By Jonathan Michael Feldman, November 19, 2023; Revised version April 3, 2024
It is often assumed that post-colonial theory cannot, by definition, replicate the oppressive discourses which are, in part, the object of its study. None is more aware than Edward Said of the hazards of reproducing what he calls, in Culture and Imperialism, a historical analysis based upon ‘essentialism and exclusiveness’ or the ‘politics of separate identity’. In…Representations of the Intellectual, Said has argued that this ‘new tribalism’ or ‘absence of universals’ now threatens to deform secular critical thinking in general. As a means of contesting a new doctrinal tribalism, [one can] examine the ways in which the history of antisemitism has either been marginalized or excluded within post-colonial theory. My contention is that the immense (but slowly shrinking) gap between post-colonial and post Holocaust studies—or the gap between theories of anti-Black racism, orientalism and antisemitism—at worst adds to this divisive new tribalism and, at best, does not sufficiently generalize from or intertwine particular histories of victimization.
Bryan Cheyette, “Jews and Jewishness in the writings of George Eliot and Frantz Fanon,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1995: 3-17.
[The] skeptical [post-colonial] attitude…allowed a generation of scholars to rethink the accepted “truths” (or biases) of past generations. But the problem with this skepticism is that when mixed with self-righteousness, it becomes an intellectual wall. Furthermore, this way of thinking started specifically targeting specific groups, seen as the canonic “bad guys”: colonizers, chauvinists, supporters of patriarchy, capitalists and others. It was not permissible to apply the same critical lens when dealing with so-called victims of these “bad guys.”
Aviad Kleinberg, “Are All Israelis ‘Colonialists’ Who Deserve to Die?,” Haaretz, November 13, 2023.
We verified chilling videos which show armed men shooting at civilians and dragging people away as hostages. One disturbing video shows armed men parading a woman through central Gaza, like a scene from a nightmare. All civilians who were abducted, including children, must be released immediately.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, “Israel: Palestinian armed groups must be held accountable for deliberate civilian killings, abductions and indiscriminate attacks,” Amnesty International, October 12, 2023.
This is an announcement by the Palestinian ‘We Want to Live’ popular protest movement. Like all Palestinian citizens in Gaza, we have been following the anguished cries of our oppressed young people, who found themselves helpless at sea without a compass, clinging to a faint spark of hope that they could not find in their homeland… Only a stony-hearted person, whose flame of humanity has been extinguished… can ignore these cries. Who will condemn the heroic Gazan leaders… who [drive] SUVs, whose residences have become like palaces, and who, [like Ghazi Hamad’s son,] give wedding presents such as airline tickets and invitations [to stay] at hotels in the most luxurious tourism resorts.
Message addressed to the Hamas leaders in Gaza by Gazans in “We Want to Live Campaign,” November 6, 2021, as published by S. Schneidmann, “Economic, Social Protests Against Hamas Flare Up Again In Gaza: ‘We Want To Live’; The Economic Hardship Has Become Intolerable; Hamas Officials Are Out Of Touch With The People,” MEMRI, November 15, 2021.
In any case, in order to be a Zionist, it is not necessary to love the Jews. I know some Zionists who are definitely anti-Semitic. And to be a Jew is not necessarily to be a Zionist. I’m putting it to you this way in the attempt to clarify something which is happening all around us…Can I explain how does it happen that when someone is called anti-Semitic he is only considered to be anti-Jewish, because Arabs are also Semites, and what you are saying is that you can not call a pro-Arab an anti-Semite? Well, I cannot answer your question really, because your logic, you know, is true. For example, obviously I am not an anti-Semite, not only because I am pro-Arab but because I am not anti-Jewish either.
James Baldwin, “Blacks and Jews,” The Black Scholar, November/December, Vol. 19, No. 6, 1988: 3-15.
Departure Points I: Israel, Jews and Anti-Semitism
Let’s assume that fake charges of anti-Semitism leveled at Israel critics are a far more serious problem than anti-Semitism on the left. Can’t the very same promoters of these fake charges gain legitimacy from actual anti-Semites who also oppose Israel? I say yes. I believe that Hamas is anti-Semitic because if a group that kills the greatest number of Jews after the Holocaust is not engaged in Jew hate, then who or what then is? Post-colonial ideologues who reframe Hamas’s murders as strategic do so from a position of “privilege,” i.e. from the standpoint of someone who has not been murdered or held hostage and may instead be sitting in an Ivy League university or the more comfortable confines of Western cosmopolitan society. Do we have the “fog of protest” or tribalistic paradigmatic loyalties? Not all Israeli Jews are Zionists, but all Israeli Jews are Jews. Hamas has shown how it is hard it is for them to attack Zionism without also attacking Jews. Hamas’s own actions have created problems for the left which insists that attacks on Zionism are not necessarily attacks on Jews. You can attack Israel’s policies without attacking Jews and engaging in Jew hate. Some argue that attacks on Zionism are anti-Semitic. Even if those so arguing were wrong, we still have the problems created first by Hamas and then by supporters of Hamas.
We have the anti-militarism of fools (Hamas support) which can easily morph into anti-Semitism. Parts of the right and left are confused. Objectively, Hamas’s attack was like a huge advertisement for beefing up the Israeli military even if Hamas, their supporters, and some on the left want to interpret things differently. And Israeli attacks on Palestinians have operated in analogous ways by lending legitimacy (among some groups) to terrorists or creating recruitment incentives (among some) for terrorists. And there are even Hamas attacks on Gazans, Palestinian marginalization of Palestinians or Israeli attacks on Israelis that one can consider. The U.S. attacks on Serbia helped fragment the Serbian opposition to Slobodan Milošević, just as Hamas attacks on Israel (temporarily) unified the country under Netanyahu.
The Israeli government has contributed to the cycle of violence, even if Hamas is guilty of war crimes and is responsible for its own actions. The Israeli government has tolerated if not abetted violence by settlers against Palestinians on the West Bank. Citing UN statistics, Amnesty International stated that in 2022, “Israeli forces killed 151 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and injured 9,875…amid a surge of military incursions that involved excessive use of force, including unlawful killings and apparent extrajudicial executions.” Observers like Nicolas de Rivière, the French UN representative, condemned the increase in Israeli settlement construction thirty years after the Oslo Accord. He noted that doing so ran counter to Geneva Convention (IV) and Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016).
There are other problems of Israeli expansion and attacks on civilians prior to October 7th, which have been well documented. In 2021, the U.S. State Department identified the following problems: “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; arbitrary detention, often extraterritorial detention of Palestinians from the occupied territories in Israel; restrictions on Palestinians residing in Jerusalem including arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, family, and home; substantial interference with the freedom of association; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; harassment of nongovernmental organizations; significant restrictions on freedom of movement within the country; violence against asylum seekers and irregular migrants; violence or threats of violence against national, racial, or ethnic minority groups; and labor rights abuses against foreign workers and Palestinians from the West Bank.”
Departure Points II: Sartre, Gellhorn, Pilger and the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Collectively such problems raise the question of Palestinian rights and self-defense. Yet, Hamas cannot possibly be the agency for “self-defense” when it engages in atrocities against Israeli civilians and non-Israeli citizens residing in Israel and helps trigger massive retaliation efforts by Israel. Nevertheless, various actors have passively or actively supported Hamas. This essay examines how these actors, who include certain academics, think tanks, journalists and social movement formations have supported a political tendency that tolerates this cycle of violence and represents what I view as a pseudo-critical discourse. This tendency involves allegiances to wealthy philanthropists and tribalistic allegiances where sometimes Israelis and Uyghurs are out of favor but Hamas and Iran are apologized for.
I am not writing a left guy turns rightwing apologist essay. Rather, I am exposing a left discourse that is basically reactionary and is self-consciously aligned with reactionary forces. This discourse uses post-colonial language to whitewash the dangers of the cycle of violence. The cycle is perpetuated because a key premise of pseudo-critical discourse is that one set of victims has “privilege” over another. Sometimes the attempt at balancing victims, leads to a potential emphasis on one group over another. Thus, even a revolutionary like Jean-Paul Sartre, shaped by the holocaust and other factors, remained committed to various aspects of the Israeli project while trying to balance Palestinian concerns, a commitment which some observers regarded as a betrayal of Palestinians. In contrast, despite whatever limits may have existed to Sartre’s position, it now turns out that an under-appreciation of Israeli victims by some reveals that part of Sartre’s commitments were not mistaken. For while the critics of Sartre like Edward Said argued that he undervalued the Palestinian other, we see that now how some intellectuals undervalue the Jewish or Israeli other. A durable ceasefire, end to occupation and bombing of civilians is urgently needed, but these goals don’t supersede other considerations, i.e. how the dirty laundry of Israel opponents facilitates a right-wing narrative which propels the cycle of violence that links terrorism and militarism.
Ruqaiyah Zarook is one critic of Sartre and what he terms the PEP position, i.e. “progressive except for Palestine.” In Current Affairs, he writes: “The PEP position has rightfully been critiqued (or demolished) by Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger. His work protests the decontextualized Western media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which largely presents the illusion of equality between both sides rather than the reality of an asymmetrical conflict between oppressed and oppressor.” If only it were that easy.
