The most important thing to say is that this blockade and bombing campaign are horrific and indefensible. You can sign a ceasefire petition here. And find a list of aid orgs you can donate to here. Call and email your congresspeople and urge them to support Cori Bush’s ceasefire resolution. Please tell your friends and family to do the same.
I’ve waffled about whether it’s right to say anything before a ceasefire. Maybe until then, nothing matters. Ultimately I decided to do it, because it looks like things are likely to get worse before they get better. And because I think the American Left is deeply confused. And that our current political strategy will not help end these horrors.
This essay responds to what I’m seeing on my social media feeds, which may be different from what you see on yours. I know very few Zionists, very few politically moderate people. So what I see and what I’m addressing is the far left. What I see us saying and want to respond to is the following:
Decolonization by any means necessary, therefore, don’t condemn Hamas’ attack.
Hamas is an occupation resistance group and they are liberation heroes.
It is Islamaphobic to condemn Hamas.
Israeli citizens cannot be innocent because they are settlers.
Any attempt to complicate the narrative beyond that is immoral.
Let’s start with when the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posted this image of one of the Hamas’ paragliders on its Instagram. After they faced a backlash, they released a statement saying they “weren’t proud of it,” and went on to say, “We stand with Palestine and the people who will do what they must to live free.” Here’s where I’m seeing confusion.
The “people of Palestine” did not paraglide into Israel and massacre civilians to free themselves from Israeli occupation. Hamas did that to provoke a massive counter attack by Israel in a geopolitical chess move guided by the interests of their main backer, the Iranian regime, sacrificing the Palestinian people in the process (according to, among many other experts, senior scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Hussein Ibish, who has dedicated his career to studying anti-Arab racism and the geopolitics of the Middle East).
Hamas put Palestinians in the line of fire for its own political ends. Israel fired the shots and is ultimately responsible for the deaths. But still, to defend Hamas’ actions by saying, “don’t tell the resistance how to resist” just does not make sense. It also pegs the actions of Hamas on all Palestinians who want freedom.
You don’t need to get your information about Hamas from the “mainstream media.” You can read its own original public charter in which it explicitly states its Jihadist mission of exterminating Jews and explains how Jews control the media and the whole world and how they profited off WWII. In 2017, Hamas changed its charter to say that no, it’s not antisemitic, never has been, and that anti-Semitism was only a European thing. I cannot buy that they had such a profound change of heart, but I can see obvious political benefits to the change, although the move managed to piss off just about all of their constituents for different reasons (comprehensive paper about the charter change from the Institute for Palestinian Studies). Let me not mince my words: Hamas is not an anti-colonial resistance organization. It is a fascist, fundamentalist religious organization that has branded itself as one.
Hamas and the Israeli regime need each other. Without a threat to Jewish life, Israel could not justify its existence. If there were less violence from Hamas or from Palestinians in general, the far-right Israelis would lose political support. That’s why Israel’s far right propped up the creation of Hamas (this Intercept documentary has conspiracy aesthetics but the evidence presented seems irrefutable to me. There’s also this NYT piece, “Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas”) Hamas, likewise, needs Israeli oppression to maintain power. Israeli oppression is responsible for much of the radicalization of the people who support Hamas.
The American left, in its imposition of the American anti-racist framework on Palestinian liberation, has flattened Palestinians and their governments into a monolithic, noble victim. We have conflated Hamas with the people of Palestine completely. We have failed to see Palestinians as a people with an entire spectrum of political beliefs, failed to see how their layers of government are corrupt and problematic in layered ways that also victimize them.
Is Palestine the oppressed side? Yes. Does the Israeli regime lie and pump out propaganda? Yes. Does that mean we should believe everything Palestinian political leaders say? Definitely not. Does it mean we should unquestionably accept everything in every post on social media by a Palestinian person or group? No. It would not be a service to Palestinians to do that.1
People underestimate how much their social media algorithm bubble dictates which Palestinian perspectives they see. The algorithm shows you the most extreme perspectives in line with your own views and things that will maximally enrage you. This is how social media radicalizes. I think people who are immersed in decolonization and antiracism discourse on a regular basis are being fed Palestinian perspectives that many Palestinians would find very extreme. And then they think the best thing to do in solidarity is to adopt those views unquestioningly.
