You should really read my book, Berliners. I’m serious. You really, really should. It’s a good book that’s important as a kind of map of our moment. And you should give copies to your friends, and especially to any young adults who seem confused about our time and their place in it. You’ll have a much, much better idea of that history…and our current situation. And maybe of that pesky line that Solzhenitsyn reminded us passes through the middle of each of our hearts.

Procure your copy here or wherever you love to buy books, especially from your favorite Indie bookseller. It’s also available on Kindle or Audible, though since AI companies are shredding books, even though they’ve already been sued for stealing our work (including, yes, my books!), I heartily recommend the hardcover. In fact, I think the age of personal libraries is back and must come back.

When you’ve read Berliners, do let me know what you think here in the comments.

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Can you even believe I’m saying that? It feels like the longest winter I can remember. I’ve definitely thought of scenes in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter often over these last few months! We had major storm damage to our little house from the ice storms, but things are settling down, and I have walls and ceilings, where just …

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Books for you and everyone on your list!

Giving books is a really inexpensive and meaningfu…

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Happy fall, everyone! We are rapidly losing leaves here, but some of them are just coming into their glory—our yellow maple, Japanese cherry and pink dogwood.

I’ll bet you want to read something happy and cozy, don’tcha? Well, then! Come read this rare (for me) t…

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I recently did a great interview for Cultivate Newsletter with a remarkable woman named Holly Hickman. (She and I wonder how we haven’t known each other for 20 years!) Cultivate, part of the popular online School of Traditional Skills, is a newsletter for homesteaders and those who want to l…

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Four starred reviews for A Knot is Not a Tangle!

I’ve done a lot of books at this point, and I can tell you, even getting reviewed these days is a lucky break. And a starred review, even more rare. To get three stars? Well, I can tell you, this hasn’t happened to me in ten years.

I am so excited to share this book with you. …

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National Book Award finalist, Edgar awa…

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Those of you who have followed me or my Vesperisms podcast pre-Substack know that one of my main pursuits is to help people de-politicize their worldview and embrace an artistic one instead. It bears repeating, because it’s uncommon these days to encounter the view that one can b…

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But the citizens…

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Emily Barth Isler’s touching text in our new picture book together, Three Pieces of Broken Glass, was a joy to illustrate. And we’ve just released the cover…which means that you can now pre-order it!

From award-winning creators Emily Barth Isler and Vesper Stamper, this luminous a…

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Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: Of Humans & War
By Alessandro Sanna
With an introduction by Ammiel Alcalay
Translated from Italian by Ammiel Alcalay
Unruly Books, an imprint of Enchanted Lion Books*
ISBN: 978-1-59270-421-7 • $34.95

I never set out to be someone who writes about war.

I’m a pacifist peacenik, a ‘90’s NYC hippie, a sensitive artist. It wasn’t until I…

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That “polarity” does not equal a “binary”, per se, and it does not mean it is simple. For example, though the pacifist-almost-anarchist in me hates to admit it, I do believe in the concept of just war, and that the proper translation of Exodus 21:13 is “You shall not murder”, not “You shall not kill.” Real human beings do get killed in the pursuit of saving lives or preventing further death. To understand this is to be a realist. The challenge is to not go further into becoming a cynic.

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One commenter (I’m not sure if he’s a subscriber here)…

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And then I knew my day would be utterly sidetracked by the need to write this article. *sigh*

The first article I read was by Eve Barlow, a Scottish-Jewish music critic who has, since October 7, pivoted to writing almost exclusively about Jewish and Israeli concerns. Like other articles Eve’s written, it’s essentially a meditation on being a straight-spined Jewish woman in this climate, but it also looks at the difference between the vast majority of Jews who retain the values of their people and those who, either because of ignorance or a desire to be accepted by those who steward the popular narrative of the day, sell them out for so much pottage. Eve gives examples: “The kapos. The Yevsektsiya. The Neturei Karta. The If Not Nows. As it says in the Haggadah (the prayer book we use at the Passover seder) ‘In every generation, our enemies rise up against us,’ and it should have included: ‘and some of our own people help them.’” Ouch.

