On Oct. 30, a long list of faculty at Columbia University and Barnard College attached their names to an open letter which argued that the murders, rapes, and kidnappings committed by Hamas against Israelis and foreign nationals in Israel—mostly civilians—were a “military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years.”
The open letter is just the latest episode in a broader convulsion of cruel stupidity on the Western left since the atrocities of Oct. 7.
Protesters celebrated the massacre of young concert attendees in New York. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) declared the slaughter of civilians was a “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime” and “not unprovoked.” An open letter from a “coalition of Palestine solidarity groups” at Harvard University announced that Israel is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and stated that the “apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Underneath the outright refusal to condemn an explicitly genocidal organization that just carried out the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, there are a couple of revealing assumptions. These assumptions—which are obscured by the language of faux anti-imperialism and humanitarian concern—help to explain why otherwise decent people can excuse (and even endorse) the worst crimes imaginable.
There are two primary reasons so many left-wing activists, students, and professors are incapable of acknowledging that Hamas committed ghastly atrocities in southern Israel.
First, there’s the conflation of Hamas with the people of Palestine as a whole. The Oct. 30 letter asks readers to consider whether the pogrom in Israel was “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation” (italics added). This is a grotesque smear of the majority of Palestinians, who confront endless indignities and deprivations but wouldn’t dream of expressing their discontent by gunning down children and grandmothers.
Allowing the most extreme members of a movement or society to function as its representatives isn’t just a profound insult to many innocent people—it’s also a political disaster.
When Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced the “complete siege” of Gaza, he said: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Cutting off food, water, and electricity to everyone in Gaza is a brutal form of collective punishment—and one which is much easier to rationalize if the people of Gaza are dehumanized and treated as indistinguishable from Hamas.
The left should spend its political energy drawing a clear line between the Gazans who just want to protect their families and the theocratic gang that has intentionally put those families in mortal peril.
But many self-described friends of the Palestinians are doing the opposite.
It’s bad enough when leftists treat Hamas as the authentic voice of the Palestinians, but it’s an ugly and dangerous farce when they lavish the organization with praise. This is what former British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn did when he described Hamas as an “organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region.”
The second reason many on the left refuse to hold Hamas accountable for the horrors it inflicted on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 is the long-standing left-wing conviction that anti-Western terrorist organizations have no agency.
Recall the language in the letters and statements above: the attack was a “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” Israel is “entirely responsible” and the “only one to blame.”
It’s one thing to assert that the attack was a “military response”—a ploy to reframe the slaughter of civilians as self-defense. But it’s something quite different to relieve Hamas of responsibility for its actions altogether.
This is an expression of a fundamental belief on much of the left—that victims of oppression are not self-determined human beings capable of making their own decisions. Just as victims of systemic racism can’t hold racist views themselves (the argument goes), victims of what the left has decided is a “settler colonial” enterprise couldn’t possibly be genocidal imperialists.
Some on the left don’t even think Hamas can be blamed for its oppression of other Palestinians—as the British activist Owen Jones recently explained: “It wasn’t actually Hamas who introduced the law banning homosexuality in Gaza. Guess who it was? The British Empire.”
The left privileges the status of victimhood over all other aspects of identity. But in the case of Hamas, all you have to do is read its Charter—a horror show of antisemitic paranoia and exterminationist fantasy—to see that the group’s obsessive hatred of Jews is a much more salient motivating factor than the restrictions imposed on Gaza.
Millions of Palestinians don’t launch rockets at civilians or go on rampages at music festivals and kibbutzim, and many resistance movements throughout history have been nonviolent. Human behavior isn’t a product of a single variable like victimhood.
The two main reasons for the outbreak of moral confusion on the left after Oct. 7 are directly related.
In the minds of many campus protesters and activists, Hamas and the Palestinians are interchangeable. They’re all just victims with brown skin, so they can be haphazardly grouped together. The best among them are no different from the worst. (This conflation of Hamas with ordinary Palestinians is, ironically, exactly what the most vicious anti-Palestinian voices in Israel and on the right do, as well.)
This isn’t even the soft bigotry of low expectations—it’s just bigotry, and it will only hurt the people it professes to defend.
