Hamas is guilty of genocide - against Palestinians

 Hamas is Perpetrating Genocide Against—Gazans

 There is no shortage of people claiming that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. That the allegation is not merely false but ludicrous has been established by, among others, military expert John Spencer, seven experts on genocide, and friend of the blog Andrew Pessin. An essential component of “genocide” is intent, and that, as Spencer puts it, “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war,” is simply indisputable. These measures include the massive aid Israel facilitates to Gaza, the building of field hospitals, the existence of military units to minimize civilian damage, and the millions of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians, not to mention all the explicit statements made by Israeli political and military leaders that their war is with Hamas—and that the war ends immediately when Hamas surrenders and returns the hostages.

 In fact, as Pessin has noted, the only genocidal party to the conflict is Hamas, against the Jews:

Hamas, the [direct] descendant of the same Muslim Brotherhood that contributed to the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews, the organization whose charter openly endorses the genocide of all Jews, who attempted an act of genocide on October 7, and who has openly and repeatedly declared its intentions to “repeat October 7” as many times as is necessary to remove the Jews. 

But what hasn’t been appreciated is that Hamas is also guilty of genocide—against Gazans. They are in fact engaging in the genocide of their own people.

One of the definitions of genocide under the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." And this is exactly what Hamas has been doing to the Gazan civilian population.

Hamas initiated the war with its barbaric massacre on October 7, a massive escalation that they knew would bring a similarly massive Israeli military response. They know that they are the target of Israeli airstrikes whenever hostilities break out. Yet for nearly two decades, they have not built a single bomb shelter for the people, even as they dug hundreds of miles of tunnels and bunkers for themselves. They knew that Israel would attempt to kill them and then deliberately created an infrastructure where the civilians of Gaza would literally be in the way. For two decades they had every opportunity to move their military facilities away from the people. But they didn't. As a matter of deliberate strategy.

In 2014, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, admitted that sometimes Hamas fired rockets from residential areas, although he claimed they were "mistakes." Yet the evidence that Hamas fires from houses, mosques, schools, and “safe” humanitarian areas, and does on a regular basis, and has done so for years, is overwhelming. Just this week they released a video of themselves, in civilian clothes, firing two rockets from inside a tent in a humanitarian area. They do this knowing Israel will quite legitimately strike back—which means they are calculating actions that will bring about the physical destruction of Gaza, its civilians, in whole or in part. 

They expect huge amounts of damage and death of civilians. They create the circumstances for it to happen. And they do so deliberately, in full knowledge of the consequences.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t merely fire from civilian buildings that should be “protected” by international humanitarian law but have fully militarized them, using hospitals, houses, mosques, and schools as command centers, to house their servers and fighters, to store weapons, to hide hostages in, and so forth, thus converting them into legitimate military targets. They have built those hundreds of miles of military tunnels under literally every building, booby-trapping buildings, making nearly every building a legitimate military target. Those booby-traps, and the extensive use of IEDs, have caused the deaths of numerous IDF soldiers in recent months; but unreported is how many ordinary Gazans may have been killed by Hamas simply trying to enter their booby-trapped homes or on the way.

They have turned all of Gaza into a life-threatening, legitimate military target.

And yet there’s more.

Numerous reports confirm Hamas’s efforts to prevent civilians from moving out of harm’s way, by blocking or blowing up roads or again by shooting them. Numerous reports also confirm that Hamas regularly steals the humanitarian aid that Israel helps deliver, often shooting Gazans who try to access the aid (or otherwise resist their rule). They have repeatedly attacked the very crossings that deliver the aid, shutting them down for days until Israel takes it upon itself to repair them and resume deliveries. In just one incident in May, 2024, Hamas killed four IDF soldiers in an attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing, shutting down one of the largest aid-crossing sites. Just reflect on the absurdity of this situation: Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, kill Israeli soldiers to stop the delivery of aid to Gazan civilians, while Israel sacrifices its soldiers to continue the delivery of aid, to Gazan civilians—and yet Israel is charged with “genocide”!

Not only do they deliberately use civilians as human shields across the entire Gaza Strip, in other words, they murder them to prevent them from escaping the danger and undertake extensive actions to deprive them of humanitarian aid—to starve them, in effect, while turning their abodes and places of refuge into legitimate military targets and thus sites to be destroyed.

All of the above occurs, undeniably, deliberately, with the intent essential for “genocide”: Hamas repeatedly undertakes actions that either directly cause, or whose clearly foreseeable consequences are, conditions bringing about the physical destruction, in part or in whole, of the Gazan civilian population. Murdering people attempting to get to safety, and starving them by stealing their aid, are as direct as can be, while initiating the war in the first place with that barbaric massacre, after having turned the entire Strip into a military site, is only slightly less so.

Penultimately, consider this: During the past ten months, when Hamas and the world have been decrying the destruction of Gaza and (falsely) alleging Israeli genocide, it has been within Hamas’s power to end it all instantly by surrendering and returning the hostages. As simple as that, they could stop the destruction, and have had the power to stop it every day for ten months—and chosen not to exercise it. This is a deliberate choice to sacrifice the blood and treasure of Gazans to pursue their nihilistic aims. 

And finally, their own statements prove that they want to see the deaths of their own people.

In just one of many similar statements by various Hamas leaders, late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in October, "I have said this before, and I say it time again: The blood of the women, children, and elderly…...We are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge, and [pushes us] to move forward."

Hamas is perpetrating genocide—against its own people.

(Originally this was a different article, but Andrew Pessin had reworked an earlier version, and then there was an editing catastrophe, so this is a combination of mine and Andrew's writings.)

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How a Ph.D. student reacted to facts about Israel and Gaza (Andrew Pessin)

Guest post by Andrew Pessin

Anti-Israelism and the Ph.D.

1.

One doesn’t often get such delightful emails as this:

Do not contact me again you deranged, perverted, genocidal freak. Please save your poorly composed genocide denialism delusional fascist essay for your substack audience of 5 like-minded brain rotted sociopaths. Please know this pathetic email does not intimidate me, you and your creepy zionist alumni friends do not intimidate me, all of Israel, and all of their weapons, and their international impunity, and their corrupt imperial power do not intimidate me. I pity you. Your life must truly be so miserable and meaningless for you, at your big retired age, to be wasting your final days harassing young women you do not know and who do not wish to know or engage with you. How embarrassing!

Though it wasn’t actually me who received this, it might as well have been. I wrote an article refuting the current libel that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza, and a reader of that article forwarded it to the author of that email and was treated to this response. Not wanting to hog it to himself, he kindly shared it with me.

One might be tempted to chuckle were it not all so tragic and, ultimately, perhaps even deadly.

The author of this email is a graduate student at an elite university. I shall call her “H” (for Hamas and Hezbollah, whose side she takes in the current conflict) and call the university “Ivy.” In H’s response we see everything wrong not only with the general anti-Israel hatred present on so many campuses, including (or especially) elite campuses, but everything wrong with the academy in general over the past number of years.

2.

Of all the many lies regularly told about Israel, the “genocide” allegation is currently the most important. If Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza then (a) Israel is evil and (b) all measures must be taken to stop it. Never mind its justification for being at war with Hamas, or the fact that Hamas is actually fighting back, or the prospects for some form of long-term peace: if it’s not just a bilateral war (with the tragic, if inevitable, civilian casualties) but a unilateral “genocide,” then Israel must unilaterally stop its military activity.

Nor should one imagine that labeling this activity as “genocide” is a measure of perfectly admirable concern for Gaza’s suffering civilian population. That suffering would, after all, be more quickly and permanently alleviated by the surrender of Hamas and return of hostages, which would end the war instantly and allow Gaza to be rebuilt for actual peace and prosperity. The “genocide” label in fact aims to delegitimize Israel’s war effort, to stop Israel with Hamas still in power and still holding the hostages, and thus to advance Hamas’s actually genocidal agenda toward the Jews. The allegation of “genocide” is in fact a weapon in the longstanding war against Israel.

Assuming, that is, that it is false.

Of course it is false. In fact it is demonstrably false. It is not even remotely true. Gaza may be experiencing significant destruction and Gazan civilians great suffering, but, regrettably but true, that is an ordinary (if tragic) consequence of war. Though you might not know it from the hyper-focus on Israel, there are well over 100 military conflicts occurring in the world right now, and there isn’t one of them that doesn’t involve significant destruction and civilian suffering and casualties. Many involve destruction and civilian casualties far exceeding those in the current Israel-Hamas war and even in the wider Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim conflict. Unless all wars are “genocides,” Israel’s war on Hamas is not remotely a “genocide,” even if it’s nearly the only one on that long list of conflicts that ever gets libeled by that label. My lengthy and detailed article defending this conclusion examines the reported casualty numbers and offers extensive evidence and many arguments to demonstrate that, to the contrary, Israel in its war against Hamas is taking literally unprecedented measures to target only militants and to spare civilian lives, and largely succeeding in doing so. To the contrary, too, the side actually seeking, and partially perpetrating, genocide is Hamas: the evidence for that is incontrovertible, starting with its never renounced foundational charter, including its four decades of terrorist activity and open declarations of genocidal intent, and of course its October 7 massacre and subsequent declarations. In light of all this evidence and these arguments, the “genocide” allegation can be seen for what it is: a weaponized blood libel that aims to delegitimize Israel and thus support Hamas’s genocidal war effort.

