Wallace Shawn Joins the Antisemites, and Outdoes the Worst of Them

Wallace Shawn’s grotesque assault on Israel can be found here: “Jewish Actor Wallace Shawn Calls Israel ‘Demonically Evil,’ in ‘Some Ways Worse’ Than Nazis for Gaza War,” by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, February 5, 2025:

…The “Young Sheldon” star has been a longtime critic of Israel and its military actions in Gaza during the war against Hamas terrorists controlling the enclave who orchestrated the deadly terrorist attack across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. After the massacre, he signed a letter from Artists4Ceasefire calling on former US President Joe Biden to push for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to end the war.

Wallace Shawn was already calling for a ceasefire after just a few weeks of the war in Gaza that Hamas had started with the atrocities it carried out on October 7. Shawn wanted to stop the IDF in its tracks, leaving the 251 hostages in captivity, and Hamas still intact. His palpable want of sympathy for the Jewish state was already on display.

Shawn has repeatedly criticized US support for the Jewish state during the Israel-Hamas war. He accused Israel of “brutal occupation,” and of “massacring innocent people” and inflicting “deliberate cruelties” on Palestinians in Gaza. He has participated in rallies and events organized by the anti-Israel groups If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, and is also a member of JVP’s [the anti-Israel Jewish Voices for Peace] advisory board.

A Jewish Voice For Peace, forsooth! There is no “brutal occupation” of Gaza by the IDF. There are soldiers in Gaza who, having devastated Hamas, are now pulling out gradually from the Strip, first pulling back from the cities, and ultimately, they will pull out of all of Gaza once the remaining hostages have been returned, and Hamas has been destroyed so that it cannot regroup, rearm, or recruit new members. Israelis do not want to remain in Gaza; they want only to be made permanently safe from the killers of Hamas.

During his appearance on Halper’s podcast, Shawn also accused Israel of “starving people, preventing children from getting medicine on purpose, and bombing hospitals” in Gaza. “If you don’t see that it’s evil to do those things to other human beings, then you’re in a different universe for me,” he argued

Do we have to go over this again? The IDF does not “starve people” — the only ones put on a starvation diet in Gaza have been Israeli hostages. Nor does it “prevent children from getting medicine on purpose.” The IDF has facilitated the entry of over 1.3 million tons of humanitarian aid — food and medicine — to Gaza within the last 15 months. Does Shawn know that many dozens of Gazans with hard-to-treat conditions — cancer, rare blood diseases — have been taken to Israel, where they are treated at the Sheba Medical Center?

The IDF does not bomb hospitals that are being used solely as hospitals. But its soldiers do attack those parts of hospitals that have been taken over by Hamas terrorists, who use some hospital wings to hide both themselves and their weapons. At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, more than 200 Hamas fighters who had been using the hospital to hide in then surrendered to the IDF. At Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the IDF killed 200 Hamas fighters and captured 500 more. These hospitals were far more than hospitals — they were enemy encampments.

Similarly, the IDF does not “bomb schools,” but rather, bombs school buildings that are no longer functioning as schools, but as places where Hamas hides its men, weapons, and rocket launchers.

He [Shawn] additionally said, “I can imagine that some Israelis who are today in support of what their country is doing in Gaza or in the West Bank, even some of them might in 10 years wake up and say, ‘Why did I justify that?’ … Of course, [Israelis] must consciously or unconsciously know that every single day they are making the hatred increase. And the hatred level is something we can’t imagine.”

So Wallace Shawn is worried about the rise in antisemitism — the “hatred level is something we can’t imagine” — but instead of articulately defending Israel and Jews as they deserve, which is the only way to deal with the tidal wave of antisemitism, he chooses, grotesquely, to join the antisemites, and even to outdo the worst of them, by accusing the IDF of being “worse than the Nazis” and claiming that “Hitler was more decent” than the Israelis because he at least tried to hide his atrocities, whereas the IDF “boasts” of them. Let’s repeat here what Professor John Spencer concluded after studying the war in Gaza, that “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history — above & beyond what international law requires.”