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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/opinion/israel-palestinians-netanyahu-flydubai.html
When Criticism of Israel Goes Off the Rails
(New York Times) Bret Stephens - Zealous criticism of Israel goes off the rails when it somehow imagines, or pretends, that blame for the crises in the Holy Land falls on one side alone and that Israel's security challenges are either a product of its imagination or payback for its own policies. Israel came into existence with its enemies avowing its extermination, and nearly eight decades later those intentions remain unchanged. The experience of Israelis in this century is that every time they have vacated territory, whether in southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005, they have gained neither international grace nor physical security. Instead, their retreats created staging grounds for the kind of horror that so many Israelis experienced firsthand on and after Oct. 7 - horrors that many of the world's so-called humanitarians and justice-seekers chose to celebrate, downplay or flat-out deny. Constant critics of Israel might try to remember that Israelis aren't simply hallucinating their own peril.