On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive
New York synagogue called the New Shul. All day, he’d been on the phone with congregants deeply distraught over the massacres and mass kidnappings in Israel. Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close
Friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,” who were either justifying Hamas’ atrocities or celebrating them outright. This sense of deep betrayal is not limited to New York. Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anti-colonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of
Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own. By now, you’ve probably seen examples. There was the giddy message put out by the national committee of Students for Justice in Palestine, which proclaimed, “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air and sea.” New York’s chapter of the
Democratic Socialists of America promoted a rally where speakers applauded the attacks, and the Connecticut DSA enthused, “Yesterday, the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented anti-colonial struggle.” Black Lives Matter
Chicago posted a photo of a figure in a paraglider like those Hamas used to descend on a desert rave and turn it into a killing field. “I think what surprised me most was the indifference to human suffering,” said Joshua Leifer, a contributing editor at the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents and a member of the editorial board at the progressive publication Dissent. “I’m trying to hold on, personally, to my commitments, my values, which now feel in conflict, in a way, with the political community that I lived alongside in the
United States for basically my whole adult life,” he said. “It certainly has begun to feel like a
BREAKING point.” Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naive progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary. As I write this, Israel has imposed what the
Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called a “complete siege” of Gaza’s 2 million people, about half of whom are younger than 18. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Such collective punishment is, like the mass killing of civilians in Israel, a war crime. Hunger was already rampant in Gaza before this conflict broke out; today, the World Food Program estimates that 63% of its population, living in one of the most densely populated places in the world, is “food insecure.” “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza,” António Guterres, the secretary-general of the
United Nations, said in 2021. If Gaza was already hell, we lack the language for what it’s about to become. When the Israeli ground invasion begins, there will be little political pressure to take pains to spare civilians. The
American special envoy charged with monitoring and combating antisemitism has insisted, “No one has the right to tell Israel how to defend itself and prevent and deter future attacks.” But if humanist principles spur total revulsion toward the terrorist crimes in Israel, they also demand restraint in Gaza. Among those principles are these: Victimization and dispossession are not alibis for barbarism. The distinction between civilians and combatants must be respected. No cause, righteous or otherwise, excuses the killing of children. It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow those universal ideas about
Human Rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted. Their views are the mirror image of those who claim that, given what Israel has endured, the scale of its retaliation cannot be questioned. “At the strategic level, it would be much more helpful if there was a large group of American leftists who had the moral credibility to say, ‘We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas, and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel’” to not commit atrocities in Gaza, Leifer said. There are, of course, leaders making exactly that argument. “Right now, the international community must focus on reducing humanitarian suffering and protecting innocent people on both sides of this conflict,” read a statement by Bernie Sanders. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” That message is undermined when a loud part of the left insists that when it comes to Israelis, there is no such thing as civilians. It’s too early to know how the left’s widespread failure of solidarity will change our politics, but I suspect some sort of fracture is coming. On
Social Media, some scholars and activists are repeating the line “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” suggesting that the homicidal spree we just saw in Israel is not a departure from their ideology but the embodiment of it. I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.