Reflections on the Sympathy for the Campus Protests

I wrote this essay a few months ago, and it got lost in the shuffle of other publications. I post it because, if anything, the situation is worse now than it was when I wrote it: (at least in my opinion) people who think they’re good, moderate liberals, people I otherwise admire and take seriously, are actually engaged in deeply misguided and self-destructive ways of thinking about the conflict twixt river and sea.

I’m on a class listserv from college, and occasionally we discuss the conflict between Israel and her neighbors. Recently a number of people expressed broad sympathy for the encampers. So I asked what it was about these protests that so many agree with them? One person, someone very smart and well-informed, wrote back:

Off the top of my head - I agree that the Israeli military response has been excessive and insufficiently protective of civilians.  I agree that this Israeli government needs to find ways to reach a two-state solution, rather than taking steps to make it impossible.  I agree that Israel should be far more willing to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.  I agree that the West Bank settlements are by and large unlawful and in any event are a significant impediment to peace.  And I personally believe that history is going to conclude that Netanyahu significantly harmed the State of Israel - hopefully not irreparably.  

None of that is inconsistent with my belief that Hamas is a despicable organization that committed atrocities, and that it unlawfully uses civilian populations as a shield.  Or that the Palestinian Authority as currently constituted is a corrupt and feeble organization that needs to be replaced.

I find this a baffling response. Nothing in this list has anything to do with the what demonstrators believe and militate for. On the contrary, I would have thought every point raised would inspire someone to distance themselves from the protestors who scorn a Two-State Solution, who consider Tel Aviv (and Otef Gaza) a settlement as much as anything on the WB and any Israeli living there a legitimate target for ferocious violence, who consider any Israeli leader unacceptable, and who wish irreparable damage on Israel. Why would someone list these (nice, liberal) sentiments as an explanation of sympathy for their cause?

And it gets worse. Even these good liberal reasons, all by themselves on their own, have significant flaws:

Excessive Force

Whence comes this conviction (it leads the list), that the Israeli response has been “excessive and insufficiently protective of civilians.” From serious research and knowledge of urban warfare battle-field conditions? Or from reading the NYT, the Wapo, NPR, and CNN - all of whom cite Hamas figures and, even when they admit openly where those figures come from, they still believe them? Is it informed by reading people who analyze the data, note the massive lack of documentation, and do real comparisons with other urban warfare? Since I wrote this, the UN has revised its figures of both deaths and civilian deaths by as much as 50%. The explanation for this late and rather dramatic revision was “the fog of war,” for which read: we were taking the figures hamas and its media arm gave us as reliable.

This graph is a representation of media compliance: for Hamas the “vast majority” of dead must be civilians, women and children. The (Arab) media upon which the columns in yellow are based, are compliant with these demands, and a DEI-driven (Western) media eager to showcase their Arab contributers, regurgitate it, so Western consumers of the news, can swallow it whole. The poison, sweetened with the indignation of Israel it solicits, goes down effortlessly.

Just how excessive? Just how insufficient? Do good Western liberals really feel so confident in their information that they can so deplore what (they think) Israel has done to the Gazans, that they can express sympathy with demonstrators who consider what Israel is doing is genocide, even as they side with openly genocidal jihadis? 1000 7/10s!

Two-State Solution and Israeli obstacles

Despite the fond hopes of positive-sum liberals in the West, there has never been (yet) a possibility of a Two-State Solution (much less one that Israel is making impossible). Recently the foreign ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, called for an immediate cease fire (one feeble mention of hostages) and insisted:

We are committed to working towards an irreversible path to achieving a two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians can live securely within internationally recognised borders. This is the only realistic option to achieve a just and enduring peace

It’s harder to imagine greater folly articulated by the alleged adults in the room. “The whole world” knows, everybody agrees, this is the only realistic option, even when it’s a) not realistic, and b) it will lead to war not peace.