The second article in my inbox, “A Prayer for Palestine” was by a gentleman whose acquaintance I have the pleasure of having, Michael Warren Davis. Michael and I were each on the YouTube show Pints With Aquinas back in 2023—right before 10/7—speaking about our respective rescues out of the occult and into a life with Jesus. Michael was Catholic at the time of his video, but has since converted to the Eastern Orthodox church, so we have that in common as well.

I’m sorry to say, Michael’s essay read nothing like a prayer.

Full disclosure: I contacted Michael before publishing this article to let him know that I would be writing it, but that I would not engage in ad hominem attacks, looking instead at the points he presents and rebutting them carefully. He responded graciously. I believe, from the brief interactions I have had with him, that Michael is a lovely and loving man with whom I have no personal beef, that he has a soft heart toward God and his fellow man, and that he sincerely wants to do right. It is in that spirit that I engage in this rebuttal, which I hope will help him to nuance his understanding, and help my own readers navigate some of the stickier points on this conflict.

As I said, Michael and I are both in the Eastern Orthodox church, and this bears a comment. At some point in the future, I will publish a longer article dealing with anti-Jewishness and anti-Zionism in the Orthodox Church (and in some corners of Christianity more generally). To be honest, the Catholic Church has done worlds better on this, beginning with the Nostra Aetate Declaration from the Vatican II Council in 1965, and continuing through the present day, most recently in an excellent full-day gathering by the Philos Project (< part 1 of 3 is linked). Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church has no such document or initiative, and (in my experience) continues to brush off its deep, cultural, historic and current antisemitism, while insufficiently addressing (my priest is an exception to this, thank God) the very real issue of new converts coming in from the internet…and bringing some very dark corners with them that have nothing to do with the faith.

Alas, I am on a book deadline and writing this is derailing my time (please don’t tell my editor!), so I will stay focused on the article. I felt it urgent to remark on Michael’s arguments, and it gave me the impetus to write on this long-overdue subject, so I hope this is helpful to you all.

Readers of Vesperisms are likely familiar enough with my work as a historical novelist (and if you’re not, why not start?) to know that I don’t shy away from difficult topics or historical events in my books, and this is especially true in the case of genocide, the most serious of Michael’s accusations.

For the last decade and more, I have been meticulously and publicly researching, speaking about and creating work on this exact subject, so it would be a cheap and inaccurate shot to label me as a “genocide apologist” (which doesn’t mean people haven’t tried). The way I am wired as a novelist, I do not take any term or slogan at face value, and I do not create cheap villains. I try to see all sides of an issue, a term, or a character, and understand them thoroughly. More important to me than being “right”—or “righteous”—is the question of how people and groups get to where they are. I ask readers to keep this in mind as we get into a fairly granular exploration of Mr. Davis’ argument.

Davis is a bit late to the party, I must say. All points he raises in his article have been tackled elsewhere since October 7 and before. He does cite an article he wrote in 2023 only three days before the pogrom in Israel, so at least he’s not as noob as popular baby-faced TikTok influencer Guy Christiansen, who has openly admitted, though not realizing what a self-own it was, that he knew nothing about the conflict prior to 10/7, and started his journey down the algorithm when a friend told him (I kid you not) to “Google the Nakba”. But it gives me no pleasure to say that Davis shows about the same level of understanding of this history as Christiansen.

It’s easy to fall into this. I’m sympathetic; I had to begin the same process for my book research, and it’s daunting to comb through competing narratives and get to the cold, hard facts. (Hint: the internet is not friendly to this enterprise; that’s not where I primarily source.) It’s this exact process that sharpened me as a historical researcher, and I’m aware of my reputation for care and precision. Readers will need to forgive me if I make small mistakes in this article, though, as I’m engaging in a bit more accelerated version, but it’s backed up by years of work on the subject, so I believe the questions I raise and the rebuttals I give are as accurate as I can make them in a day. So let’s jump in.

