Shira Efron is no friend of Israel

By Walter E. Block

Dr. Shira Efron. Screengrab via Youtube.Dr. Shira Efron. Screengrab via Youtube.

Dr. Shira Efron bewails the fact that the Jewish state is becoming more and more isolated from more and more people. She finds “Especially worrisome … the age breakdown. Among Americans aged 18 to 49, nearly three-quarters view Israel unfavorably, including nearly 60 percent of young Republicans, the very demographic many Israelis still assume supports the Jewish state. It is, in short, next to impossible to find a young cohort in America that looks at Israel and likes what it sees.”

What is the problem, and how can the Israelis solve it, so as to become more acceptable to the masses of people who now hate and revile it? She offers this: “Much criticism stems from Israel’s behavior: in addition to images of devastation and hungry children in Gaza, as part of Israel’s brutal response to the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, the world now often sees footage of settlers torching Palestinian homes in the West Bank and reads about Israeli soldiers looting living rooms in Lebanon.”

Let us consider this advice one point at a time.

First, the “devastation and hungry children in Gaza.” Whose fault is this? In 2005, Israel forcibly removed all of its citizens from this unhappy corner of the world. For all intents and purposes, this was in effect a “two state solution.” There was a civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but after 2007, the former was in total control. What did they do with their in-effect sovereignty? Did they built hotels? No. Desalinization plants? None. Maybe factories for consumer goods? Not at all. Instead, tunnels out from which sprang suicide bombers, aimed at Israel restaurants and nightclubs. Israel is supposed to stand idly by in the face of this devastation aimed at it?

Second, “Israel’s brutal response to the Hamas massacre.” Hamas mobilized vast armaments; drones, rockets, bombs. They parked them in hospitals, schools and residential areas. Was Israel supposed to refrain from defending itself against an enemy that used its own people as shields in such a manner? No other army, not even the Nazis, ever did anything so despicable. Since when is self-defense to be characterized as “brutal,” particularly by a supposed friend of the Jewish state?

Third, “settlers torching Palestinian homes in the West Bank.” There is more fallacy in this short phrase than you can shake a stick at. The “settlers” are the Palestinians, who can trace their occupancy only a few scant centuries. The original occupants were the Jews, who were there, tilling the soil, for several millennia. Moreover, those homes were torched because their occupants threw stones as the Jews, stabbed them with knives, shot them with guns. The victims didn’t much like being subjected to modern pogroms. As well, the proper name for these territories is Judea and Samaria, not the “West Bank.” Surely, an Israeli such as she ought to know this.

Fourth, “Israeli soldiers looting living rooms in Lebanon.” Why are they there in the first place? That is because Hezbollah has this quaint habit of pulverizing northern Israel with drones and bombs. If Canada attacked Montana in such a manner, do you think the US would stand idly by with its thumb in its mouth and tolerate such behavior? No sovereign nation would allow any such thing. If and to the rare extent such things do occur, IDF soldiers would be punished. How about the misbehavior and much worse, of its enemy soldiers? They are celebrated, not penalized.

This Middle Eastern expert acknowledges that these latter “incidents represent a small fraction of Israeli conduct…” Yes, indeed. She also correctly notes that “they are framed through a social justice lens and amplified by social media.” What she fails to realize is that it is commentators like her, and her colleagues at the New York Times, who are doing just that.

I have no reason to believe that this is purposeful. As far as I know, she honestly thinks she is helping the Israeli cause. But she is so taken with the left-wing view of this matter, with the appeasement-is-best approach, that she does not see matters clearly. She should ask herself, suppose Israel were to give in, fully, to Iran and is three proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, to all of their demand. What would life be like for Jews now living in Israel. There would be no “two state” solution. There would be only one state, Palestine, in which Jews would be a distinct minority. Would they be treated any better than are whites, now, in South Africa? Probably not. I don’t say that October 7, 2023 would be repeated every day. But I do not deny it either. These are the people with whom she is asking the Israeli government to bargain with, to engage in “diplomacy” with.

June 9, 2026 | 6 Comments »

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  1. “THE LEGALITY OF ISRAELI SOVEREIGNTY OVER JUDEA AND SAMARIA ACCORDING TO INTERNATIONAL LAW”!
    Perhaps she is ignorant of this article!

    What is HER solution!

    1

  2. Natalie Portman, Justine Triet and Jacques Audiard Defend Israeli Director Nadav Lapid: ‘The Cultural Boycott Is an Intellectual Failure’

    https://variety.com/2026/film/global/natalie-portman-justine-triet-defend-boycott-israeli-lapid-1236770480/

    My comment:

    Israeli leftwing Tokyo Rose/Axis Sally Hanoi Jane-like useful idiots who don’t understand that they’ve outlived their usefulness and who remind me of the Yevsektsia in that regard. The crocodile they aided and abetted when in its infancy, now fully grown, is eating them last. I won’t say, “Bon Appetit.” That would be just too mean.