There is in fact an “asymmetrical conflict,” but Sartre’s position was not simply PEP but represented a struggle to find balance. The counterargument is that Sartre’s “neutrality” was a failure of commitment on his part. The counter-counter-argument is that Sartre also failed to make certain mistakes that are made when one avoids nuance and forgoes the necessary attempt at balance. What does that mean? The answer can be seen in one of Pilger’s associates, the journalist Jonathan Cook who has eschewed balance by repressively tolerating Hamas. Cook was a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2011 for his Middle East reporting. Pilger himself has sat on the committee for the prize. The irony here is that Gellhorn not only had Jewish roots through her father, but was a champion of Israel. But more importantly, the counterpoint to Gellhorn’s pro-Israel bias (which some may fault), is Cook’s anti-Israel bias in which he privileges one set of victims over another. The “choosing the weaker party” cannot mean choosing the rapist, torturer, serial murderer, and thug.
Cook’s privileging is not an accident, but one of intentional intellectual design. The actions of Hamas are consistent with revolutionary theories that date back to 1969. These theories utilized an idealistic duality between the oppressed and the oppressor. On May 16, 1969, Bill Hillier of Peace News interviewed “a top-ranking member” of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP) in London. In a question to this unnamed member, Hillier said “the Zionist state thrives on the existence of war.” He then asked, “can it not be said that the carrying out of military operations against purely civilian targets as opposed to military or economic targets” would complicate “the task of the revolutionary Left inside Israel” and “tend to solidify the Israelis more and more behind Zionism?” In response, the leader said “military operations against civilians form part and parcel of any struggle for national liberation.” In addition, “the military operations carried [out] by the armed struggle of the Palestinian people is designed to create as much disturbance and as much dislocation in the Zionist state occupying Palestine, to prove by deeds that the Zionist design is no longer comfortable, no longer profitable for anybody, and no longer viable even for the one people who initially believed in it.” Finally, “those same military operations are designed to warn the Jewish community in occupied Palestine of the crimes committed in its name by Zionism against the whole people, i.e., against the Palestinian people.” The leader stated, “Zionism is equally dangerous to both Arabs and Jews” (“Democratic Popular Front: We are Marxist-Leninists,” in John Gerassi, editor, The Coming of the New International, New York and Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1971, page 243). Interestingly enough, John Gerassi, the editor who published Hillier’s interview, was Sartre’s “non-Godson,” his father (Fernando Gerassi) was a friend of Sartre and a Sephardic Jewish Spanish Civil War general. DPFLP’s position raises an obvious objection. Given the cycle of violence, not only Netanyahu but also Hamas is “equally dangerous to both Arabs and Jews.”
This “revolutionary” terrorist approach unravels as some on the Left now accuse Israel of embracing the same ideology and argumentation displayed by the DPFLP above. So Israel is accused of carrying out “military operations against civilians.” Some accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing which can be associated with the goal “to create as much disturbance and as much dislocation” in Gaza as possible, to prove that Hamas or perhaps any Palestinian entity “is no longer comfortable” or “viable.” And there appears to be the idea that Hamas has acted “against the whole people,” i.e., against the Israeli people. DPFLP’s approach is a dead end. Its claims about what Zionism does to Palestinians and what Palestinians should do to Israelis has now found its answer about what this variant of “revolutionary” Palestinian ideology does to Israelis and the response in what some believe Israelis should do to Palestinians. In both equations that answer is slaughter and slaughter. Yet, increasing numbers have embraced or engaged in a tolerance of this “revolutionary” ideology. Hillier’s suggestions that violence against Israeli citizens would strengthen military reprisals and divisions turned out to be quite prophetic. What some view as “revolutionary” appears to be “counter-revolutionary” in that it both perpetuates and worsens the status quo of division, underdevelopment and the death cycle.
Brutal, durable and repetitive oppression can lead one to demonize the oppressor and so the resolution of one’s rage makes many support violence against the oppressor. While Sartre and Frantz Fanon have been seen as key intellectuals in this camp, they both introduced complications into this narrative concerning revolutionary violence. For Sartre it turns out was gravely moved by the holocaust, having absolutely zero tolerance for any form of anti-Semitism. Fanon was clearly aware that even the victim of colonization or racism could also be a victimizer or be engaged in a kind of sociological racial hierarchy which is essentially a political hierarchy. Sides could not always be easily designed and drawn, with multiple struggles corresponding to multiple arenas of oppression.
A key focal point for this essay is an article by aforementioned esteemed chronicler of Palestinian affairs, Jonathan Cook. Cook has tried very hard to show Israeli crimes, oppression and victimhood of the Palestinian people. Yet, in what is purported to be a commentary on “media,” “militarism” and “propaganda,” Cook himself engages in a form of propaganda that uses media to rationalize and justify the cycle of violence. This cycle links terrorist actions that help trigger militarism/occupation and militarist/occupation actions that help trigger terrorism. This cycle also helps displace alternatives, particularly when intellectuals tolerate various parts of the cycle.
By any means necessary or by the means that necessarily breaks the cycle of violence?
The most brilliant and brave anti-colonial thinkers are thought to have championed the defense of the oppressed “by any means necessary,” a phrase most associated with Malcolm X. Scholarship on Malcolm X by Lawrence B. Goodheart presents a complicated picture. It does not help the cause of those deploying the “by any means necessary” slogan that Malcolm X said in an April 24, 1959 lecture in New York City that the Jew “is one of the worst of the devils.” He “does more to take advantage of the so called black people than any other and yet poses as being a friend to the black people.” Goodheart, citing Bruce Perry notes that “Malcolm etymologically equated the word Israel with Azrael, the angel of death, as well as stating that the Star of David was actually Satan’s emblem.” Anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel were linked. Goodheart notes that “after the schism of 1963-64 in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm still argued that Israel was an illegitimate polity” and quotes him as follows: “‘The British acquiesced and helped them to wrest Palestine away from the Arabs, the rightful owners, and then the Jews set up Israel, their own country.”
Goodheart also shows that Malcolm X was not a diehard anti-Semite. During a speech to “Young Socialists” in Detroit, sometime around late 1964, he “reacted to an antisemitic harangue launched by a black man during a question session moderated by a man with a Jewish name. Malcolm said pointedly: ‘I suspect our moderator today is Jewish and I won’t put him in the position of silencing you. So I will. Now shut up and sit down.'” Malcolm X evolved away from his earlier positions in many ways.
What’s more important, however, is how Martin Luther King explicitly broke from the cycle of violence. Some have viewed King’s approach as naive (or argue for some division of labor between the more militant Malcolm X and the more pacifist King). What is essential for the discussion here is the benefits of King’s explicit attacks on militarism per se and the violence cycle, without any anti-Semitic associations. King engaged in nuance and did not attempt to deconstruct the term “anti-Semitism” (at least as far as I can tell), but even James Baldwin (in the introductory quote above) acknowledged the term’s meaning as being “anti-Jewish.” Some now deconstruct this term, so they can dispense perhaps with the instances when the left itself is involved in what can be classified as Jew hate. I will deal with the issue of quantity and weight of such Jew hate below.
There is a neo-conservative to right-wing appropriation of what used to be called “black anti-Semitism,” a counter-narrative of Jewish professional managerial class exploitation of African Americans, and a post-colonial discourse clearly linking anti-racism and opposition to Israel. While sifting through those currents can sometimes be useful or other times a tedious exercise, the default is often to keep things on a rather superficial level. It is at that level that the left often prefers to operate at the risk of its own marginalization. In contrast, Malcolm X stands for many other things such as the deployment of a moral code, linked to a franchised network of political actors, media presence and entrepreneurship that potentially transcends scarcity or provides a utopian map of alternatives. In contemporary left culture which is sometimes mediated by social media soundbites, however, Malcolm X is often reduced to canned slogans like “by any means necessary.”
An October 8th demonstration at Times Square in Manhattan embraced the logic of DPFLP and “by any means necessary.” One account in The Times of Israel argues: “Among the pro-Palestinian side, the mood was celebratory and spiteful. Demonstrators chanted ‘700,’ apparently referring to the confirmed number of Israeli fatalities in the attack so far, and held up the number seven on their hands while making throat-slitting gestures. Others flashed victory signs with their hands while shouting insults.” Some groups groups supporting this demonstration were “affiliated with student organizations at the City University of New York (CUNY).” According to an October 11th post at The People’s Forum website, the organizers of the demonstration included the Palestinian Youth Movement, The People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, American Muslims for Palestine New Jersey and the ANSWER Coalition. This post criticized Israeli actions and described the Hamas slaughter as follows: “Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza initiated an unprecedented liberation struggle, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood,'” as part of a “decolonization” movement. In the past the Anti-Defamation League has linked the ANSWER coalition to support for Hamas as seen in various incidents.
The October 8th Demonstration, DSA, and Splits in the Left
The primary sponsor of The People’s Forum is Neville Roy Singham, a high technology multimillionaire. He was recently described in The New York Times “as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.” The Times claimed that Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.” Manolo De Los Santos is Executive Director of The People’s Forum, the sponsor of the event. He apparently said “China’s political and economic system puts “people first,” compared to the American system, which prioritizes ‘profits over people.'” Fracesca Blocc at The Free Press claims “Singham and his wife [Jodie] Evans have donated over $20.4 million to The People’s Forum from 2017 to 2022 through a series of shell organizations and donor advisory groups—accounting for nearly all of the group’s funding.” After Singham sold his software consulting firm Thoughtworks for $785 million, the People’s Forum was established. They “employed 13 staff members and held more than $13.6 million in total assets” as of 2021.