3.

But I’m fallible. The evidence I invoke could be problematic. (The problem of obtaining accurate information in this war is particularly acute.) My reasoning could be fallacious. I admit that I could be mistaken in sundry ways. God knows I’ve been mistaken often enough, as everyone from my Ph.D. advisor to my wife seems to enjoy pointing out. But I’m an academic. So critique me. Challenge my evidence. Offer alternative sources of evidence. Show me where my reasoning goes wrong. That is how an academic—or anyone committed to the pursuit of truth—behaves. Do not read the extensive evidence and argument on offer and merely shout in response, “But, genocide!” Worse, do not not read the extensive evidence and argument and just shout, “But, genocide!” That is not how an academic behaves.

Especially not an academic affiliated with an elite institution—among the most elite academic institutions in the world, in fact, dedicated, as every elite institution mentions in their mission statements and public declarations, to the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge (and therefore truth). For one is surely not pursuing knowledge or truth if one refuses to read, or simply dismisses, views different from one’s own that are accompanied by evidence and argument. To behave that way is to decide in advance what is true independently of the evidence and arguments that are supposed to lead one to truth. To behave that way is essentially to make things up, presumably to further one’s political agenda. And that is just not how an academic supposedly in the business of truth should behave.  

In more detail now: I shared my long article against the “genocide” allegation on my substack. A reader shared it on his own substack, noting (he emailed me) that “I typically forward my posts to, among others, those at [Ivy] I think might be, or should be, interested in hearing something other than the standard Hamas/Palestinian talking points.” And so he did, sending it to, among some seven dozen others, H. He sent it to H because he thought she was the president of a significant graduate student group at Ivy that is actively, and publicly, involved in anti-Israel activity there. He thought she was still president because several recent student newspaper articles identified her as such, and at least until this past week she lists herself as “president” on her LinkedIn page. (It turns out that, as of recently, she is no longer president, which my reader subsequently acknowledged. No matter.) To get a sense of her public platform, a search of her name on the Ivy student newspaper site returns 31 hits, many concerning her work with the group she until recently led. Many of these articles publicly provide her email address, perhaps as a contact for the public group she led. As for the group itself, it publicly declares that its members include “researchers,” “teachers,” and “mentors” at [Ivy] (i.e. academics), that it rejects all forms of discrimination, and that it nurtures both the personal and the professional lives of its members. Whether the group fulfills these virtuous claims toward many of its Jewish members is not clear, given that it has consistently been outspoken against Israel, dating back some years but especially so in supporting “resistance” (i.e. terror) since October 7, including through its prominent “Palestinian Solidarity Caucus.” So this is why H was included on the list of some seven dozen to receive my reader’s email: she was (until recently) the oft-publicly-quoted president of this very public anti-Israel group, somehow finding copious time for her anti-Israel advocacy while pursuing her PhD at Ivy in the humanities.

My reader was, arguably, doing the thing academics should do. This graduate student group publicly advocates for Hamas’s victory, in libeling Israel as perpetrating “genocide.” Since H is an Ivy academic, working toward a PhD, shouldn’t she at least grapple with an academic article contesting one of the fundamental claims repeatedly made by the group she so publicly represents?

One thing we can perhaps all agree on, given her response above, is that she didn’t like the article.

As to how or why her response is so objectionable, let us count the ways.

4.

Do not contact me again you deranged, perverted, genocidal freak. Please save your poorly composed genocide denialism delusional fascist essay for your substack audience of 5 like-minded brain rotted sociopaths.

On the plus side, that H calls it “poorly composed” suggests she may have read it, or some, though one suspects, given the content, that she hasn’t, and, given the tone, that she’s just flinging insults. But all considered this message comes across as being from a person who has decided that the current war is a “genocide” and isn’t interested in actually examining or engaging with the evidence and arguments. Instead she offers some childish textbook ad hominem fallacy, calling the competing point of view, and the person endorsing it, “deranged,” “perverted,” “delusional,” and “fascist.” These are also the first clues that she is not in fact operating with the same English language that I am, at least. There is literally nothing in my anti-“genocide” article that conceivably has anything to do with fascism, for example, so she seems to be simply slapping that word on any point of view she doesn’t like. Ditto for “delusional,” which is an odd response to a 4000-word, detailed, heavily documented, and quite sober engagement with facts and evidence, all of which, though fallible, is about as far from “delusional” as one could be. If my theory doesn’t fit the facts, as they say, so much the worse for the facts: dismiss them as “delusional” and you don’t have to deal with them. Orwell would be proud here: the view that doesn’t engage with the facts is the truth, in her mind, while the actual facts are discredited as delusions.

Given this abuse of language, her use of “genocide” becomes equally suspect.

Indeed, notice how she tosses in, quite strategically, that word “genocidal” and the phrase “genocide denialism.” Apparently someone who denies that a “genocide” is occurring in some particular instance is ipso facto in favor of, or complicit in, that (non-existing) genocide. That leap of logic is hard to bridge: denying something is an instance of genocide literally has nothing to do with whether one is in favor of or in any way complicit in anything. I am myself quite opposed to all forms of genocide and my writing that article literally perpetrated nothing, except an article. It’s even quite logically possible to deny a “genocide” is occurring and still be quite opposed to the way the Israeli military is conducting its Gaza campaign, as a more honest anti-Israelist might hold. Her move only makes sense when we realize she isn’t using “genocide” to mean genocide here. It may just mean, in her mind, any military activity she doesn’t like, or specifically any Israeli military activity, period, regardless of whether that activity is, well, actually “genocidal.” She quite obviously doesn’t like any Israeli military activity, including, given her public history, even that in the form of self-defense or that which clearly targets militants while attempting to minimize civilian casualties. So she calls all Israeli military activity “genocide” no matter how it is exercised, and any article that seemingly defends any Israeli military activity—including by denying the genocide libel levied against it—is therefore in support of “genocide.” Now that makes sense, apart from the fact that she’s making up her own meaning for the word “genocide.” As with her use of “fascist” and “delusional,” “genocide” becomes a label she slaps on everything Israel she doesn’t like. Orwell would again be proud, though perhaps her elementary school English teachers, and the Webster dictionary, might be a little disappointed.

Beyond the childish insults and the flagrant abuse of language, also note the neat rhetorical trick here. She libels Israel with “genocide,” then labels anyone who questions her libel as a “genocidal genocide denialist.” This move supplements her textbook ad hominem fallacy with some textbook “poisoning the well” fallacy (with perhaps some textbook “begging the question” fallacy and simple gaslighting thrown in for good measure). To see the problem, imagine I falsely alleged that your friend was a pedophile, and the moment you began to refute the allegation I responded by calling you a “pedophilic pedophile-denier.” That would be an obvious attempt to discredit you in advance, before you can even offer the evidence or arguments to refute the libel, thus making the libel impossible to challenge. Your demonstrating that the allegation is false is transformed into actively supporting the evil activity falsely being alleged! It’s like falsely charging someone with a crime then charging anyone who offers evidence to refute the charge with the same crime. It’s called a fallacy because that strategy obviously doesn’t mean the original allegation is true; it amounts to refusing even to consider the relevant evidence to determine whether the allegation is true, thus shows a profound disinterest in truth. But “fallacy” is too technical, and polite, a term: it’s deeply dishonest and, frankly, sleazy. It’s political advocacy, bullying, dressed up as rational discourse. It’s Soviet-style totalitarian propaganda and manipulation, worthy of a Stalinesque show trial.

It’s not what someone who cares about truth would do. Yet the person doing this is en route to a PhD at an elite institution. One would be tempted to share this behavior with her PhD committee, as evidence of her unsuitedness to the degree, did one not suspect or fear that many on her committee would behave the same way as she.

Note next the nice little dig at her antagonist’s allegedly small following, of “5 like-minded brain rotted sociopaths.” Points for the amusing insults, though once again one suspects that “sociopath,” like “fascist” etc., is simply a slur here that she flings against any position or person she does not like. My guess is that she believes all Zionists are ipso facto sociopaths, which means that for her, those who believe that Jews have basic human rights, including the right to live in security in their ancestral homeland, are evil mentally defectives. I believe, to the contrary, that this reveals far more about her deep-rooted bigotry against Jews than it does anything about Zionists or Jews.

