Decent and honest Democrats must reckon with the evidence of their own eyes.
The unspeakable torture, immolation, and wholesale slaughter of Israeli civilians of all ages — a body count that now exceeds 1,200 and is expected to keep climbing — hasn’t been condemned universally. Card-carrying Democrats and run-of-the-mill liberals have spent the days since the October 7 massacre being regularly confronted with evidence that some of their ostensible political allies seem to celebrate the bloodshed.
The Black Lives Matter organizations to which they dutifully contributed their hard-earned funds, and the student groups to which they directed their tuition dollars, are promoting the image of paragliding Hamas terrorists as a symbol of righteous resistance. At college after college, student-produced statements have assigned blame for the slaughter of Israelis to Israel. Graduate programs and law schools, too, have taken up the claim that the Jewish state brought this on itself.
These morally repulsive displays of solidarity with the murderers have shocked the conscience of many good liberals. The Economist’s Africa editor, Jonathan Rosenthal, described the “hurt” he experienced witnessing “the response of many outside Israel, including some people I had once respected, who even as hostages were still being taken and Jews were being slaughtered, were blaming the victims and justifying the horrors.”
He was not alone. “This weekend has been a wake-up call, even radicalizing, for a lot of American Jews when it comes to recognizing who their allies actually are and who they are not,” longtime political reporter and editor Garance Franke-Ruta admitted. “I was naïve,” Harvard divinity scholar and rabbi David Wolpe confessed. “I did not believe that in the Western world there would be multiple rallys [sic] celebrating child murder. And encouraging more.”
It is shocking, though not surprising. And while we can hope that this serves as a “mugged by reality” moment for so many on the left who accommodated the more militant progressives in their ranks for so long, if the past is prologue, it’s more likely that the memory of this betrayal will soon fade.
Writing nearly a decade ago, law professor David Bernstein responded to a piece by Peter Beinart, who had argued that Israel was overreacting to a Hamas-sanctioned operation in which terrorists exposed a network of tunnels into Israel by using them to kidnap several teenagers. Israeli sources warned with eerie prescience that the tunnels were “intended to stream hundreds, if not thousands, of dedicated terrorists, many on suicide missions, in the quiet of night, to destinations where they could kill as many innocent people as possible and leave Israel mauled as never before.”
Beinart thought Jerusalem had gone overboard and, in responding with force to clear the tunnel network amid a barrage of rocket fire from inside Gaza, had betrayed the Jewish faith. “Don’t perpetuate the mass desensitization to Palestinian suffering and death that characterizes mainstream American Jewish life,” he wrote to his fellow American Jews. Bernstein was unimpressed by the logic not just in Beinart’s admonition but in liberalism’s conceits more broadly:
I’ve been thinking for some time about blogging about the concept of “enemies”, and how modern universalist liberalism has trouble dealing with the possibility that in some conflicts there is no mutually acceptable solution (at least not from the subjective perspective of the participants in the conflict), and thus one really has a conflict among enemies, not simply a misunderstanding that can be resolved through negotiations and compromises. [And sometimes, it should be pretty clear to a liberal of any stripe which side has the reasonable position.] To take an extreme example, if an Islamist extremist insists that violence against the West is necessary until Islam dominates Europe and North America, that extremist is an enemy, regardless of what the West does or doesn’t do. The West can either fight or submit.
The moral absolutes and inviolable ethical binaries Bernstein established here are anathema to those who see nuance as the height of sophistication and regard themselves as sophisticates. Only the brutes and the brainwashed subscribe to Manichaean dualities. In charity, those who are unpersuaded by gauche talk of good and evil assign their own high-minded sentiments to their co-partisans. But that is an unduly generous assumption.
The cycle will continue to repeat itself until decent and honest Democrats are willing to reckon with the evidence of their own eyes.