“A Prayer for Palestine” begins with a beautiful engraving of St. Dorotheus of Gaza. St. Dorotheus lived in the Levant region (which was renamed Syria or Palestina by the Romans, but was originally Judea/Samaria, and is still the historically accurate term) in the Byzantine era, and he died just before the Muslim conquest (634-638 AD). Even under Jewish jurisdiction, whether in the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel or the Hasmonean Kingdom of the Maccabees, Judea and Samaria had always been populated by diverse people groups. Arabs primarily lived in the northeast of the region—in what is today Syria and Lebanon, and prior to that, the Arabian peninsula—and were present in the land of Israel in ancient times, even if not themselves indigenous. Jews lived throughout the land, but after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 AD) were internally displaced mostly northward, from Judea toward Galilee. Jews and Arabs were certainly not the only people groups in the region.

We may not know the ethnicity of St. Dorotheus, but as a resident of Byzantine Syria Palestina, he could have had any of the following backgrounds: Jewish, Greek, Phoenician, Arab, Roman, Egyptian, Carthaginian, Ethiopian or many others. In fact, when you visit Israel today (which I highly recommend!), you’ll be struck by two things: a) how small it is, and b) how diverse it is. This is especially apparent in Galilee. I give, as an example, the site of what is popularly thought to be Bethsaida.

Spoiler: it can’t possibly be Bethsaida. First of all, it’s 3 km up a mountain from the sea—and yet, it’s supposed to be a fishing village. Defenders will say that the water level must have been higher, but that would have meant all the other biblical towns—Capernaum, Magdala, even Tiberias—would have been underwater.

But then there’s the fact that this site was most definitely a huge pagan city, replete with stalls to hold bulls sacrificed to Baal and Asherah. Little, if any, evidence exists of a Jewish presence in whatever-that-town’s-name-really-was. My good friend Dr. R. Steven Notley is leading an excavation at a site called El-Araj, right on the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee, that has yielded the true site of Bethsaida. I’ve visited both sites, am 100% convinced that the matter is settled, and hope the true site will be fully excavated and open to visitors before I’m too old.

My point is that the entire region is—and always has been—honeycombed with villages, towns and cities of different ethnicities and religious persuasions. Regardless of the authority in charge, reality on the ground has always meant a cheek-by-jowl existence, even today. Even in the “West Bank” (though not in Gaza).

It’s important to keep this in mind when considering the conflict in the land of Israel, because it immediately refutes charges of “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide”. And it’s with that second term, the most egregious of Davis’ accusations, that I wish to begin.

In the last decade or so, we have seen redefinitions take place before our eyes to an inordinate degree. In my work on the conditions that led to and were engaged in during the Holocaust, linguistic capture was a prime subject of importance. For example, “resettlement on farms in the East”, a common phrase used to assuage Jewish fear, was a euphemism for “torturous cattle car deportation to death camp in Poland.” So we want to be careful with words, especially ones loaded with consequence.

The term “genocide” has a genesis. It was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in the aftermath of the Holocaust: the systematic, industrial-scale attempt at the total annihilation, through intentional murder, of the Jewish population of Europe. Hitler was explicit about his aims as far back as the publication of his manifesto, Mein Kampf, in 1925. The word “genocide” was not used then, because it did not exist. This is not to say the practice did not exist; ten years before Mein Kampf was published, the Turkish Ottomans enacted a genocide against the Armenian population of Turkey, killing 1.5 million, and we have seen many, many other genocides, particularly in the last century.

The UN General Assembly, in Article 2 of its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (ratified 9 December 1948 and entered into force 12 January 1951), defines the crime as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

We first must distinguish this from the realities of conventional warfare. First, the Convention’s definition is rooted in intent. “Genocide”, literally “People-killing”, or “killing of a people group”, has as its specific goal the elimination of a particular people group as such. It’s easy to see how the Holocaust meets the definition, as do the Armenian and Cambodian genocides. (Indeed, the actions of Russia against Ukraine fit the bill pretty well.) In the case of Israel’s military action in Gaza, yes, a) members of the group have been killed, and b) serious bodily and mental harm to the people of Gaza have been caused by the war. It is a war, after all. But does the criterion of intent fit Israel’s actions, and do clauses c-e apply?

