The Season of Moral Insanity
People should be careful when they're excusing the murder of innocent civilians... much more careful than this
Years ago, a man brutally murdered both of his parents. When it came to the sentencing phase of his trial, he asked for merciful consideration. After all, he pleaded, he was an orphan.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves. Hamas’ actions in Israel are unconscionable and inconsistent with even the normal tactics of terrorists. The Western Leftists trying to excuse (or glorify) rape and infanticide are relying on a bivalent (simplified, therefore inaccurate) view of the world, a misunderstanding of Israeli politics and history, and an unquestioning acceptance of the writings of Frantz Fanon and the ‘decolonization’ model.
Hamas’ actions in Gaza are more layered and disingenuous. They have massively siphoned money and concrete and equipment and expertise away from the provision of services or the building of infrastructure for the residents of Gaza. Instead they have used them for construction of a ‘second city’ underground and the construction of thousands of rockets and the training of a small army of terrorists and fighters.
The more egregious aspect of their rule is that they have arranged their resistance in such a way as to cost maximum (Gazan) civilian casualties in the event of any Israeli bombing and incursion. They have obviously done this to manipulate global observers and thereby pressure and constrain Israel, and those observers have let themselves be deceived and misdirected and exploited. Their blend of cowardice and moral inconsistency is, perhaps, Hamas’ greatest asset. I never had really strong feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but I knew the basic details. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen our media cover a foreign event story and veer so often into outright propaganda of omission and commission. The coverage is shocking to me.
Hamas transports its hostages back through cheering and supportive crowds of hateful Gazan civilians, the same people fretted over by Western media and whose corpses are used as pawns by Hamas in their international chess game with Israel and the West
In asking these questions I’m thinking of the UNRA, the Arab countries who regularly make statements about the situation, the Biden administration and the European governments who have directed billions of dollars to Hamas, either directly or indirectly: Why has no one pressured Hamas to build bomb shelters along with its vast network of tunnels, thereby protecting Gazan civilians to some extent? Why are there worldwide calls for an Israeli ceasefire… but none for a Hamas surrender? Why is virtually no one in the media calling on Hamas to release its hostages immediately? Why is Hamas, the elected and popular (it seems) government of Gaza not being called upon to divert its water and food and fuel and funding to help its own citizens? Why is the two state solution still discussed as a promising conclusion, when the Palestinians have rejected it OVER AND OVER since 1948? 1948, 1967, Camp David, 2000, 2005, the last formal meeting with Mahmoud Abbas… those are the instances I can recall off the top of my head right now (as such there could be a few errors) and I’m not a regular observer of Israeli-Palestinian politics!
I must confess I usually find this conflict tiresome but my attention has turned to it in the wake of 10/7, shocked by the disgusting behavior of Hamas fighters but FAR more shocked at the celebratory response of Western Leftists. I knew that critical theory had infested our institutions and deranged many young professionals and academics and students and children but even with that knowledge I believed they would be more circumspect. They might privately rejoice in the atrocities of Hamas, I thought, but they would understand how such public displays would appear to their peers and be fairly covert about their feelings. The fact that hundreds of thinkers and policy-makers and institutions have COMPLETELY failed to assess any blame on Hamas for atrocities they openly committed is a very bad sign. It means the rot is deeper than I thought, for people like these only make public proclamations when they are in a large and agreeable crowd. They are not independent thinkers and they are cowards, so the boldness with which they made their feelings known should chill all of us.
Their feelings are based in an error-ridden conception of the conflict and its history (which I address, point-by-point, below) and also in a Manichean worldview which sorts everyone into oppressor and oppressed. If you are in the former group than any action against you by the supposedly dispossessed is not just excusable but is righteous. Surely I don’t need to explain how there are literally no additional assumptions or ideas needed to bring a person to the point where they sanction and support genocide. Dehumanizing an entire group and excusing all violence against them based on their group membership places one in the ranks of the Turkish murderers of the Armenians in the early 20th century, and the Hutus in 1993, and the Nazis. Hundreds of thousands (or millions) of privileged and well-placed Americans are now openly genocidaires, as they are still called in Rwanda.
The worldview underlying this is critical theory and a kind of anti-colonial revolutionary moral/psychological theory authored by Fanon (see below). The mistakes and erroneous assumptions include:
Both sides have been intransigent and share blame for a failure to come to a “two state solution” - Israel has been willing to give +99% of the land delineated by the 1967 border on a half dozen occasions in the past 50 years. The truth is that Palestinians don’t (their leadership, but also many regular people) want that kind of state. The truth (which most Westerners have not grappled with) is that Palestinians are often willing to live in squalor and live on UN handouts and support the murder of Israeli civilians to have the distant and ridiculous mirage of a unified Palestine, a nation sitting atop the land that Israel has now. This would probably result in the deaths or expulsion of most of the 7 million Jews who live in Israel now. Whenever possible the media and politicians should press Palestinians to be honest about their ultimate aims and we should express that they are completely unacceptable. Israel will not be erased and failing to grapple with that fact means that Palestinians often behave like mentally ill people, captives to their compelling delusion.