The Free Press is associated with various notable conservatives or “anti-woke” figures like Bari Weiss and Coleman Hughes. Many on the left dislike these people, but the left does not always engage in retrospective analyses of its own misdeeds, perhaps out of fear of feeding right wing slander attacks or potential benefactors. A case in point is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), one of the left’s most important organizations for accountability. FAIR’s report on The New York Times expose on Singham, written by Julie Hollar, suggested it was McCarthyism because apparently members of the left are beyond reproach. She writes: “Despite its length, the piece provides no evidence that either the philanthropist himself or the groups he funds are doing anything improper. Instead, the reams of evidence it offers seem to show only that Singham has a pro-China tilt and funds groups that do as well.” Here promotion of the Chinese state and apologists for China are reduced to the innocuous sounding “pro-China tilt.” So FAIR covers for Singham whose NGO promotes Hamas. As a result, right-media becomes the default accountability system for left malfeasance. Repressive tolerance for Hamas thrives when introspection is slandered as McCarthyism.
There is growing censorship of student groups, but that has been facilitated by some groups’ endorsement for terrorists. Codepink, another beneficiary of Singham, claims that The New York Times opposes peace with China. In contrast, The Times writes that Codepink leader Jodie Evans “describes the Uyghurs as terrorists and defends their mass detention. ‘We have to do something,’ she said in 2021. In a recent YouTube video chat, she was asked if she had anything negative to say about China.” Her response was: “I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything.” The Congressional Research Service reported on September 22, 2023 that the Uyghurs “have garnered the attention of U.S. policymakers, particularly since 2018, due to reports” of their “mass internment” in “reeducation” centers. These “facilities were part of an ongoing government effort to systematically transform the thought and behavior of Uyghurs and forcefully assimilate them into PRC society, an effort some observers say is destroying Uyghur culture and identity.”
The October 8th demonstration and other developments led some DSA critics in The New Republic to argue that DSA “destroyed its moral and political authority to speak on Israel and Palestine, and on much else.” Others contend that a DSA tweet endorsing a demonstration organized by other parties is relatively meaningless. They argue that the central complaint of defectors was DSA’s growing support for Palestinians against the Israeli state. An analysis in The Indypendent by Theodore Hamm states: “The day prior to the rally, the NYC chapter of the DSA tweeted an invite to the action that expressed support for Palestine and made no mention of the Hamas-initiated mass violence. The organization did not co-sponsor the Times Square event, and none of its members took the mic.” Hamm also writes: “The tone of the rally shocked many people across the political spectrum. Even though Hamas had just killed more than 1,400 Israelis, speakers treated it like a World Cup victory celebration.”
Some claim that that this Manhattan demonstration celebrated Hamas attacks. Some of the splits within the left (as seen in the DSA dispute) are based on repressive tolerance of Israeli militarism and mass killing of Palestinians. Growing solidarity with Palestine is important and DSA seems to be only remotely connected to the October 8th event. Others like Maurice Isserman claim that DSA’s response to the October 7th atrocities was weak to complicit. He wrote in The Nation that DSA’s “statement on October 7 made no mention—let alone offering any criticism—of Hamas, declaring instead, ‘Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime—a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States.’”
It is hard to assess this episode from a distance. Critics of the defectors imply that they are not seriously antiwar or tolerate Israeli occupation/militarism or don’t like the DSA’s move away from Israel. The defectors charge DSA is not sufficiently vocal against Hamas, but no one can directly link significant parts of DSA to a pro-Hamas position. A related case may be that critics of Palestinian advocates at Brown University seem to debunk its anti-Israel stance, but also point to a lack of sufficient condemnation of Hamas. Can those supporting Israel or criticizing DSA be right about the complicity (silence is consent) with Hamas? Can we critique complicity based on the idea that terrorists are not simply robots who must respond to militarism by triggering even more militarism? Or, have many older left critics of Israel neglected its militarism and territorial expansionism?
Problems in the Universities
The answer to the questions posed require that we look beyond DSA’s internal politics. Whatever ambiguities there might be about the DSA or Brown cases (again with some saying that there is no there there in Hamas support), there are numerous examples of repressive tolerance of Hamas in incidents in the USA, Sweden and other places. We have at least two problems related to higher education and the conflict. First, civil rights groups have argued that the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) groups have been repressed. On November 1st, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent an open letter “to over 650 college and university leaders” where they expressed their “strong opposition to any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses, and urged universities to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights.” The letter followed “a call to universities to investigate SJP chapters for ‘material support for terrorism,’ without citing any evidence of such support.” A related news story reported that “many Palestinian rights advocates have complained of intimidation tactics, public shaming and being doxed, a practice by which their personal information is disseminated publicly, often online.” Others suggest a double standard in criticism of anti-Semitism among students versus that voiced by business leaders.
A second problem is that various higher education platforms sometimes prefer to incubate incendiary sounding discourses tied to deconstruction which never can transcend their scarcity position. These discourses and elements within the social movements that feed off of them are subversive sounding, but essentially safe for the ruling class and elites, aside from the externalities associated with divestment by a few disgruntled investors.
In a related context, John Sanbonmatsu has written: “Like a virus travelling through the body of critical thought, postmodernism has succeeded by commandeering the disciplinary apparatus nearest to hand and turning it to account – stamping out genetic replicas of itself for export to other fields, other sub-disciplines, other geographies. Once settled in its discursive host, the virus takes hold again, blooms, sends off new messengers.” Sanbonmatsu shows how a form of capitalism colonizes the left and produces some result. There are righteous elements which are combined with deconstructive regression. Some argue that postmodernism has lost influence on campuses, but there does seem to be an absence of nuanced discussions.
The Columbia University Controversy: A Case of Intellectual Revisionism and Regression
There are various sources behind pseudo-subversive discourse. Key actors include the academic community, journalists like Cook, selected Palestinian sympathizers and a fragment of their supporters in the diaspora. No doubt Israeli apologists have analogous networks, but they are not my focus in this essay. Let us start with the university. A key reference point is an article published on November 1st on the controversy at Columbia University in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article explains the actions student groups and supporters as follows. It quotes a faculty letter which states: “In our view, the student statement aims to recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023, pointing out that military operations and state violence did not begin that day.” The letter continues that the October 7th attack rather “represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years.’” Here the Hamas attack is reduced to “a military response.”
One Columbia faculty member went further. Derek Spitz at Fathom Journal wrote the following in a post published in November 2023: “Joseph Massad, professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, writing in The Electronic Intifada on the morning after the 7 October massacre, spoke of ‘an innovative Palestinian resistance’ in ‘stunning videos’ of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. For him this was ‘the Palestinian war of liberation.’ Readers were invited to marvel, with Professor Massad, at the ‘shocking success of the Palestinian offensive,’ the ‘major achievement of the resistance,’ its takeover of several ‘Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22kms, as in the case of Ofakim’. (Of course, these ‘Israeli settler-colonies’ are inside the recognised international borders of Israel proper. If they are ‘settler colonies’, that tells you all you need to know about the popular favourite: ‘from the river to the sea, etc.’)”
In the article in The Electronic Intifada, Massad writes the following: “The Arab governments allied with Israel have been demanding that Hamas stop its resistance operations while having remained mostly silent and completely inactive in the last few weeks about the continuing Israeli pogroms. Both Western and Arab governments and liberals often condemn the Palestinian resistance for accepting military and financial help from the Iranian government to defend the Palestinian people against Israeli colonialism, as if the Palestinians had refused offers of support from other countries. This would be like demanding that the Europeans resisting the Nazi occupation during World War II refuse military and financial help from the white supremacist and apartheid United States, not to mention the racist colonizing regimes of France and Britain.” It’s an interesting take certainly, but says zero about Hamas’s torture of Gazans or Gazan protests against Hamas. The teleology of “resistance” and “victimhood” is used to justify anything and everything.
Massad terror-washes or militarist-washes Iran by writing: “Yet unlike those countries, Iran has neither been responsible for the murder of millions around the world nor for colonizing or occupying the lands of others.” Massad engages in a kind of mind-numbing here. He wants to reduce morality to relative numbers, sidestepping thousands of persons killed by the Iranian regime. By his logic, if Israel were to kill 20,000 that would be okay because it has not “been responsible for the murder of millions around the world.” Of course, Massad can claim that Israel is a colonizer and land occupier, unlike Iran which simply represses its population systematically. In 2022, Amnesty International explained: “Thousands of people were arbitrarily detained and/or unfairly prosecuted solely for peacefully exercising their human rights. Women, LGBTI people, and ethnic and religious minorities suffered intensified discrimination and violence. Enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment, including through the deliberate denial of medical care, were widespread and systematic. Cruel and inhuman punishments, including flogging, amputation and blinding, were imposed and/or carried out. The use of the death penalty increased and public executions resumed. Trials remained systematically unfair. Systemic impunity prevailed for past and ongoing crimes against humanity relating to prison massacres in 1988 and other crimes under international law.” Israel has also been criticized by Amnesty International, but the point is two, three, four, etc. wrongs don’t make a right.
The November 1st article in The Chronicle on the Columbia University controversy requires further context. We have longstanding, problematic Israeli policies but also deficient framing in opposition to these policies. Many on the left can’t figure out how to sufficiently condemn both expansive militarism/occupation and terrorism. The language defending Israel often involves “bad faith,” as Sartre would put it, by giving Israel a pass. Similarly, the language used by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine’s October 9th Statement of Solidarity involves displacing Hamas’s crimes as in this formulation: “Palestinians launched a counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor.” So, their statement is consistent with the approach of Massad.
