In my previous post I commented on the spectacle of pampered students and faculty at our elite colleges and universities cutting class, donning keffiyehs, LARPing as oppressed Palestinians (at the top of their lungs, and as disruptively as possible, which is always fun and exciting), and calling for the extinction of the Jewish state. (As far as I can tell, the extinction of the Jews themselves, as long as we’re at it, wouldn’t bother them much either: nobody’s saying much about where the Jews themselves are supposed to go, once the area is Judenrein “from the river to the sea”, but from what I’m hearing I get the impression that if they just kind of ceased to exist it would be a not-unwelcome lagniappe.)
We white males are by now well-accustomed to calls for our erasure, of course, but I think that suddenly a lot of blue-state American Jews — of the type for whom not voting Democrat would be a far greater offense to their faith than a bacon cheeseburger with a side of fried clams — are aghast to behold the monster they’ve nurtured. My post was, for the most part, a comment on watching this coalition on the Left fracturing and beginning to eat itself, along with some remarks about how the protests were obviously well-funded and highly coordinated, with the stroppy students acting as little more than an easily biddable mob, their excitable young brains washed clean of everything other than “Who?” and “Whom?“.
Although I hadn’t said much about the conflict in Gaza itself, our friend and always-insightful commenter Jacques joined the conversation, to focus on which side in that war might in fact hold the higher moral ground — which is of course relevant to how we should react to the protests.
As a thought experiment, imagine that no western kids had ever been subjected to woke indoctrination. Imagine that all of them were ideally rational and moral young people. How would we expect these kids to react to what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians? Would these rational and moral kids just shrug? Would they think it was entirely moral and decent to exterminate tens of thousands of civilians, including children, in the hope of killing a much smaller number of guerilla fighters? Would they have no objection to Israeli politicians referring to Arabs as “Amalek”? I think some of these imaginary ideal kids would be protesting too.
Jacques, is several places, indicts Israel for the severity of its military response. For example (my italics):
I don’t agree that the Israelis are doing much to avoid “unnecessary” civilian casualties. It looks like their goal is maximal civilian casualties. (As you’d expect when Israeli leaders openly invoke “Amalek” and the genocidal moral code of the Jewish bible.)
Is this true? Israel is at war. How does its conduct compare to other historical examples of warfare, especially urban warfare? It certainly isn’t hard, throughout the ages, to find examples of cities being totally annihilated — men, women, young and old — in the fury of war. It is also difficult — and I’ll come back to this — to draw a bright line, either in military or ideological terms, between civilians and Hamas; it could easily be argued that Hamas itself cares far less about the safety and well-being of Gaza’s civilians than Israel itself does, and that Hamas knows very well that every image or account of civilian victims is potent ammunition against Israel in the court of world opinion. (In the comment-thread at the previous post, I linked to a thread on X arguing that Israel is, at the very least, certainly not trying to maximize civilian casualties. I’ll link it again here; make of it what you will.)
Regarding “Amalek”, the term refers to an ancient people who were implacable, mortal enemies of Israel. Is the term inaptly applied to Hamas, who marinate their children from birth in the belief that the greatest possible good is the destruction of Israel and blood-vengeance against all Jews?
I should probably at this point make some sort of summary of my own thoughts about this war, and more generally, about the intractable conflict in the region that has festered since before I was born, and even more generally than that, about war and conflict as a whole:
First, I’ll say that I generally support the idea of distinct, cohesive and homogeneous peoples having homelands. The kind of Diversity worth wanting, I think, is the kind where one culture or ethny does things their way over here, and another does things differently over there, and every people gets to have a place where they can feel at home, create as much civic trust as possible, and let their commonalities of folkways, language, religion, cuisine, art, history, and myth shape their shared public life as much as their private lives at home. (I’ve written about this for years; see for example, my brief essay Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration, from eleven years ago.) This arrangement preserves all the fascinating, distinctive characteristics of each culture in its own fertile soil, rather than throwing them all together into a gigantic global grinding machine to pulverize them into dust. The right way to experience real, “enriching” diversity in a healthy world is to travel. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Unlike the “Palestinians”, the Jews constitute an ethnically distinct people, with a specific (and highly influential) cultural history originating thousands of years ago in the land they now occupy. I endorse their wish to have a national homeland. (I won’t call it a “right”, because most talk of “rights” is just a mess of conflicting opinions, but I’m glad to see them have a place of their own.)