Instead of “land for peace” it has always been for the Palestinian leadership, “secular" and religious, land for war: the more the concessions the more likely the war. We in Israel unfortunately have come to understand this (kicking and screaming denial all the way). Thinkers in the West, living in increasingly vulnerable liberal bubbles, (apparently think they) can still afford to ignore this and indulge this luxury belief: after all, it keeps Israel on the hook, and avoids asking Palestinians and their supporters difficult questions.

So while it might have made sense (not really, but still) to invoke the path to  peace from the 1990s, it became astonishingly foolish after the Oslo Jihad of 2000. But instead of acknowledging they had badly misread the evidence, that for Palestinians secular and religious, land for war meant any Israeli concession strengthened their war party, “peace advocates" doubled down on their insistence that the Palestinians were ready for peace [sic], and that Israel should make greater concessions. After 2000 – that is after Jihadis had declared open warfare on infidel democracies (9/11 less than a year later), continued to militate for peace by pressuring Israel to give more.

At that point, and certainly after 7/10, anyone who can say either – we need a Two-State Solution – or – Israel is holding it up - is either dissembling or just not paying attention to where the categorical opposition the Two-State Solution comes from.

Israeli Culpability in Restricting “Humanitarian Aid”

The French have a saying: enfoncer les portes ouverts (break down open doors). The comment that Israel should be “far more willing” to allow in humantarian aid, operates in an imagined environment in which Hamas plays no role, and anything suffering Palestinians endure is Israel’s fault. Israel, despite how militarily counter-indicated it is, has made ample amounts of aid available, more than enough to feed the population.

Understandably, what liberal wants to contemplate a religious movement so fanatic and power-hungry that it will victimize its own people, either by making deliveries impossible or by stealing them and using them for their own purposes – including controling the population. The liberal cognitive egocentrist thinks of humanitarian aid as something everyone wants to get to innocent civilians (except mean Israelis), not something that merciless jihadis actually want to sabotage, steal, and control. As Stalin’s explanation of black humor goes: “It’s like food. Not everybody gets it."

West Bank Settlements

This has been a staple of “peace-camp” criticism of Israel: the settlements stand in the way of peace. For some reason, this ranks much higher in their estimation than what some of us think is the key problem, namely the continuous genocidal preaching from the pulpits, some of which is going on in the West? Looked at dispassionately, as historians are supposed to, it’s a remarkable to ascertain that 80 years after the Holocaust, “world opinion" is insisting that the only Jewish state empower with a state, a movement who (for the last 80 years) openly admire and want to finish Hitler’s work… and many progressives make this demand in the name of the great positive-sum solution, “land for peace.” 

Nor, alas, has 7/10 budged their needles. Indeed, the whole “the only solution is the Two-State Solution” that dominates western liberal thinking and the Biden administration operates as the driving edge of the arab land-for-war demand. Israel took risks for peace in the 90s, and that blew up in our faces when the Palestinians made clear it was only their One State Solution (“From the River to the Sea…”) that was acceptable. The "peace camp" responded to this launching of global jihad against the West (9-11 came less than a year later), by insisting that it was Israel’s fault that Oslo failed, and that they need to take more risks with their neighbors of proven bad (nazi-bad) faith.

7/10 Inexcusable… but!

Having listed his unrelated and misconcieved reasons to sympathize with the protesters (i.e., his compassion for Palestinian suffering which he blames on Israel), the writer insists:

None of that is inconsistent with my belief that Hamas is a despicable organization that committed atrocities, and that it unlawfully uses civilian populations as a shield.  Or that the Palestinian Authority as currently constituted is a corrupt and feeble organization that needs to be replaced.

On the contrary, all of this is inconsistent with previous statements and sentiments. As another commenter put it: “7/10 was atrocious… but…”

How can one acknowledge the problem and then speak of a Two-State Solution. Whom would one running this Palestinian state whose creation is offered as the solution to the problem to which israel is the impediment? And if it’s the “secular” PA, whose corruption and weakness one may deplore (even as I suspect people consider  them “moderate”), how long does one think before a) Hamas overruns them just like they did in Gaza in 2006/7, and b) that “liberated” territory becomes a magnet for global jihadis.