But I digress. The main point about this dig is that it is fallacious as well. Since when, in the pursuit of truth, does the number of followers matter? Truth isn’t a democracy. Sometimes the minority, sometimes even the single brave individual standing against the mob, has the truth on their side. The Nazis had massive popular support in Germany of their time; does that mean they were right in their worldview? In academia, in fact, one is often encouraged to find one’s own point of view, one’s own original angle or theory, that differs from others’. What have you contributed, what use are you as an academic, after all, if you are merely going to parrot whatever the majority already thinks? On this perspective it may well be a plus that you have few followers, or even better that you stand alone, particularly in the humanities. Or perhaps not—because the only thing that matters, when it comes to determining the truth, is what the evidence and arguments have to say, not the numbers of people who agree.

All she is really doing here, with her juvenile insults, is trying to bully my reader into silence by somehow embarrassing or shaming him. As a PhD in progress her preference for fallacies, disinterest in evidence and arguments, and now bullying behavior, are all truly quite alarming.

5.

Please know this pathetic email does not intimidate me, you and your creepy zionist alumni friends do not intimidate me, all of Israel, and all of their weapons, and their international impunity, and their corrupt imperial power do not intimidate me.

So, then, to present this person with evidence and arguments that challenge her preconceived opinion is apparently perceived by her as an attempt to “intimidate” her. People sometimes complain about the current generation of “snowflake” students; one wonders if this is what they mean. Indeed, the truth can be intimidating: it doesn’t care what you think or feel about it, and you ignore it or deny it at your peril. Eventually, we have to hope, it will get you to comply. But at minimum an academic who is interested in truth would want to comply. And a truth-seeker would want to hear alternative points of view and opposing arguments. On what grounds do you believe whatever you believe to be true, after all, if not evidence and arguments? And if you want the truth, to avoid being mistaken, don’t you want to hear all the evidence and arguments? How would you ever determine that you are wrong about something unless you seriously consider the evidence and arguments that support the other side?

H’s reply reveals that she is playing a very different game here. To bring evidence and arguments is, for her, not a commendable attempt to persuade by rational truth-seeking means but a condemnable attempt to “intimidate.” See, too, the immediate link she makes between the emailed attempt to persuade her and “all of Israel, and all of their weapons”: the attempt to persuade is equated with the force of a military and its weapons. This person apparently sees no difference between offering evidence and arguments for a position and coming in with guns blazing. There are indeed academic theories, fairly popular across various disciplines, that hold more or less that view, that persuasion should be construed as a form of intimidation. But now where persuasion is discredited as “intimidation” one’s opinion becomes divorced from truth. Opinion is no longer based on evidence and arguments, whose whole point is to “persuade.” Opinion becomes untouchable, insensitive to evidence and arguments, to be preserved no matter what the evidence and arguments, the truth, might be. Someone who holds this is simply not concerned with the truth, since the truth, to the degree that we can determine it, is closely connected to evidence and arguments.

The opinion matters—having the right opinion as determined by some scale or persons or political agenda having nothing to do with the truth—but not the truth.

This is apparently what they are teaching in this PhD program at Ivy.

This person will soon be a professor in a classroom near you.

6.

I pity you. Your life must truly be so miserable and meaningless for you, at your big retired age, to be wasting your final days harassing young women you do not know and who do not wish to know or engage with you. How embarrassing!

In case the fallacies above, the disinterest in truth, and the “persuasion is intimidation” (and now “harassment”) worldview weren’t enough to have you concerned about higher education today, she closes with a finale smorgasbord of bigotry and more fallacies.

Yes my reader is an alum of that same Ivy from some decades back. But why is she invoking his age? In what universe does that matter? He sent this budding academic an academic article challenging something she publicly alleges, using the email address she publicly posts when making her allegations. What matters is only whether what he (or the article) is saying, or arguing, whether it is true or correct or persuasive, not who is saying it or how old they are. The gratuitous meanness (“your big retired age,” “wasting your final days”) reveals what is happening here: she is attempting to dismiss him, discredit him without having to listen to him, as a worthless old fogey.

 

For the record, discrediting people on the basis of their age isn’t merely an additional ad hominem and poisoning the well fallacy: it’s also a form of bigotry. It’s called ageism—and it’s one of the forms of discrimination that her own graduate student group publicly claims it is opposed to. One only hopes she treats her grandparents, and maybe her more senior professors, with at least a little more respect than this. And may she merit that her future grandchildren not treat her the way she treats her seniors.

 

And of course two can play at that game: this young whippersnapper seems awfully sure of herself, for such a young, inexperienced whippersnapper. She is even arrogant enough to offer advice to my reader on how he should spend his golden years! That arrogance, incidentally, violates the standpoint theory quite prevalent in her social circles, according to which it’s considered offensive to speak to the experience of identities different from yours. Imagine a white person instructing a person of color how they should live their lives as a person of color; a man instructing a woman; a heterosexual instructing a gay. That offensive arrogance makes a truly painful combination with her simultaneous youthful ignorance. In her view, his interest in defending the truth—not to mention defending the Jews from the blood libels relentlessly flung against them—is not among her candidates for well-spent golden years time. To the contrary, when hate-filled young whippersnappers spread dangerous lies, I can think of little more meaningful activity than countering it—however old you are.

But don’t listen to me. I’m an older guy too.

“Wasting your final days ….”

This is not a serious person.

This is a young bully, self-absorbed into her echo chamber, slinging mud to shame and to silence.

Because ageism apparently isn’t bigotry enough she throws in some sexism as well, framing his missive as an instance of “harassing young women.” She may be a “young woman,” but why, exactly, is that relevant? As we noted, my reader regularly writes to many people who publicly espouse anti-Israel or antisemitic views, regardless of their age or sex, including many of the publicly anti-Israel professors that fill this graduate student’s Ivy campus and perhaps department. The email in question, he informed me, he bcc’d to some seven dozen people. Her accusation is trying to imply something sinister here, as if she were targeted for that identity, by the older man she has already disparaged for his age. What in fact was a reasonable attempt to engage intellectually, by challenging her publicly expressed position, is experienced as targeting her as a young woman. Again, this is a PhD candidate at an elite institution. Has no one told her that part of getting a PhD, of becoming an intellectual, an academic, a researcher, one who searches for truth—is having your claims, your allegations, your arguments actually challenged? Is every such academic challenge an attack on a “young woman”? Are men not allowed to challenge what women say? Or just older men aren’t allowed?

Or are just Jews not allowed?

Or is no one allowed to challenge her, ever?

Just what, oh what, are they teaching them in her graduate program?

7.

I try to be fair to the people I disagree with. That’s part of my own commitment to the truth: you won’t get at the truth unless you give alternative views the very best hearings you can give them, which includes giving one’s intellectual opponents a fair hearing and the benefit of the doubt. So I try to put myself in their shoes, to the degree possible.

All I know of this person is this email, and what I’ve read in a half-dozen articles by or about her in the Ivy student newspaper. Though I share the human inclination to make large, snap judgments based on partial information, I do my best to resist that here. For all I know she is a wonderful human being in many ways that I would recognize, so I take my remarks above to express judgments about that email alone and not ultimately about the person making them. Plus, I recently published a novel partly about how different we can become from our college-age (or graduate school age) selves, so I recognize: she’s a young whippersnapper, and has plenty of time to grow and change ahead.

I understand she sincerely believes a “genocide” is occurring. Though I am critical of the grounds on which she believes that, I recognize that if I believed that, I too would be deeply emotional, deeply active, and filled with not very nice feelings toward those I believed were perpetrating, complicit in, or just generally supportive of that genocide. That is why my feelings toward Hamas, and toward the many on campuses who either openly or implicitly support Hamas, are not very positive. So I get that.

The closest example I can think of for myself might be that of a Holocaust denier. Suppose someone sent me a long, documented article “demonstrating” that various aspects of the Holocaust never happened: challenging the numbers, denying the gas chambers, etc. Many such articles (and books) in fact exist, and are all too easy to find on the internet, and all too many people fall into that category. I can understand not engaging with such a person, because there is no point; I can understand, even, sending an angry email not dissimilar to the one this young woman sent to my reader (though more likely I would simply not engage at all). Genocide-deniers, indeed. So I even get that email, too.

In not engaging with the Holocaust denier, in even contemplating sending a similarly dismissive email to the Holocaust denier, am I guilty of some or all of the things I have just levied against her?

The cases seem profoundly different to me.

But that is a matter for another article, so I leave it here for now.

 Follow Andrew Pessin on substack (https://andrewpessin.substack.com/), twitter (@AndrewPessin), or at www.andrewpessin.com....

 

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Even If (Most Of) What Detractors Say About The Founding Of Israel Were True …(Andrew Pessin) (Part 1 of 2)

Guest post by Andrew Pessin: (Subscribe to his free substack)

________________________

“I was forced to leave my study group because my group members told me that the people at the Nova music festival deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.”

--M.I.T. student Talia Kahn on her campus environment

1. 2023 and 1948

It may be 2023 but campus responses to October 7 show that, for many, it’s still 1948.

