Jewish progressives are stung by allies who excuse Hamas' slaughter of Israelis

Furious at the reaction he was seeing to the terrorist killing of some 700 mostly Israeli civilians, Yahoshafat Ben Avraham went to his Instagram account Saturday to figuratively rend his garment.

To vent his rage.

You probably don’t recognize his Hebrew name, but you will his birth name – Amar’e Stoudemire, one of the greatest players to ever run with the NBA Phoenix Suns and a high-profile convert to the Jewish faith.

"I woke up this morning to some disturbing news out of Israel, said Stoudemire in his Instagram video. "That Hamas (are) kidnapping children, putting them in cages, killing women, killing the elderly — that's some coward s---.”

"And for all y'all Black Lives Matter [supporters] who ain't sayin' nothin,' or (saying) 'let me figure out exactly what happened before I say anything,' f--- you.

He wasn't done.

“Figure out what? It ain't never been cool to kidnap kids and put 'em in cages. It ain't ever been cool to kill women and elderly, never been no matter where you from, what you represent, what tribe you from. Don't matter. It ain't never been no cool thing, never been nothing nobody supported."

But Black Lives Matter UK supported it. The official page of Great Britain’s BLM tweeted out on Sunday to its "87.8k" followers:

This after Hamas had slaughtered some 700 Israelis, including Jewish families in their homes and some 260 young adults at an open-air music festival.

Blaming the Jews for the murder of Jews

This after the killers fatally wounded a Jewish grandmother and then filmed her with her own cellphone and uploaded the footage to her Facebook account so her loved ones would see her death throes.

And BLM UK wasn’t alone. A number of American progressive leaders expressed grief before turning the onus on Israel.

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted, “I am heartbroken by the ongoing violence in Palestine and Israel,” then closed with, “As part of achieving a just and lasting peace, we must do our part to stop this violence and trauma by ending U.S. government support for Israeli military occupation and apartheid.”

In response, American Jews, particularly progressives who have long supported the marginalized and dispossessed, now reveal their disillusionment with fellow liberals.

American actress, writer and stand-up comedian Sarah Silverman swung back hard at a Palestinian sympathizer on X:

“You f---. Do you have any idea how many of those children and teens and elderly protest the occupation on the f---ing daily? That’s who Hamas killed that’s who they are raping over the bodies of their friends you piece of s---. ‘But Palestine’??”

“These are humans JUST LIKE every Palestinian we mourn and fight for.”

‘You’ve dehumanized Jewish people living in Israel' 

American singer and songwriter Regina Spektor, who emigrated with her Russian-Jewish family to the United States and has long supported progressive causes such as Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood and human rights for Tibet, went to Instagram to sound her contempt:

“If you’ve devalued Jewish life so much that mourning murdered Jewish children at a festival, raped women, and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has offended you - leave.

“If you think that this was ‘a result’; ‘deserved’, or some other freakish & heartless idea - you’ve dehumanized Jewish people living in Israel to a point where you yourself have lost much humanity.”

One of the most poignant expressions of this gathering disillusionment came from Joshua Leifer, who writes for Jewish Currents, a magazine focused on “thought, activism and culture" of the Jewish left.

A heart-felt lament on indifference to Jewish suffering

In a six-part string, he tweeted:

“Turned on my phone after the holiday and was overwhelmed by the images of death and horror. My partner and I frantically text friends and loved ones to make sure they're okay. Everyone seems to have lost someone or knows someone who has. The loss, the tragedy-incomprehensible.

“There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for.

“... I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. 

“... People who were supposed to have been interlocutors, partners in some type of common conversation, self-professed human rights defenders, even would-be colleagues are celebrating and glorifying unspeakable acts that violate the most basic elements of human life. I feel sick.  

He closed his message with a kind of prayer.

“Now is a time to mourn the lives, and, against all odds, keep our faith in the possibility of a better future for all people, Palestinians and Israelis alike.”  

Back in 2016, another Jewish liberal, David L. Bernstein, who had just been named president and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, was warning that modern social-justice ideology grounded in victim worship, post-modernism and its rejection of objective truth, represents a threat to Judaism and the Jewish state.

“If a group sees itself as oppressed, it will see Israel as part of the dominant power structure doing the oppressing and Palestinians as fellow victims,” he wrote in an op-ed.

In her review of Bernstein’s 2022 book “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews”, Law & Liberty's Juliana Geran Pilon drew from the book's forward penned by Soviet dissident and former Israeli politician Natan Sharansky.

“In woke ideology,” Sharansky explained, “if you substitute the word race for class, you will get almost the exact same Marxist-Leninist dogma in which we were indoctrinated in schools that became the basis of the hatred against dissidents and anyone who dared question the party line.”

“... The role of the Jew is not to join forces with the ideological fads of the day, but to stand up for independent thought and the liberal principles on which the democracies of the world were founded.”

As many progressive Jews have probably suspected for years, they stand with political allies who are capable of looking upon the same mass murder they saw last Saturday and see not a terrorist atrocity but Jewish culpability.

Who see not Jewish babies killed in their cribs, but the just deserts of the Jewish State.

How does anyone bridge that divide?

Why would any decent person want to?

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Woke abandons decency in response to slaughter of Jews