I believe what I shall call the recourse argument here is that we must side with Hamas, the “resistance” and the revolutionary movement against “the Israeli colonial state.” Yet, this binary is based on totally false premises. We see here simplistic dualities like “colonizer” and the “colonized,” which stem from developments in leftist “post-colonial” thought. The irony here is that Said and Fanon’s thinking has been misappropriated by academic successors in a grievous fashion. When it comes to Said, he did not simply view the Israelis as oppressors such that all Palestinian resistance or opposing forces were endorsed. Rather, Said was highly critical of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority and never supported gratuitous violence much less fundamentalists. Similarly, Fanon did not uniformly support violence and argued that its use required careful deliberation, with some forms of violence being counter-productive.
The Columbia “post-colonialists” have engaged in an arbitrary selection of ideas which might be traced to the late Columbia University professor Edward Said’s writings in his book on Orientalism or Frantz Fannon’s discussions of political violence. A Wikipedia entry says Massad’s work apparently builds on Said’s scholarship in Orientalism; Said even praised Massad’s work when he was alive. In The Culture of Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994: page 376) Said did argue that images of terrorists can devolve into demonization which “imbues” the West with feelings of “privilege and rectitude” as well as a “righteous anger and defensiveness in which ‘others’ are finally seen as enemies, bent on destroying our civilization and way of life.” Here Said rejects the collapse of Palestinians with the image of terrorists. Massad appears to embrace this collapse as he suggests that Hamas speaks for all Palestinians. Moreover, Said even stated that Jews (even Zionists) like Palestinians have an historic claim in Israel/Palestine in contrast to Massad’s gross simplifications. So, Massad and his student followers have engaged in a form of intellectual revisionism and regression. Massad even is revisionistic vis-à-vis his own ideas. In an essay published in 2004, he wrote: “But the fact that Jews were massacred does not give Zionists the right to steal someone else’s homeland and to massacre the Palestinian people. The oppression of a people does not endow it with rights to oppress others.” (Emphasis added). Massad builds on ideas of Said that discrimination against Jews (anti-Semitism) transformed into discrimination against Arabs. Then, Massad drops Said’s logic of symmetry and reverts to the recourse argument which Said did not fully embrace.
Violence can grow from a scarcity in using peaceful means, but the left’s association with Hamas merely extends that scarcity. Israel is engaged in colonization, e.g. settlements in the West Bank. Palestinians should resist oppression. Yet, the October 7th attacks were gratuitous as they triggered even worse Israeli militarism and can hardly be called “resistance,” “defensive,” or even “military,” rendering the use of these words absurd. A subset of victims can be victimizers. Leftists in the U.S. should not engage in sloppy or tone deaf language repressively tolerating Hamas, a fundamentalist organization that not only is aligned with oppressive Iran, but also has tortured Palestinians themselves. The way out requires innovations in economic and social reconstruction that transcend scarcity, oppression and post-colonial obfuscation.
Said’s symmetry is turned on its head in the clash of idiocies. Pro-Palestinians at Columbia University have been doxed and harassed with sound trucks, but the celebration of violence that some attribute to the pro-Palestinian camp probably incentivizes such behavior among certain persons. The doxing follows a precedent established by others to harass student groups supporting Israel, however. For example, according to a Haaretz report the group SJP promoted tactics that “included disrupting Israeli and pro-Israel speakers visiting campuses.” Others point to Israeli attacks on solidarity movements in Harvard University and other places. The breakdown in free speech promoted by pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli elements suggests that simply choosing sides along the lines of the recourse argument is not always sufficient or fails miserably. The New Left was supposed to claim that the ends do not justify the means, instead we see here the Stalinistic formulation (of the Old Left), that the ends justify the means.
Students for Justice in Palestine
Other articles and reports which may be more or less well researched point to various claims about repressive tolerance of Hamas including essays in Politico published on October 11th and an expose by Judy Maltz of Haaretz on November 17th which analyzed the limits of SJP. The Haaretz article claims the following: “based on dozens of conversations with Jewish students on U.S. campuses since October 7, a sizable majority seem to feel that by legitimizing and even glorifying the atrocities perpetuated by Hamas, and by showing no empathy for fellow Jewish students grieving for the victims, SJP has crossed the line from anti-Zionist to antisemitic.” This article states: “An Instagram post published on the day of the attack by the SJP chapter of the University of Michigan, for example, said: ‘“’Long live the resistance. Power to our Freedom Fighters. Glory to our Martyrs.’ An Instagram story put up by John Jay College, also that day, declared: ‘Do not let Western media call this terrorism. This is DECOLONIZATION.’”
Alan Blinder at The New York Times conducted his own analysis of SJP, published the same day as Maltz’s. Blinder explains that the organization is highly decentralized, with what appear to be loose controls over local chapters. He cites Scott Newman, former president of the Jewish Student Union at Berkeley for the 2000-2001 academic term. Blinder writes that Newman “recalled a demonstration where someone had a sign bearing three symbols: the Star of David, an equal sign and a swastika.” I myself have seen such signs in places like Oslo or in social media posts recently on Facebook. The Facebook post led to a discussion where several people defended a clear anti-Semitic trope by discussing Israeli crimes, totally oblivious to the larger symbolic meaning of the Star of David. While The Nation reported that “Israel is illegally operating a secret nationwide campus spying operation within the United States,” it failed to take up any of the critical reporting on SJP.
Blinder points to investigations of the SJP’s potential links to Hamas via the intermediary called “American Muslims for Palestine” (AMP), a Virginia group. Hatem Bazian, the current AMP chair does acknowledge what he calls minimal support for SJP. Another factor used to link SJP to Hamas has been “a five-page ‘Day of Resistance’ tool kit” that was distributed by the organization’s national steering committee after the October 7th Hamas attack. Blinder described an illustrated advertisement for the group where “from above, a paraglider seemed to fly in — widely perceived as a deliberate echo of Hamas’s use of paragliders during its assault on Israel last month.” Bazian was featured in a news story in The New Yorker about how he was harassed by Israeli spies.
Quantity or Quality I: The Fog of Protest
I leave it to others to evaluate the reports by Maltz and Blinder. We can view them in three different ways. First, one argument is that these are pro-Palestinian groups being falsely charged with anti-Semitism or support for Hamas. Second, the national or local groups are clearly flirting with or actively engaging in support for Hamas, with sporadic tolerance of anti-Semitism. Third, the degree of decentralized or centralized sloppiness is significant in its own right, especially when incidents of “minor frequency” potential serve as dog whistles or provide symbolic support for more explicitly pro-Hamas discourse (taken up more directly by other groups in a de facto division of labor). In this sense, decentralization objectively services deniability with respect to claims of Hamas support. The claims of McCarthyite attacks on groups in solidarity with Palestine are met with counter claims of repressive tolerance of Hamas.
Like “the fog of war,” there may be a “fog of protest.” A central question is how much emphasis one puts on each journalistic detail, what paradigm or framework is used to scrutinize such details, and how various other details or incidents lend weight to the chosen paradigm. Those inspired by hate or disgust for various factions may under-emphasize or downplay what are regarded as “minor incidents,” but minor is in the eye of the beholder. Let us now turn to “other incidents” to sort out the fog of protest.
From Sweden to the West Bank
A report in Swedish Radio published on October states: “Chants praising the leader of the Al-Qassam brigades — the armed wing of Hamas — have been heard in Helsingborg and Malmö,” two Swedish municipalities. Presently Jamal El-Haj, a Social Democrat in the Swedish parliament who has been linked to Hamas (through participation in a conference) in pro-Israeli and other media is the subject of even greater controversy following accusations by the Swedish Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson.
Another report points to a survey by researchers from Birzeit who “gathered…data through face-to-face interviews with thousands of Palestinians throughout Judea and Samaria, and at three points in southern Gaza.” This report, based on the survey, claims that “some 75% of Palestinians support the Hamas-led slaughter of Oct. 7. Another 11% don’t have an opinion.” I24 reported on the survey as follows: “the survey showed that 68 percent in the West Bank strongly supported the massacres and kidnapping, while another 16 percent supported to some extent.” Is this right-wing propaganda or does terrorism gain support based on extensive exposure to Israeli militarism and occupation? In March-April 2023 only 32% of Jewish Israelis supported a two-state solution, so the degradation of discourse is not limited to one side. And yet 41% of Arab Israelis supported the two-state solution. These poll data may simply register a kind of protest vote against Israel that takes the form of support for the terrorist attacks.
Quantity or Quality II: Reading U.S. Poll Data on Support for Hamas
Another departure point for our paradigmatic lens to view whether the repressive tolerance of Hamas exists in Western circles can be seen in the intermediary institutions which act as discursive multipliers. One such multiplier is Al Jazeera. While providing various useful articles about Israeli malfeasance, they are an echo chamber for Joseph Massad, Jonathan Cook, Miko Peled, Max Blumenthal and other repressive tolerators of Hamas profiled in this essay. The articles published in Al Jazeera are not always objectionable, but such media inflates the status or media capital of persons who legitimate Hamas.