Many campuses exploded in outright celebration of the barbaric violence, the enthusiasts typically invoking, by way of justification, the massacre’s “context” or “root causes” (in Israel’s “occupation,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” etc.) and the legitimacy of “resistance” to those evils “by any means necessary.” Even many who didn’t quite “celebrate” the violence invoked the same by way of explanation quickly bleeding into justification. And many of those who remained silent about October 7, too, were no doubt thinking the same when they said things such as “I need to learn more about this complex situation before rendering judgment.” Now normally after watching armed men tie up a mother and father and three small children and burn them alive you don’t need to “learn more” to determine who the bad guys are, but hey, it’s “complex.” I’ve argued elsewhere that that silence amounts to complicity, to borrow the popular expression many progressives apply everywhere except to themselves: you’re in favor of October 7 or you’re against, in other words, and silence entails the former.

But now this shocking campus response itself has its own “context” and “root causes.” In my view the twenty-year-long campus Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign of lies against Israel combined with the more recent expansion of progressivism (aka Critical Race Theory, DEI, Wokeism, etc.) has amounted to a campaign to delegitimize and dehumanize not just Israeli Jews but all Jews; and the clear success of that campaign explains why so many are somehow unable to see that the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder of babies, children, women, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly is a straightforward moral atrocity constituting a mass terror attack. If every Jew is fundamentally guilty, then their torture and murder is not merely permissible but even obligatory; if every Jew is guilty, then nothing you do to the Jew can make the Jew a victim.

So what does this have to do with 1948?

The dehumanization campaign above in fact ultimately rests on the premise that the 1948 establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel was a massive injustice. For consider: if that establishment were perfectly just, then the efforts to prevent it then and the 75 years of nearly continuous “resistance” to it since, whether military, terrorist, diplomatic, cognitive, or other, would be unjust. In turn, many of the measures that Israel has taken over the years that detractors cite as “root causes” above—as Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians, as mechanisms subserving its “occupation” and “apartheid,” etc.—would be seen not as illegitimate aggressive measures of domination but as legitimate reactive measures of self-defense. Take just two examples, the security barrier along western Judea and Samaria and the blockade on Gaza instituted after Hamas took power there by an illegal violent coup. Detractors call the former an “Apartheid Wall” and say of the latter that it makes Gaza an “open air prison.” But to those who see the establishment of Israel as just these are legitimate defensive measures justified by the unremittent preexisting violence directed toward Israelis by Palestinians.

If Jewish sovereignty there is legitimate, in other words, then Jews are ordinary human beings with ordinary human rights including the right to defend themselves, by walls or blockades as need be. But if Jewish sovereignty is not legitimate then Jews are simply evildoers who, per campus dehumanization, lack even the basic human right to defend themselves, and all such measures become aggressive mechanisms of an unjust occupation. On this view every Jew is guilty and therefore worthy even of the atrocious harms of October 7, including the babies, and Hamas is not a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group but “freedom fighters” fighting for “decolonization.”

If 1948 is just, in short, then 2023 is a terrorist atrocity; if 1948 is unjust then 2023 is political liberation.

So 2023 really still is about 1948.

This point has actually been clear for some time. Those who follow the campus scene know that the anti-Israel movement long ago gave up on the demand merely for a Palestinian state alongside Israel in favor of undoing Israel entirely. The popular chant, “We don’t want two states, we want 1948!,” states that about as clearly as can be. But it took October 7 to see how profound and visceral that demand is, as it manifested itself in the celebration of the slaughter. For them, the massive injustice of 1948 means that the Israeli Jews of today have it coming to them, as the M.I.T. student above quoted her antagonists.  

Clearly Israel advocates need to double down on disseminating their “narrative,” the one grounded in the long Jewish history in this land, and on finding ways to do it that will break through the ideological fortress that BDS and progressivism have established on our campuses.

But here I sketch an alternative, complementary strategy.

2. Grant Them (Most of) What They (Falsely) Claim

Let’s for the moment (falsely) grant the detractors what they claim, or most of it, namely that the establishment of Israel was an injustice: per their narrative, that Jews were “settler-colonists,” outsiders who, via “ethnic cleansing,” took over the land that became the State of Israel.

Even if so, I suggest, the campus anti-Israel movement of 2023 is morally objectionable. And once we see that this movement—that aims to undo the Jewish state “by any means necessary,” to “dismantle Zionism,” to remove its supporters from campuses, with events, talks, panels, conferences such as this one numbering in the thousands across hundreds of campuses in recent years—in fact is morally objectionable, then we can begin to see it for what it actually is: a campaign of dehumanizing hate that grotesquely leads its proponents to see the mutilation and mass murder of Jewish children as the moral high ground.

3. The Child As a Metaphysical and Ethical Fresh Start

Let’s start with a repulsive practice that occurred for a while soon after October 7: activists not ripping down the posters of Israeli hostages but instead replacing their “Kidnapped” headings with the word “Occupier.” There was a photo of a sweet little kidnapped three-year-old girl, for example, labeled as an “Occupier.” A three-year old who was born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, and so on, possibly stretching way back.

In contrast consider how refugees and immigrants are considered in pretty much any other country in the world. Someone moves to Canada, and maybe in time becomes, feels, is a Canadian; but their children are largely raised as and feel Canadian, and certainly their grandchildren. Three of my own four grandparents immigrated as refugees from Russia to the United States, and my parents, and certainly I myself, feel as American as can be. One or two generations is more than enough, generally, for assimilation and ultimately legitimation. Anyone who claims otherwise—who tells the children or grandchildren of an immigrant that they don’t belong here—would instantly and correctly be branded a racist.

Well, those who put the word “Occupier” on the photo of a three-year old are saying that no matter how many generations her family may have lived in this land, even if her family is one of those whose roots trace back two or three thousand years, then she can never belong there.

They may as well put a target right on her head—as Hamas in fact did.

Now what, exactly, is so repulsive about this practice, beyond its obvious racism? It’s that that little girl is entirely innocent, she cannot be blamed, for anything that may have preceded her in this world. She is simply not responsible for the alleged sins of her parents, or of her grandparents, or great-grandparents, any more than the small child of a Hamas member is responsible for his parent’s terrorist activities. Nobody is responsible for what anybody did prior to their own birth. Nor is it her fault or responsibility that she was born when and where she was.

A child, a new generation, is fresh start, a “do-over” in the most profound metaphysical and ethical ways.

Keep this child in mind as we next consider the question of how to rectify large-scale historical injustices.

4. On Rectifying Large-Scale Historical Injustice

Take your pick for an example; there is no shortage of historical injustices. Obviously, unfortunately, we have no time machine, no way to literally undo the event or retroactively prevent it. Uncountably many innocent lives have been lost and shattered in every terrorist act or war, but there’s just no way now to make Sept 11 not have happened, or the Vietnam War, or World Wars II or I, or the American Civil War, or the French Revolution, or the 30 Years War—or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (which, curiously, is pretty much the only major historical event that large numbers of people around the world ever even express interest in undoing).

So that’s off the table.

The next best thing would be to compensate those individuals who actually suffered the injustice. But if the injustice involved their death that’s also impossible; and unfortunately for those who survive the injustice, they die off too as the event gradually sinks into history. If there are ways to identify and compensate any remaining survivors of specific concrete injustices, by all means have at it.

 The most plausible mode of rectification for some large-scale historical injustice, then, is to compensate not the individuals who suffered the injustices but their descendants. And that’s where things immediately get tricky.

First, from whom, exactly, should they get their compensation? Presumably from descendants of those who perpetrated the original injustice. But a child, we just saw, is a fresh start, a “do-over,” who cannot be held responsible for the sins of her forebears. It seems very unjust to demand recompense from someone who is in no way responsible for the injustice in question.

Nor, though it’s more complex, is it obvious that the descendant of the original victim should actually be entitled to anything, period, especially as the generations go on. If a new child is not responsible for the sins of her ancestors, neither is she deserving of any of the merits or blessings of the ancestor; nor is she automatically entitled, by virtue of being born, to restitution of something that may have once belonged to them or compensation for something that may have happened to them. Obviously where there is some concrete property in question and a relevant enduring legal system in place there may be laws governing inheritance and restitution, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. The fact that something unjust happened to my grandparents or they were unjustly deprived of something does not automatically mean that I am owed anything. I didn’t suffer the loss, after all, and nothing was taken from me; I was born long after, into the new reality created subsequent to the loss—a fresh start.

Of course an objector might imagine here a counterfactual such as, “Well, if the loss hadn’t occurred then I would have been born into a better situation, so I did after all suffer the loss myself.” If so, then she might be entitled to restitution or compensation.