Repeating the formulaic denunciation that Hamas “unlawfully uses civilian populations as a shield,” doesn’t mean one really takes in what it means, what the implications it has for grievances against Israel mistreating the poor Gazans. It doesn’t begin to question the orgy of Palestinian suffering Western news media are flooding their own viewers with, nor how indispensable to Hamas' war strategy Western addiction to these icons of hatred is. And yet this, I think, lies at connection liberals feel to the demonstrators: this compassion for Gazans, engineered by Hamas who literallly create the suffering in order to abuse your compassion. 

As for what the connection between those who feel for the poor Gazans (as do we Israelis as well – you make us cartoon characters if you think we don’t), and these pro-Hamas demonstrators who celebrate hatred and sadism and engage in "mostly peaceful” demonstrations that target anything Jewish that isn’t thoroughly dhimmified... I would have thought that people who deplore the victimization of the Gazans would focus not on Israel but Hamas, and want their cannibal strategy, perhaps unique in history for its depravity, to fail, rather than participate in it. 

You apparently (think you) can (afford to) indulge your simple (Israel-blaming) compassion for Gazans, one of the more extravagant luxury beliefs. For some of you out there, that compassion is further sweetened by the indignation it permits you to feel about the bad Jewish state). But we in Israel cannot.

We understand that until there’s no Hamas (like in Germany after WWII there was no Nazi party), not only will the Gazans continue to suffer their cruel fate at the hands of their abusive “leaders” who sacrifice them in order to manipulate you, but we know that every time we let our guard down, we will suffer, and every time we defend ourselves, the global public sphere will fill with Palestinian iconography of suffering, icons of hatred against us, inflaming the Muslim world and driving your own youth morally insane. 

You can accept and repeat that you can’t kill an ideology and Israel should just face the fact that they will have to live with Hamas, because you don’t yet realize that their ideology has far less to do with “Palestine” than with the Muslim imperial dream to reestablish dar al Islam (the first Nakba in 1924, the dissolution of the Caliphate), and that that ideology targets you as well. You either confront it – as we Israelis must – or you will succumb. They will not go away; they have millennial dreams that you unwittingly help them put in action. Either liberal and humane societies defend themselves, or they surrender to forces far more ruthless, showing up like moral zombies at once to protest the victimization of Gazans and to celebrate the authors of that victimization who dream of genocide as the path to world conquest.

Why has no one concerned for Gazans militated for getting them out? Everybody assumed that getting civilians out of harm’s way was the obvious thing to do when Russia invaded Ukraine or when Jihadi wars broke out in the Arab world after the “Arab Spring,” flooding countries like Jordan and Turkey and Europe (!) with refugees. Every surrounding country offered to take them in, but somehow, with the Gazans, everyone falls in with Hamas’ demand that they must stay and get victimized. 

Right now, it’s only Gazan families that can pay tens of thousands of dollars that can get out. Why can’t ordinary Gazans who want to get out from under Hamas’ talons, vote with their feet and flee not just Israeli operations, but their own rulers who provoke those operations and thrive on their suffering? Why does everyone side with Hamas on this? Is it because, for some reason, it feels so good to condemn Israel, or, that Israel must be saddled with a vicious genocidal population on their border? Or both?

Excuse me for thinking that somehow, somewhere in the deep unconscious, it’s more important, even necessary, to at least some of the good people to have people who are victims of Jews, than it is to prevent their victimization. And, alas for the Palestinian people, they are the chosen people of these supersessionist, zero-sum, thinkers, addicted to moral Schadenfreude.

How else can one explain how good, two-state-solution, peace-loving, humanitarian, liberals can feel sympathy for demonstrators who are doing the bidding of, in some cases directly taking directions from, Hamas and Hamas proxies like SJP after 7/10 (which of course we all condemn… but…). How else could the “progressive left” have so badly betrayed their values in the aftermath of 7/10. 

It’s enuf to make one think gee… maybe the obsession of the left with Israel and it’s determination to invert the moral universe in order to piss down upon her from imagined moral heights, offers evidence that, for them at least, the Jews are the chosen people.