The larger problem is the academic arguments (seen above) and journalistic reporting (which is reviewed below) incentivize “extremist” views which add to their quantitative weight. This weight can’t be separated from Hamas support within the United States. A poll conducted by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll on November 15-16 among 2,851 registered voters found that Hamas was viewed favorably by 17% of those polled. While Israel was viewed favorably by a far greater number, 57%, the 17% figure is not insignificant. While 24% were strongly favorable towards Israel, 6% were strongly favorable to Hamas. The poll asked: “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified in any way?” Among those 18-24, 58% believed that the attacks “can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” Among those 25-34, 43% argued that the attacks could be so justified. The poll asked: “Do you think the recent attack focused on the Israeli military or indiscriminately targeted civilians?” The poll answered that among those 18-24, 53% answered the Israeli military.
Parts of the left have correctly argued that simply because you are critical of Israel does not make you anti-Semitic. Some argue that being against Israel or Zionism does not make you anti-Semitic, although others might claim that “the devil is in the details.” Leaving that question aside, we have other possibilities, i.e. just because you are critical of Israel, against Israel or oppose Zionism does not mean that you are not anti-Semitic. The problem considered here is that some persons believe that being critical of or against Israel means that they are always above the charge of anti-Semitism. Some of these persons are engaged in the anti-Semitism of fools or, if you prefer, the anti-militarism of fools. Alan Johnson at the Fathom website describes the ground for “the form taken by left-wing antisemitism today” which he calls in his post “antisemitic anti-Zionism.” Johnson has left-wing credentials, but he and Fathom are or have been associated with the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. Even if we dispense with Fathom’s arguments, I still contend that supporting or tolerating Hamas is anti-Semitic.
The poll data above, if accurate, shows clearly that there is a large youth segment that repressively tolerates Hamas. Among those 18-24, 59% believed that antisemitism was “prevalent in university campuses today.” In other words, the poll suggests that either anti-Israeli attitudes are falsely collapsed under anti-Semitism or that there is substantive anti-Semitism on campuses. But, we see clear support for Hamas in the poll among the youngest group surveyed. Those polled were asked: “Do you think universities have a moral obligation to condemn the Hamas terrorist killings or should they not make any statements on it?” Among those 18-24, 46% said no statement should be made. That percentage seems far beyond any margin of error.
Finally, in trying to examine the validity of the Harvard Harris poll, I searched for other surveys. Another poll was conducted from October 27 to October 31st, by Intelligent.com in which they surveyed 609 current college students. The survey revealed that many such persons opinions are shaped by social media: “25% of college students say they’re very knowledgeable about current Israel-Hamas war” and “20% say they’re very knowledgeable about Israel-Palestine conflict,” as “86% of college students have learned about these issues through social media.” In addition, “one-third rarely or never fact-check information they consume,” but “22% of college students say they sympathize with Hamas and 26% with the Israeli government.” Putting the two polls together, one might guess or estimate that about one out of every five college aid persons sympathizes with Hamas. A third poll by Hart Research Associates/Public Opinion Strategies, Study #230343, involved 1,000 registered voters during November 10-14, 2023. This poll found that only 1% had a very positive or somewhat positive view of Hamas. Yet, it also found that 11% had a “neutral” view of Hamas, i.e. 12% repressively tolerated Hamas. In 2022, 10% of all voters were aged 18-29.
Carl Campanile at The New York Post, a paper known for its ant-Left stance, described the Intelligent.com poll as follows: “The findings help explain the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests sweeping across many college campuses, despite the fact that Hamas started the war with Israel with an Oct. 7 sneak invasion, killing about 1,200 people and taking scores of hostages.” Campanile cited William Jacobson who blamed the pro-Hamas sentiment on the boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel (BDS) movement. Let us assume that most demonstrations are not pro-Hamas and that the BDS movement is not pro-Hamas. If that is the case, associations with Palestinian solidarity should involve nuance. Yet, we see in certain individuals an absence of nuance. Some claim links between Hamas and BDS, but the latter is viewed by many as a non-violent opponent of Israeli policies. Surely the Israel-Palestine conflict pre-dates October 7th, but we still need to confront the expansive pro-Hamas support.
Collectively the data from three polls shows significant support for Hamas among youth (or in the general population). These youth are affected either by social media or by varieties of on campus groups. The alternative to Hamas is a nuanced narrative. Critics of student groups claim that they do not offer sufficient nuance in their arguments. Others say they are doxed and deconstructed by Zionist right-wingers and others. Despite all this, the “dependent variable” is clear, i.e. many young people appear to support Hamas. In addition, scholars of knowledge resistance explain a larger set of paradigmatic failures (or ways to frame things) that are not necessarily restricted to the right, but can easily extend to the left. Criticism of Israel is not always significantly divorced from support of Hamas.
Orwellian Appropriations of “Resistance”
If the poll data are correct, they place various manifestations of Hamas support among protestors, academics, NGOs, and journalists in a new light. The October 8th rally in New York was “attended by more than 1,000 pro-Palestine backers, who chanted ‘Resistance is justified when people are occupied,'” according to a report by Jason Beeferman in Politico. On October 12, Amnesty International described this “resistance” by writing that: “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups flagrantly violated international law and displayed a chilling disregard for human life by carrying out cruel and brutal crimes including mass summary killings, hostage-taking, and launching indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel.” Amnesty continued: “Video footage analysed by Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab shows Palestinian fighters on the initial day of the attacks deliberately shooting at civilians and taking civilians as hostages. In one of the most egregious incidents at the Nova Music festival, at least 260 people were killed, while others are still missing.”
A combination of right-wing propaganda, sloppy journalism, and academic social amnesia helped turn the word “radical” into the word “extremist.” Now, the word “resistance” has been appropriated to support terrorism, with some on the left gaslighting us that there is no such thing as a “terrorist,” because the term is used to displace Israel’s own terror. I have elsewhere distinguished the two terms, but one can simply say that two wrongs (militarism and terrorism) don’t make a right, especially as they both support each other. That argument is why the recourse argument is deficient. A key distinction, however, is that while the word “radical” originally meant to get to the root of things, from the Latin word “radix,” the word “resistance” potentially devolves into petitioning (or even violently attacking) the system, elites, power structures, etc., without actually restructuring or proactively changing them. Essentially, “resistance” means “opposition to,” but not “transformation of.” Karl Marx, whose ideas on Jews include gross distortions was correct to argue that often the rigorous opposition to something gives it a substance that it might not otherwise have. Others will say that terrorism works for some but not others. In this essay, I argue that it works primarily for the terrorists’ ideology and their intellectual champions, but not for Gazans or Israelis.
Jonathan Cook’s Worthy and Unworthy Victims
Part of the left’s problem can be found among those who believe that a quantitative and qualitative assessment of victimhood alleviates you from various moral or political standards of behavior. Some persons who psychologically and politically identify with victims believe that they have a moral “get out of jail free card,” when it comes to scrutiny of their comments and observations. Upon some reflection, I have concluded that these persons have favorite victims, what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky called “worthy and unworthy victims.”
Consider the case of Jonathan Cook who has devoted a considerable part of his career explaining Israeli misdeeds. He’s hardly a marginal figure, with 39,000 followers on Facebook and 115,700 followers on the X platform. He may have a willing constituency in the pro-Hamas demographic discussed earlier. In an essay published on November 17, “The War Machine Wants You to Condemn Hamas,” Cook’s article in Consortium News argues: “The act of condemnation has been cynically weaponised…The aim is not to show solidarity with Israelis. It’s to fan the flames of hatred to rationalise crimes against Palestinians.” Before even reading the full article, we have encountered a logical absurdity. The absurdity is that a given set of facts and realities are necessarily exploited to support hatred and rationalize criminal activity against Palestinians. This claim is totally illogical because it assumes that all audiences concerned about Hamas’s acts are homogeneous and have ill intent. Consider the bigger picture: Significant support for Hamas among a youth cohort, but Cook says don’t demonize Hamas.
Does Cook simply mean the war machine’s condemnation? Let us turn to his first sentences. He writes: “however counter-intuitive it may sound, there are three good grounds — ethical ones, at that — for refusing to join in the chorus of condemnation of Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7.” No. It seems what Cook does is to de-legitimate the condemnation of Hamas itself because of some phenomenon—perhaps the fact that the war machine condemns Hamas. Cook continues: “That isn’t the same as condoning what Hamas did. It is clear the group carried out war crimes that day—not least by attacking civilians and taking them as hostages. But there is an important distinction to be made between recognising that crimes were committed and colluding in an act of condemnation that has been openly politicised, and continues to be politicised, to justify harming Palestinian civilians.” I don’t buy this argument at all. Not condoning without condemning is repressive tolerance, the tolerance of what is repressive. Unlike DPFLP and Massad, Cook does not condone violence against civilians, but he tolerates the entity engaged in such violence.
The Left as George W. Bush: “If you are not with us, you are against us” dualities
Cook argues that you should not condone, but not condemn, which as far as I can tell means to tolerate. Why? When you don’t condone something but fail to condemn it, you are basically tolerating that thing. Let us do a little thought experiment: “I don’t condone racism and slavery, but I don’t condemn them either because that would involve risks for some other party than the slaves, e.g. slave owners.”