Perhaps, but this objection opens up a whole set of problems. Once you open the counterfactuals then almost anything goes. If the loss hadn’t occurred then many things would have been different, a whole other course of life would have ensued, and who can know what that may have included? Perhaps in this new course of life your grandfather would have been hit by a truck or died of a heart attack and never sired your parent, so you would never have been born—but if you owe your very existence to the loss you can hardly claim that the loss harmed you! Or perhaps if the loss hadn’t occurred you would have ended up far worse than you in fact are, so the loss actually improved your condition. Millions of people have become refugees and ended up resettling elsewhere, where their children, or grandchildren, eventually end up with much better lives than they would have had had the ancestors stayed put. Even if we grant that the historical loss resulted in a negative outcome for you, it’s not clear that that outcome can be blamed entirely or even maximally on the loss itself. In the case of the Palestinian refugees, for example, even where we grant that their contemporary conditions are poor, should we blame those conditions on the 1948 war—or on the 75 years of their mistreatment and mismanagement since, at the hands (for example) of the refugee agency UNRWA and the many Arab states who resisted their rehabilitation and resettlement?

Moreover, why isolate and emphasize only that single counterfactual concerning your grandfather? What if your grandfather himself had acquired the thing in question by some unjust means? Or inherited it from people higher up the ancestral ladder who had done so? As you go up the ladder there are surely many injustices to be found, perhaps in great quantities, particularly given the long history of human warfare across the globe. If you insist that the descendant of the person who stole it from your grandfather doesn’t have rightful claim to it, then what happens to your grandfather’s claim to it if he only had it because one of his ancestors had stolen it from another? Shall we go all the way back to the 7^th-century Muslim Arab conquest of the Land of Israel, which took the land ultimately from (say) the descendants of the 1^st-century Roman conquest of the Land of Israel, which took it from the Jews? Shouldn’t we in that case give it all back to the Jews, or the descendants thereof? If we insist on “root causes,” shouldn’t we go all the way back to the roots?

So, yes, maybe you would have been born into a better situation had one particular injustice not occurred—but you equally might have been born into a worse situation had all sorts of other older injustices not occurred. If you are contemplating counterfactuals and thus undoing history, justice requires undoing them all.

If your grandparents did something unjust to my grandparents, then, that does not automatically give me a claim against you: you didn’t do anything, and I didn’t suffer anything. More broadly, the fact that one community did something unjust toward another community does not entail that all future generations of the latter have any legitimate claims against all future generations of the former. In fact if we go quantitative and acknowledge the enormous growth in the relevant populations over time, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that demanding compensation from later descendants of the original injustice-doers would end up perpetrating against them an even greater injustice than the original one their ancestors perpetrated. And it could hardly be just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice.

Let us repeat that point:

It is not just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice.

5. Still Not Convinced?

Even if you still have some intuition that later descendants of injustice-victims should have such claims, trying to accommodate those claims would literally be both impossible to do and a formula for disaster. If we inherit both the sins and the claims of our ancestors then we will live in a perpetual Hatfields v McCoys world in which everyone ultimately has a claim against everyone else. World history both distant and recent features massive injustices on inconceivable scales; as Arab intellectual Hussain Abdul-Hussain has put it on social media, everybody’s grandfather lost something, so everybody will have various, multiple claims to compensation. Even restricting ourselves to the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict (IPJAMC), even where we’re (counterfactually) granting that the Jews came from outside and took over via ethnic cleansing, who exactly were these perpetrator Jews? In the standard anti-Israel narrative these Jews came from Europe—whence they fled overwhelmingly as refugees escaping the massive injustice of persecution and pogroms. A simple glance at 19^th century European antisemitism, culminating in mass-murderous pogroms of 1881 and 1903 among others (not to mention in 1930s Germany and the Holocaust), will easily demonstrate that. In addition to these Jews of course were the hundreds of thousands who fled Arab and Islamic persecution and pogroms across the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many lives and much property behind. These Jews were all victims of injustice, even if, on the anti-Israel narrative, they then victimized the innocent Palestinian Arabs. How can one demand today’s Israelis compensate today’s Palestinian Arabs without also demanding that most Middle East and North African countries compensate the Israelis? Throw in the fact that many Arabs themselves emigrated from those countries to Palestine in the 20^th century and they, and/or their immediate relatives, may well even have participated in the persecution of the Jews who fled those countries. So today’s Palestinians also owe something to today’s Israeli Jews!

Everybody’s grandfather lost something. To look backward, to maintain and pursue all those claims, is only a formula for propagating violence and instability.

All the more so when we step a bit closer to reality, acknowledging the actual long history of Jews in the Land of Israel and remembering that at the time of the U.N. Partition proposal’s passing in November of 1947 there were zero Palestinian refugees. Zionism itself, in other words, displaced no one. There was, in fact, room enough for everyone in Palestine, until the Arabs launched the civil war and then the multi-Arab-army international war. In the process one percent of the Jewish population lost their lives, tens of thousands were injured, Jews were ethnically cleansed from those parts of the land that Egypt and Jordan conquered, and so on. So even if the Jewish immigration into the land (which displaced no one) were itself an injustice, consider the disproportionate injustice then perpetrated against them in the murderous military and terrorist activity that followed. If the Arab descendants of 1948 have a legitimate claim against the Jews of 2023, again, then surely the Jews of 2023 have similarly legitimate claims against their contemporary Arabs.

So there may well have been some massive injustice in the past. But it’s literally impossible to undo that injustice, and any efforts to compensate for the injustice will only perpetrate further, almost surely greater injustices, if not directly sink the region into the pre-modern Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, in which everybody loses.

Everybody’s grandfather lost something. And so unless we accept the idea that every new child is a fresh start, then everybody has a claim against everybody and all is lost.

(part 2)

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The One Simple Question That Determines Everything: "Is it acceptable to slaughter, rape, behead and burn people in pursuit of political gain?" (Conclusion) (Andrew Pessin)

Part 1

Part 2

By Andrew Pessin

5. On “Decolonization” (and Other Lies)

The “no” answer to (Q) drove us to understand how so many might come to answer “yes,” as a result of years of propagation of a series of lies about Israel further amplified by CRT and DEI. The next logical step would be to debunk each of these lies and perhaps even that amplifying ideology, but while doing so is not actually very difficult it would require more space than is available here. But since those who’ve answered (Q) affirmatively are largely citing “decolonization” as the political aim or ideology that justifies Hamas’s massacre, we shall focus on that one. We’ve already noted both the hypocrisy and the falseness of the justificatory claim, but here we will dig a little deeper.

The main point is that even if one did somehow accept that “decolonization” justifies such slaughter in general, in fact it has no application to the Jews in the Land in the Israel. Applying “decolonization” here is based on the assumption that Israel, or Zionism, is a “settler-colonial” project, along with the affiliated claim that some or all of the State of Israel “occupies” Palestinian territory or the “State of Palestine.” But this entire narrative, on which the “yes” answer to (Q) is based, is actually false, a lie, a willful lie aimed (as we’ve seen) to dehumanize Jews in support of a long-term genocidal campaign against them.

(1) Technically and legally there is no “occupation” at all: Israel is a legally recognized U.N. member state with a legal basis (in the League of Nations and the subsequent U.N. charter) for controlling Judea and Samaria, and even the Palestinians acknowledged that the Oslo Accords ended the “occupation” of what they call the “West Bank.” (Gaza is discussed below.) Certainly the people massacred in the south of Israel were living within the internationally recognized borders of Israel and were by no legal measure “settlers.” And it literally doesn’t make sense to think of Israel as “occupied Palestine,” as there never previously existed an Arab state called Palestine. You may wish the land belonged to the Palestinians, but that doesn’t make it so.

(2) More generally, Jews are the original indigenous inhabitants of this land. Jews had sovereignty or autonomy in this land for 1300 years until the 1^st century Roman conquest, maintained their connection and claim to the land forever afterward, and in fact still lived there continuously for the subsequent 2000 years. Islam and the Arabs swept in in the 7^th century nearly 2000 years after Jews had established themselves there, colonizing the region. The establishment of the State of Israel was in fact the first and perhaps only case where an indigenous people reclaimed the homeland that others had colonized. Those promoting “decolonization” should be siding with the Jews.

(3) The masses of Jews who immigrated there from the late 19^th century onward were not colonists but refugees, fleeing both persecution and massive pogroms not just across Europe but also the Middle East and North Africa, including the pending, then actual, Holocaust. Jews were nearly entirely ethnically cleansed from the Middle East and North Africa and literally had nowhere else to go but to their indigenous homeland. There was no “mother country” sending Jews out to colonize the land to establish its presence and advance its own purposes. The war of 1948 was not between colonizer and colonized but between a people who had survived one genocide and were now defending themselves against another. Those seeking to aid refugees and victims of ethnic cleansing should be siding with the Jews.

Those who counter that these immigrants, even if refugees, should count as colonists anyway would have to grant both (1) that the large-scale immigration of Arabs into the region during the same period constituted continued Arab colonization of the land and (2) that contemporary Muslims are currently colonizing Europe due to their mass immigration there. Stating the latter on a campus today would have you instantly branded a racist—as you indeed would be if you held that Jewish refugees, and Jewish refugees alone, should not have been allowed to flee to their indigenous homeland.

