What Every Crow Knows

Zionism, justice, and the liberal apologist’s dilemma

Human beings are born with a sense of fairness. In fact, not only humans, but primates and even crows — birds with brains the size of a walnut — have been shown to have it. It’s that basic.

This is what supporters of Israel are up against. The injustice done to Palestinians doesn’t require a political framework to recognize. Yes, it’s an instance of settler colonialism, but it requires only the human capacity to imagine: what if this had been done to me? Generations of connection to a land — families who farmed it, were born on it, buried their dead in it — erased. Driven at gunpoint into exile. If that were done to you, you would understand instantly that it was wrong. This is the egregious hypocrisy in the hearts of Israel’s apologists.

The historical record is not seriously in dispute. What happened in 1948 is amply documented: over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land through a systematic campaign of threats, harassment, and violence — their homes and villages destroyed so they would have nothing to return to. Only motivated ignorance can wish this away. And here is the curious thing: there are voices today — one thinks of a certain strain of liberal Zionist — who are genuinely, vocally horrified by what Israeli settlers are doing in the West Bank in 2026. The dispossession. The violence. The impunity. They decry it loudly and in good conscience.

And yet that is essentially the same process by which Israel came into being in 1948. Time, apparently, whitewashes everything.

That the suffering of Jews in Europe was immeasurable is not in question. But justice doesn’t work by displacement. One people’s agony does not create a license to inflict agony on another. Understanding why something happened is not the same as excusing it. The claim that a connection to land dating back three thousand years entitles a people to expel those currently living on it would not be recognized as a legal or moral principle in any other context — and everyone involved knows it. It was inexcusable.

What was done in the name of Zionism will never not have been a grave injustice to the Palestinian people. The Zionist calculation was always that time was its ally — the old would die, and the young would forget. But the young are not forgetting. The same technological advances that widened the military gap between Israel and Palestinians have also put mobile phones in the hands of millions of witnesses, making the moral reality of what that military power inflicts visible in real time, to billions of people.

Israel has gained territory through invasions, annexations and occupations. It is feared by its neighbors. It has nuclear weapons and the most powerful military patron in the world. It has also become, in the eyes of much of the world, a pariah — and no appeal to ancient scripture, no accusation of antisemitism leveled at inconvenient critics, no $730 million hasbara campaign changes what people can see with their own eyes and interpret for themselves.

What’s more, Americans and the world have taken sharp notice of the role Israel played in goading the United States into an unprovoked, willful attack on Iran.

How, then, does one go on supporting an Israel so roundly reviled? One may sympathize with those who try, the Progressive Except for Palestine, but the contradiction at the heart of that position is structural, and no amount of personal anguish can wish it away.

There is genuine pain in being Jewish in this moment: the feeling of offense when criticism of Israel lands close to a cherished belief, the difficulty of explaining to a child why the menorah lighting might not be safe this year. The closeness Jewish Americans with family in Israel feel makes the controversy visceral. The political alienation of finding that progressive spaces that once felt like home, now feel hostile. And the fear that anger at Israel will be directed against Jews. These are understandable experiences.

But consider what they are being used to counterbalance.

In the West Bank, a decades-long occupation has produced a regime that international legal scholars and human rights organizations describe in terms reserved for history’s most repugnant systems of racial discrimination. Settlers operate with impunity under military protection, and Palestinians who resist — or merely exist in the wrong place — are met with detention, violence, or death.

In Gaza, civilians have been starved deliberately and systematically, bombed in shelters, in hospitals, in schools. The death toll is staggering, and credible estimates count roughly forty percent of the dead being children. The word “genocide” is used not only by fringe agitators but by United Nations officials, by the International Court of Justice, by scholars whose life’s work has been the study of exactly this. An American child who is afraid to attend a menorah lighting is experiencing something real. A child in Gaza who has lost both parents, both legs, and access to drinkable water is experiencing something else. To place these sufferings side by side as though they occupy the same moral plane isn’t spiritual depth. It’s obscenity.

The insistence that one cannot separate Jews from Israel is not a defense. It’s a danger, most of all to Jews themselves. The separation of Jewish identity from the actions of the Zionist state is not an attack on Jewishness. It’s a protection of it.

It’s worth noting that Israel’s most devastating critics are themselves Jewish — historians, journalists, human rights lawyers, former soldiers. They haven’t abandoned their identity. They’ve refused to let it be wielded as a shield for the indefensible.

Even a crow can tell when something’s unfair. The instinct is deeper than politics, older than any arcane religious text. Those who’ve bet that narrative management, political leverage, and the passage of time will eventually overwrite that innate knowing are fighting a losing battle against nature itself. They’re at odds with their own human nature. It would be wise to accept the loss before the cost of denial grows higher still.