If you don’t like my thought experiment, and there may in fact be limits, let us try another approach. In response to McCarthyism in the United States, the attack on Communists and leftists having nothing to do with the Communist Party, some in the New Left argued: “The attack on the Communist Party is being instrumentalized as part of a larger repressive campaign by the State against the left, therefore we should not condemn Communism.” This strategy, followed in different ways after the American New Left ceased direct operations in 1975, led to the tolerance of various forms of sectarian, parasitic left organizations for several decades thereafter. In contrast, a more advisable approach would have been to condemn both the Stalinist Communist Party that serviced the Soviet repression machine in addition to the repressive apparatus of the McCarthyite state. To a certain extent when American progressives did not follow this line, it was left to various conservative and liberal elements to oppose Communists but they often did so by aligning partially or fully with the repressive state. Likewise, Cook is ceding territory to the worst elements among blanket Israel supporters by foreclosing any other opportunities for opposing Hamas without blanket support for Israel. In this fashion, he gladly repeats all the mistakes of the U.S. left over a period stretching for more than fifty years. Cook forecloses possibilities for opposing Hamas’s terrorism and Israeli militarism simultaneously, a part of a larger current in the solidarity movement that creates simple dualities: (a) For Hamas and For Palestinians versus (b) Against Hamas and Against Palestinians.
Let us continue. Cook writes: “Those demanding condemnation are chiefly interested in imposing a consensus, and a dangerous one, that insists the atrocity clock started on Oct 7. Such people want to wipe from the scorecard decades of atrocities by Israel towards Palestinians: ethnic cleansing, massacres, colonisation, siege, violent dispossession.” Yes, there are some people, but Cook again homogenizes those condemning the October 7 attacks, which approach or are a form of ethnic cleansing, in the most arbitrary fashion.
Decolonization as Terrorism-Washing
Cook embellishes his argument by talking about Palestinian victimhood, which is real, but does so in a way to displace and invalidate Israeli victims. He disrespects both victims by leveraging one set of victims to mitigate the other as in the last quoted statement above. Cook has invested a lot time in exposing the victimhood of Palestinians. That is a worthwhile project, but he seems to be a one trick pony and engages in a kind of perverse terrorism-washing. Again, he does that by homogenizing every single person who could condemn the October 7 massacre as believers in a clock that begins then. The other part of Cook’s implicit narrative is that prior to October 7th, Israel engaged in systemic misdeeds. Let us assume that this is true. Even if that were true, such misdeeds were often part of a cycle of violence in which Hamas actions and other forms of terrorism empowered the Israeli right and even pushed part of the Israeli left to the right.
So-called “Decolonization” as a Scarcity Creation Mechanism that Marginalizes the Left
In a paper entitled, “Does Terrorism Work?,” Eric D. Gould illustrates part of the problem. He argues: “local terror attacks cause Israelis to be more willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians. These effects are stronger for demographic groups that are traditionally right-wing in their political views. However, terror attacks beyond a certain threshold cause Israelis to adopt a less-accommodating position. In addition, terror induces Israelis to vote increasingly for right-wing parties, as the right-wing parties move to the left in response to terror.” In the article “Terrorism and the Rise of Right-Wing Content in Israeli Books,” Tamar Mitts, shows in the journal International Organization, how terrorism fed right-wing intellectual developments: “content related to the political right has increased in Israeli books after periods of terrorism, a change that has become more pronounced over the years.” More generally, Yossi Klein Halevi claimed in an interview discussion on the Ezra Klein show that the second “intifada changed Israeli politics in the opposite way of the first intifada. It brought the right to power pretty much permanently over the last 20 plus years. And it wasn’t only the intensity of the terrorism. It was the fact that it happened after Israel had said yes to two peace offers.”
Even if Halevi over-estimated the value (to Palestinians) of Israel’s peace offers, the collective evidence suggests that terrorism has helped marginalize the Israeli left in a systemic fashion. If Cook is not worried about undermining the Israeli left, which he might view as part of “the illegitimate Zionist oppressor entity,” then he should worry about how he is undermining the Iranian left, the Gazan left or those Palestinians who themselves feel oppressed by Hamas. To the extent Hamas represents what Netanyahu himself has supported, Cook is somewhat aligned with Netanyahu himself. It turns out that killing Israeli soldiers turned out not to advance the security interests of vast numbers of Gazans because of the terror/violence logic deployed by the two principal combatants.
Cook continues to repeat a mechanistic view of condemnation of Hamas attacks such that they always and necessarily serve hegemonic interests: “In Western societies, pro-Israel sentiment is baked in, articulated constantly by our politicians and media. Anyone who condemns Hamas has no control whatsoever over the ends to which their condemnation will be put. In short, condemnation of the kind demanded of everyone about Oct. 7 is not cost-free. It has been weaponised to drive out context; erase Palestinian suffering and Israeli oppression; and to simplify and distort history.” This viewpoint negates how pro-Israeli hegemony is partially based on the very association of (a) forces opposed to Israel with (b) repressive tolerance of Hamas. Cook engages in this repressive tolerance by making any condemnation of Hamas a service to Israeli militarism. So, Cook himself promotes the very hegemonic forces which he describes as necessary. That’s ironic since this necessary quality is partially based on the choices of people like Cook who end up helping to de-legitimate the Palestinian cause (among some).
As time goes on Cook digs a deeper hole for himself. He writes: “Those demanding condemnation want the condemnation not so the world can be made a better, safer place, but so their rationalisations for the continuing bombing campaign against Palestinian civilians in Gaza sound more plausible.” This author has no dialectical relationship to his audience, the reader, because he engages in a form of gross generalization. He makes it impossible to condemn both terrorism and militarism, which by default helps promote the cycle of violence as I suggested in an earlier essay.
Justifying Terrorism by Negating the Tactical Failures Used as Pretexts and Instrumentalizing the Audience
I have earlier argued that one of the appeals of Hamas terrorism is based on the failure of the left and peace movements to systematically accumulate power. Even if peaceful means to Israeli militarism is constrained in Palestine, Noam Chomsky has argued that much of what Israel does involves sanctioning or enabling by the United States. Therefore, the deficiencies in the U.S. left and peace movements become relevant. These movements include various apologists for Hamas which should neither be inflated nor deflated. As a default, some on the left turn to embracing Hamas or tolerating it as a short cut to changing the Israeli state (and it has changed the Israeli state by incentivizing it to be even more militaristic). What Cook’s essay helps us understand is that he takes the scarcity of left power as a given. He writes: “Anyone who condemns Hamas has no control whatsoever over the ends to which their condemnation will be put.” In other words, the political scarcity of the audience who opposes terror necessarily makes them a tool of the right; they cannot be part of the peace movement or any other force that effectively opposes the war machine. In contrast, Michael Lerner and Paul Goodman addressed the problem of “surplus powerlessness” in which the left undercuts its own power by engaging in faulty designs. Cook argues that those condemning October 7th are powerless to do anything other than serve militarist repression. By doing so he is just one more left architect of powerlessness, dystopia and fatalism, contributing to the very hegemony he complains about.
Moral Relativism based on Cascading Assumptions
Cook continues to make more logical mistakes, sinking deeper and deeper into moral relativism. Consider these key sentences: “If Hamas’ actions need to be singled out for special condemnation (while Israel’s decades of crimes do not), then Hamas’ actions must be an order of magnitude worse than anything Israel has ever done.” The problem here is that Cook seems incapable of defining two guilty parties. And he seems to believe that condemnation of Hamas requires the condemner to accept that Hamas is worse than Israel.
Cook engages in moral relativity based on cascading assumptions. The logic of his argument here seems to be the following: (a) Condemning Hamas necessarily leads Hamas’s crimes to be exaggerated, (b) if they are exaggerated then by necessity that gives Israel the right to do whatever it wants, and (c) this in turns leads to mass atrocities. You simply can’t have condemnation because he argues that doing so is “not an expression of shared humanity,” but rather fans “the flames of hatred, for justifying ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians.” Here we have three false claims that lead to a big lie. Cook may be describing how Israeli elites act and instrumentalize Hamas’s crimes to support their own militarism. Yet, Cook collapses all opponents of Hamas into service of Israel. This kind of thinking is very familiar. It is almost identical to those who believe that all supporters of Palestine must service Hamas. That Cook repressively tolerates Hamas by refusing to support its condemnation creates a kind of weird symmetry between his thinking and that of apologists of militarism.
Anti-Colonial Reporting: Rebranding Oppression as Resistance
Cook then goes on to condone Hamas, despite his earlier statement that he does not condone Hamas. He does that by writing: “Implicit in the demand for condemnation is an intention to strip Palestinians of the right to any kind of resistance to brutal military occupation by Israel.” Cook makes a wild claim. Now he argues that condemning October 7 attacks involves the intent to strip Palestinians to the right of any resistance to Israel. This makes no sense whatsoever. Conceivably, some persons are able to both condemn and oppose Israeli actions and those of Hamas. One would think that those aligned with the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority opposed to Hamas enter that camp.
Cook negates three obvious reference points by inflating Hamas as a force of resistance (which appears to be his intent). The first reference point is that during the 2014 conflict Palestinians were “tortured” and “summarily killed by Hamas forces” according to Amnesty International. The second reference point is that Gazans are not merely constrained or occupied by Israelis, but also by Hamas itself according to Palestinian social scientists. Third, Hamas is aligned with an Iranian regime, being in part their proxy force, that has killed hundreds of persons during the Mahsa Amini protests alone. These three points make me believe than non-condemning is condoning. Speech is action and the negation of active “resistance” to Hamas is support according anti-colonialists’ own logic (except when the argument does not work for them).