(4) Jews didn’t arrive in Mandate Palestine with an army and conquer it. They bought the land they came to live on and develop, as even the Arab leadership acknowledged at the time to the 1937 Peel commission. If you believe that Jews and Jews alone should not have been permitted to purchase land then you are simply a racist.

(5) The Jews, and Zionism, displaced and occupied or colonized nobody. In fact just the opposite: as just noted there was large-scale Arab immigration into Palestine during the decades of modern political Zionism, as the Jewish economic development of Palestine drew them in. There was room enough for everyone. As of the 1947 U.N. partition vote there were zero Palestinian refugees. The Jews accepted the partition; had the Arabs accepted it there would have been two states and zero refugees. Instead the Arabs immediately commenced violence, beginning first the civil war followed by the invasion of multiple Arab armies in May of 1948. Those wars created refugees, as every single war on earth has created refugees. Had there been no war, instigated by the Arabs, then there would have been no refugees, and not a single person displaced.

To be sure there was much horrendous behavior during these wars, including massacres and expulsions—by both sides. But absent the war, Jews, and Zionism, themselves displaced nobody. It was not a colonial movement. After the war, as is well known, Israel offered repatriation of refugees in exchange for peace agreements and the drawing of permanent borders. The Arabs refused.

(6) Gaza isn’t occupied in any sense. Israel withdrew from there in 2005 at great financial and emotional expense, uprooting 8000 people, as part of an experiment to see if the Palestinians could create a peaceful state of their own beside Israel, a test of the two-state solution. Instead Hamas took it over, began firing rockets, started 5 wars, massacred 1200 mostly civilians, now forcing Israel to go back in there to protect its citizens from Hamas’s avowed genocidal aims. Israel did not occupy Gaza but gave it away, and doesn’t want it.

(7) The various measures Israel-haters object to are not mechanisms of occupation but of security, starting with the blockade on Gaza. As part of the global Islamist campaign (as we’ve seen) the Arabs of this region have been trying to murder the Jews here for over 100 years, and the Jews take various measures to defend themselves. Those who (for example) cite the blockade as if it’s a justification for the massacre are either misinformed or liars who support the mass murder of Jews. The blockade was instituted as a defensive measure only after Hamas, whose charter declares their war on all Jews, came to power and began acting on their goals. As we saw, it can’t retroactively be turned into the motivation for Hamas’s violence.

Or to put that differently: those justifying October 7 say things like, “Well it didn’t happen in a vacuum—the context is 56, or 75 years of occupation” (depending just how deep their hatred of Israel is). But they are very selective about the “context.” The “context” also includes literally 100 years of Arab violence toward Jews including the genocidal ideologies of Hamas and the P.A. Again, as with the blockade, most Israeli policies are a defensive response to the violence perpetrated by Arabs and cannot retroactively be turned into a justification of the violence. There is no “occupation”: there are only Jews defending themselves from genocidal violence.

(8) Finally, the entire narrative ignores the multiple peace offers Israel has made that would have established a Palestinian state and ended even any pretense of “occupation.” Israel didn’t merely withdraw from Gaza but withdrew from most of the West Bank and subsequently made massive concessions to the Palestinians to reach a final status two-state solution. The Palestinians rejected this every time because their goal is not two states but to destroy the Jewish state. Even if you think that “occupation” still remains, then its doing so is entirely due to the unwillingness not of Israel but of the Palestinians to end it.

Put all this together:

Jews have as much right to live in this land with sovereignty and with security as do the Palestinians. The narrative that attempts to portray them as “colonialist occupiers” who have no business being there and who kicked out the “indigenous” inhabitants is simply a malicious lie designed, as we’ve seen, to mark them for murder.

You don’t see this any more clearly than in the latest repulsive practice: activists not ripping down the hostage posters but instead replacing their headings of “Kidnapped” with the word “Occupier.” So you have a photo of a sweet little kidnapped 3-year-old girl labeled as an “Occupier.” A 3-year old who was born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, and so on, possibly even stretching back centuries.

In contrast consider how refugees and immigrants are considered in pretty much any other country in the world. Someone moves to Canada, and maybe in time becomes, feels, is a Canadian; but their children are largely raised as and feel Canadian, and certainly their grandchildren. Three of my own four grandparents immigrated from Russia to the United States, and already my parents, and I myself, feel as American as American can be.

Those who put the word “Occupier” on the photo of a 3-year old are saying that no matter how many generations her family has lived in this land, even if her family is one of those whose roots trace back two or three thousand years, then she can never belong there.

They may as well put a target right on her head.

Exactly as Hamas did.

 

6. Campus Responses

We turn to one last point that follows from answering “no” to (Q): we obtain some clarity on how administrators should respond to what’s happening on their campuses. It’s as simple as the yes-no question with which we started: to answer “no” is to acknowledge that October 7 was a terrorist atrocity, and to acknowledge that is to acknowledge that supporting it has no place on a university campus, no matter what one’s political orientation. Even a pro-Palestinian activist ought to be able to answer “no,” in my opinion.

To be sure, campuses are in principle dedicated to the ideal of “free speech.” If they were truly and consistently dedicated to that principle, then fine, people should be able to advocate for anything they want, including hate and violence. But (1) even free speech absolutists recognize that violence sets a limit to acceptable speech, and surely does on a campus: one may not openly advocate for, celebrate, or incite violence. And (2) in practice most campuses actually show quite limited commitment to free speech insofar as, over the past decade or more, they have become dedicated to opposing “hate speech.” Just try to bring a conservative thinker to most campuses, or someone critical of Black Lives Matter, or someone who has moral doubts about the LGBTQ+ movement, or someone opposed to liberal immigration policies or to abortion rights, and that often gets shut down quicker than someone falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

That the campus rallies concerning October 7 violate both (1) and (2) seems clear. With respect to (1), as we’ve seen, they found the violence “exhilarating” and “awesome,” they celebrated it, they justified it, and, in calling to “Globalize the Intifada!” and bring “the resistance” to campuses they called for more of it. With respect to (2), which is perhaps a bit more subtle, let me just ask some questions.

Again, is there any other identity group about which it would be acceptable to celebrate their mass slaughter? Is there any other identity group about which it would be acceptable even to respond to their mass slaughter by asking to “learn more,” by providing “context,” insisting on “nuance,” wanting to hear the “other side”?

When nine Black people were gunned down in South Carolina in 2015, did anyone say, “Wait until we get the gunman’s point of view”? Or ditto when 49 people were massacred at the Pulse gay nightclub in 2016? Or ditto again at the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand in which 51 Muslims were murdered?

If this isn’t hate directed toward an identity group, then what is?

All the years of dehumanizing lies have blinded all too many to the fact that it is hate that drives the campaign against Israel and the Jews, and that hate now drives these rallies and these campus behaviors. If campuses are justified in condemning and curtailing hate speech and hate actions, then they should be condemning and curtailing what is now going on. Free speech is important, essential even to the traditional mission of the university (to pursue “truth”), but on today’s campuses hate rallies are not permissible: no campus would allow a Ku Klux Klan rally, an anti-LGBTQ+ rally, anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim rallies, and so no campus should allow these current rallies either. All the more so when they go beyond speech, as they almost consistently do, when the rallies turn physical: there have been disruptions, sit-ins and occupations of campus buildings, bullying, harassment, death threats and physical assaults targeting Jews, vandalism against Hillels and Chabad Houses and Jewish fraternities, and so on.

To answer “no” to (Q) is to understand that none of this is acceptable. No campus celebration of violence, no justification of violence, no support of terror, period, and it is the administrators’ obligation not to be silent about not merely October 7 but about the hate that has descended upon their campuses. What’s therefore necessary is to shut it down. To discipline the community members who perpetrate it. Suspend or expel them, if they are students and the infraction is serious enough or repeated. Suspend or fire them if they are staff members and the infractions are serious enough or repeated. Suspend them, even revoke their tenure, if they are faculty members. 

It is simple. Administrators must enforce the Codes of Conducts they already have in place for all members of their community and for all other matters, and suspend, expel, fire, or terminate anyone who violates them. Jewish campus members have the right to pursue their education and profession, to advocate for Israel and or Zionism and for Jews if they wish, in the same safety and security as everyone else has for their identities and causes.

