Dec. 2025
Pat Johnson
(Excerpted from original post on Pat’s BEATEN WITH A SHTICK Substack

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
This is a quote from Golda Meir that has always seemed to me to be condescending and sanctimonious. But as I considered her words more deeply after the ceasefire agreement, the return of the remaining hostages and the end (for now) of the conflict — I have a different perspective on what she meant. I think her words expose the heart of this conflict in a way nothing else does.

In the long history of anti-Jewish agitation and atrocities, Palestinianism stands out as having perfected the artform. This is to take nothing away from the enemies of the past, whose imagination and creativity in devising new and ever more effective ways of tormenting and annihilating Jews has been outstanding. But Palestinianism has identified an Achilles heel that no other enemy has devised.

On the streets of Israel right now, we are seeing jubilation. But this jubilation is not the triumphalism of victors of past wars in human history. Overwhelmingly, Israelis are celebrating an end to the death and destruction on both sides. This is something that may be almost unknown in the history of humans fighting one another.

This is where Golda’s words took on fresh meaning for me. Despite the incessant wall of noise we have heard worldwide over the past two years about Israelis (and Jews) embodying the essence of immorality and malevolence, precisely the opposite has been proven true.

Jews literally invented, “thou shalt not kill.” This was a central part of the covenant that took place when the Hebrew people became a nation at Mount Sinai. This is at the heart of what it is to be a Jew.
Across the centuries, partly because of their tenacity in clinging to these ethical values, Jews were cast out and their sense of belonging was systematically negated by the societies in which they lived. Their religiosity was denied — seen as outside the realm of societal and divine acceptance and relegated to the margins of spiritual legitimacy. This negation transformed into a racial one: Jews were told they did not fit into the national or ethnic categories of the lands they called home. And then, under the Nazis, this negation reached its most horrifying form: a denial of their very humanity, a monstrous lie that Jews did not even belong to the human species.

And yet, even that ultimate attempt to physically annihilate the Jews failed. Not only that, but the surviving Jews incredibly clung no less tenaciously to the ethical values of their ancestors. Even the most comprehensive, thorough, genocidal external forces could not eradicate the Jewish presence from the world.

This is around the time when a group of Arab and Muslim thinkers invented a new strategy, exploiting the people who would come to be called Palestinians in a backdoor strategy to undermine Jewish identity and existence from the inside. They would devise a strategy in which the Jews were forced to act against their own values and, if all went according to plan, destroy the only thing no one else could take away from them: their morality, their struggle to seek justice, their censorious duty to thou shalt not kill.

Palestinianism, the motivating ideology of Hamas, raises children to kill and be killed, to view martyrdom as the acme of human achievement. It emphatically teaches young Palestinians that death is sacred and desirable. This message is inculcated into young Palestinians with their mother’s milk, through every aspect of Palestinian society — education, religion, popular culture. There are millions of examples of this, perhaps none more succinct than the monument at Al-Quds University declaring: “Beware of natural death; do not die, but amidst the hail of bullets.”

Palestinianism has mastered a strategy that even the most venal enemies of the past had never perfected. It is to “prove” that, for all the holier-than-thou Jewish words of morality, justice and sanctity of life, they are not only no better than the rest of us reprobates but arguably the worst of our entire sinful species.

This was the brilliance of the genocide libel. There is no moral affront greater than genocide. And there is no affront to Jewish values greater than this. Indeed, the very term had to be invented to describe the 20th-century Jewish historical experience. So the genocide libel does triple duty. It inverts Jewish victimhood, accusing the Jews of perpetrating the worst atrocities of their own people. It turns the world against the Jews the way accusations of well-poisonings and blood libels did in centuries past. But — and here is the brilliance of Palestinianism — it does what every external attempt to annihilate the Jews could not: it discredits and subverts the very thing that makes Jews who they are.
Jews, in the strategy of Palestinianism, will be proven not only as imposters with no claim to the land but imposters with no claim to the thing that, even above the sanctity of the Jewish people’s connection to the land of Zion and Jerusalem itself, defines them: their claim to be the carriers of ethical monotheism, strivers for morality and pursuers of justice. Palestinianism seeks to “prove” the Jews not only have no claim to the land Palestinians claim as theirs, but no claim to the morality upon which Jews have built their entire identity. 

Palestinianism has found the Achilles heel that millennia of enemies of the Jews, for all their creativity and innovation, could never quite figure, not only to steal the land where their history resides, but to undermine the very things that define them to themselves, to the world and, for those who believe, to God. To force them to betray their own most scared values: to kill.

Has Palestinianism — and through it, the broader Arab and Muslim consensus and the marching millions worldwide — finally done what all the combined enemies of the Jewish people through history have failed to do, to divest from Jewish people the only thing more important to their identity than the land of Israel itself: their claim to morality, their quest for justice, the covenant they have to bring to humanity humanity iself?

Decidedly not. Because everything I read and everything I hear from my Jewish friends and from Jewish commentators is that now is a time for moral reckoning. A political one, yes. But a moral reckoning, above all. The very fact that, for so many Jews, this moment is seen not as a time for triumphalism or resting on laurels of victory, but as the beginning of a time of reflection and teshuvah, is evidence of the real victory.

Now that the war is over (for now), Jews are responding as they do — by agonizing over their state’s actions, by agitating for justice not only for themselves but for Palestinians. They are not engaged in gloating, chest-beating, jingoism or anything resembling triumphalism.

On the contrary, Israelis and Jews worldwide seem overwhelmingly to be launching a process of introspection, analyzing what they were forced to do in the horrific depths of an unprecedented war, what moral compromises and affronts to justice were perpetrated in their names.

If there is any triumph in this war, this is it. It is not military victory that is the victory here. It is the joy that the hostages have returned and the realization that (for now) the dying on both sides will end.

This is what Golda meant with her words. Above all, the fact that Jewish people are engaged in that process of moral interrogation, and have never stopped questioning what is ethical and just, especially in the most unimaginably trying situations like we have witnessed in the past two years, is the surest proof that the culmination of 2,000 years of increasingly imaginative strategies to strip the Jewish people not only of their lives but of that which is most sacred to them, their commitment to all life but also to morality and justice, have failed profoundly.

Pat Johnson is founder of Upstanders Canada, which was created to mobilize non-Jewish Canadians to stand up against antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Photo caption: Israelis in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Monday October 13, 2025, celebrate the return of all living and most of the dead Israeli hostages taken captive.

Photo courtesy of UPI/Newscom