The aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel was a wake-up call for a lot of Jewish liberals.
For political progressives, the fact that some of their allies on the left were cheering for Hamas was a bridge too far.
The spectacle of pro-Hamas activism in American streets — and especially on the campuses of elite universities like Harvard and Columbia — has established beyond any doubt the intersectional left’s embrace of a form of Jew-hatred that is indistinguishable from that of the Nazis.
However, these progressives are not the primary threat to Israel in the West. I am far more worried about the behavior and comments of decent liberals —those who have expressed their revulsion at Hamas’ actions and denounced the support the terrorists have gotten from the progressives, but who, unlike President Joe Biden, don’t add a “full stop” to their support of Israel.
The loud chorus of corporate media talking heads and pundits, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who are treating Israel’s efforts to put an end to this deadly threat as morally dubious are not as despicable as those openly approving of the mass killing of Jews. However, it is the avatars of a “decent left” that treat the Israeli counter-offensive as also wrong who wield far more influence and do far more damage to the existential struggle to defend the Jewish state.
They assert a degree of moral equivalence between the efforts of the IDF to take out terrorists and the crimes of Hamas.
It is hard to ignore the mobs in New York’s Times Square howling for the shedding of Jewish blood. Yet it is unlikely that anyone in the Biden administration, even the mid-level staffers most hostile to Israel, is paying much attention to them.
But the op-ed columnists working at The New York Times just a few blocks away urging opposition to Israel’s counter-offensive and calling for international pressure on the Jewish state that will essentially leave the murderers in place and triumphant when the shooting stops — they are the real problem.
Statements and social-media posts from the Black Lives Matter movement approving Hamas’ attacks, including one in which they invoked the paragliders used to perpetrate the massacre at a Rave festival in which hundreds were slaughtered and women were raped next to the corpses of their friends, was particularly egregious.
So, too, were the demonstrations by the Democratic Socialists of America, where Hamas was applauded, as well as gatherings around the country in which some Arab and Palestinian Americans identified with Hamas and labeled their bestial acts as justified “resistance.”
The fact that they had no scruples about publicly embracing atrocities of this sort had to hurt the Jewish left.
Congressional “Squad” leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) felt the need to disassociate herself from what she rightly described as the “bigotry” and the “callousness” on display at the Times Square DSA pep rally for Hamas. Yet, in the same statement, she asserted a moral equivalence between Israeli victims and Palestinian terrorists, and called for a ceasefire that would allow the Islamist group to escape punishment for its crimes.
AOC’s pivot away from open support for Hamas — a stance that separated her from her “Squad” colleague Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — proved telling. The opportunistic Ocasio-Cortez understood that the place for critics of Israel was not to be among the ranks of those cheering the slaughter of Jews but among those seeking to stop Israel from preventing future terrorist attacks.
The foreign-policy establishment had already begun to weigh in to deprecate any Israeli action that might take down Hamas as pieces by Richard Haas and Thomas Friedman indicate. They were soon joined by other Times columnists like Nicholas Kristof and Michelle Goldberg, who were careful to denounce Hamas atrocities but swiftly moved on to say that Israel’s counterattack was bound to be, in principle and practice, as wrong as the terrorist massacre.
None was more clear about this than Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman. His piece, “Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs moral consistency, not moral clarity,” got to the heart of the debate that will determine whether the Biden administration will stick to its praiseworthy stance supporting Israel or abandon it in the coming days once an Israeli offensive comes under fire from those who will cite Palestinian casualties as a reason to let Hamas off the hook.
Waldman thinks the effort to draw a clear moral distinction between Hamas crimes and Israeli efforts to prevent future crimes is wrong. He says that if you see Hamas as in the wrong and Israel as in the right, then you are no different from Hamas!
What Waldman wants is more nuance in which our grief for Palestinian civilian casualties is balanced against our tears for Israelis who have been murdered, raped or kidnapped.
We deplore the suffering of all innocents. But Waldman is unwilling to understand that a cause that cheers the most depraved atrocities is immoral, while a cause that seeks to destroy the group and the ideology that produces those crimes is, by definition, moral, even if that results in the deaths of civilians.
Military campaigns of the Allies against the Nazis necessitated an unfortunate toll of German civilian dead.
So will Israel’s fight to wipe out Hamas, even if its army does far more to avoid such deaths than any other.
Some historians continue to debate the morality of some of the air raids on Germany. But can anyone seriously doubt that a scrupulousness about violating the laws of war that would have allowed the Nazi regime to survive, so as to lessen the number of German civilian casualties, would have been profoundly immoral?
Hamas’ beliefs on display on Oct. 7 shows that the Islamist group is not merely dedicated to Israel’s destruction but is as genocidal and barbaric as the Nazis.
That means that those who argue that Israel must stand down and allow Hamas to survive as the sovereign power in the Gaza Strip are advocating a stance that is immoral.
In wars like these, responsibility for the deaths that occur belongs to those who pursue immoral ends, not their opponents.
The campaign to completely eliminate Hamas is — from both a legal and moral perspective — is a just war. Those who oppose such a war in the name of a “moral consistency” want us to think they are “decent” and morally distinct from those progressives who glory in Hamas crimes. But the opinion leaders who are pushing for the Biden administration to use its leverage to stop Israel from defeating Hamas are more dangerous than the leftists who aren’t afraid to express their anti-Semitism in public.
The rantings of the hard left create an atmosphere of hate that makes Jewish life more difficult on campuses and in cities. But the decent liberals may prove to be the lifeline that the criminals who shed Jewish blood need, and may do more harm in the long run.
If they succeed in persuading Biden to back away from Israel and let Hamas win, these supposedly virtuous people will have the blood of all the future victims of Islamist terrorism, Jewish and non-Jewish — on their hands.