“When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you?”
That’s the opening line of Masha Gessen’s New York Times essay, only slightly less tendentious than its title, *“How to Be a Good Citizen of a Bad Country.”* Yet, the piece ultimately refutes itself. The “bad” country it condemns allows its critics to denounce it freely, speak to Times reporters, travel at will, and suffer no punishment—privileges unthinkable anywhere else in the region.
In Hamas-ruled Gaza, such “resistance” is brutally suppressed. Does Gessen remember that there was not a single protest in Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 massacre—only celebrations?
To brand Israel—a country with free speech, a free press, independent courts, opposition parties, and checks and balances—as “bad” in a region governed by terrorists, militias, juntas, and theocrats is a category error so significant that it disqualifies a writer from serious consideration.
Someone at the Times apparently agreed, because at some point after publication, the title was quietly changed to *“How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things.”* This is better, but it is still followed by a first paragraph that ends with the question, “How can one be a good citizen of a bad state?”
The article signals a twisted utopian lens, anchored in a postcolonial, critical-theory framework that sees only prosperous democratic states as oppressors and those ruled by coercion and thuggery as victims. It judges countries not by their duty to protect citizens but by trendy conceptual metrics.
From the first sentence, loyalty to Israel is treated as complicity with “monsters,” and resistance to one’s own state becomes the only moral path forward. Gessen profiles Israelis opposing their government during the Gaza war and elevates them as moral freedom fighters. These “good citizens” must reject Zionism and “do scary things” to resist evil.
The essay’s verbiage comes straight out of the academy: people are reduced to “Western bodies” and “Jewish bodies,” while Israel becomes an abstract “apparatus” implicating everyone in “policies and… crimes.” This is the work of a mind so clouded by hatred—perhaps even self-hatred—that reason no longer stands a chance.
Most alarming is how the piece skirts the horrors of October 7, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, raped women, burned families alive, and kidnapped children. Gessen refers to it clinically as “the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on the south of Israel,” as if the massacre were some morning skirmish.
Later, the article mentions a 47-minute film compiled from Hamas body-camera and security footage—a cold, incontrovertible record of murder—and writes, almost ironically, “Israelis refer to the reel as ‘the atrocity film,’” as if that were propaganda.
The tone is chillingly detached, as though describing a banal student protest rather than mass murder. This detachment extends to Israel’s compulsory military service, which Gessen calls “the state’s most effective instrument for implicating the maximum number of people in its policies and its crimes,” as if it were a crime to defend oneself from terrorists whose first principle is the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
Gessen escalates the abstraction with the casual use of “genocide,” applied solely to Israel, without noting Hamas’s explicit intent and actual bloody actions to eradicate Jews. Definitions—like human suffering—become malleable in this moral universe, just as they are on the safe, pastoral campuses where these ideas were hatched.
If genocide means the deliberate and systematic attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, then its use to describe Israel’s defensive war against Hamas is a calumnious falsehood.
Israel is a nuclear power with the ability to kill every one of the 2.2 million people living in the 141 square miles of Gaza without ever having to step foot in the territory. Instead, Israel made the decision to go block by block and house by house in search of hostages, warning civilians with air drops, cell phone calls, and public announcements—only to suffer over 700 military deaths, the population-adjusted equivalent of 24,000 deaths if it were the United States.
This is not the behavior of a state intent on genocide. It is also uncommon for genocidal states to provide or enable extensive humanitarian aid and medical care to Gaza—an unprecedented level of assistance from a country to an enemy territory.
Measured by rough tonnage, Israel’s 1.46 million tons of aid (mostly food) to Gaza is more than the 400,000 tons of food delivered during the Berlin Airlift after World War II, considered a historic achievement. All of this takes place while under attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis.
Gessen then turns from Israel to that island off the coast of the United States, Manhattan, writing:
> “In my life in New York, I have not yet seen a single ICE officer though I know that buildings in my neighborhood have been raided and I can go for weeks, if not longer, without interacting with a Trump supporter. Israeli dissidents, on the other hand, always feel as though they are swimming in a sea of otherness.”
The implication here is unambiguous: Trump supporters and ICE agents are the moral equivalents of the genocidal “monsters” described earlier. It’s a strange confession from someone who extols dissent as essential to democracy.
Who exactly are “the others” in this worldview? Those who vote differently? Those who believe a nation has a right to defend itself? The “sea of otherness” Gessen imagines says less about Israel or America than it does about the author’s own vain isolation.
The tone and academic jargon of essays like this are smokescreens meant to replace complex reasoning. Postcolonial theory’s language dominates precisely because it avoids the real world. And no matter how hard the disciples of these ideologies try, their utopian fantasy land will not emerge.
Yet they beat on, dodging the realities of war, terror, and national survival. For Gessen and company, it is comforting to interpret reality through abstraction. Unfortunately, in the real world, that comfort destroys rather than builds.
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*Getting Back to an ‘Honorable Manhood’*
*What Graham Platner’s Tattoo Really Reveals*
https://spectator.org/the-new-york-times-sets-a-new-low-on-israel/
