In the ten days since the massacre in southern Israel, many normally very opinionated people have been writing about their political epiphanies following the event itself and the reactions to it. I’m sure I’ll have some too. But I want to share some things I’m actually not surprised by.
I’m not surprised that Donald Trump is a horrible human being. He’s been a public figure for nearly half a century. He is who he is.
I’m not surprised Joe Biden has been a friend to Israel both morally and strategically. He too has been a public figure for half a century. And more than that, his administration’s entire approach to US foreign policy has been more mature and more effective than that of any administration since at least Nixon-Kissinger.
I’m not surprised Hamas engaged in a sadistic orgy of murdering Jews. Their charter is crystal clear about its murderous antisemitism. At every point in the organization’s history, it has been singularly dedicated to murdering Jews. By knife, by car, by suicide bomber, by rocket, whatever. It has never deviated from this and never pretended to deviate from this. Dispatches about a “new, moderate” approach, which you can find from the 1990’s onward, reflect what people wanted to hear, not what Hamas was ever actually saying.
I’m not surprised that the Einsatzgruppen who carried out the massacre on October 7 photographed and shared their exploits widely on social media to an adoring Palestinian public, because the fantasies of violent revenge, humiliation, and most importantly elimination have always been central to the Palestinian cause. Ignoring both Palestinian rhetoric and actions allows one to imagine that the cause is a cause of national liberation.
Many liberation movements face difficult choices on the cusp of independence, including unanswered territorial demands, losing sites of historical and religious significance, limitations on foreign and defense policy as a result of war. But none reject the option of independence entirely (and certainly not repeatedly) unless they can undo another people’s independence.
The Palestinian cause has always been at its heart a cause of national elimination, not national liberation. When your cause is liberation, you make painful compromises because not being free is so awful. When your cause is someone else’s elimination, any compromise that leaves them standing is a humiliating failure.
I’m not surprised that the antisemitism raged in the streets of major Western cities. It has always been central to the Palestinian cause and, pious pronouncements aside, no one would ever seriously want it any other way. Not just because the aim of eliminating the Jewish state is necessarily antisemitic, but because without antisemitism the cause has simply no means of mobilization. Try getting people in America or Europe to care about Kurdistan, Darfur, Tibet. Some genuinely do. Some pretend to for their own reasons. None believe that in doing so they are striking a blow against powerful forces at home that are use their ill begotten wealth to conspire to silence voices of criticism of their brethren who love killing children for fun.
I’m not surprised that every single Israeli action in response to the massacre has been billed by all the self-appointed experts as “violations of international law.” There has never been a single Israeli military action in my lifetime that wasn’t described this way. Concepts in international law generally have two usages: the standard one and the one applied to Israel. Forcible transfer, proportionality, blockade, targeting of civilians, occupation. The latter was suddenly redefined in 2005 to cover armies that aren’t actually occupying any land so that Israel could still be blamed for occupying Gaza, and this was just accepted by all the human rights organizations as Truth. It’s not surprising that in the years after that there was a concerted campaign to redefine “apartheid” to apply especially to Israel, and for years I have been warning everyone that the next one on the agenda was “genocide.”
And that’s why I wasn’t surprised when panels of experts began issuing urgent documents this week about “warning signs” that Israel was about to commit a genocide. This just days after actual Einsatzgruppen stormed into Israel and murdered over 1000 people, ideologically committed, by the actual official charter of the organization which sent them, to genocide.
I wasn’t surprised that campus radicals and assorted far left groups in the West cheered the massacre (nor was I surprised that some backtracked when it started interfering with their plans to join prestigious law firms and brokerage houses). The notion that Israelis are a unique and essential evil has been an article of faith in far-left theology for a long time. You don’t need to wait for violence to encounter it. People might oppose other countries’ policies. They might have more general critiques of another culture or way of life. But there is no other nation whose food, for example, is routinely described as some kind of crime. No other people whose language could be described as somehow illegitimate, as was the case in a leading left-wing journal a few months back.
And I wasn’t surprised at the anguish of the proud-to-be-ashamed crowd of Oedipal Jews who were shocked to discover their ideological comrades reveling in the murder of hundreds of Jews on an autumnal Saturday morning. Their inability to correctly assess the motivations of the anti-Israel obsessives they had partnered with at home matched only their inability to correctly assess the motivations of the terrorist group they were always lecturing us had actually moderated.
For all their furrowed brows and trendy glasses, this group never had a serious grasp on the situation in the middle east and were never really asked to. What they did have was two things that were the foundation of their entire con. First, an unquenchable need to be liked by the cool kids of the radical left, and second a distended feeling of superiority toward the Jewish community they came from.
The disappointment they felt could have been an opportunity to face the difficult questions of how they got it all so wrong. But true to form, the agonizing threads about left “losing its values” or just not being able to “handle” the discussion focused only on their feelings and not on the events that happened, the ideologies that motivated them, or how people who fashion themselves as pinnacles of sophistication could be so blindsided by reality in both southern Israel and Williamsburg.
Certainly absent from any of the indulgent online self-help was a reckoning with their own role in the intellectual ecosystem that produced the voices they came to be so shocked by. Most of them followed the same path from the Ivy League to a stint at the Haaretz English edition for some in-country cred to a sinecure at an anti-Israel foundation needing an expert with a Jewish-sounding name to churn out regular reports connecting any and all political developments to Israeli racism, or alternatively to one of the fashionable lefty journals who need a monthly feature on either Israel’s fallen morality or how powerful Americans who claim to care about antisemitism are actually up to something.
An entire generation of Israelis will begin their political consciousness from the morning roving bands of marauders raped, tortured, kidnapped, and murdered more than 1000 people in more than a dozen villages and towns. A politics that begins from the no doubt harrowing experience of being lied to at summer camp doesn’t merit being taken seriously anymore — and probably never did.