The land area of Israel is smaller than New Jersey, and it is surrounded by neighboring Arab nations compared to whose vast expanses Israel is a tiny speck. These Arab homelands — Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and others — could easily have absorbed the displaced Arabs from what became Israel; there were fewer than a million in 1948. But none did, not then or in the following 75 years; the answer, instead, was war, in 1948, 1967, and again in 1973. After that, the interests of the pan-Arab cause, apparently, were better served by maintaining Gaza and the West Bank as a festering wound, as a bloody shirt to wave, and as a sensational public theater of oppression, than by succoring, resettling, and assimilating the fellow Arabs living there.
In 2005, Israel ceded control of Gaza to the Gazans, who found themselves with twenty-five miles of prime Mediterranean seacoast, a seaport, abundant international aid, and the political freedom to arrange whatever sort of government they liked. In the election of 2006, they chose Hamas, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood whose charter is essentially a manifesto for ceaseless, exterminationist jihad against Jews, and against the state of Israel. There were no more elections after that.
With its natural assets, international aid flowing in, oil and gas resources, and assistance from Arab brethren around the region, Gaza could have become a solvent, even prosperous place, with a healthy tourist industry. But having Hamas in charge meant that the bulk of whatever assets became available would be diverted, not to the prosperity of the Gazan people, but to the jihad against Israel, in the form of weapons, tunnels, and of course the personal enrichment of the party elites. And because there’s nothing that unifies a people as well as an external enemy, millions of Gazans were raised to think of little else than their bitter anger against the Jewish nation next door. Israel now “had the wolf by the ears”; for it to relax its vigilance would be catastrophic.
And so it was. On October 7th of last year, Hamas launched an assault of almost unspeakable horror — indiscriminately and mercilessly attacking, raping, slaughtering, torturing, mutilating, and kidnapping Israeli civilians, male and female, from infants to the elderly. Picture the most gruesome and bestial atrocities you can imagine anyone unrestrained by conscience or decency carrying out upon another human being, and you likely will not have imagined half of what happened that day.
It is hard to imagine that any nation in history, so attacked — especially given that Hamas has steadfastly refused to give up the hostages it took (who include, by the way, several Americans) — would fail to rise up in incandescent fury, considering also that nearly three-quarters of Gazans stand in support of what happened on that day in October. And so Israel has. They will not tolerate the existence of this threat on their doorstep any longer, and they will not cease until Hamas is destroyed. (I think, honestly, that if any one of us were in Israel’s place, we would feel the same way.)
Hamas asked for a war, and so they have got it — and in Gaza, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of daylight between the combatants and the civilians. There is no plausible scenario in which Israel relents before this hydra is slain. The suffering is Gaza is awful, but war is war, and this is war. Had Hamas not done what they did in October — a truly monstrous eruption of the blackest cruelty and evil — this would not be happening.
Having said all that, however, my own feeling is that this war is not our war. Israel is rich and technically advanced, and has a top-tier military — its Iron Dome, for example, appears to be a better anti-missile system than our own. It also has access to a worldwide network of very wealthy people and institutions. It has been our stupendous folly to invite the world’s ancient feuds and grievances to play themselves out in our own cities and institutions, and we are now seeing right here at home the strife and disintegration that were the inevitable result.
Between our shameful meddling in Ukraine, the disastrous result in Afghanistan, and widening war in the Near East, this hasn’t been — to put it mildly — a very good few years for U.S. adventurism abroad. Perhaps we might, before further hell breaks loose, take a moment to reflect on the advice John Quincy Adams (then Secretary of State under James Monroe) gave the nation in 1821:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and
her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence,
she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy,
and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
Over to you, Jacques. Am I seeing all of this wrongly?
