For those Jews who pride themselves on their rejection of the state of Israel, or in their commitment to condemning its supposed sins, the events of October 7 came as a brutal shock—despite the fact that Hamas has been telegraphing, and acting on, its intentions since its formation. Jewish anti-Zionists were also taken aback by the willingness of so many radical leftists to cheer on the massacre. Shany Mor takes a closer look at the responses of those he terms “Oedipal Jews.”
For all their furrowed brows and trendy glasses, this group never had a serious grasp on the situation in the Middle East. . . . What they did have were 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, their agonizing [social-media] threads about the left “losing its values” or just not being able to “handle” the discussion focused only on their own 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. . . . 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.
Read more on Medium: https://medium.com/@shanymor/maybe-shocked-but-not-surprised-38dc145e294b