What the Left’s Support for Hamas Means

T he “Free Palestine” movement is passionately wrong about all of its major claims, and thus a microcosm of the modern hard Left.

On October 7, Westerners (virtually) witnessed some of the worst para-military atrocities of our era, as armed fighters from the terrorist group Hamas broke through the Israeli border and slaughtered more than 1,000 civilians. Perhaps most shockingly, at least 260 people were killed at a single desert rave — ironically, a party dedicated to the hope of a stable future peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The apparently lifeless body of one female raver, Germany’s Shani Louk, was driven back to the Gaza Strip and paraded through the streets — nearly naked in the back of a pickup truck — while Palestinian men spit on it.

At another location, virtually the entire 100-strong population of the Kfar Aza kibbutz was massacred, with babies and young toddlers reportedly being burnt alive or beheaded. Obviously, dozens of violent rapes took place — many were reported at the over-run rave (some taking place next to heaps of corpses), and horrifying photos circulated of a captured Israeli woman so badly abused that the seat of her thick sweat pants was soaked through with blood.

These atrocities were followed by a mass upsurge of support among the American and Western intelligentsia — for Hamas. At Harvard, a coalition of 34 prominent student organizations, including the Muslim Women’s Caucus of the Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Muslim Law School Association, the Harvard Neighbor Program, Amnesty International (!) at Harvard, and Harvard Jews for Liberation, signed an open letter holding Israel fully responsible for the attack on its citizens. To quote: “We . . . hold the Israeli apartheid regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Unambiguous stuff.

Down the road at Yale — no Kentucky State in terms of quality, but a solid little place: I’ve heard of it — tenured professor Zareena Grewal explicitly justified violence against Israeli non-combatants by arguing that white “settlers” can never be true “civilians.” Outside the Ivory Tower, massive pro-Hamas rallies took place in London, New York City, Chicago, and Montreal (among other cities), while members of the U.S. Congress’s hip left-leaning “Squad” joined with multiple allies in calling for an “immediate cease-fire in Gaza” and no Israeli retaliation for the brutal attacks.

Several things stand out about all of this. First, the modern “Free Palestine” movement objectively strikes me as one of the least sympathetic and trustworthy popular campaigns I have ever seen. Almost all of its advocates’ major public-facing claims are, in two words, not true. Israel is not an “apartheid state”: The citizen population of Israel proper is 21 percent Arab, there is a popular Arab party in the ruling Knesset, and the Palestinian area currently being fought over is a self-governing Arab region that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers have not occupied since 2005.

Nor has Israel “consistently refused a peace.” At least four very serious Israeli/Palestinian peace proposals have been put on the table, during formal talks, since the famous Camp David Accords of 1978 — with the Palestinians almost invariably doing more to torpedo them than their Jewish counterparts. This is unsurprising when considered in any depth, given that a core aim of the original Hamas charter is the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the region: unconditional reconquista of all Israeli-held land “from the river to the sea.” Accepting anything less would be, to most Palestinian activists, definitional failure.

The back-and-forth pattern of regional violence so familiar to us all is not “Israel’s fault.” The Gaza Strip is ruled by a literal terrorist group, Hamas — which was fairly elected in 2006, still maintains a more than 50 percent level of popular support, and has initiated virtually every post-2000 round of hostilities by (for example) firing deadly targeted rockets into Israel. Per the formal count conducted by the IDF, there have been at least 20,000 such attacks during the 21st century alone.

For that matter, Israel does not rest “on stolen land,” except in the sense that every country does. “Palestine” was not a country prior to the establishment of the Israeli nation, but rather an oppressed hinterland province of the Ottoman Empire and then the British Empire — the latter of which declared, in the famous Balfour Declaration and other papers, its full intent to establish a Jewish state in the region. Should we choose to dig deeper, a rather famous book exists that documents historical Jewish occupation of the region often known as the Holy Land.

Simply put, activists do not believe what they believe about “Palestine” because it is true, or even particularly plausible. They believe it because it gels neatly with a pre-set narrative centered on “power dynamics,” which defines some groups (brown people, “underdogs”) as almost always being in the right. And this brings us to a very important second point: There are many influential storylines that descend from this narrative infesting society today — and leftists actually 100 percent mean what they are saying when they talk about them.

Analyzed logically, broad theories of “decolonization” are referring to (and advocating) the removal of all “colonial” people(s) — whites, ADOS blacks, presumably Caucasian Hispanics, Jews — from the lands they currently occupy . . . “by any means necessary.” Good-faith classical liberals and RINOs, of course, often imagine that any idea this sweeping and absurd must be a metaphor or a joke. But most prominent de-colonial advocates openly say what I just did.

In the wake of the shocking atrocities in Israel, well-known Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif approvingly asked: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers!” She obviously wasn’t joking. And when you turn on the television and see 40,000 people chanting “From the river to the sea!” and waving Palestinian and Hamas flags, odds are that they aren’t kidding around, either.

Our society might want to move on a bit from The Worst Day in History, January 6, 2021, and focus a bit more on this disturbing reality. Very large numbers of prominent left-leaning citizens say quite insane things quite often and seriously: that they want the police abolished, “whiteness” extinguished, and racial and sexual “equity” across every job — regardless of performance — just to give a few obvious examples. What has been said publicly about Israelis and Jews this past week is said daily and in complete earnestness about whites, black conservatives, “gender critical” women, and the rich (among others).

The people making these arguments are saying what they truly think, we should take them very seriously, and we should and must remember that what both we and the Israelis defend globally — Western capitalist democracy — is far, far superior to any of its noisy alternatives.

L’chaim.