Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

8/20/2026

There were many factors that brought about the creation of the State of Israel.  There was the Zionist movement that began in the late nineteenth century, the Balfour declaration in 1917, the migration of Jews to Palestine beginning in the late nineteenth-century and increasing to a torrent after World War II, the UN’s approval of partition in 1947, and the enthusiastic support of the United States. But almost certainly the most important trigger, the true enabling factors were moral, emotional and possibly spiritual, the sense of guilt that European nations felt about the Holocaust.  

This led, quite appropriately, to both the emotional sense that something was owed to the Jewish people and the practical sense that a Jewish nation-state that could be a refuge and protection for Jews was a good idea.  This led to the recognition of the historical claim of the Jewish people to the land of Palestine and a willingness to overlook the claims of the people who were living there and accept their displacement.

This sense of a debt owed the Jewish people has been slowly fading for some time, as the Holocaust receded in memory, but it has recently been destroyed, ironically by Israel’s own actions. Sadly, the continued Jewish occupation of the West Bank, and the atrocities carried out by the Jewish settlers, and particularly the actions of Israel in Gaza have effectively cancelled the emotional debt that much of the world felt it owed Jews and caused the strong sense that the world felt that it owed the Jewish people and therefore should support Israel to wither away and do so quite rapidly.

Equivalence, at least in terms of lives lost does not exist, the currently accepted totals are about 70,000 dead in Gaza as opposed to about six million Jews and four million others in the Holocaust.  But this is simply mathematics.  In terms of feeling the Jewish people were victims of a genocide in Europe, now they are seen, fairly or not, as having committed genocide themselves.  

Sadly, I fear that Israel is reaching the bottom of the well of support from the West very rapidly, and if that well is not already dry, it will be very soon.  Israel went to that well once too often and the change of sentiment in the Western world has happened shockingly fast.