Perhaps the tide is turning slightly, one month into the affair; perhaps some administrators are coming around to fulfilling their actual responsibilities. At several institutions, faculty members who were filmed behaving badly have apparently been disciplined, for example here and here. At Harvard, a student filmed harassing a Jewish student is reportedly being evicted from his campus housing. There is some nascent pushback against the behavior of SJP and an affiliated group, Jewish Voice for Peace (which despite its name is a fringe group whose members include many non-Jews, and in fact isn’t for “peace” but for the elimination of Israel as its post-October 7 behavior clearly revealed). Several years ago Fordham University refused to allow an SJP chapter to form, citing the organization’s tendency to disrupt the rights of other groups (i.e. Jews and Zionists); that decision survived a journey through the courts. In the aftermath of October 7 Brandeis University deregistered its SJP chapter due to its open support of terrorist violence. Columbia University soon followed suit, suspending both SJP and JVP for violating numerous campus rules. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed that SJP, in declaring itself “part of” the “resistance” movement, had thus declared itself part of a terrorist movement, which put it in violation of various federal statutes including those against belonging to and providing material support to terrorist organizations. By the way, Hamas is designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, which itself ought to be an important clue that supporting it or its agenda on campus is not acceptable—because what has been going on on all too many campuses is indeed open support of, the provision of material support to, a terrorist organization, exactly what the “no” answer to (Q) would proscribe.

To answer “no” to (Q), then, is to recognize that SJP and its affiliates have crossed the line from permissible free speech and political advocacy into support for terrorism.

Enough, then, of tolerating this madness. Enough of the flimsy administration statements that suddenly “refuse to take a position on political matters” (despite years of taking many political positions), that decry violence “on both sides” without recognizing the distinctions between cause and effect or between justification and lack thereof, that lament the “loss of life” in a generic way without distinguishing direct targeting from collateral damage. It is time for administrators to answer (Q) with a firm “no,” which entails openly identifying the perpetrators and the ideology of the October 7 massacre, i.e. Hamas and its Islamism, identifying that massacre as a mass terrorist attack and atrocity, and then committing themselves to everything that follows from the “no” answer: recognition of the genocidal nature of the Palestinian movement, support for Israel’s right to defend itself within the ordinary norms of international law, recognition of and then pushback against the campaign of lies that has served to dehumanize and delegitimize the Jew, support for those ready and willing to demonstrate the falseness of each of those lies, and, finally, the enforcement of their campus conduct codes and the actual discipline of those who, in their actions and their speech, openly support terror and undertake to attack Jews.

It's a simple yes or no question.

But everything follows upon how you answer it.

Answer it now.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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The One Simple Question That Determines Everything: "Is it acceptable to slaughter, rape, behead and burn people in pursuit of a political aim?" (Part 2) (Andrew Pessin)

(By Andrew Pessin, Continued from  part 1). 

3. How Would You Respond To An Openly Genocidal Terror Group That Doesn’t Care About Its Own Civilians?

So far I’ve argued that every decent human being must answer (Q) with an unqualified, full-stop “no,” and that the “no” answer reveals the true nature of the Palestinian movement as a genocidal Islamist movement seeking to murder all Jews and destroy the West. Once you understand this then everything about the “conflict” looks different including, now, how one might think about Israel’s response to October 7.

If you can’t answer “no” to (Q) then you cannot understand the actual threat that Israel faces, and thus cannot understand (and ought not to criticize) Israel’s response.

It’s common for anti-Israelists to insist that people have the right to “resist” their oppression, adding “by any means necessary” as a sanitized way to answer “yes” to (Q), thus justifying violence against Israel and Israelis. But now if people have the right to “resist” their oppression, people surely have the right to “resist” their extermination, and “by any means necessary.” On this view there would literally be no moral limits to what Israel can do in response to Hamas. The only people who deny that right to the Jews have already dehumanized them to the point where Jews no longer enjoy the “human rights” all other humans have, as we’ll explore below.

That the threat Hamas poses is precisely that of extermination is indisputable. From its founding charter to nearly every action and statement in the 35 years since, as we’ve seen, its goal has been clear. Hamas murdered and wounded many thousands of Israelis throughout the 1990s and 2000s in suicide bombings and other attacks. Israel then withdrew from Gaza in 2005 at great financial and emotional cost to itself partly as a gesture toward peaceful coexistence. In response Hamas took over the enclave by a violent coup in 2007 and immediately began firing rockets at Israel, each one a double war-crime (fired from within a civilian population toward a civilian population). In the past 16 years Hamas has launched tens of thousands of rockets and started five full-fledged wars in addition to many smaller skirmishes, in addition to perpetrating many individual terrorist attacks. Each war ended the same way, as a stalemate, with Hamas still in power—after which Hamas then took the intervening time to rearm and get militarily stronger. October 7 escalated their program to a whole new, barbaric level, and they have promised to do it again and again until every Jew is eliminated.

It is indisputable that Hamas will never accept any peaceful “solution,” beyond the elimination of all Jews. They say that openly and every behavior confirms it. If Israel is to defend itself from this genocidal program, then, it can only be by the elimination of Hamas. And since Hamas gets stronger with each interval, there is no longer any reasonable option but to eliminate Hamas—now, because next time they might even have nuclear weapons, supplied by Iran.

If the State of Israel is to protect its citizens, then, it has the moral obligation of eliminating Hamas.

The question is how.

Well, how would you fight a genocidal enemy that has no concern for its own civilians, and would even be happy to sacrifice them as long as it destroyed you? By conceding to them? Empowering them? Giving them a state?

Or would you fight them “by any means necessary”?

Of course most anti-Israelists condemn any measure that Israel takes to contain Hamas’s genocidal threat, including the non-violent ones. These include the blockade Israel imposed after Hamas took power and began firing rockets, which, in an inversion of reality, anti-Israelists now claim is a justified cause of the violence Hamas perpetrates against Jews rather than its justified effect. These also include many of the policies and actions that anti-Israelists attribute to “the occupation,” such as the separation fence, checkpoints, even some of the settlement activity in Judea and Samaria (which they refer to by the Jordanian colonial name of “West Bank”). When you answer “no” to (Q) and thus recognize the actual threat Israeli Jews are up against, these measures are more accurately seen not as “the mechanism of occupation” but as necessary measures of self-defense.

Still, these non-violent measures obviously don’t test the limits of the phrase “by any means necessary,” so it’s Israel’s military responses that draw their special ire, for example due to the civilian casualties that result. And indeed, in each of the five wars and other skirmishes started by Hamas, Israel’s military responses have caused civilian casualties.

That topic requires its own substantive essay, but here just a couple of brief points.

First, again, those who answer “yes” to (Q) are not in much position to complain of the other side killing civilians. If they endorse civilian casualties when these are the direct target of the attack—as they were in the October 7 slaughter—they can hardly object to civilian casualties as collateral damage from the targeting of military threats. Or if they may resist oppression “by any means necessary” they can hardly object when Israel resists its extermination “by any means necessary.”

More importantly, if anyone can figure out how to eliminate Hamas without any civilian casualties at all then Israel would be all ears. That is obviously impossible both by all the general norms of warfare—has there ever been a war, in all history, that didn’t involve civilian casualties?—and all the more so by the fact that Hamas embeds itself among civilians, uses them as human shields, blocks their efforts to evacuate, has rockets that misfire and kills them itself, and more. These multiple war crimes in fact make Hamas morally and legal responsible for any civilian casualties that result from strikes targeting Hamas.

Does that then license the unlimited slaughter of civilians, the utter destruction of Gaza?

Of course not, at least to those who answer “no” to (Q).

In fact Israel, unlike Hamas, makes extensive efforts to follow the international “laws of war,” which allow civilian casualties in the relevant proportions and under the relevant conditions. This is not the place to defend that claim, except to note (1) how remarkable is the degree to which Israel conforms to international law in a conflict with an enemy who flouts it entirely—the October 7 massacre of civilians including children being just one example of thousands—at the same time as (2) the international community relentlessly charges Israel with flouting those laws while ignoring Hamas’s actual blatant violations. It actually isn’t difficult to show that Israel takes more care to protect Gazan civilians than does Hamas, the enclave’s ruling authority.

The “no” answer also gives one more important result.

Already in the first days of Israel’s response to October 7 the calls for “de-escalation,” and “ceasefire,” began. Anti-Israelists called for these increasingly vociferously as the days then weeks of the campaign went on, condemning alleged Israeli “genocide” in the form of civilian casualties. But wasn’t Hamas’s mass sadistic slaughter of some 1200 mostly civilians itself an escalation? And part of an explicit campaign of, literally, genocide? How does one come out for “de-escalation” only after the Jew-slaughterers have finished their slaughter, without even acknowledging that slaughter? How does one come out against “genocide” only after the openly genocidal group has finished its round of genocidal activity, and do so without acknowledging that genocidal activity? Think about what that behavior reveals: they have no objection when Jews are attacked, but they condemn Jews when they respond. Or maybe: genocide is dreadful, except when it’s perpetrated against Jews.

Further, to call for ceasefire now simply means that Hamas wins, and can just use the interim once more to increase its military might for the next round of conflict. That’s not a genuine ceasefire; that is in the long term to prolong the fighting with almost surely a much greater civilian toll overall. Empirical experience, after five wars in 16 years, clearly demonstrates that to be true. Nor is such a call respecting the power of the “no” answer to (Q): as Hamas openly declared, that atrocity is exactly what is going to happen again and again, unless Hamas is eliminated.

