The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Israel’s Critics Have a History Problem

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Charges of apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide against Israel fall apart under historical scrutiny, Victor Davis Hanson argues. He points to the glaring double standard applied to Israel while far more severe abuses by other regimes receive little attention on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision, to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca.

Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility, Canadian new vehicle total registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. We're told by a lot of representatives in our own Congress. Zeran Mondami and others have said that Israel's an apartheid state. We hear settler colonialists. If you want to talk about settler colonials, where did the Arabs come from?

They swept in from Asia into the Middle East and North Africa and as settler colonialists conquered Byzantians, and earlier Roman territories that had been Western for 700 years. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanssen of the Daily Signal. We're hearing a lot of charges since October 7th that Israel has committed a litany of war crimes. Let's examine them very carefully because I think they tell us more about the accuser than they do the accused. We're told by a lot of representatives in our own Congress, mostly on the Democratic side, not all. Tucker Carlson, for example, Candace Olens, but also Zeran Mondami and others have said that Israel's an apartheid state.

In other words, it has racial enclaves. But there's nothing in the Israeli constitution that requires you to be Jewish. In fact, there's 2 million Arabs living freely, voting freely, inside Israel. In contrast of the 22 member Arab nations, almost all of them require Islam as the national religion. And of the 30 Muslim countries, Arab and non-Arab alike, about 23 of them make it a crime to be an apostate from Islam. Does anybody ever say that these are apartheid states? Do you really believe that if you were of a trans community, you could start a movement in Iran? Could you have a Mormon chapter on the West Bank?

Could you build a new cathedral of Christian worship in Istanbul today under Erdogan? You think there's a gay rights parade going on in Gaza? No, no, these are apartheid. They eliminate and marginalize communities. Let's look at another charge that we hear, settler colonialist. This means that Israel were interlopers. Let me ask you something. Israel, modern day Israel, we have archaeological and linguistic evidence that Jews were living there 3,500 to 4,000 years ago.

People who spoke early Hebrew, who practiced the Jewish faith and lived on the land that is now Israel. If you want to talk about settler colonials, where did the Arabs come from? They swept in from Asia into the Middle East and North Africa, and as settler colonialists conquered Byzantine and earlier Roman territories that had been Western for 700 years. The greatest church in Christodom was Hagia Sophia, built in the 6th century AD by the Emperor Justinian. It was the largest and most revered church in Christendom for a thousand years, and yet in the 15th century, settler colonialists under the Sultan, came in and conquered and settled,

and took over Asia Minor from the Byzantines. And they slapped minarets and appropriately appropriated, culturally appropriated, a Christian church and turned it into a mosque. They were settler colonialists. Mondami's family are settler colonials. They were part of a British imperial project. at the turn of the 19th to 20th century who put settlers from other areas of the British Empire into Africa to help advance their colonial control of the indigenous people. And even today, Mondami 1% Indian community controls 65% of the GDP of Uganda, settler colonialist. I could go on, but this is a ridiculous

is charged to lodge against Israel, when of all of these settler colonial powers, it has the longest pedigree in one place. Now we hear about ethnically cleansing. Ethnic cleansing. We're told that the Israelis ethnically cleansed the Gossans and often people in the West Bank. I don't know quite what that means, but before I try to translate it, we do know there's a lot of ethnic cleansers. Mr. Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has threatened to send missiles both into Athens and into Israel. His government, not his own, but the Turkish government of which he is a continual successor to, ethnically cleansed all of the Greeks from northern Cyprus and occupied it, and then sent

settler colonialists from Turkey. I haven't heard anybody complain about that. Is there a protest I missed at Columbia? Did Ilyan Omar forget that, or she just gives a pass to a fellow Muslim country? While October 7th was transpiring, far away in Muslim Azerbaijan, they were ethnically cleansing 150,000 Armenians from their ancestral home of nearly a thousand years in the Nagorno-Karabakh corridor. I didn't hear a word from Ilyan Omar.

I didn't hear a word from Ae O'O. I didn't hear a word for Zoran, Mondami. And then we come to genocide. Genocide. The Israelis say they committed genocide. Believe me, people who commit genocide, we know. We know who they are, and they don't vaccinate the targeted population. They don't send food.

They don't allow medical doctors and supplies to go into the targeted genocidal people. But more importantly, when Israel was formed by 1950, there was a lot of the United States. there was 170,000 Arabs still in Israel that comprised 12% of the population. Fast forward to 2006. Guess what? Genocidal Israel saw the population of Arabs, who were now Israeli citizens, increased to 2 million. And the percentage of non-Jews and Israel who were Arab Muslims increased from 12% to 20%. Genocidal regimes don't take the targeted victim and then increase the population, both in real numbers and percentages, vis-a-vis their own demographics.

They just don't do that. And if you talk about ethnic cleansing, Hassan Parker, a fierce podcaster, critic of Israel, he was born in the United States, but he grew up in Turkey as parents are Turkish human. Turkey probably is the most genocidal regime of the last two centuries. It wiped out almost a million Armenians in the Armenian genocide. It went into Ionia in 1920 and destroyed, burned down the Greek city of Smyrna, an ancient city that had a 2,500-year Greek pedigree, and then ethnically cleansed a million Greeks off the entire coast of Ionia. That's genocidal.

Mao Zetong killed 50, 60 million of his own people. That's genocidal, yet we never hear of any of that. When you talk about war criminals, Zoran Mondami wants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he sets foot in New York. Why not arrest the Chinese delegation? They hold one million Uyghurs, Muslims, and labor camps. and they're the inheritors of a government that killed 60 to 70 million of its own people. I don't think they're going to be arrested. Members of Mondami's own staff were planning to meet the Iranian delegation.

They slaughtered 30, 40, 50 of their own Iranian people not too long ago. Were they going to be targeted for arrest? I don't think so. Were the Azerbaijani is going to be targeted for rest for ethnic cleansing? No. How about the Muslims of Nigeria that are killing thousands of Nigerian Christians? Are they targeted when they come to New York? No.

So what's going on? Well, first of all, many of this rhetoric, most of this rhetoric comes from young people who are in the universities and they're both ignorant and arrogant. They don't take history. They don't take languages. They know nothing to the Middle East other than what they are. told by Middle East propaganda departments. And first and second generation immigrants

from the Middle East who fled horrific conditions, came to the United States, were generously treated by their host, and offered them prosperity, freedom, and security. And in exchange for all of that, were ridiculed, and called all sorts of names and damned for their support of Israel. In other words, this is sort of a joke. And I would go further and say it's a projectionist experience. The degree to which someone in the leftist Islamist's new coalition accuses Israel

will be an apartheid nation, a settler colonialist nation, an ethnically cleansing nation, a genocidal nation, and a war criminal nation, suggests that the nations that they come, whether it's Ilean Omar's own family, her father was a colonel in the Sayyid-Berry-genocidal regime, whether it's that or it's people who come from Turkey who have a long history of genocide, it's a projectionist experience. They project their own sins onto tiny, democratic, and free Israel. Why? I don't know, but I have a suspicion. It's because Israel is predominantly made up of Jews. Thank you very much. Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Sea. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal.

Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.