Anti-Israel chants - like "From the river to the sea" or accusations that Israel is a colonialist project - are not only historically inaccurate, they are also deadly. In a brilliant piece in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg explores Yahya Sinwar's critical miscalculation that led to the collapse of Iran's anti-Israel coalition after October 7. Sinwar was caught up in his own propaganda, convinced that Israelis see themselves as foreigners who do not truly belong in their own state. His logic was straightforward: hit them hard enough, and they will collapse.
The outcome of that miscalculation is painfully clear. The Gaza Strip lies in devastation. Hezbollah - under the leadership of Hassan Nasrallah, who was recently killed by Israel - is weakened to an extreme degree. Iran itself has suffered devastating strikes at the hands of the IDF, demonstrating Israel's military superiority.
But the lesson we must draw goes beyond Sinwar and Nasrallah. It extends to the far-left rhetoric surrounding Israel. For years, this rhetoric has insisted on the same thing Sinwar thought: that Israel is a settler-colonial state built by European immigrants and therefore uniquely fragile and reversible. You see this belief in chants at anti-Israel protests - slogans labeling Israelis as white colonizers and calling for their removal, as if they were French colonialists in Algeria. The perception, as Adam Kirsch describes, is that Israel is a colonial project that can simply be undone.
Yet this view is profoundly flawed. It erases the diverse reality of Israeli society - a nation where half of the Jewish population hails not from Europe but from the Middle East and North Africa. It ignores that most Israelis feel deeply rooted in their homeland, every bit as indigenous to this region as anyone else. And it adopts a false historical parallel - hoping that, like the FLN against the French, violence will cause Israelis to give up and leave.
Thomas Aquinas framed truth as an aptness between what one says about something and the thing itself. If one says that the sun is hot and the sun is hot, that is truth. Applying this standard, if anti-Israel chants truly reflected reality - if Israelis were merely fragile colonizers, then continuous violent attacks would eventually break them. But if that is not the case, if these beliefs do not match the reality on the ground, then those chants are not apt.
William James offers another useful paradigm for understanding truth. In his pragmatism, the value of an idea is measured by its practical effects - by how it shapes behavior and how the world responds. Seen through this lens, we recognize that Israeli society acts as an anti-colonial, deeply rooted community with profound ties to its land and identity. If we imagine a spectrum with fragile societies on one end, easily shattered by pressure, and anti-fragile societies on the other, strengthened by challenge, it's evident that after nearly two years of intense war, Israel belongs on the anti-fragile end. In this pragmatic sense, anti-Israel myths do not reflect a fragile settler colony but an anti-fragile society that grows more resolute under attack.
And this insight matters. Because if it is false to assume that Israelis will collapse like colonial powers of the past, then the only logical response is to abandon this fantasy and find other ways to resolve the conflict. Like the United States, where nobody seriously expects returning Turtle Island to Indigenous tribes by expelling the entire settler-descended population, it is impossible, and dangerous, to pretend that Israel can simply be reversed.
Recognizing that these anti-Israel chants are not apt is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is a moral imperative. Twenty months into an intense and devastating war, this perverse hope that Israel can simply be wished away is only fueling more suffering. Understanding that these myths do not align with reality is the first step toward preventing further bloodshed and moving toward genuine solutions.
