A Brief Reply to Ezra Klein - With Some Facts On Lebanon
On “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy”
Earlier this week, Ezra Klein offered a case for a more pluralist progressive discourse- one that, in his view, can comfortably include anti-Zionist positions without crossing into antisemitism.
I have much to say about the piece as a whole - first published under the headline “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy,” later changed to “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan”.
As to Israel, I find the argument, at its core, hollow. Is there really a shortage of rabid anti-Zionist views in progressive circles - from Zohran Mamdani to many others? Or on the Right, for that matter? If Klein wanted to make the case for a more pluralistic discourse in progressive circles, he might just as well have argued for those who defend Israel—they are the real minority. Instead, he chose Israel because it’s easy, I suppose.
Now Klein urges acceptance of Hasan Piker’s “arguments” - those heavy-duty contributions like admiring Hezbollah’s flag or claiming Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel.
What drew my attention was not the broader thesis — I do not think there’s a case to answer — but a single sentence, casually inserted, within a general indictment of Israel’s conduct.
That sentence claimed that Israel “used the Iran war as an opportunity” to invade Lebanon, displace more than a million people, and prevent hundreds of thousands from returning to their homes.
Some of the criticism of the Israeli government, in the same paragraph, I share and write about in my own columns. That is not the issue. The problem is the fusion of fact and distortion.
And it matters, because it reflects something deeper: a conversation increasingly detached from basic chronology and attached only to sentiment. Piker’s sentiment, it seems.
As to Lebanon falsehood: With global attention fixed on Gaza, many simply do not know what has unfolded in the north of Israel since October 7. Klein either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care.
So — here are some facts.
Hezbollah opened hostilities against Israel on October 8, 2023 — less than 24 hours after Hamas carried out one of the deadliest massacres in the history of terrorist attacks. For more than a decade, Hezbollah had openly threatened to invade northern Israel and seize towns and villages, much as Hamas eventually did. It was a declared intent.
Hezbollah chose to sustain a continuous war of attrition against Israel’s north — before any Israeli ground operation in Gaza. The result: dozens of thousands of Israelis displaced, entire communities evacuated, a region effectively emptied - with Kibbutizm and other villages destroyed by bombing. This campaign was backed, financed, and directed by Iran.
Only after taking significant blows on the battlefield did Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire.
Inside Lebanon, something important happened during the war. Large parts of the political system — and the public — placed responsibility on Hezbollah. Calls to disarm the group (a commitment made by Lebanon back in 2000, entrenched in a U.N. security council decision) grew louder, including from the country’s leadership. Israel, for its part, maintained a limited incursion — measured in a few miles — pending a final arrangement that would push Hezbollah forces away from its border and and be disarmed.
When the current conflict with Iran began, Hezbollah attacked Israel again and broke the ceasefire — much to the dismay of Lebanese leaders and its people. Israel responded with a counter-attack, also issuing evacuation warnings in southern Lebanon as the area became an active war zone, and expanding operations against Hezbollah positions. Israeli leaders are floating a buffer zone — perhaps up to 12 miles, likely less — to push the threat away from border communities. One can debate the wisdom of that policy. Many in Israel do - I wrote its a march of folly. But it is a response to sustained attacks, not their origin.
Yet all of this is flattened into a single accusation, a falsehood: Israel as aggressor. In this framing, chronology disappears, agency is nothing, and responsibility flows in only one direction. What is left is not analysis, but narrative— one that requires forgetting how this began, and who chose to continue it.
Once that inversion takes hold, the conclusions follow almost automatically.
Most Lebanese would have never written such a statement on the war, specifically not the liberals and progressives who despise Hezbollah. Yet Klein adopts the narrative of their fundamentalist rival, in Lebanon, only to indict Israel.
Hasan Piker is really not the enemy to this text, it seems; he is a friend.
It's quite simple. Piker espouses overt, hateful, eliminationist bigotry. He might dress it up nicer than Fuentes or David Duke (though his anti-Americanism is more explicit), but it's the same thing - a violation of our universal moral TABOOS.
People like Piker must be ostracized not only out of our mainstream politics (the "big tents") but also out of polite society. This is the only way to uphold these taboos and prevent the hate from becoming normalized and spiraling into violence and anarchy.
This is the playbook we used to marginalize and defeat the KKK, and what we must do today to #MakeTaboosTabooAgain
Ezra Klein and his family should spend a month in Kiryat Shmona and then he can have an opinion. A prime example of Luxury beliefs.