As regards intent, we have to look at the actions which preceded Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Prior to 10/7, a ceasefire had been agreed between the two parties. The night I arrived in Israel in May of that year, Hamas broke that ceasefire, resulting in fighter jets over my desert hotel in the middle of the night, and a days-long rocket attack from Gaza into Israel. One was intercepted right across a valley from where I was on a fun archaeological dig in a Maccabean cave; too close for comfort. Thankfully, Iron Dome got those rockets, a new ceasefire was made, and life went on as normal in Israel…and in Gaza. For four months, anyway.

In fact, for almost 20 years since Israel unilaterally pulled out from Gaza in 2005—up to and including exhuming the bodies from Jewish cemeteries to avoid the desecration the Israelis knew would be inevitable—rocket attacks from Gaza became so common, and the purpose-built Iron Dome so effective, that people barely batted an eye when a siren would sound, necessitating frequent trips to bomb shelters, now built into Israeli homes as a matter of course (this home-shelter is called a “mamad”). Stop and think about this for a moment: in a home in Israel, you find bomb shelters to shield you from rockets from Gaza. In a home in Gaza, it’s common to find those rockets, as well as entrances to tunnels. Not for civilians to shelter in, but for terrorists to conduct operations. Please let that sink in for a moment when tempted to “both-sides” this.

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, has written extensively about this war. I will expand on this later in this article when I deal with Michael Davis’ numbers, but in brief, Spencer’s analysis shows that the IDF has conducted as “moral” a war as it’s possible to do under these circumstances. I have friends with sons and brothers in the IDF, and they confirm: they are held to incredibly strict moral considerations, often at the cost of their own safety, in order to minimize civilian harm. However, the situation the IDF found when it went into Gaza was so unprecedented—and so calculated by Hamas to increase civilian casualties—that there was no way to avoid them.

There have been recent attempts to redefine genocide in order to shoehorn the situation in Gaza into it, and to try Israel for war crimes, but, like misapplying a Western “anti-colonial” or “antiracist” frame onto the realities in the Middle East, the Israel-Gaza war does not fit the comprehensive and accepted definition of genocide: not just in numbers or proportionate deaths, with which Davis takes issue, but the total absence of intent, disregard for civilian conditions (c), prevention of birth (d) or removal of children (e).

But what if we look at the above definition in light of Hamas’ attacks of October 7—and indeed the Hamas and PLO charters, not to mention the actions of the Nazi-allied Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, and the Arab League’s five-army, multinational force that invaded Israel the day after it declared independence (from the British) on May 14, 1948? Do these not contain explicitly genocidal intent—which has been carried out on numerous occasions, and is being called for in protests all over the world?

And what of the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Jews of surrounding Muslim nations from 1941-1951? Almost a million Jews were forcibly evacuated from lands in which they had lived for millenia? My friend Sarah Sassoon, for example, speaks often and writes books for children about the expulsion of her Iraqi Jewish family who had lived in Baghdad since the Babylonian Exile. But because of the dominance of the Palestinian story in Western minds, we’ve all heard the term “Nakba”, but almost never “Farhud”.

In each of these cases—and especially on October 7—the assaults match the definition of genocide on every count: intent to eliminate; killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I want to take a moment here to make an anecdotal point: there is an allergy in the Jewish body politic against genocide. Having been raised Jewish myself, and with a more or less equal footing in the Jewish community as the Christian one, I can confidently say that have never heard the desire for any Palestinian or Arab to be harmed. On the contrary, I have only ever—including in Israel, by people from all walks of life, including active IDF soldiers—heard this sentiment:

There is a popular trope among “anti-Zionists” that “the victims have now become the victimizers.” It’s disgusting, it has a name (Holocaust inversion), and I refute it whenever I hear it. You can take it all the way to the bank that Jews got one message loud and clear after the Holocaust: this must never happen again. To us, but also to anyone.

Even though the Holocaust was an unequivocal situation that was unique in history as a specifically Jewish tragedy, the reflex was not vengeance, but the indomitable will to live, and to engage in deep, thoughtful analysis of the conditions which lead to genocide. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC has a whole arm dedicated to the study of other genocides, with a permanent exhibit space devoted to this. And every Jewish child—secular or religious—is raised with his mother’s milk with a profound sense of responsibility to make the world better. I’m not saying every individual Jewish person is a saint; I’m just telling you about the culture that birthed the modern State of Israel.

