That’s just it. The “neighbourhood bully,”in response to persecution and exile in Europe, set up shop on property owned by other people, forced them into the crappy parts of the property, armed himself to the teeth, and has repeatedly inflicted defeat and harm on his neighbours when they tried to remove him.

The way we’ve frame Israel’s existence isn’t that the “Jews don’t have a right to resist.” It’s that “Israel has the right to exist and defend itself,” meaning it is entitled to its deny Palestinians their sovereignty and the Right of Return and to use disproportionate force and kill civilians whenever they are attacked.

And what’s sad is the complete disingenuousness of it all. The belief that Israel must exist and Arabs must “get over it” because they are not safe elsewhere (namely, Europe) is and always has been a byproduct of the “better there than here” mentality and the belief that Zionists and “international Jews” are powerful lobbyists. It’s antisemitism writ large, it’s responsible for the problems we are seeing today, and it’s unsustainable.