But to insist that you can’t condemn the violence, that it’s racist to condemn Hamas, is to speak confidently on behalf of an entire people, many of whom do, in fact, hate Hamas. Hamas hasn’t been elected since 2006, and even then it wasn’t elected by a majority. To hold onto power, it simply never held another election.
I saw one post criticizing leftist, humanist “both sides rhetoric” as (“unbelievably arrogant, privileged, and ironically devoid of empathy,” and) “not centering the voices of the oppressed.” Which voices, though? The oppressed have many voices.
Do Palestinians support Hamas as liberators? Do they actually hate Hamas for governing horribly and imposing Islamism and rerouting aid money toward the purchase of weapons? Do they support Hamas’ Islamist politics? Do they support the idea of exterminating Jews? Do they decidedly not hate Jews? Did they watch the videos of the massacres and celebrate? Did they watch them in horror? Do they maybe not support Hamas’ Islamist, genocidal politics but did they still feel hopeful about finally having a win? Did they condemn the attack entirely? Are they furious with Hamas for bringing on the bombings? Again, they are a whole nation of people with a whole spectrum of political beliefs! Probably all of the above and more! You can find Palestinians expressing all of those opinions on social media. No one person or post speaks for a nation.
It goes without saying that all Palestinians, regardless of their political beliefs, deserve safety and autonomy. All people do, including Israelis. Whether or not you believe Israel should exist, it simply does. It is a country of 9 million people, 7 million of whom are Jews. Most of them are a few generations deep already, and a huge contingent of them oppose the occupation and this bombing campaign. Relocating 7 million people is not a feasible plan and advocating for it only emboldens and fuels rightwing nationalism. A poll from July showed that 50% of Gazans agreed with the statement that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction,” and agree with a 2-state solution.
Anti-zionism may not be antisemitism, but the anti-zionist movement has become openly antisemitic in its cheering on of the slaughtering of Israeli citizens. Would we have cheered on the slaughter of teenagers at a music festival, kidnapping of children, gunning down of entire families in their homes here in the US by a radical group from any of the peoples our government has reigned terror on? I … really doubt it.
I think part of what makes the American Left so willing to cast aside the humanity of Israelis (e.g. “settlers are not civilians”) is the antisemitic caricature in their minds of Israelis as rich, white Europeans walking around armed to the teeth. One article that was shared a lot described the murdered civilians as “this population of heavily militarized settlers.” That’s just not a realistic image of most Israelis who are mostly just regular ass people living pretty regular ass lives. And it’s worth noting that some of the people killed and kidnapped were pro-Palestine activists, like Hayim Katsman (killed), an activist against the expulsion of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta and 74-year old Vivian Silver (hostage), who spent decades crusading for Palestinian equality and facilitated transfers for Gazans into Israeli hospitals.
Most Israelis aren’t even white. About two thirds of Israelis are brown descendants of Mizrahi/Sephardi/SWANA people, a huge contingent of whom came to Israel as refugees when every Arab country kicked out all of their Jews. I’m fairly certain lefty progressive Americans would have reacted very differently to the attacks if they understood that what happened was poor brown people killing mostly other (less, but still pretty) poor brown people.
I understand that peaceful Palestinian resistance has been met with violence in the past and that decolonization may indeed require violence. And there was also a lot of misinformation following the Hamas attack, unverified allegations that exaggerated the violence. But what has been verified, what was captured on video and published by Hamas itself, is extraordinarily cruel and horrifying. If Israeli propaganda exaggerated the violence, what followed was an overcompensation in the other direction––denial and minimization of horrific acts (this widely shared article, under the first set of asterisks, is a good example of what that looked like.) I’m no war strategist, but I can’t see the advantage to having carried out the attack that way. And I think it’s OK to condemn that brutality. Doing so does not ignore, condone, or excuse any of Israel’s continued violence. Nor does mourning the innocent, tortured dead.