In the interest of space and getting back to Davis’ article, I will leave it there, but I will say this: if you have never encountered the paradigm of the previous paragraph, you do not know enough Jews. It’s OK; most people don’t. There are only 15 million of them (the prewar Jewish population has still not recovered its numbers from the Holocaust). But if you have a synagogue in your area, call and talk to the Rabbi. Ask to visit. Provided you go in good faith, they will welcome you. Present yourself as someone willing to listen and learn, before you present whatever you read on the internet.

Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a large swath of the surrounding regional population (which according to surveys overwhelmingly hold antisemitic beliefs), have literal genocidal intentions against not just Israel, but Jews as a whole. They use the inversion of their own beliefs and intentions to level libelous accusations against Jews and the Jewish State, even after the pogrom of October 7—which met every single criterion of the definition of genocide. The only thing they lacked was success.

Back to “A Prayer for Palestine”. At least Davis acknowledges that there were Jews living in the land of Israel before 1948. Trust me, most critics don’t even understand that, let alone the subject of Jewish indigeneity or their continuous unbroken presence in the land.

Archbishop Elias Chacour’s poetic account of the destruction of his village tugs at the heart, for sure, and in no way do I want to throw shade on the peacemaking work he has done. However, I have questions about the narrative of his that Davis shares as an example of supposed Israeli genocide.

I won’t get into the rosy yet fantastical picture he paints of Arab-Jewish relations in his childhood, except to say that they echo a common Holocaust revisionism: the sovereign Arab population, excited to welcome foreign Jews into the millenia-long native Arab homeland as guests, only to have it thrown back in their faces. Perhaps they did indeed feel warm toward their Jewish neighbors, but Elias’ family would definitely have been in the minority.

Forced to leave Kafr Bir’im at age 6, Chacour says that the IDF (renamed from the Haganah the day after the five-army attack) said they could return to their home on Christmas Day. There are a couple of issues with this right off the bat.

It might help to look at Kafr Bir’im’s history. Originally in Hebrew Kfar Berem or Bar’am, this was an ancient Jewish village that, like the surrounding region of the Galilee, particularly nearby Safed (Tzfat), remained Jewish until the 13th century, when it was presumably abandoned. It was a tiny village until the 20th century, and had a majority Muslim population at some point, before it was rebuilt by Lebanese Maronite Christians who arrived sometime in the 1800’s. The remains of two Jewish synagogues can be found there, one from the Roman period; of interest nearby are the alleged tombs of the prophet Obadiah and of Mordechai and Esther.

It’s possible that the church Chacour mentions is Lady of Kafr Maronite Church. This may be an 1857 structure rebuilt on the remains of an earlier church that was destroyed in a violent earthquake in the 1830s. In any case, even though the village no longer exists, the church has been rebuilt and, at least from what I could see on Google Maps, is now a lovely and accessible place within the Bar’am National Park—but as time is limited, there my assessment ends.

In any case, after being evicted, Chacour’s family, along with the other villagers, sheltered about 8 km south in Jish, another Israel-Lebanon border town. They lived in the homes of Muslims who had also been evacuated. This is, of course, a tragedy, as all war is. In all wars, people are displaced. However, Davis never mentions the conditions that caused this war: the attack on Israel by five Arab nations intent on its total destruction.

As you might expect for a border town that abuts a hostile country which had just attacked it, Kafr Bir’im was in a vulnerable position. Given its new reality—being surrounded by enemy nations—the change in the status quo was inevitable. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is, for the same reason that the entire population of northern Israel, including Jews, Druze and others, had to be evacuated again right after October 7, 2023, when Hezbollah joined the fight from Lebanon and Syria. Friends of mine housed these displaced residents for months. There was no promise of return to their homes. Slowly, as Israel works to secure the border, people are beginning to return, but it’s equally likely the status quo will change yet again.

And again, in 2023 as in 1948, this was not a war that Israel started.

