Seth Mandel: ‘Squandering Sympathy’ By Surviving
These observations about Israel’s squandering nature are offered not in anger but in sadness, of course. Why can’t Israel ever do anything constructive with sympathy?Dr. Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh: America’s Mainstreaming of Hamas, Antisemitism, and Terror
It’s not as though there’s some mysterious equation to solve here. Israelis gained all that sympathy on Oct. 7 by dying horrible deaths. What’s more important, sympathy or survival? The world is very disappointed in the Jewish state’s choice.
It’s an old story. After Germany’s 1938 annexation of Austria, Jews were desperate for escape. President Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t willing to effect any change in U.S. immigration policy, either by executive action or pressuring Congress. But he was willing to organize a conference of nations who would talk and talk and talk about how sad it all was, because that at least could “show our sympathy with the victims of those conditions.”
“Sympathy” for the Jews usually means a death sentence. And FDR ensured it would be so, as Rick Richman writes in And None Shall Make Them Afraid, his recent book of key moments in the life and work of various Zionist figures (also reviewed in Commentary’s July/August issue here): “The text of the invitation included an assurance that no country would be expected to change its laws to admit more refugees or to provide any funds to resettle refugees; any financing, the invitation noted, would have to be provided by private organizations.”
FDR also instructed the State Department to prevent any consideration of sending the fleeing European Jews to Palestine. Other Western democracies were no better.
In attendance to watch all this unfold was Golda Meir. She was both dejected and resolute. The lesson was that “Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive.” The conference inspired one of her most famous comments: “There is one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”
Meir would return to this theme time and again after the establishment of the state of Israel and her rise to the prime minister’s office. The world, she repeatedly recognized, was full of sympathy for dead and defeated Jews, and the Jews would squander that sympathy by surviving. What has changed isn’t the world’s preferences but the Jewish people’s ability to render those preferences irrelevant.
We are currently witnessing the mainstreaming of Hamas in the U.S. Thousands of protesters across American cities and more than 200 university campuses have been calling to destroy the small, democratic, Jewish-majority state instead of advocating for a peaceful Palestinian one alongside Israel.Why do feminists turn a blind eye to Islamists?
Since Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, tens of thousands of American university students, faculty, and supporters have been chanting, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," a call to replace the only Jewish-majority state with the 23rd Muslim Arab-majority one. Behind many of the demonstrations is Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas-linked group which quotes or echoes slogans and rhetoric from the 1988 Hamas Charter and Hamas leaders.
Hamas' jihadi rhetoric and extremist ideology is inciting violence against Jews and Jewish institutions across North America today. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar has threatened to target Jews "wherever they are." In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, Israel and diaspora Jewry are both targeted for elimination.
Other professional feminists and ‘thought leaders’ have been similarly silent on Hamas’s actions. A widely circulated open letter, entitled ‘Feminists for a free Palestine. Stop the genocide. End the Occupation’, neither mentions Jewish women nor condemns Hamas. By early November, over 1,200 ‘scholars who work in feminist, queer and trans studies’ had signed the letter.
Two things are at play in the warped response of Western feminists to the atrocities of 7 October. Firstly, their embrace of the ideology of ‘decolonisation’ and their simple-minded view of Israel as a ‘settler-colonial’ state has prevented them from standing in solidarity with Israeli women. They see them as part of an evil occupying force and therefore as less than human. Secondly, they are unwilling to criticise Islamist terror and violence, largely for fear of being labelled Islamophobic.
Indeed, Western feminists’ unwillingness to condemn Islamist violence against women extends beyond Hamas’s rape and mutilation of Jews. They have also shown themselves incapable of standing up for women persecuted by Islamist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan.
It is over a year since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed by Iran’s religious police for violating Iran’s hijab law and failing to wear the veil ‘properly’. Amini’s killing may have prompted mass protests by brave, hijab-free women in Iran. But it has prompted very little in the way of solidarity in the West. In November, the death of teenager Armita Geravand, also apparently at the hands of Iran’s morality police, passed by with even less comment or outrage. It seems that Western feminists are too frightened of appearing Islamophobic to do what Iranian women have bravely been doing – challenging a misogynistic state that compels women to wear a veil.
Western feminists have shown a similarly curious reluctance to criticise the Taliban. After all, the Taliban ought to be an obvious target of feminist ire. Since it regained control of Afghanistan in 2021 it has banned Afghan women from any form of political participation, prevented them from dressing how they choose and banned them from education and most forms of work. Yet you will struggle to find much condemnation of this medieval sexism from Western feminists and ostentatiously ‘progressive’ organisations this year. After reports emerged that the Taliban has been imprisoning survivors of domestic abuse ‘for their own protection’, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan meekly said that the Taliban’s handling of ‘gender-based violence complaints’ was ‘unclear and inconsistent’. Which is one way of describing a movement that systematically degrades and oppresses women.
There does seem to be a massive Islamist-shaped blindspot here. Feminists and their progressive apologists are only too happy to call out relatively trivial acts of sexism in the West. Yet they show a repeated unwillingness to stick up for women suffering at the hands of Islamists, from Iran to Israel to Afghanistan.
If we want to advance women’s freedom around the world, then we cannot ignore the misogyny of the Islamists.