Anti-Colonial Reporting: Legal Actions as Displacement Mechanisms for Illegal Actions
Cook shows his true colors when he tries to come up with excuses for Hamas actions on October 7th. His comments read like the mirror image of an Israeli Defence Forces media spokesman: “There are plenty of things Hamas did on Oct. 7 that were legitimate under international law, such as attacking Israeli military bases that have been enforcing the siege of Gaza for 16 years.” Do I need to remind the reader that an entity can engage in war crimes despite also doing legal things at the same time? The reference to the legal elements is again part of Cook’s ploy to displace Hamas’s crimes, i.e. another iteration of terrorism-washing. Cook repeats this formula again as when he writes: “But the demand for condemnation intentionally seeks to blur the distinction between what Hamas had every legal right to do — attack the Israeli army — and what it did not have a right to do, which is kill civilians and take them hostage. Instead, all of the day’s events are painted as illegitimate, all of the day’s events are blended into one giant atrocity.” It is as if Cook were to write: “Bin Laden was a Saudi taxpayer and paid his taxes every year, even if he also illegally organized a terror plot that caused thousands to die.” As Marcuse noted with repressive tolerance “the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one.”
Anti-Colonial Reporting as a Form of Sports Journalism: The Good Hamas and the Bad Hamas
In some films we find the genre of the Good Mother and the Bad Mother. This genre has been linked to Melanie Klein, who “under the mentorship of Karl Abraham,” “brought the concept of the two mothers to psychoanalysis.” My central interest here is whether one’s psychological attachment to the good displaces the bad or whether the good is created and identified with in order to negate the bad (or vice versa). The “bad mother” of Hamas is still a mother to Cook, an object of identification, attachment, and loyalty.
Cook repeatedly impugns the motives of those condemning the terrorist attack on October 7th: “Those demanding condemnation want the condemnation not so the world can be made a better, safer place, but so their rationalisations for the continuing bombing campaign against Palestinian civilians in Gaza sound more plausible.” He again collapses all the potential actors and constituencies opposing October 7th. While not condoning Hamas, he ends up taking their side and is their advocate. Cook is a Hamas advocate because he synthesizes from the Israeli malfeasance, terror and injustice that has been his professional specialty a web of dilutions, rationalizations, and justifications for Hamas terror. He does that by splitting Hamas in two: the bad Hamas and the good Hamas. A key passage illustrates how this works. He describes a BBC profile of a soldier “who chose to avenge his dead comrades” by participating in the Gaza attack. Yet, Cook points out that this soldier was engaged in “the collective punishment of 2.3 million Palestinian civilians through a 16-year siege — a war crime.” As a result, these “actions made him and his comrades an entirely legitimate target for Hamas’ attack.”
Essentially during all these years of what seemed like heroic exposure of Israeli malfeasance, Cook has been what amounts to a sports reporter for the home team. I know the genre well from living in two different countries, listening to sports journalists who advocate always for their team, their brand, their allegiance. We know that the October 7th attack was a war crime (which Cook says himself). So the actions of a given Hamas fighter should now—given Cook’s own logic — make “him and his comrades an entirely legitimate target for” the soldier’s attack. Demonizing works both ways. In 2015, hundreds of protesters in Malmö, Sweden “were filmed Monday chanting in Arabic about slaughtering Jews and stabbing soldiers.” Yet, in that very city, Jews and Palestinians have cooperated in holding joint actions this year to honor the Israeli and Palestinian victims of the conflict. Cooperation between the two parties has been complicated by the current conflict, however.
Scarcity, Sports Reporting, Moral Relativism, Dualities and Instrumentalization: Anti-Terrorism as Pentagon Agency
Cook concludes his essay by writing that “the demand for condemnation is designed to implant the idea that Palestinians must accept their fate” because he apparently deems Hamas as the key agent of liberation. The war machine of the West “wants” this condemnation from you, but that will ensure that “Palestinian children keep being killed” and condemnation will foreclose Palestinian freedom. This kind of thinking sounds familiar and upon reflection I see here the gist of Stalinist logic: If you condemn the Communist Party, you will service capitalism. If you support civil liberties, you will undermine Socialism. Or in Cook’s words, “condemn if you wish, but understand that Palestinians will pay a heavy price for your words.” In contrast, by associating opposition to Israel with repressive tolerance of Hamas, Cook helps de-legitimate opposition to Israeli actions and also negates any Israeli security concerns, because Israelis are always oppressors, colonialists, occupiers — not some, not sometimes, but essentially everyone and always. This seems to be my impression of what he is writing because he tolerates Hamas’s allegedly “good side” to kill Israelis and thus justify the part of the cycle of violence that he chooses to focus on. Those opposed to Israel’s military occupation can still oppose violent attacks on that military especially when such attacks trigger even more militarism and help Hamas which itself undemocratically controls and abuses Gazans.
Terrorism-Washing as the Anti-Semitism of Fools
Hamas targeted Jewish civilians who happened to be in Israel. There is no such thing as “valid” and “invalid” Jewish civilian victims except in the minds of those having special allegiance to terrorism and theories that rationalize terror as political leverage. In contrast, we see here a clear case of how terror is used by Israel to leverage militarist violence with Cook trying to stop that by looking the other way at terrorist violence. Theories which suggest that civilians do not have the right to exist are also based on various militarist or terrorist principles that demonize the other. If even one Jew fears for their life, that is enough. In the 1946 book, Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “For Jews are often uneasy,” a Jew “cannot even say that tomorrow he will still be in the country he inhabits today, for his situation, his power, and even his right to live may be placed in jeopardy from one moment to the next” (page 132). He concluded his book with these prophetic words: “Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights.” The last sentence reads: “Not one Frenchman will be secure so long as a single Jew—in France or in the world at large—can fear for his life” (page 153). The Israeli military now plays on this fear because people of Cook’s ilk offer them no alternative. That is not to justify Israel’s actions, but simply to show that we need to come up with solutions that are not based on cheerleading various forms of objectification, oppression and rallying to one’s “side.” By legitimating the “Good Hamas,” Cook provides legitimacy for the “Bad Hamas.”
When even one Gazan or Palestinian is not safe, no Gazans and Palestinians are safe. The safety of Palestinians and Israelis are bound with one another even if militarist cheerleaders and terrorist-washers see no world beyond the cycle of violence. Would be anti-colonialists see terrorism as a way beyond Israel’s hegemonic oppression, yet by demonizing all Israelis (and Jews within Israel by extension) and/or passively tolerating terrorism as militarism (or in their view “military actions” which I deem terror), they replicate the very scarcity of power they claim motivates their belief system.
In an ideal world we would have joint Palestinian-Israeli security forces reigning in and dismantling settlers, Hamas, and extremists of all kinds. That world obviously does not exist now, but Cook’s teleology makes such a world impossible. In Cook, we are witnessing again another step towards the final stages of New Leftism tied to “resistance” that displaces economic and social reconstruction, champions pseudo-anti-colonialism and promotes reductionistic ideas.
Postscript: Terrorism Displacement by Hedges, Blumenthal and Peled
On November 17th, Chris Hedges published the article, “Did Israel’s Military Kill Its Own Civilians on Oct. 7,” in the Real News. The subtitle of this post states: “Testimony from survivors of Al Aqsa Flood, combined with the documented past actions of Israel’s armed forces against captured soldiers and civilians, raise questions about what really caused the high Israeli death toll.” So the assumption is that the high Israeli toll was linked to Israeli actions. The interview then goes on to present claims that hardly match the subtitle’s argument. There are various claims circulating in the media, not all of which can be verified.
Hedges interviews Max Blumenthal who acknowledges that “it does appear clear that many Israeli non-combatants were shot by Hamas gunmen.” The article lists an episode in which the Israeli military attacked Israeli citizens in what is described as a sloppy attempt to attack the October 7 attackers. Then, it is claimed that various Israelis fleeing the attack in cars were also attacked by the Israeli military. There are no precise numbers, just anecdotes. And it is obvious that rescue attempts will often involve deaths to hostages or non-combatants. Blumenthal argues: “Because what about this operation suggests that they’re actually trying to rescue hostages? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” In contrast, the Israelis did negotiate a deal, albeit under U.S. pressure, to free some hostages, contradicting Blumenthal’s argument about “the operation.” Yet, Blumenthal states: “And the political dynamics that have been put in play by assaulting everyone in the Gaza Strip, are sending the message that no negotiations are possible whatsoever.” A claim which turned out to be false.
Blumenthal continues: “But Palestinian armed struggle has always been driven by political demands that were essentially rational and were related to ending ethnic cleansing and ending the military occupation of Palestinians.” He apparently has zero understanding of the cycle of violence and how that is irrational and how his version of “rationality” has helped trigger mass deaths of Palestinians. Why? The answer is apparently that the Israeli state is evil enough to be a colonizer, ethnic cleanser, a military occupier, but not evil enough to be a mass murderer of civilians if provoked. If I understand this framework correctly, it is as follows: “Israel should do what I want and also not do what I want and what I want is basically the logic of what holds what should be contradictory elements together.” Max Blumenthal argues: “The entire West had declared Hamas a terrorist organization that could not be negotiated with. So the only way to spur negotiations is through violence. And that’s what they did.” Here he repeats Cook’s siding with the Communists against the McCarthyites, because there is no other force than Hamas to represent Palestinian interests. In his original article, Blumenthal sifts through data that is sufficient for raising questions, but hardly sufficient to justify the argument that most Israelis on October 7th were killed by the Israeli military itself.