Back to the Chacour family. Unfortunately, the image of the cheery, pastoral Christmas revelers summiting the hill overlooking Kafr Bir’im is a total fabrication: the leveling of the vacant village happened five years afterwards, not on Christmas, but on September 19, 1953—while Chacour was 14, away at a boarding school in Haifa.

I want to take a moment here ponder military realities, which neither a 6- or even 14-year old child can understand. I now have a kid in the military myself, and this has required me to examine my pacifism, which I still hold to. But though I am still committed to peacemaking and to personal non-violence, I am also a realist.

The reality of war is ugly. I despise it. I struggle with my family’s new identity as a military family. But there is a difference between wars of conquest, like Russia’s, and wars of self-defense, like Israel’s.

The difference between today and 1939 is that Jews can now defend themselves. The reality for Jews since the diaspora (136 AD) is that they have always lacked a robust ability to do this. As a minority community always at the mercy of the nations in which they settled, Jews were considered second-class citizens in every single one, whether in the Middle East or in Europe, whether Christian nations or Muslim ones. Subject to Jim Crow-style laws, they were always subject to persecution, and their legal status was always in flux.

We are used to thinking of Jews as perpetual victims; the old stereotype of the “wandering Jew”. But 1948 represented the first time that Jews could not only mount a defensive campaign against those who attacked them, but for the first time since the Maccabean revolt, they won. And with the reality of the Holocaust now in the historical record only 3 years prior, along with the ethnic cleansing of the Middle Eastern Jews, it was imperative that they did.

Self-defense is literally in the name of the IDF. You will notice, if you review the history of modern Israel's wars, that aside from trying to secure its own borders, Israel has never tried to engage in a war of conquest into its surrounding neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or Egypt. This is the opposite of colonialism. Israel has accepted every negotiated peace deal, even giving away territory, in order to pursue peace with their neighbors, who have turned down every deal. This has been true in 1967, 1973, 1982, 1987, 2000, 2002, 2008, and on and on until 2023.

What has made the current war different is the scale of atrocity on October 7, and what Israel found when they launched their ground operations fully three weeks later (a lot more time than Kafr Bir’im had).

In 2005, immediately after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas was elected and promptly set to work eliminating their political opponents. They also began a vast infrastructure campaign specifically designed not for citizen benefit or self-defense, but to infiltrate Israel. They commandeered international aid, both financial and material, to do this, creating an enormous arsenal scattered throughout Gaza, and a network of subterranean tunnels larger than the London Underground. Hamas didn’t use donated concrete create to build a subway, or water pipes to carry desalinated water to their citizens: instead, all of it was stolen with one purpose: to destroy Israel. They also indoctrinated a generation of children—many of whom grew up to engage in the October 7 atrocities as either combatants or civilian participants—to value martyrdom as the highest ideal.

When the IDF began their ground operations, they discovered rockets under baby cribs; weapons caches in mosques and schools, Hamas headquarters in and beneath hospitals, and—as shown in the attempted but unsuccessful rescue of Hersh Polin and his five compatriots last year—tunnel entrances in children’s bedrooms. They found children’s magazines showing kids how to stab Jews and textbooks published by UNRWA with antisemitic math lessons. They found bodies of maimed hostages and cages where they were starved and tortured. I won’t go into more.

And that’s just what they found. Nevermind the active war, with continuously flying rockets, hidden IEDs, and terrorists actively using apartment buildings, mosques, schools and hospitals to lure attacks that would inevitably cost civilian lives. Still—Israel allowed aid convoys in, carefully of course, but enough for each civilian to have more than enough. They brought medical equipment in to take care of wounded civilians, and more—yet Hamas continues not only to steal vast amounts of the aid for themselves, but to resell it in the markets under inflated prices, and to torture and kill those who try to access the aid themselves.

And yet not one of those surrounding Arab League nations offered to take in any refugees, even though Gaza shares a border with Egypt, from which many Gaza residents ancestrally hail. Jordan finally agreed this year, sitting in the Oval Office with President Trump, to take in 2000 of Gaza’s children in need of medical care—and has so far taken in about 29.

