Peter Davis, a sociologist by trade and the former First Gentleman of New Zealand, took to X recently to offer a peculiar interpretation of antisemitic graffiti daubed on a wall in Aro Valley.
The slur (targeting Jews as a people, not Netanyahu or even Israel per se) was not, in Davis’ view, an expression of millennia-old bigotry finding new license under geopolitical cover. No, it was, somehow, the fault of the Netanyahu government. With a single stroke of clumsy causal logic, Davis took a hateful scribble targeting Jews in his own country and made it the moral responsibility of Jews thousands of miles away. One might call it parochialism. I call it something far worse.
This is a telling moment, and not just for Davis. It illustrates a pathology on the identitarian Left that has curdled into something more disturbing than mere naïveté.
In his post, Davis pines for a “diplomatic solution”, lamenting that the last attempt ended with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995. But history cannot be so conveniently airbrushed. If Rabin was the last sincere Israeli peacemaker, what was Ehud Barak? Chopped liver? In 2000, Barak – hardly a figure of the hard-right – offered Yasser Arafat virtually the entire West Bank, a shared Jerusalem, and the dismantling of settlements. Arafat walked away. And not only did he walk away – he quickly unleashed the Second Intifada. Barak’s comprehensive peace proposal was met not with counteroffers, but with suicide bombers in buses and cafés.
To omit this episode is not a mere oversight. It is narrative engineering.
And here lies the deeper rot in Davis’ framing: his memory is as selective as it is systemically antisemitic. That is to say, it is formed by a worldview in which Jewish agency is always the problem and Palestinian agency need never be addressed. In this worldview, Israeli efforts at peace are dismissed unless they end in national suicide, and Palestinian violence is either excused or, worse, erased.
One need only examine the far-left’s pantheon of intellectuals to see how deeply this rot runs. Noam Chomsky, the doddering conscience of the anti-imperialist Left, has for decades offered page after page of analysis on the conflict in which the actual decisions and ideologies of Palestinian leaders are barely mentioned, if at all. Hamas is always a response, not a movement. Arafat’s betrayal of peace goes unspoken, but Ariel Sharon’s every bulldozer gets indexed. In Chomsky’s world, there is no Palestinian responsibility, only Israeli culpability. The messaging is designed to miseducate.
This cognitive blind spot – or Big Lie – is a defining feature of contemporary Left analysis on the Levant. It allows Peter Davis to equate antisemitism in New Zealand with Israeli state policy, despite the graffiti saying nothing about settlements or Netanyahu. It was antisemitism, pure and simple. But Davis cannot see it, because his worldview demands a guilty Jew at the center of every tragedy.
It also explains the perverse nostalgia for Rabin. He is safe because he is dead, and more importantly, because he was killed by a fellow Jew. That allows commentators like Davis to use him as both martyr and cudgel – proof, they think, that it is internal Jewish dysfunction, not any external extremism, that killed, and continues to kick the corpse, of the peace process. But were he alive today, Rabin would have confronted the same Palestinian Authority that scuttled peace in 2000, and the same Hamas that now rules Gaza with theocratic cruelty. Would Rabin, too, be condemned for defending his citizens?
The mythology of Rabin-as-last-hope is an ideological fig leaf for those unwilling to confront what really happened in the wake of Camp David: the Palestinian leadership made a choice. They chose grievance over statehood, martyrdom over compromise. That choice has been made again and again – by Arafat, by Hamas, and by Abbas, who has turned down even more peace offers since Barak.
If peace died with Rabin, it did not die by the gun of a lone settler. It died in the rejectionist doctrine of the Palestinian leadership and the dogmatic indulgence of their Western apologists. It died in the terror campaign that followed the most generous peace offer ever placed on the table. It died each time a Western liberal, like Davis, turned away from the sight of a bombed bus and asked, “What did the Jew do to deserve this?”
To be clear: criticism of Netanyahu or Israeli policy is not antisemitic. But to take the spray-painted hatred of Jews and make it the fault of Israeli Jews – while excusing, ignoring, or distorting the record of Palestinian leaders – is not critique. It is complicity.
And that is what Peter Davis offers, dressed up as reflection. It is a dishonest moral equation that assigns all responsibility to the Jews and removes it entirely from those who have repeatedly chosen war, terror, and rejection. If the Jew simply must be to blame, you’re either not paying attention, or believe the historical script needs a rewrite. And if fantasy is your preferred genre (and by Davis’ behavior we can safely assume it is), stop insulting our intelligence by pretending you want peace.
