In the Shadow of the Israel-Gaza War

What the conflict reveals about America’s domestic politics

Intellectuals, rarely short on opinions, often fall back on a familiar dodge when confronted with a controversy they’d rather avoid: calling the issue “complex.”

The war in Gaza is one such case. To be sure, the tangled history, religion, and culture behind the Israel–Palestine conflict make it genuinely complicated. Partisans on both sides accuse their opponents of ignorance while promoting their own preferred narratives and facts to claim authority over the subject.

I should acknowledge that I’m no expert on Israel and Palestine. I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I haven’t visited either territory. For that reason, I’ve written little about the conflict and don’t claim to grasp all its intricacies.

But I do understand American domestic politics. And I can see the shadows the Gaza war has cast here at home. On one side stand Palestine’s domestic proxies: the decolonization theorists, keffiyeh-clad campus leftists, and, increasingly, the radicalized individuals now out for blood.

These elements are connected. The ideology is hatched at places like Harvard, where it trickles down to student activists who occupy campus buildings and make lithographs of Hamas paragliders. It then gets refracted on social media, flipping the switch within the minds of those predisposed to violence, giving them a rationale to lash out at Jews. Consider the recent spate of property bombings, the cold-blooded murder of two Israeli embassy employees, and the injuries inflicted by Molotov cocktails on a dozen people in Boulder, Colorado.

I don’t need to speak Hebrew or Arabic to recognize this domestic movement as an enemy. It’s enough to read its literature and observe its supporters’ actions to see that it embodies the forces of barbarism—forces that, if left unchecked, would tear down the pillars of civilization both abroad and at home.

I don’t need to have visited Israel or the Gaza Strip to grasp the basic analogy driving this activism: Palestinians are to Israel as the Left is to America. In the Left’s narrative, Israel stands in for the American empire, and Jews represent the white oppressors the Left seeks to overthrow.

The academic Left views Hamas as heroic resistance fighters battling a technologically superior but morally bankrupt enemy—just as they see themselves as intellectual insurgents resisting capitalism and systemic oppression in the U.S. Campus activists celebrated the October 7 paragliders because Hamas achieved in practice what they can only imagine in theory. The bloodshed offered emotional release—a euphoric political moment that made their ideology feel real.

It’s easy to forget, living here, that civilization doesn’t arise spontaneously or sustain itself without effort. In truth, civilization has existed in few places and at even fewer moments in history. It is always under threat.

One may feel unqualified to judge a foreign conflict or wish for the U.S. to disengage from global proxy wars. But there is no such luxury when it comes to the shadow war unfolding in America’s cities, campuses, and places of worship. The academic elite now treats support for Israel as an embarrassment, and solidarity with the Palestinians as a marker of intellectual bravery. But the shadows tell a different story.

I don’t need to trace every historical movement of the peoples of Israel, or justify every maneuver on today’s battlefield, to conclude—at least in an American context—that Israel’s supporters, whatever their faults, stand for civilization, and that Hamas’s apologists stand for barbarism.

I see one faction radicalizing universities, celebrating slaughter, shouting death to America, and spilling blood in the streets. I don’t need to be an expert to know which side deserves my support.