So the residents of Gaza are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Unable to leave, still controlled by a terrorist dictatorship that restricts their access to aid and continues to hold hostages in the tunnels or in civilian homes, it’s true—they are sitting ducks. But we can’t have it both ways: either Israel evacuates, in which case Hamas rearms and continues to indoctrinate their population and launch perpetual attacks, or Israel tries to uproot this infrastructure—with civilians present, or with other nations letting the refugees in temporarily or permanently. When polled, by the way, a third would choose to emigrate from Gaza permanently.

So, if we were back in Archbishop Chacour’s village of Kafr Bir’im under the same circumstances, would it be better to stay or go? Like the northern villages in 1948, Gaza will never be the same, and neither will the towns and kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope. Places previously occupied will be abandoned, rebuilt, lived in by others. This, sadly, is the nature of war. It is the nature of all wars, of all borders, of all nations. Even Europe looks nothing like it did before the two World Wars.

Yet Davis considers none of this when he says, echoing a classic blood libel: “For nearly eighty years, the Israeli government has been trying to cleanse Palestine of its Arab population. Muslims, Christians, and dissident Jews are all being targeted.” This is patently false—in Israel, all of those groups have freedom to protest, and they do. In Gaza (which is not Israel), Muslims and Christians are beginning, out of desperation, to protest, but it is Hamas that prevents them. And, by the way, there are no Jews in Gaza, dissident or otherwise. It is judenrein.

Davis gives no consideration, or, I assume, has knowledge, of either the honeycomb-nature of Israeli topography, its 20% Arab population (who are full citizens) as well as its other citizen minorities, or the fact that 60% of the Jewish Israeli population are not European but Middle Eastern Jews whose ancestors were ethnically cleansed from their homes and told never to return. Maybe some of them still have the key to their front doors.

Israel’s treatment of Christians

I’ll have to be brief on this, but Davis cites his (pre-10/7) 2023 article in The American Conservative detailing the plight of Christians in Palestine (like Tucker Carlson did in hosting a famous propaganda peddler in a clerical collar). He says that from the 1920’s until today, the Christian population of Bethlehem has flipped from 80% to 20%, which is true. The article cites a 2017 study at a Palestinian university that takes the temperature of the Palestinian Christian population about why their numbers are dropping. The predictable result: It’s Israel’s Fault™. But the study (which is not linked for us to review its methodology) only documents sentiment, not necessarily reality. It’s not a study; it’s a poll. Davis seems to think that because Dar Kalima University, who published the study, is a “secular university led by a Protestant minister”, that it can’t be biased, in the midst of a famously indoctrinated population. The study also does not interview Christians who left the territories, nor Christians living in Israel. Only those left behind.

He makes no distinction between Palestine and Israel, which are jurisdictionally speaking two completely different entities, in which Christians have wildly different lived experiences.

What he fails to mention is that Christianity is both growing and freely practiced in one, and only one, place in the Middle East: Israel. What you see below in a tweet by Shadi Khalloul is a gathering of Israeli Christians on the northern border, advocating for their suffering brethren in Syria. These Christians are free, as Khalloul states, and as a result have the ability to advocate for their unfree brothers.

Also: St. Porphyrios church in Gaza was not “reduced to rubble”. An assembly hall on the campus was damaged by a precision strike on a Hamas control center next door. Two people, not 18, were killed and a dozen injured, and the IDF issued took full responsibility in its public apology.

It would take another article to refute Davis’ American Conservative article, so I will declare this outside of my purview today.

Lastly, I wish to get to the issue of Davis’ numbers. I saved this until last because it is the easiest to rebut, and has been for some time now. He says:

Consider the raw numbers. Here are the comparative casualties since the October 3 terrorist attack:

• 50,021 Palestinians total vs. 1,139 Israelis total

• 37,500 Palestinian civilians vs. 815 Israeli civilians

• 17,400 Palestinian children vs. 36 Israeli children

I hope that you can see from my very lengthy exploration of the term “genocide” earlier that nowhere in the definition thereof does it speak of numbers or proportions. Unequal casualties do not equal a definition of genocide, especially when the attacking party (Hamas) engages in the war crime not only of using human shields, but in building its entire infrastructure for that exact purpose.