Moreover, there is a whole other mode of de-escalation, and genocide prevention, that these anti-Israel activists are presumably intentionally ignoring. They could be demanding that Hamas return all the hostages immediately and surrender, and then the war is over, instantly. You don’t get more de-escalating and anti-genocidal than that. It is extraordinarily telling that this is not the mode they are calling for.

Their calls for ceasefire are, then, calls for the victory of Hamas.

If you answer “no” to (Q), and condemn the Hamas slaughter full stop, then you recognize the absolute unacceptability of the continued existence of Hamas, which in turn justifies a massive Israeli response to Hamas even despite tragically significant civilian casualties—which are in any case entirely Hamas’s responsibility.

And if you answer “yes”?

Then by your own reckoning the Jewish people may “resist” their own extermination “by any means necessary,” and you have no standing to object.

4. Delegitimization and Dehumanization

We turn now to the next result from a full stop “no” answer to (Q): we are compelled to examine exactly how it has come to pass that so many on our campuses can find themselves answering “yes” instead.

Let’s begin with this observation from Vassar College professor of Russian history Michaela Pohl from 2016:

The atmosphere at Vassar … is troubled. I am not Jewish, but even I have experienced an increase in hostility and strained silences among students and colleagues … I have been called a “f--king fascist,” “Zionist” and “idiot” for speaking out against Vassar’s BDS resolution and speaking up for Israel and for US policy. I have seen Jewish students profiled and singled out at a BDS meeting. I have felt the icy silence that reigns in some departments … Academics who suggest that Israel is harvesting organs … earn [approving] tweets and clicks—and deal in hate speech … It is speech that angers and mobilizes and that relishes its effects but denies that the effect was ever the intention.

As for the long-term effects of such an environment, Pohl noted that “students look down at their desks when I say things about Jewish emancipation [in Russia] … [there are] embarrassed silences in class while discussing Jewish history.”

This may be America in 2023, but what we’re seeing is an old story, dressed up fresh for the 21^st century Western world.

Years of lies, fertilizing the soil, all deliberately designed to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jew, to label the Jew as inhuman, demonic, pure evil. Once you are convinced that the Jew represents evil, then persecuting Jews, even killing Jews, becomes not only acceptable but even obligatory. If the Jew is evil, then you in turn must be a very good person in persecuting and killing him. The ancient and medieval Christians did this for centuries, portraying the Jew as the fleshly embodiment of evil for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. The Germans and the Nazis did this for decades in racial terms, inspired and justifying their actions by the antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even developing a whole academic discipline to demonstrate the evils of the Jews and thus inspiring the book title, as apt today as ever, Hitler’s Professors. After some decades of this program, killing actual living Jews isn’t merely easier but becomes an act of virtue.

The newer lies, now also several decades old, are merely superficial variations on the older lies, aiming to better reflect the specific evils of today. The charges of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and more recently, right out of Goebbels’ playbook, “Jewish supremacy”—not to mention probably every single thing most people believe about Gaza—all of these are lies, in fact easily documentable and demonstrable lies for anyone who takes a few minutes to honestly evaluate them. (Many people for example don’t know that rather unlike most “open air prisons” or “concentration camps” Gaza has four-star hotels and restaurants, luxury cars, ritzy malls, affluent neighborhoods, fancy beach resorts, and an obesity problem, not to mention a massive military infrastructure.) These charges don’t have to be true, they just have to be widely circulated, widely repeated, and widely believed, so that the Jew becomes the embodiment of whatever is considered most evil today.

And this is what the Palestinian movement, along with its many “progressive” allies, has successfully accomplished.

After almost twenty years of the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel, orchestrated on campus by the more than 200 chapters of SJP, their short-term goal, that of damaging Israel economically, was a bust; but the long-term goal, the real goal, has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Whether or not a particular BDS resolution passes or fails on a given campus, the campaign itself soaks the campus in all the lies above for weeks on end, year after year. Most students don’t really follow the details, but come away thinking, man, those Jews with their genocide, apartheid, and supremacy, must really be pretty evil.

And now in 2023 no one blinks when SJP asserts boldly, baldly, as if factually, on their recent social media celebrating the slaughter of 1200 mostly Jews, that every single Israeli Jew is a "settler"—even the ones who live within the internationally recognized borders of the U.N. member State of Israel, even the ones whose lineage in that land might well trace back to Biblical times. In today’s campus vernacular the label “settler” is a slur rivalling in evilness the slur “Nazi” (which they also repeatedly sling against Israelis). If every Israeli Jew is a settler, then every Israeli Jew is evil, and therefore legitimately murdered. That includes the babies, and the grandmothers, and the unarmed dancing teenagers, and by the way it also justifies torturing them and raping them before you murder them.

Nor is an eye blinked when George Washington University’s SJP, for example, goes even further and openly declares that “We reject the distinction between 'civilian' and 'militant' … Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.” The assault on language and intelligence here is almost as bad as the physical assault on Jewish civilians that it justifies. It is so shocking that it must be repeated: “Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor even if lounging on the beach.” That adorable four-year-old boy, born in that land to parents who were born in that land to parents who were born in that land (and beyond), splashing in the waves as his loving mother looks on: that small boy is an aggressor, a soldier, an occupier, a—settler.

Every Israeli Jew is guilty. And if every Israeli Jew is guilty, is evil, then so is every other Jew who supports them and may even be related to them. Since approximately half the world’s Jews live in Israel and the significant majority of the other half supports Israel, feels connected to it, has relatives and acquaintances who live there, and so on, then the result is clear:

There are no innocent Jews.

The actual Nazis couldn’t have orchestrated it better.

But even this is only part of the story.

To this now two-decade-old propaganda campaign was added, in the past decade or so, another ideological movement. Going by various names—Wokeness, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—this ideology has taken campuses (and many other institutions) by storm, thoroughly exploding after the infamous George Floyd affair in 2020. The antagonism this movement shows not merely toward Israel but towards Jews in general is well documented, but the simple summary is this. Members of Western societies, including America, divide into two basic classes, they say, the oppressor and the oppressed, with one’s membership determined primarily by one’s race. As such, “white supremacy” is understood as the fundamental evil responsible for all sorts of disparities between white people and all people of color. Where there are such disparities (in wealth and income, in health, in education, in admission to Ivy League universities, in police interactions, etc.) these are due to white privilege affording benefits unavailable to people of color. Ideas such as “merit,” “equal opportunity,” and “color-blindness” are derided as either illusions or mechanisms by which to enforce white supremacy.

What does this have to do with the Jews?

Since Jews, on average, “do well”—never mind that many Jews are poor, unhealthy, not prosperous, and have long been disproportionately targeted for discrimination and violence etc.—then Jews are in the class of “white supremacist oppressors of people of color.” (Never mind too that actual white supremacists, going back to the Nazis and earlier, persecuted Jews for not being white, and that many, many Jews are racially indistinguishable from other people of color.) In fact since Jews “do well” on average compared to other “white” groups, Jews are sometimes considered uber-white: the worst of the oppressors. If the SJPers and BDSers label Jews with the defamatory slur of being settlers, the CRTers and DEIers label them with the equally defamatory slur of being uber-white.

Between these two sets of ideologies so dominant on campuses then, Israeli Jews, American Jews, European Jews, Jews simpliciter—are simply evil, full stop, the same full stop that should accompany the “no” answer to (Q).

There are no innocent Jews, not in Israel, not elsewhere.

Those “decent” administrators, faculty members, who say nothing while 1200 Jews are slaughtered—and livestreamed, with the most horrific recordings circulating the globe getting millions of views and shares and likes and celebratory comments—do they remain silent because they too believe these Jews actually—deserve this?

One liberated kibbutz included the bodies of 40 babies.

Babies.

Some beheaded.

Are there no innocent Jews, who don’t deserve this fate?

If you can’t condemn this with a full stop “no” to (Q)—if you remain silent—then you must believe these Jews deserve it. I can draw no other conclusion. Is it possible that my academic colleagues, sophisticated, educated, refined, “experts” in values—for do they not daily proclaim their expertise in values, in their anti-racism, their anti-hate, their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion?—is it possible that the people we work with, share offices with, who teach our children, share the belief and value system of the ancient and medieval Christians, the modern Nazis?

And of Hamas, as we have already discussed?

“We are all Hamas!” the young woman in North Carolina screamed—speaking, perhaps, for all these administrators, faculty members, students who remained silent.

Is there any other identity group about which it would be acceptable to celebrate their mass slaughter, and campaign to bring that slaughter to your campus? What exactly are all those diversity and inclusion administrators paid to do, if not to prevent this?

Or at least condemn it?

But silence is what we got on my campus, and on many campuses—like the silence in Prof. Pohl’s class whenever the topic of Jews come up.

Silence is complicity—and equivalent to a “yes” answer to (Q), at least when the victims are Jews.

 (Part 3/conclusion)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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