Liberals, Distortions, and Hamas
In my last post on Instagram, I wrote about a potential sea-change in Israeli and Jewish politics, and discussed two ideas that I consider dangerous enough that they warrant careful dissection. In this post, I will dissect one more, even more pernicious: propaganda.
My first post following Hamas’s October 7th attack recounted feelings of powerlessness. Powerless to help Israel. Powerless to help those Hamas kidnapped. Powerless at the sight of babies decapitated and burned. There is something singular about these. images and their effect on Jews’ and I presume, the human psyche. It is the same, peculiar effect of walking through a concentration camp; knowing the immeasurable torment that happened there, and knowing too, that if a century ago, a butterfly had flapped its wings ever so slightly another way, I would have arrived there in a cattle-car rather than a tour bus, and I would have walked into the camp and never left.
Powerlessness is the point. Hamas and every other antisemite want Jews to feel without power and without connection. I believe Hamas’s intent was to break the process of normalization of relations among Israel and its historical adversaries, and that its sponsor Iran’s intent was to prod Hamas to break the process of normalization among Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia. It is, of course, also each of Iran’s and Hamas’s intent to exterminate Jews. Hence, the October 7th attack. The “peace” process began to move on without Hamas and Iran, and so Hamas perpetrated the atrocity the world witnessed to hijack that process, to bait Israel into an offensive posture, and to create the monster out of Israel that Hamas has taught their citizens to hate, to fear, to blame for their governance failures and to legitimize their otherwise extractive and undemocratic rule.
Aside from powerlessness, I believe it is the condition of world Jewry, of diaspora Jewry, to feel some guilt — a descendant of the profound guilt that afflicted survivors of the Holocaust. The two, powerlessness and guilt, are not unrelated; the former suggests the latter’s cure. Everything counts. Be it money, material, blood, time, attention, unity, it all counts. Beyond all of that, there is information and education. Solidarity within our spheres is necessary but not sufficient. Jews have a moral obligation, and as we are reminded every so often, an existential one, to educates ourselves, one another, and the outside world about the truth; to disabuse ourselves, one another, and the world of the distortions. On this front, we Jews can never stop fighting.
After the October 7th attack, and through today, it was heartening to see institutions and individuals in seats of powers and positions of influence — Joe Biden, Eric Adams, news anchors and media figures — call spades spades. It was as. frightening to watch other American institutions, of higher education, especially, issue statements utterly lacking in moral clarity, equivocating around around condemning terrorism. There are many sides in every issue; but October 7th had only two: terror and sanity.
Particularly troubling are liberals’ “failing the Hamas test” as one Atlantic writer put it. In theory, liberals, with their emphasis of enlightened politics, human dignity as a value of governance, and the rules-based international order, should have condemned October 7th. Instead, liberals were bogged down in moral morass. It’s the history of apartheid that did it; it’s the poverty and life expectancy that did it; it’s anything but the individuals who actually took the knife to a baby’s throat, anything but the individuals who actually tied the knot that bound Israelis’ hands and feet and set their bodies ablaze, anything but the individuals throwing grenades into a packed shelters and shooting whoever miraculously survived at close range.
Context, rather than individual, moral responsibility. Context cannot excuse moral failure. This is the idea I will dissect, here.
Cognitive psychology might respond that these liberals’ informational diet has biased them toward Hamas. And heuristics — the availability of that biased information, for example — locks these liberals’ into a doom loop of seeing reality only insofar as it confirms these biases, rather than seeing reality for what it is. This might be true, but it commits the same error as the liberals’ reasoning: it relies on context to excuse moral failure.
Or, it could be that all humans have sadistic inclinations and vindicate those normally hidden inclinations through revolutionary politics. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, pointed out, some people are attracted to the farthest left liberalism because its high-flying principles give license to violence. (Particularly when it compensates for ineffectuality.) This might be true, but it again commits the same error: it relies on interior personality organization to excuse very real moral failure.
At first glance, this reasoning’s pervasiveness among liberals is befuddling. Like the advocate for victims of domestic abuse who himself abuses his partner, human nature is more accommodating of contradiction than we might expect. At second glance, this reason is characteristic of left-leaning ideas. Think: Karl Marx and historical materialism — economic forces determine the path of history. The left’s intellectual history provides examples not only of context-driven theories of history, but also instances of those theories’ use in service of radical politics. Think: Lenin and the October Revolution of 1917 (violent overthrow of Romanov Tsar). Not so befuddling, after all.
A moral failure of such a magnitude that it interprets wanton savagery as fighting for freedom, and a resolute pursuit of the perpetrators as genocide cannot be excused. A moral failure so severe that it interprets Israel’s warning of Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza ahead of ground operations out from harms way, and Hamas’s warning to Palestinians to remain so as to make martyrs out of innocent civilians as ethnic cleansing cannot be excused. Much less explained.
The truth is I cannot fathom the cause. It is, as Secretary Blinken said, “beyond me.” Our own experience in the run-ups to recent presidential elections taught us that, too often, facts don’t matter. People find their own, alternative facts. How to penetrate the individual so thoroughly enmeshed in hate?
In the flurry of social media content, one post on Instagram stood out. The post was written by an attorney my age. It went something like this: If you have posted only about dead babies and raped women, then you have fallen victim to a wartime propaganda machine.
One way to dissect and refute this argument is by reducing it to its absurd conclusion. “Reducing the argument” means establishing a contention by deriving an absurdity that follows denying that contention. Simply put, thesis X must be true because, were it false, such a world would be untenable.
Applied here: the liberals’ distortion of reality that I described above amounts to moral failure because, were it false — if we could accept that decapitating babies and raping children are part and parcel with pursuing national self-determination — such a world would be untenable, indeed abhorrent.
Things should end there. And yet, the liberal argument persists in two predictably absurd ways.
The first way: the “a” in “rape” was actually “*.” In other words, the word “rape” was triggering and this person refused to type it out. Meanwhile decapitated babies was spelled: “decapitated babies.” (Decapitated Jewish babies are, evidently, not triggering. I remain unsure whether it is their lack of heads, their inherited religious affiliation, or their age.)
This second way requires that we take the argument at its face. Palestinians are oppressed by Israelis and it is that condition of oppression that warrants action. Not any action. The specific actions Hamas took on October 7, 2023. These actions were justified to de-colonize Palestine. For too long, the Zionists have imposed their will, substituting theirs for the Palestinians, robbing the Palestinian nation and people of self-determination and autonomy. Call it the liberal, post-colonial argument.
As evidence for the truth of their reasoning, I have seen liberals cite to the very fringes of organized Judaism, the Satmar and Neturei Karta, as proof that there are reasonable Jews. I have seen citations to IfNotNow calling Israel’s pursuit of Hamas genocide. The mere fact that I find a self-loathing or fanatical Jew who speaks out against Zionism does not make Zionism racism. It evokes a sense of an all-encompassing, Orwellian conspiracy among Jews to hide the truth. It is classic antisemitism.
The logic fares no better than the evidence. Sketching the argument out, the absurdity becomes plain.
The liberal, post-colonial argument commits the same error that that the liberal, post-colonial argument purports to solve. Namely, that it robs the Palestinian nation and people of self-determination and autonomy. Context is responsible for the Palestinians’ actions, and for the Palestinians’ fate. It reduces individual Palestinians to moral automatons, incapable of deciphering for themselves right or wrong, incapable of morality itself, inhuman.
The result is a distorted interpretation of events present and past; it confuses Israel’s warning Palestinians of the locations they will strike so as to avoid collateral damage for systematized mass extermination à la Auschwitz. It denies Palestinians’ moral agency.