I understand if the scope of Israel’s offenses and the resulting traumas have left Palestinians unable to feel anything for dead Israelis. But I can’t wrap my mind around all the language I saw from American people sharply criticizing any condemnation or mourning at all.
Should we as Americans harden our hearts to what is cruel and horrific even if we think it’s justified? Isn’t that exactly what the Zionists are doing in defending this disproportionate retaliation? The stance “the actions of a government justifies violence against its people and to condemn that violence is to support the actions of that government,” is the exact same stance taken by the Israeli regime. We are dooming ourselves to pooping back and forth forever ))<>((. (Jews make jokes to get through tragedy, it’s how we survive, OK?)
I get why it’s fucked up to ask the victim to be the bigger person and stop the cycle. But I’m not asking Palestinians. I’m asking Americans.
As Arielle Angel wrote in Jewish Currents, “I have many friends…who are asking themselves how they can be part of a left that seems to treat Israeli deaths as a necessary, if not desirable, part of Palestinian liberation. But…the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn. For people who feel like their pain is being devalued, it’s because it is; and that devaluation is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life. As the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, ‘Where life is precious, life is precious.’”
Does mourning Israeli deaths matter in the face of the exponentially bigger massacre unfolding right now? Kind of, yeah. Because the way the discourse I’m describing shapes our political strategy is utterly derailing us as a movement. Call me “unbelievably arrogant,” but I think a more nuanced, humanistic approach would be far more effective in achieving our objectives.
The White House currently refuses to acknowledge let alone condemn the atrocity unfolding in front of the world. To force their hand, we desperately need political support beyond our own movement. We need to form political coalitions. The lenses we’re seeing through and the language we’re speaking in are preventing that from happening. We are making ourselves politically radioactive. I am not a white Jew telling Palestinians how to resist. I am a white Jew telling other Americans that I don’t think we’re being good allies.
The occupation must end. The pounding of Gaza with bombs, the blockade of food, water, and fuel, the disproportionate violence on a regular basis, the annexation of land must stop immediately. The right of return must be granted. The Nakba must be recognized. Reparations must be made. And also, the reality is that if all of this happened tomorrow, if Israel put down its weapons and surveillance, Jews in Israel would get slaughtered by Islamist extremists immediately.
We must fight, not glorify, extremism and deradicalize in all directions if there’s any hope for peace. When I spent a month in Israel and Palestine in 2016 interviewing people all over the political spectrum, the refrain I heard most often was, “we don’t hate each other, it’s the extremists on both sides ruining it for everybody.” Nobody ever said “it’s not complicated.” This is definitely a very, very complicated situation.
Holding complexity is not apologizing for violence or colonialism or refusing to take a stand. It’s being realistic about what a peacebuilding process that values human life is going to require.
Again, you can sign a ceasefire petition here. And find a list of aid orgs you can donate to here. Call and email your elected officials and tell them this has to stop. Call and email your congresspeople and urge them to support Cori Bush’s ceasefire resolution. Please tell your friends and family to do the same. Here is a toolkit.
Recommended reading:
I saw one smart lefty I know post an interview from CNN with a former member of the Palestinian Authority completely denying that any civilians had been killed in the Hamas attack with the caption “MUST WATCH. Can’t believe they actually aired this.” He meant that as in, “oh my god, the mainstream media, which is so anti-Palestine and complicit in the spreading of Israeli propaganda actually aired some truth for once.” Firstly, the thing about the “mainstream media" is that The Zionists complain just as bitterly that it is utterly biased against Israel. Secondly, when I was in Palestine, the consensus about the Palestinian Authority among the Palestinians I met was basically that they are corrupt, lying dirtbags. Palestine is the oppressed side. Its leaders are also capable of propaganda.