Israel/Palestine Thoughts And Reader Feedback

It has been a brutal few days for the world.

by Ben Cohen

No Banter Roundtable Podcast this week as I have been traveling. In lieu of a podcast I thought I’d post some of the comments I’ve received on my antisemitism piece. A few thoughts before though:

Like all of you, I’ve been watching the crisis in Israel/Gaza unfold in absolute horror. A land assault on Gaza appears to be imminent and it will almost certainly lead to a grave humanitarian crisis. I’ve been monitoring media/social media reactions to the conflict closely too and am still struck by the hatred on display towards Jews — particularly on the identity politics left. Andrew Sullivan has a fantastic piece describing his own shock at the almost total indifference to Jewish life:

It wasn’t the usual support of Hamas, nor the familiar condemnation of Israel’s settlements. That I anticipated. What shocked me was the vivid and genuine expressions of solidarity with the mass murderers — even as their atrocities were in front of our eyes. That requires real ideological commitment, to repress every human impulse of empathy to uphold your priors.

Yet dozens of Harvard student groups did indeed cheer Hamas. Various chapters of BLM did the same. Ditto the Democratic Socialists of America. University leaders — quick to pontificate on any current topic — went conspicuously mum. The Black Caucus of Young Democrats of America declared support for Hamas because “Black folks and Palestinians both know what it feels like to be oppressed and experience white supremacy.” BLM Grassroots said the pogrom “must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.” In Australia, demonstrators actually chanted “Gas the Jews!” In London, the Israeli Embassy was besieged. BLM Chicago, one of the biggest chapters, put out a poster showing an actual hang-glider coming to slaughter the innocent, with the slogan “I Stand With Palestine” and a brief explanation: “That is all, that is it!”

Do you see now why some of us have been calling out this “social justice” movement for years? It should not be a shock to know where BLM stands. Their founder, Patrisse Cullors, urged us “to end the imperialist project called Israel” as far back as 2015. And from the perspective of critical theory, Hamas is obviously in the right. CRT emphatically places the rights and dignity of the individual far below the right of the non-white masses to defeat “white/Jewish supremacy.” Of course they support Hamas. Palestinians are merely punching up — and that exonerates them of any moral culpability. Just as African-Americans cannot commit a hate crime, so Hamas definitionally cannot commit terror.

It is extremely important that the Left starts to grapple with this insanity. As someone of Jewish descent, all I wanted was for people to recognize and condemn the slaughter of innocent Jewish civilians. I wasn’t asking anyone to condone Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, or praise Israel’s far right government. Just an acknowledgment that Jewish lives matter, and that gang rape, decapitations, and murdering infants isn’t acceptable. Instead, all I saw was solidarity with Palestine memes and refusals to condemn Hamas’s sadistic killing spree:

Showing support for innocent Israelis does not mean you do not support innocent Palestinians. I cannot fathom what families in Gaza are going through right now, and they deserve to live peacefully and prosper like Israelis do. But when it comes to the impending invasion of Gaza, I do not see what other options the Israelis have. They have to respond, and they have to wipe Hamas out. Hamas knew what their barbaric assault would entail, so I do not see why they are not being held responsible. Israel has given residents of Gaza a window to evacuate, yet hard left commentators refuse to even acknowledge this — even as footage of Hamas blocking evacuation routes circulates social media.

Hamas deliberately embeds itself in civilian settings and uses civilians as human shields. There are no official military targets, so Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. None of this appears to matter to the militant Left. Instead they are framing this as another chapter in the “oppressors vs oppressed” narrative, where white powerful Jews are killing poor brown Palestinians.

This nonsense has to stop, and the Left has to allow more nuance back into the conversation. Because if you can explain away the murder of children, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

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Below are the unedited reader comments from my last piece. If you’d like to leave a comment below, please be respectful and refrain from attacking other readers:

Thank you for this, Ben. I’m 73 years old, I grew up in New York City. I have never, with a few trivial exceptions, encountered any real antisemitism in my personal life — until about six years ago, when TFG [Donald Trump] essentially gave white supremacists, anti-Semites, and bigots generally, permission and a voice.

By the way, I will argue that Jews are not in fact “white people”; I rely on the “argument from authority”: Who in this society cares most about who is ”white” and who isn’t? Answer: White supremacists. White supremacists do not consider Jew “white” (we’re a “mongrel race”). That’s good enough for me. I don’t wanna be associated with them, anyway…

Also, the attitude that Jews are subhuman, yet simultaneously in charge of everything, reminds me of the Republican attitude towards Joe Biden. On the one hand, he’s feeble and senile; on the other hand he’s some kind of mastermind behind an anti-woke agenda. Go figure.

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Ben, this is the best essay I have read so far over the past few days about the seemingly never ending plague of antisemitism, and how events like this show us how deeply it is embedded in societies all over the world. That image of what was taking place in Sydney, Australia, absolutely turned my stomach. How obscene to be chanting death to an entire ethnic/religious group. I’ve come to believe that climate change is not what’s going to wipe us out, but hate will do it easily.

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I agree with you completely on the barbarism of the Hamas terrorist campaign, but you perhaps unintentionally defeat your whole argument by saying "They fought a war and kicked out the losers. This is the history of empire, and more recently the nation state." By this argument, Hamas is simply fighting a war with intent on kicking out the losers.

I've always thought the "rules of war" were a major oxymoron because war itself is barbaric. This battle, and these atrocities, will continue for centuries until either one side is completely extinguished or both sides learn to cohabitate within one land or divide the land into two sovereign states. Sadly, the USA is prime example of the problems of cohabitation. Look at how oppressed most non-white/Christian/heterosexual people are here. The rise of MAGA parallels the rise of Hamas. Win election by capitalizing on outrage and fear, and then hold no further elections. What happened there is already happening here, and our "both sides" horserace media are doing nothing to stop it. Think about all the school shootings (dead children), mass shootings, rapes, and assaults we have in the USA any given year -- now imagine them all happening in a single weekend. I think we get desensitized to it because the violence and oppression here is constant, but at a lower volume than the sudden spike in violence in the Middle East.

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I’m a liberal consistent Democratic Party voter and around election time volunteer. The far Left and pro Palestinian ‘progressives’ are not allies, they’re antisemitic enemies that have done the full horseshoe to standing alongside far Right Neo Nazis. And this isn’t new - it was obvious to me since college days in the mid-late 90s, just now we all see their EXCITEMENT over dead Jews that is indistinguishable from any far Right terrorist in the US.

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What I’d like to see more of is “Yes, Israel, you were brutally attacked and those responsible must be found and punished. But, no, you don’t get to overreact and use it as an excuse to collectively punish civilians yourself.”

Israel’s moral authority to respond to this attack is lost when their response is to target *all* Palestinians.

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