threading the needle

selective outrage, rhetorical cul-de-sacs, and [a portion of] the Left's response to Hamas' invasion of Israel

As long as I can remember, I have been the guy who tempers alarmism among my fellow Jews by offering the refrain, “not everything is antisemitism.” I’ve been severely critical of Israel since I was in college, where I studied the history of the region, joined a peace group, and, through the latter, befriended a Palestinian pianist whose experiences would come to color my own attitudes. The habit, among Israel’s staunchest defenders, of branding as antisemitic any criticism of the state is a reflex I find intellectually lazy and often dishonest.

Israel is—and has been for more than fifty years—an occupier and an oppressor of Palestinian lands and people. Since 2007, as it has drifted increasingly toward something resembling an ethnofascist state, Israel (with the support of Egypt) has operated what is for all intents and purposes an open-air prison in Gaza, whose more than two million residents are effectively forbidden from leaving the territory. It is one of the poorest regions in the world: more than a third of the population (if not more) lives in poverty, more than half are categorized as food insecure, nearly 80 percent of piped water is non potable, and the unemployment rate hovers around 40 percent. 

The Gaza blockade is in clear violation of international law, which Israel flouts, in large part, with the support of allies like the United States, which refuse to hold the state accountable. I won’t even get into a discussion of illegal settlements or the crimes routinely committed by the IDF. Suffice it to say—and this is putting it mildly—Israel has long failed to live up to its purported democratic ideals. 

It is within this context that I wish to express profound dismay in the face of a portion of the Left’s response to Hamas’ brutal killings and kidnappings of civilians over the weekend—women, children, and the elderly among them. A good many leftists seem to have completely lost the plot, treating Hamas’ cold-blooded and unprecedented attack on Israeli citizens—a not insignificant number of them peace activists—as mere tit for tat.

Here, for example, is a statement co-signed by thirty-one student groups at Harvard University, which fails to so much as mention Hamas, let alone the hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians killed, instead claiming that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the weekend’s “actions.” Or Lake Micah, an editor for The Drift (a magazine I love, and to which I subscribe), who wrote the following:

a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. The thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum…

Aside from an almost comical misunderstanding of the politics of this moment—the fact that Hamas undertook this campaign at a time when their support among Palestinians is waning; that these attacks are a gift to the Israeli right wing, which now will retaliate with impunity, which in turn will lead to the further immiseration of the Palestinian people rather than to their liberation (as of this writing, 180,000 residents of Gaza are reported now to be homeless in the face of shelling by the IDF)—it’s astonishing to me that Micah would reduce the indiscriminate murder of civilians to “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” 

Here’s the thing: it is absolutely correct to demand that these “actions” are framed within the broader context of occupation and oppression. But to move directly to that framing without an acknowledgement of what those “actions” comprised—i.e., the targeting, murder, and kidnapping of vulnerable civilian populations, the viciousness of Hamas’ tactics, etc.—is not only heartless; it’s also, I would wager, bad politics.

Still, I don’t believe that these kinds of responses are necessarily antisemitic, as has been implied or expressed explicitly in recent days. I do think these polemics betray a militancy which mirrors the “ends-justify-the-means” slide toward violence and autocracy that we witness among adherents of the MAGA movement. At the same time, in their lack of nuance, these statements also mirror the myopia of reflexively pro-Israel rhetoric, as in this very bad New York Times editorial, which does not acknowledge the Israeli occupation. Indeed, the U.S. mainstream media’s history of double-standards when reporting on the region—e.g., the use of the word ‘terror’ to frame those actions taken by Palestinian militants, but not similar (and similarly terrifying) actions taken by the IDF—is unacceptable. Yet by not only emulating this selective outrage, but also in some instances celebrating Hamas’ attack, many on the left have ceded the moral high ground. Put simply, these statements betray a basic lack of commitment to universal human rights.

Again, is this antisemitism? Maybe. Sure. Probably. But I would argue that it’s the wrong question, one that lands us in an unproductive rhetorical cul-de-sac that ultimately mystifies what is otherwise a blindingly clear, irreducible moral failure. We can argue til we’re blue in the face about what is or isn’t antisemitism, and we’ll never be able to say for sure. And that’s because antisemitism is a squishy, moving target¹. 

On the other hand, it’s pretty simple to achieve moral clarity if we instead ask the following question: is it okay to elide the abduction of children and the slaying of attendees of a music festival with “the thrum of history”? Put another way, when our concern is with categorizing speech (is it antisemitic?), we allow the speaker to reside comfortably in a discourse of abstract semantics. Better, in my view, would be to ask the signatories of the Harvard statement to confront the ethical position they’ve staked out: that, if we take them at their word, they simply haven’t the luxury of treating murdered civilians as human, of taking a breath to mourn their loss, before pivoting to the larger context of the conflict. The dead are, in this view, little more than collateral damage, an inevitability that the regime has brought upon itself. That such a reductive, binary view of the world should emanate from one of the world’s most (allegedly) intellectually rigorous institutions is the mordant punchline to this sad state of affairs.

The good news is that there are a lot of folks threading the needle here pretty darn well: grieving for the Israeli dead, missing, and kidnapped, while continuing to shine a light on the state’s brutal oppression of Palestinians. Among them is Rabbi Sharon Brous, whose voice in times of crisis I nearly always find to be a balm. So too, Breaking the Silence, a group led by former Israeli soldiers, which released a statement that condemned the horrific attacks by Hamas while directing attention to the root causes of this cycle of violence, which, again, is an outgrowth of more than half a century of occupation and oppression. 

In sum (and with apologies for being reductive): Hamas does not monolithically represent the Palestinian people; neither does Netanyahu, backed by his thuggish government of Jewish supremacists, represent all Israelis. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and the lion’s share of the suffering will fall on the Palestinians.

That being said: of my friends, colleagues, and readers on the left, I ask that you make empathetic space for the Israeli victims of Hamas’ campaign of terror; it will not diminish your credibility as advocates for Palestinian human rights, self-determination, and statehood, nor ought it deprive you of the energy to continue to loudly criticize Israel’s human rights abuses. And to those with deep ties to Israel, please know that my heart goes out to all who’ve lost loved ones, whose loved ones are missing or in captivity or simply living in fear, even as I will continue to fight for the Palestinian cause. May we all learn to hold multiple truths at once, even—and especially—during times of crisis.

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In lighter news: the Louisville Orchestra performs Heirloom this weekend.

A week from Sunday, I’ll play in Los Angeles with Attacca Quartet.

That’s all for now…

from Walter Benjamin’s Archive

1. To be clear, the perils of abstract semantics cut both ways: accusations of antisemitism against those critical of Israel often serve as a distraction from the fact that Israel’s actions are frequently indefensible. And yet, those accusations are given the appearance of credibility by virtue of the fact that antisemitism has festered at or just beneath the surface of society at least since the Middle Ages. Parallels with this tendency to cloak oneself in the garments of prejudice abound in our era of the weaponization of identity politics.

Witness, for example, Senator Robert Menendez, who responded to his recent indictment for (highly credible and amply-documented charges of) bribery with accusations of racism: “Those behind this campaign,” offered Menendez, “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator and serve with honor and distinction.” Similarly, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, during his campaign for office, routinely leveraged accusations of racism against those who sought to highlight his ethically checkered past.