There's a lot to say, of course, about how much this sort of thing -- safe, comfortable Westerners appointing themselves arbiters of which nations are allowed to exist -- has taken over the politics of the Western left. Or about what Israelis see that they don't -- for example, why Israeli Jews who hail from the Arab world are more right-wing and hawkish than the ones thrust upon the land artificially by European empires (or whatever). Or about how no other Jews in any meaningful numbers actually managed to survive the 20th century outside the Anglophone world -- and when most Jews were actually fleeing to Israel, the Anglophone world was closed to them. The great exception, of course, is Soviet Jews, who were trapped in place and had their culture violently and brutally erased from them, and then fled almost entirely when the Iron Curtain fell. Or, come to think of it, about how the Jewish claim to the land isn't about some dusty old lineage, but to a great extent from every generation's own contemporary story; from nearly every chapter of the Jewish Bible and prayerbook read and studied in every synagogue on Earth for two millennia; from how every synagogue for two millennia prayed toward Jerusalem; from the medieval rabbis who at the end of their lives boarded a boat to the land of Israel so they can be buried there; from how no Muslim or Christian ever doubted that Jewish attachment until they needed to pretend to forget it in order to fight Jewish immigration. There's even a lot to say about the fundamental fakery of Western romantic discourse on indigeneity -- about how Jews were told to "go to Palestine" by Polish and Iraqi nationalists who rejected them for not being indigenous enough to Poland or Iraq, and to "go to Poland" by Palestinian activists because they're not indigenous enough to be in the land of Israel. (No one told them to go back to Iraq, of course, though they were a quarter of Baghdad's population in 1930. The brownness of half of Israeli Jews upsets the comfortable assumptions of the Western indigeneity industry, so it's ignored.) It turns out it's possible, according to the self-appointed indigeneity auditors of the Western left, for there to exist a people that's not indigenous anywhere, and so undeserving, even in the midst of the brutal genocide of millions, of any other place to escape to. (Does Caitlin know that the Jews who fled to Israel had literally nowhere else to go? If not, her crime is ignorance. If yes, her crime is a denial of history so that history can be repeated. I hope it's ignorance.) There's a lot to say about her final point, that it wouldn't actually be dangerous for the Jews to become a Middle Eastern minority once more; about how minorities generally have fared in the Middle East over the past century, and whether it really is crazy for Israelis, especially those hailing from the Arab world, to suspect that a future as a Middle Eastern minority would be a dark and bloody one; and about how it is the likes of Hamas, not some right-wing Israeli rabble-rouser, that keeps telling Israelis this is the case. But what would be the point? What would be the point of saying all that to someone who has adopted the demolition of another nation as the engine of her moral world. Such a person isn't going to sit with any of the actual history or dilemmas of this land and ask herself whether there might be some gargantuan lacunae in her understanding. Instead, let me offer a small and practical response in place of the great and grandiose dives into the depths of the Israeli soul. I think, dear Caitlin, that for all the reasons above and a few more besides, we Israelis will keep our self-determination, this safety we have found in a world that for all its endless self-righteousness never actually saves anyone. And I think, too, that those activists, like you, who condition Palestinian self-determination on us losing our own only pushes off the day of that blessed and necessary independence.

I say this as gently as I know how, because it seems to me unforgivably obvious. You cannot simultaneously build a strong international law system while also hating the West. International law is a Western idea born of a particular Western historical, cultural and political experience. And because God loves irony, no one exemplifies this fact more than the evil regime whose travails since yesterday have sparked so much legalistic hand-wringing. Both Khamenei himself and his teacher and predecessor Khomeini consistently and explicitly rejected international law as a tool of "global arrogance" (estekbar-e jahani) — i.e., of powerful secularist, individualistic democracies. Khamenei was even more explicit, routinely declaring legal frameworks like UN conventions as "colonial" traps. These declarations weren’t marginal to their ideology. They were fundamental planks of the regime’s political theology. I’ll say this, again, as gently as I can: The fact that international law and international institutions have transformed in practice into a system that more often than not runs defense for the most virulent and explicit enemies of said law might have something to do with their decline as an organizing framework of international affairs. For example, when UN agencies and international institutions target Israel more than Iran, or more than China, Iran and Russia put together, or more than all the dictatorships and wars in the world combined — they’re doing more harm to the law than to Israel. Similarly, it matters that so many of international law’s loudest spokespeople had nothing to say about Khamenei’s crimes just six weeks ago, but swung into action only when Khamenei’s long reign of terror was finally brought to an end. That’s not law. It’s the opposite of law. International law can be saved, but only if its scholars and practitioners grow up and shed the instinctive anti-Westernism and racist paternalism of the present-day academy. When international law is no longer seen by its own practitioners primarily as an instrument for containing, weakening and delegitimizing the West, but becomes genuinely about actual law, it will once again have a claim on us. If you fail to see in Khamenei the bitter foe of international law that he was, if in the midst of your legitimate critique of a war you can’t summon at least a little joy that this avowed enemy of your purported moral system is dead and gone, then you haven’t actually been fighting for international law.