 non-recognizing countries, with Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela representing the remainder.

My goal in asking about “The Looming Tower” is to discover whether the guest is knowledgeable about the most important event in U.S. history this millennium: the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Wright’s book, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, is generally recognized as a must-read about how and why 9/11 happened.

The second question, about Hiss, has a double purpose. Some people simply don’t know about the Soviet spy who served at high levels in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and was the subject of heated debate for decades: Soviet agent or persecuted victim of McCarthyism?

With the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, government archives were opened and, soon, incontrovertible proof of Hiss’s guilt emerged. All but a handful of dead-enders gave up the cause and admitted that Hiss — who was only ever convicted of perjury — was indeed a Soviet spy.

I ask the Hiss question to see whether this great Cold War controversy and its underlying reality of great-power espionage is even known to the guest. Many have no idea who Hiss was. Such ignorance reveals much. And occasionally, a holdover from the old left shows up still proclaiming “Hiss was innocent!”

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Listeners can orient themselves to the guest’s views based on the two simple questions above.

I’ve never even considered that I would ask someone, “Did the Holocaust happen?” I’ve never knowingly had a Holocaust denier on the air, just as I’ve never had on a proponent of white supremacy. It’s pretty easy to build walls against such pollutants entering the airwaves under my jurisdiction.

But now I will have to add the basic question about Israel’s nationhood. In the past three weeks, it has become painfully clear that hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans marching in demonstrations across campuses and in the streets of major cities do not accept the state of Israel’s legitimacy.

That view is radical and dangerous. And it can no longer be considered so marginal that it need not be discussed in polite society. Instead, the view is one that must be exposed and its believers obliged to explain themselves.

Israel is a sovereign state. It will never disappear unless most of the countries of the Middle East disappear in some sort of nuclear conflagration. What is also clear: Countless left-wing radicals would not shed a tear if Israel were cleared of every Jew “from the river to the sea,” the more barbarous the method, the better.

Scene after scene of anti-Israel outrages, some of them grossly antisemitic, across the United States have stunned and alarmed most mainstream liberals, moderates and conservatives these past weeks. The deep depravity of the Oct. 7 pogrom by Hamas within Israel disgusted the civilized world, but so deep is the rot in academia and among the indoctrinated children of the U.S. education system that millions of Americans would prefer averting their eyes and refusing to deal with the realities it exposed.

The worst of those realities is that Hamas demonstrated on Oct. 7 that, if it had the capability, it would kill every Israeli and probably every Jew on the planet. Iran, which materially backs Hamas in Gaza and controls Hezbollah in Lebanon, frequently declares that Israel must be destroyed. Too many in the West have for too long been unable to acknowledge that this is the Iranian regime’s ultimate goal.

“Death to Israel” — just a slogan, right? Well, no serious person can now believe other than what Tehran’s mullahs have been saying for decades. They and their proxies truly do believe it. (Thus they can never have nuclear weapons.)

We in the media should not silence the Israel deniers, but we would perform a public service if we invited them to reveal themselves. As with those who presume to address 9/11 without a basic grounding in the facts, or who deny the reach of Soviet espionage, when Israel deniers begin to spew, the audience deserves fair warning.

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