If They Could Press a Button...

The False Moral Equivalency Between Hamas & the IDF

As I wrote yesterday, one question cuts through a lot of noise and confusion. It gets right to the heart of intention, leaving aside current circumstances, respective positions, history, and a hundred other details.

“If you could press a button and make the world instantly conform to your vision, what would it look like?”

This question exposes the people who are more concerned with fomenting revolution than with improving the lives of black people. It reveals those who see the classroom as a petri dish for activist sensibilities rather than a training session for life as an adult in a capitalist country. It reveals the soldiers trying to observe proportionality and laws of war… and it reveals les genocidaires.

If the IDF had complete power they would certainly kill the entire network of Hamas fighters and decision-makers (especially now) but they would leave schools and hospitals and women and children alone. We know exactly what the IDF would do with overwhelming power, because they have it now. If they truly wanted to accomplish a ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ they could deploy their incendiary munitions right now and indiscriminately kill half the people in the Gaza strip, and then send in infantry patrols in the shadow of Merkava tanks and finish the job. They could probably achieve a 70-80% kill rate within a week. Instead they labor to attack the labs and armories and operations centers of Hamas and are mainly unable to do this without a terrible loss of life and property because of the decisions of Hamas to use their population as human shields. This is not controversial and it’s universally known.

What would Hamas do? Hamas would kill every Israeli in gruesome fashion. Their occasional rocket attacks and their unremitting public statements implying that might not have made it clear enough for everyone, but after 10/7 it can no longer be denied.

Progressives arrive at their worst and most absurd moral intuitions when pushed to account for the bad actions of groups they support. Domestic terrorists trying to kill parade-goers or police… are ignored completely (or at least their motivation is). Young male urban residents locked in blood feuds with one another that regularly take the lives of children and make their neighborhoods a hell… are due to some vague social conditions and never their own decisions or motivations. Rioters and batterers without any legitimate purpose… are not condemned. Bomb-throwers and murderers of children… are granted legitimacy due to political grievances. Bomb-throwers and murderers of children… are granted legitimacy due to political grievances. Bomb-throwers and murderers of children… are granted legitimacy due to political grievances.

Certainly the Gaza strip has suffered terribly. Whether their suffering since 2007 falls at the feet of Hamas or Israel is a very legitimate question, but put it to the side. The idea that the oppressed deserve to use violence and should be encouraged in its use flies in the face of nearly every successful asymmetric political struggle in the last 100 years. What the hell were Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi talking about if violence is the way forward for the oppressed?

The fact is that violence is both incredibly corrosive to a people’s soul, and less effective in the modern world, especially if you’re the weaker side! It’s simply more emotionally satisfying, especially for those consumed by hate. The young men raised in the prison of Hamas’ making and taught to hate since childhood are at least comprehensible, if not sympathetic. Their tactical errors in embracing violence can be instantly understood as the result of a decades-long asymmetric armed struggle, with its attendant suffering and humiliations.

What, exactly, is the excuse of privileged Western progressives?