In these insane times, the normally awful National Review – of all places to turn for sanity and basic human decency! – may have here boiled down the matter at hand to its essential moral core and put it best, most expressively and sharply.
*****
When describing the various players, commentators have set them against a series of ideological axes: Left and Right, Zionist and anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, the Settlers and the Displaced, and so forth. If I may be so bold, I would like to propose that these categories are wholly inadequate to the task before us and that, instead, we ought to be dividing the observers into just two camps. Into the first, we can place the normal human beings. Into the second, we can place the unreconstructed crackpots who have lost their godforsaken minds.
It is simply not within the normal bounds of human behavior to look at what has happened in Israel and to filter one’s instinctive moral reaction through whatever goofy, specious, ugly ideology one might have picked up in an overpriced seminar hall when aged 19. In their proper place, terms such as “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and “occupation” can be descriptively useful; as a response to the news that a bunch of armed savages have just massacred a thousand innocent people in cold blood, they are utterly, disastrously, spectacularly irrelevant. I daresay that, in certain faculty lounges and newsrooms, the latest iteration of the Unified Oppressed/Oppressor Matrix goes down a treat. To everyone else, it appears psychotic. Well-adjusted people do not read about surprise attacks that involve the machine-gunning of concertgoers, the live-streaming of executions, the beheading of babies, the raping and desecration of women, and the immolation of corpses and respond by musing about how intersectional the dead might have been. Well-adjusted people do not learn of the largest single instance of antisemitic butchery since the Holocaust and write open letters that “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence” against it, that describe the atrocities as an example of “inevitable” “resistance” that “made history,” or that cast Hamas as a quotidian political entity that is engaged in a “process of decolonization.” Well-adjusted people do not see the reams of harrowing footage that has been published and assume aloud that the most likely explanation is that the Israeli government staged a false-flag in order to protect its embattled prime minister. Such thoughts would never occur to them. George Orwell once said that “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” That there is anything much to debate about the egregious crimes that were committed in Israel over the weekend is among those “some ideas.” There is not.
Indeed, I shall go one further here and propose that it is not simply abhorrent to subordinate one’s elementary sense of horror to a set of esoteric abstractions; it is the prerequisite to barbarism. From time to time, students of history wonder how the great tyrannies of the past could have impelled so many ostensibly rational people to treat others with such brazen contempt. This question, I’m afraid, has a mundane answer: Those tyrannies persuaded their accomplices to do terrible things by insisting that the people to whom the terrible things were being done were lesser in some meaningful way. I have no doubt that many of those who are making excuses for Hamas are convinced that their dispassionate analysis is the product of an exquisite understanding of the world that the less credentialed conspicuously lack. I also have no doubt that they are wrong, for, in reality, such reactions are the grotesque product of a brainwashing process that has swapped the rudimentary building blocks of civilization for a set of monstrous self-justifications. It may be terribly bourgeois to believe that it is presumptively wrong to slaughter or rape or set fire to civilians, but, if we are to enjoy any semblance of stability in the world, it is also imperative. As sophisticated as we might fancy ourselves to have become, there will always be a place for the sort of pedestrian Manichaean dualism that rejects cruelty irrespective of its target. That the vast majority of human beings continue to believe this is not a problem within our society; it is our society. Sometimes, there really is just Good and Evil. On Saturday, when the Western world saw both, most of us were able to determine which was which. The remainder were not.
Freaks.
*****
Right. Freaks, indeed – "brainwashed," "psychotic" "freaks." Severe rhetoric but all of it apt and fully warranted in this case. Coming from the goddamn National Review – but 'broken clocks,' etc.
This more Canada-specifc piece is also very strong, echoing and reinforcing points made in the Vancouver Sun op-ed linked to below.
[Edit – addendum: And now this from the New York Times, echoing in only slightly less polemical language the important points made in the National Review piece quoted above:
On Thursday, Students for Justice in Palestine, a network of pro-Palestinian campus groups, is holding Day of Resistance demonstrations across the United States and Canada. A planning document the group posted online refers to all of Israel as a “settler colony” and says, “Settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.”
Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality. Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret.
We also shouldn’t underestimate the role of antisemitism in warping people’s moral sentiments. I’m reminded of the German New Left militants of the 1960s and ’70s. Though they were radicalized by abomination of the Nazism of their parents’ generation, some, in a grotesque irony, ended up committing anti-Jewish terrorism themselves.]