As I often say, it is children who suffer first and most for the terrible ideas of adults. It is entirely possible to grieve for every single child lost to this war and every war, and to still be clear about why they died. The death of every single one of those children—of Gaza as well as Israel—is on the hands of Hamas. And while the children of Gaza died as casualties of war, it can not be equated to the sadistic, person-to-person atrocities committed on children by Hamas on October 7, and afterwards toward the hostages, most recently the Bibas toddlers, who were strangled after their capture.

My second issue with Davis’ numbers is that they are provided by Hamas itself, and therefore entirely suspect. Davis makes this puzzling claim:

This data is all taken from Grok on March 25, 2025. Grok, of course, is Twitter’s new A.I. component. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. Benjamin Netanyahu recently described Musk as “a great friend of Israel.” There’s no pro-Palestine bias here.

Huh? The choice of Grok to compile statistics does not say anything about bias. In fact, Grok shows its weakness here in its inability to distinguish the factuality of its source material. (Insert warning about trusting AI for factual information here.)

There has been no independent body allowed into Gaza to verify the casualty numbers. In fact, in the seminal and clearly-titled article How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers, Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School at UPenn, shows irrefutable proof of the impossibility of the death toll, whether in its obvious markers of fabrication (see his charts), the speed at which numbers are released, and the proportion of women and children to combatants.

John Spencer, the urban warfare expert at West Point mentioned earlier, talks about how difficult it is to calculate the proportion of fighters to civilians because of the unconventional and criminal way Hamas engages, including disguising as civilians, and the fact that no matter what efforts are taken to evacuate civilians, in any conflict, about 10% of them inevitably stay. Despite this, knowing that they will take a heavier than necessary toll on themselves, the IDF takes steps like this to minimize the civilian casualties of their enemy (paragraph below edited for length from his Newsweek op-ed):

Warning civilians to evacuate for weeks ahead of time; dropping over 7 million flyers, making over 70,000 direct phone calls, over 13 million text messages and over 15 million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take, deploying drones with speakers and dropping giant speakers by parachute that began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the ground, and announcing and conducting daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.

All this, knowing that Hamas fighters could easily take advantage of those efforts to protect themselves.

I’d like you to imagine for a moment, a scenario in which Canada does to America what Hamas did on 10/7. (I’m not engaging in goofy 51st-statism; it’s just the border I live closest to). For 20 years, Canada launches indiscriminate rockets into the American interior, and we shoot them down but do not invade. All the while, the Canadians are building tunnels under the border as part of a sophisticated invasion into New England to kill, maim, rape and kidnap American citizens who have nothing to do with the conflict, idealistic hippies who specifically live on the border so they can make peace with their Canadian neighbors, even inviting them into their homes, giving them jobs, and taking them to more advanced American hospitals for treatment. All the while, those Canadian neighbors are using these goodwill gestures to map out their attack, and to specifically target those peace activists. They carry out their attack—what would you expect the American government to do?

The reason casualties are lower in Israel is because they have defensive capabilities, so 10/7 was thankfully an anomaly. But it is also because they are by and large a peaceful, stable nation who does not build terrorist infrastructure in its children’s bedrooms. Instead, despite the agonizing realities, Israelis raise their children to be part of a strong but ethical defense, should they need it, against neighbors who despise them.

And unfortunately, they need it.

Let me conclude here, because I have now spent my entire day on this and have to go conduct an interview for a new book I’m working on.

No one wants women and children to die. No one wants innocent people forced to leave their homes. The Golden Rule applies here—and yet, it is difficult to apply the Golden Rule when you know that should you let down your guard, it would likely not be a slap of your other cheek, but the obliteration of your people that would ensue.

To those of us who have given their lives over to the study and combat of historic and present antisemitism and genocide, the point is not to emotionally catastrophize or go tit for tat in endless “both-sidesism”, but to arrive at an accurate understanding of things, beginning with precisely defining terms, so that we can pursue a path of both truth and peace.

I truly wish Michael Warren Davis the best, and hope he eventually joins me.