To many Jews (and a few Gentiles) on the political left, it has been shocking to see those they saw as political allies rush to excuse or even to endorse Hamas’s recent atrocities. Often, they accuse these leftist apologists for terror of betraying their principles. Jonathan Chait—a writer of the center-left himself—has a very different analysis:
I believe, to the contrary, that Hamas defenders are applying their own principles correctly. The problem is the principles themselves.
The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old Communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution.
Concepts like . . . treating the self-appointed representative of any oppressed group as beyond criticism, are banal on the left. Yet for some progressive Jews, it is shocking to see it extended to the slaughter of babies, even though that is its logical endpoint. The radical rhetoric of decolonization, with its glaring absence of any limiting principles, was not just a rhetorical cover to bully some hapless school administrator into changing the curriculum. Phrases like “by any means necessary” were not just figures of speech. Any means included any means, very much including murder.
Both [the progressive Jewish writers] Julia Ioffe and Eric Levitz have pointed out that decolonization logic ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European origins and came to Israel after suffering the same ethnic cleansing as the Palestinians. This is correct. But what if it weren’t? If every Israeli Jew descended from Ashkenazi stock, would it be okay to shoot their babies? . . . That they feel compelled even to contest this point underscores the barbarous premises of their opponents.
The aforementioned Levitz—a journalist named by Chait as among those shocked by leftist apologias for terrorism—has spent much of the past few days splitting hairs over whether finding infants without heads is evidence that infants were, in fact, beheaded.
Read more on New York Magazine: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/hamas-jews-illiberal-left-progressive-israel-terrorism.html