On November 19th, Gianluca Pacchiani at The Times of Israel ran a story which debunks various claims by Blumenthal and those sharing his views. Entitled, “PA falsely says Oct. 7 rave massacre was committed by IDF; Netanyahu: Preposterous,” Pacchiani writes: “the claim disseminated by the PA has no basis in reality, originating in a Haaretz story Saturday that quoted an unnamed police source saying one of the options being looked into is that a small number of partygoers had been harmed on October 7 by fire from a military chopper that had been directed at the Hamas terrorists. The police denied the Haaretz report.” Furthermore, “the rest of the Haaretz story [was ignored] and the overwhelming visual, audial and eyewitness evidence about hundreds of Hamas gunmen storming the desert rave’s grounds and hunting down everyone they could find.” In addition, “a police statement issued in response to the Haaretz quote said that its investigation has focused only on police activities on October 7, not any IDF activities, and therefore did not provide “any indication about the harm to civilians due to aerial activity there.”
FactCheck.org argued on November 16 that: “At least 29 children have been identified by international authorities as having died in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. But a video, citing a post deleted by the World Jewish Congress, has been circulating online falsely suggesting that children didn’t die in the attack in Israel.” Others accuse Blumenthal of circulating false claims on other matters. Blumenthal has doubled down by debunking the debunkers. Yet, this debunking is about one helicopter potentially engaging civilians as if one helicopter could kill thousands of Israelis or most or many of them as in the subtitle of Hedges’s interview: “what really caused the high Israeli death toll.” What’s also interesting is how Blumenthal, like some others on the left, has apparently casted “doubt on the reality of the Uyghur Muslims’ repression in Xinjiang,” according to an expose in The Daily Beast.
Jamal clearly shows why the “legitimate resistance” claim made by Peled is a lie. In an interview with Ezra Klein she stated: “Palestinians in Gaza, at the eve of these atrocious attacks, were feeling that their freedoms and the ability to express their opinion was limited, to express their opposition to the Hamas government was limited. In Gaza and elsewhere, even on the West Bank, it’s increasingly become common to hear of stories where Palestinians oppose the leaderships, and they are arrested for criticizing the government.”
After the attacks, Dahlia Scheindlin at Haaretz reported (November 23) that another poll found “just 13 percent of Palestinians opposed Hamas’ attack (21 percent in Gaza).” The sample “was about half the size of robust Palestinian surveys, just 668 respondents, including 277 in Gaza, which lies in ruin with about one million people displaced, placing major obstacles on sampling,” however. Huda Abuarquob, a peace activist, explains why rising support for Hamas after the conflict does not necessarily legitimate Hamas as a resistance force. Aduarquob explained Palestinians feelings about the October 7 attack as follows: “In order to feel that we are not part of [the atrocities], we tried to find ways to explain it by saying these people are not Hamas. These guys who went to homes and killed people and their families, [some Palestinians believed] they are from Egypt, from tribes in Sinai, who helped [Hamas] attack the Egyptian army in Sinai.” Huda noted that “a week before October 7,” she “heard from a Gazan man that ‘there’s a lot of anger against Hamas, and the only thing that can save Hamas now is a war.’” As in the case of Netanyahu political violence was leveraged to promote legitimacy, i.e. violence drives legitimacy in the first instance, legitimacy did not initially come from violence/”resistance”. Peled seems to have things backward, at least over the time sequence in the period immediately before and moving after October 7.
The torture claim came from Amnesty International, an organization Peled himself repeatedly cites in his debate with Lewis. In addition, in contrast to Peled’s claims that many were killed by Israel itself or that Hamas somehow did not perpetuate (many?) atrocities, we have Human Rights Watch’s statement on October 18. The organization “has verified four videos from the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas-led gunmen, showing three incidents of deliberate killings, and presents this analysis in a video [they] published…The attacks should be investigated as war crimes.” In his debate with Lewis, Peled could not quickly or clearly condemn the Hamas hostage taking but simply recounted Israel’s misdeeds. Again part of the left leverages Israeli malfeasance to apologize for and defend Hamas.
Various claims run counter to the spirit of Hedges, Blumenthal and Peled and what they have feelings to relate. Isabel Kershner in The New York Times described on November 11th how “Hamas’s assault on southern Israel began with a barrage of rockets, sending scores of people into roadside refuges,” followed by gunmen who “came to hunt them.” On November 21, Sumanti Sen wrote an article, “New video from Israel music fest shows Hamas terrorist killing woman as she begs for life,” in the Hindustan Times. Sen’s account describes a video that “shows a group of people who have fled the [music] festival [where many deaths took place] arriving in the Kibbutz, assuming they are safe. They are, however, soon attacked by three Hamas terrorists carrying guns, presumably AK-47s. One of the gunmen is seen chasing after two women, catching one of them and shooting her dead at point blank range after grabbing her by her hair. The woman’s friend is seen begging for her life, but the terrorist mercilessly guns her down.”
Postscript: The Hamas Rape Charge: Fog of War or Fog of Journalism?
Some of the charges made by Israel might be viewed as war propaganda, but some sources point to evidence about the rape charge and torture involving Hamas. Then, there are others like Miko Peled who in a debate with Ivan Lewis denied that Hamas engaged in rape. Peled also argued that “Hamas is a legitimate resistance organization.” Yet, Hamas has documented links to torture and a poll before their attacks found that when Gazans were asked their “preferred party” only “27 percent said Hamas, which is lower than a third, closer to a quarter, and then 30 percent said they would favor Fatah, which is also less than a third” (according to the Palestinian researcher Amaney Jamal of Princeton University who was part of the survey team which worked from the end of September through October 6th).
The Intercept later raised questions about the rape charge in a news story published on February 28, 2024. This critique was elaborated in an interview on Democracy Now broadcast March 1, 2024. So even if the rape story turns out to be debunked, there is plenty of evidence of mass atrocities by Hamas on October 7th, i.e. debunking a lie does not erase a truth, e.g. the June 30, 2022 report that “Palestinian authorities are systematically mistreating and torturing Palestinians in detention, including critics and opponents.”
Yet, just three days later, after various media outlets on the left invested their energies in debunking the rape charge, The New York Times on March 4, 2024 reported that “a United Nations report” released on that day “said that it had found grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred against women during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel and evidence that hostages being held in the Gaza Strip were also assaulted.” The Times also reported that “the report issued by the U.N. Secretary General’s special envoy on sexual violence in conflict came in response to multiple accounts of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack, as well as allegations by Palestinian officials that Palestinian women in detention and in the West Bank had been assaulted.”
Unlike some “journalists” on the left, I don’t see my professional obligation to exonerate or find doubts about Israeli claims. Rather, the left activists and intellectuals finding fault with Israel’s rape charge, condemned various accounts with weaker grounds at the risk of not acknowledging more convincing accounts. So if their point is to demonstrate rape charges as merely war propaganda at the risk of displacing the reality of rapes, then we can rebrand such reporting as itself a kind of propaganda. The issue still requires more time to sort out.
At this point, I have doubts about news coming from both Israel and the U.S. “left,” with propaganda likely circulated by both Israeli and Palestinian sources. The United Nations report is cited in a statement published on March 4, 2024. The statement notes that the UN team believed “that the true extent of sexual violence committed during the 7 October attacks and their aftermath, could ‘take months or years to emerge and may never be fully known.'” The UN team “conducted 33 meetings with Israeli representatives, examining more than 5,000 photographic images and 50 hours of video footage” and “conducted 34 confidential interviews including with survivors and witnesses of the 7 October attacks, released hostages, first responders and others.”
A further critique of the rape charge emerged in Arun Gutpa’s analysis, published in Yes! Magazine on March 5, 2024. By March 26, 2024 new reports emerged in The New York Times about the rape charge centering on Amit Soussana. The article by Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman states: “Ms. Soussana, 40, is the first Israeli to speak publicly about being sexually assaulted during captivity after the Hamas-led raid on southern Israel. In her interviews with The Times, conducted mostly in English, she provided extensive details of sexual and other violence she suffered during a 55-day ordeal.” Another report published by Noa Shpigel in Ha’aretz on April 2nd, 2024 states: “Freed hostage Maya Regev said that ‘every woman hostage is experiencing sexual harassment [in Gaza] in one way or another’ at a Knesset committee on Tuesday. She then called on the Israeli government to take immediate action to free the rest hostages and to postpone the Knesset’s scheduled recess.” The United Nations has documented abuse of Palestinian women, including rape, by Israeli military or captors. Another controversy centers of beheading of Israeli children, a subject on which Gilead Ini has commented in a November 8, 2023 article published by Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
The right-wing view on some of these matters can be found in Bret Stephens’s column published in The New York Times on March 5, 2024: “Honest critics of Israel’s policies can raise serious objections while also candidly acknowledging the horrific circumstances that set those policies in motion. What we are seeing instead are dishonest critics, dishonestly disputing those circumstances so they can take aim at the existence of Israel itself.” Stephens makes various claims that I can’t sort out here. Suffice it to say that the left and right instrumentalize various victims to advance their own ideological frameworks. A just and equitable solution requires nuance and respect for all victims of this conflict. It cannot come from tribalistic identification with one side over another.
