The Trap You Really Don’t Have to Fall Into When You Talk About Israel and Hamas

Since the shocking, unprecedented, and ongoing incursions into Israel by Hamas militants on Saturday, the media and social media discourse about culpability has been maddening. Through the fog of war, Americans (and beyond) of every stripe have been roped into expressing support for “sides” of a conflict that many do not understand. This war is complex, and its layers of pain have been formed over many years, battles, and untold deaths. So, perhaps some recent statements, especially from students, have just been ill-conceived. But that hasn’t made the loud, if small, minority who has chosen a reflexive and counterproductive display of support—sometimes, but not always, accompanied with a caveat—for the execrable Hamas any less painful or abhorrent.

It hasn’t come just from extremely online Redditors, Instagram influencers, or Twitter leftists like British journalist Rivkah Brown, who wrote (and later deleted), “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide, as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonizers’ territory.” New York’s Democratic Socialists initially supported a Manhattan rally at which protesters appeared to endorse the attacks as justified resistance. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” wrote a group of Harvard undergraduates in a statement endorsed by 33 student groups on campus. Student groups at other schools have used a silhouetted image of a paraglider—one of the methods the Hamas murderers used to breach the wall between Gaza and Israel—on posters supporting Palestinian resistance. In a piece published Wednesday in New York magazine, Eric Levitz recounted similar expressions of support for Hamas from supposed left-wing individuals and groups.

These are relatively isolated incidents, but this rhetoric tracks with a problematic interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that casts all Israelis—not just those living in the occupied West Bank—as colonizers. Ironically, this kind of rhetoric plays directly into the hands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others on the far right who have long claimed, erroneously, that to the Palestinians, all Israelis are settlers. The inevitable media pile-on in response to such statements does a disservice to the Palestinians who will be bearing the brunt of Israel’s retaliation in the days and weeks to come, and it gives cover to those who insist that any criticism of Israeli policy is motivated, at heart, by antisemitism.

If there’s one thing that you would hope all factions on the progressive left could agree on, it’s that the hard-line religious fanatics who took suicide terrorism global in the 1990s, targeted civilians indiscriminately, bore enormous responsibility for the collapse of the Oslo peace process, and now operate a repressive, single-party authoritarian regime in Gaza are beyond the pale. More than any other single entity, Hamas (an Arabic-language acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) helped destroy the Israeli left and, with it, any meaningful prospect of a two-state solution to the conflict.

The group had plenty of help, of course, from Jewish extremists in Israel and maximalist right-wing politicians like Netanyahu himself. Not long after the famous 1993 handshake between Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn that kicked off the doomed Oslo peace process, an Israeli extremist gunned down dozens of Palestinians in a mosque, Rabin was dead from a Jewish assassin’s bullet, the settlements in territories that would need to be handed back to the Palestinians continued to inexplicably expand, and then, in 1996, Netanyahu was elected.

But there is also no meaningful factual dispute about what Hamas has done and what role the group played in the obliteration of peace prospects. Beginning in 1993, the organization perpetrated dozens of suicide attacks in Israel, killing thousands of innocent people and plunging Israeli society into a maelstrom of fear and escalation that produced reactionary governments unwilling to take even rudimentary steps toward a negotiated peace. The Palestinian national movement did not then require—and does not now need—the slaughter of innocent civilians on buses and in dance halls and in family homes.

Taking the long view should also make it clear that several decades of Hamas antics have left the Palestinians worse off, further from liberation, further from statehood, and more isolated than ever before. It is de rigueur to note that the power asymmetry between Israel and the Palestinians means that the former bears much more responsibility for ongoing violence. And it is true: Nonviolent resistance has been met with bullets, and boycott efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere have been criminalized. But a recognition of Israel’s disproportionate power must also come with a recognition that any resolution to the conflict runs directly through the hearts and minds of Israelis. It is hard to see how mass murder will make Israeli Jews more willing to countenance either Palestinian statehood or integration into a single, binational state.

Opposing Hamas and feeling revulsion at the targeting of Israeli civilians is therefore perfectly compatible with a politics highly critical of the right-wing government in Jerusalem, opposed to the settlement project in the West Bank, and supportive of Palestinian rights, aspirations, and dignity. Cheering the mass murder of civilians, on the other hand, represents a fundamental break with basic human decency. It doesn’t matter if you believe that the cause is righteous. It doesn’t matter if your opinion of Hamas’ actions is dressed up in some confused, reductive framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a simple case of colonization that requires decolonization. It doesn’t matter if the murdered civilians were led by a government itself guilty of terrible and ongoing crimes against humanity that are rarely discussed as such in American media.

Granting carte blanche to militants to murder civilians anywhere at any time is al-Qaida logic that will lead inexorably to al-Qaida outcomes. “Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is legitimate, reasonable and morally demanded duty,” read Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against “Jews and Crusaders,” which paved the road to 9/11. If you think it was wrong to murder, for example, World Trade Center janitors but OK, or even just understandable, to execute children in southern Israel, you should probably be asking yourself some probing questions about why.

Instead of applauding terror against innocents, those who are angry about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians should be embracing the logic of reconciliation, forgiveness, and coexistence, however remote it may seem at the moment. “Let all endeavors be channeled towards building a huge edifice for peace, instead of strongholds and hideouts defended by destructive rockets,” Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat told the Israeli Knesset in a 1977 address that remains underappreciated for its timeless eloquence. “Be the heralds to your sons. Tell them that past wars were the last of wars and the end of sorrows.”

Sadat was maligned at the time for selling out the Palestinians and was himself assassinated by Salafi extremists very similar in outlook and principles to today’s Hamas madmen. But he was right: The Palestinians will not be made whole by inflicting sorrow on Israelis, by creating more grief-stricken parents and children, by inviting the inevitable and terrible retaliation that has already begun. Increasing the supply of grief only boosts the aggregate demand for savagery.

There are words in Sadat’s speech to heed for Israel as well. “No one can build his happiness at the expense of the misery of others,” he told a roomful of people whose army at the time was occupying and colonizing Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Here, again, Sadat was right. Israel will never, can never, be truly secure until the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are free and the still-in-limbo refugees find justice. The nation’s fearsome military, its stockpile of nuclear weapons, its separate peace treaties with other Arab states, its separation wall—all were unable to protect thousands from the weekend’s horrors. What Israelis do now with the stinging realization that the status quo of just a few days ago was an unsustainable delusion will determine the shape of the near-term future. Pure vengeance will get them nowhere. There is not, ultimately, enough room to dig the two graves in which both Israelis and Palestinians will be buried if revenge is enshrined as a principle worth defending.