    AI Overview:

    evseksia jews The Yevsektsiya (or “Jewish Section”) was a branch of the Soviet Communist Party established in 1918. Made up of young, secularized Jewish revolutionaries, its goal was to disseminate communist propaganda to Jewish masses. Ironically, this led them to brutally suppress traditional Jewish life, religious institutions, Hebrew, and Zionism.The group was formed shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution to bring millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews into the new Soviet reality. Their core activities and impacts were hyper-focused on erasing Jewish particularism:Eradication of Religious Life: They legally abolished, and sometimes violently shut down, traditional Jewish community organizations (kehillas), yeshivas, synagogues, and cheders.Suppression of Zionism: The Yevsektsiya aggressively targeted Zionists, breaking up the All-Russian Zionist Congress in 1920 and sending thousands of activists to prison or labor camps.Promotion of “Secular Yiddishism”: Instead of traditional Judaism, they promoted a secular, Soviet-aligned Jewish identity based on the Yiddish language and culture.The Final Fate: Once the traditional Jewish community had been successfully subjugated, the Yevsektsiya was deemed obsolete. The Communist Party disbanded the section in 1930, and many of its former members were subsequently executed or sent to Gulags during Stalin’s Great Purge.For a detailed historical account of this era and how these Jewish sections operated within the Communist party, read the ?Encyclopedia.com entry on the Yevsektsiya. If you are looking for a deeper academic breakdown of Soviet politics regarding Jewish nationality, consider historian Zvi Gitelman’s foundational work, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics.

  3. The requisite and definitive move of antizionists occurs early in their discourse— very early— and it is to conjure a category of thought from the start which they call “criticism of Israel,” and which represents a kind of shared social fiction. In veiling ourselves as listeners to this sleight-of-hand, we take part in their deceitful operation, imagining a valorized species of “criticism” which is distinct from Israel-hatred itself—as though some social process of critiquing Israel may be isolated from the rest of an Israel-hating society.

    We face this ritual by quietly consoling ourselves: that “criticism of Israel” is really unrelated to violence, or at worst merely a precursor, a warning sign, or a pathway that may only later culminate in overt discrimination or violence. Yet the central operation of antizionist abuse has already and immediately gone unnoticed. The reciprocal process of gaslighting (and self-gaslighting) happens so early in antizionist discourses, and so quickly, that it is easy to miss. To indulge critique at face value is to misunderstand the fundamental nature of antizionism and antisemitism at bottom— as a web of transmitted allegations along a network of speakers. That some of these allegations may be true or false is not, in the strict sense, what counts in the cycle of libel.

    Antizionist “criticism” is not only a set of hostile acts or calls directed at Israelis, or at the ever-elusive phantasm of “The Zionists.” It is the careful rebranding of antizionist libel, and it is a civic mode of attention generation. “Criticism” is usually a part of pervasive scrutiny, and part of a systemic and obsessive cultural preoccupation with Israel’s conduct, figures, people, speech, desires, ambitions, and perceived failures. The essence of antizionism is in fact this “criticism of Israel,” as it is made up-like the classical antisemitism that came before it-of a web of popular criticisms about Jews. Late modern antisemitism also once reverberated through the world’s civil society institutions in the era of eugenics and scientific racism. Today’s thick fog of calumnies likewise manifests in the overt exclusion of Jews, and in a heated critical gaze which places Israel under a burden of self-justification to which no one else is subjected.

    For this reason, “criticism of Israel” is truthfully a tactical euphemism; it cannot be neatly abstracted from antizionism or treated as conditional, as tentatively true, or even merely as an antecedent cause of harm. At the level of civil processes like newsmedia, academic education, NGO consensus-formation or anywhere else our social facts are created, the popular deluge of abusive criticism is in fact already the vehicle of that harm. The endless cataloguing of one country’s faults, the demand for its moral perfection, the disproportionate attention to Israel’s transgressions real or imagined. These are not secondary effects of antizionism but their primary expression.

    To be subjected constantly to inspection and presumed judgment is to be made perpetually answerable to a permanent trial, one which fully intends to confer, yet again, an inferior civic and moral status upon Jews. After a time, the scrutiny becomes so pervasive that it comes to seem natural, and our state of self-gaslighting helps normalize it. We quickly accept the feeling of being judged as justified or at least as inevitable. It is not natural, nor is it normal.

    The mistake was to imagine from the start that antizionist abuse only begins when criticism turns into discrimination or violence. The obsessive, relentless criticism is already the discrimination; the cycle of libel is itself the mode of oppression, exile, and exclusion, operating in its most normalized and socially acceptable form.”

    Academics Against Antizionism (@AAAntizionism) on X

    reposted by Adam Louis-Klein on FB

    https://www.facebook.com/643402921/posts/pfbid0uCkysdss8MxP7rJvkWp1zu1oQdYCWeqMGT1sPtVUxzzKYUX4ywP8xGhW74Fz5P1ol/?

  4. centuries, eh.

    Pallywood propaganda wins an Oscar
    The film presents over a

    decade of mendatious, carefully staged and curated footage, filmed in an area designated as an IDF live-fire training ground in 1980, following a meticulous survey of what has always been desert wasteland. Opinion.
    Rachel Touitou
    2 minutes
    Mar 3, 2025 at 1:55 PM (GMT+2)

    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/404790