Israel is committing genocide/killing civilians - I’ve seen this claim ad nauseum online recently. I understand that some of it is hyperbole and some is a kind of tactical verbal deceit but there seem to be many people who believe this idea. This is wrong. If Israel wanted to kill children they could’ve killed 400,000 by now… not 4,000. Israel advises evacuations of buildings and entire areas. Hamas regularly keeps them in place even after such orders are given because Hamas wants them to be killed by Israel. Hamas rarely even has to deny this, because they’re rarely pressed on the point. Hamas wants maximum civilian casualties on both sides. Israel wants to minimize civilian casualties, on both sides.
It’s natural for the weak and oppressed to embrace brutality - In a sense it’s natural for all humans-weak and strong-to behave in a brutal fashion. This idea (which lies close to the heart of many Westerners apologist responses to the Hamas attacks) is simply wrong. The SCLC of the United States, Nelson Mandela’s ANC, Gandhi’s Independence Movement, Poland’s Solidarity, etc., etc. are all movements which sprang up under harsh state oppression. They didn’t kill infants in their cribs. In fact, most of the underdog political movements of the past century haven’t intentionally killed infants. Violence for mass movements is both a sign of low collective emotional restraint and a tactical decision. The past century’s history has shown that for a group like the Palestinians targeted nonviolence would be much more effective. But violence can also be a symptom of a certain kind of death cult ideology. ISIS was also incredibly brutal, and many of its members were middle class kids from the United States or college students from Europe. The reason that Hamas is so incredibly brutal relates to it’s hateful Islamic ideology, not its representation of the wretched of the Earth.
Israel is a ‘settler colonialist’ or ‘apartheid’ state - Israel is the only modern democracy in the region, where women and gay people and religious and ethnic minorities have full rights and legal protections. There are effectively zero Jews in the countries around Israel because if there had been they would’ve been killed long ago. About a quarter of the Israeli population is ‘Arab’ and 3/4 were born in Israel, the vast majority of whom are Mizrahi Jews (and therefore phenotypically indistinguishable from Arabs and North Africans). Israel erected a comprehensive security barrier two decades ago but there seemed to be little choice, given the endless waves of terrorist attacks. Within the borders of the country of Israel there is no colonialism or institutional racism or exploitation and the areas outside its borders, which are considered ‘Palestinian’, languish under terrible leadership and a cultural obsession with the annihilation of Israel. Colonialism and Apartheid imply some physical separation for economic exploitation or to preserve racial identities. Most Israelis just want Gaza and the West Bank to disappear entirely… or to envision some future of peaceful coexistence. This is a possibility which no Palestinian party or leader has found appealing and that fact is endlessly obscured by the media.
Gaza is full of refugee camps - I was surprised to learn that there are really no more Palestinian refugee camps. There are huge communities in Lebanon and Jordan and Syria full of descendants of those who fled during the Nakba (some were victims of violence, some were ordered to leave by their leaders, some feared that the Jews would be vindictive toward them, which mostly didn’t happen) but they include families with +3 generations of people born in those countries. Similarly the ‘refugee camps’ in Gaza are just regular Arab high density mixed-use communities. They have taxis and apartment blocs and concrete buildings and electrical transmission systems. The media uses the term ‘refugee camps’ (even though the people are presumably in their own territory, which is self-governed) to make a pejorative implication about Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
Violence is cleansing for the oppressed - This is the central idea of Frantz Fanon’s horrible book The Wretched of the Earth but I think I need more space and detail than I have here to address his book. You might look forward to an analysis/reaction (I first read that book in 8th grade… it was on the Rage Against the Machine band reading list) soon.
The media has mostly ignored the Hamas-Iran connection (which is arguably the most important element in the entire event). They’ve ignored the historical intransigence and the contemporary open racial hatred of Hamas. They’ve mostly ignored the absurd and indefensible slogans and ideas of pro-Palestinian activists and citizens in the West. They’re even mostly ignored the surge of anti-Semitism (up 1000-1500% in many American and European cities) and instead direct focus toward ‘Islamophobia’.
I have been appalled and-even in my extensive reading and cynical worldview-surprised at the behavior of American institutions in the wake of 10/7
I have been worried that the derangements of privilege and the absurdities of critical theory might get millions of Americans to the point where they would excuse or justify murder against an entire group of people simply because of that group’s identity. It seems we’re already there.