“Many will tell you Israel has a right to defend itself, to safety and security, but are silent on whether Palestinians have those rights too,” announced Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Twitter, as Hamas—unprovoked—rained over 1,000 rockets on civilians in the Jewish state, some of which landed in Gaza and killed Palestinians. These sentiments were echoed by other far-left members of Congress such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Noah Rothman comments:
If Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were truly speaking on behalf of Arab interests, you might expect to hear some of those Arab interests echo their sentiments. But the region’s Arab states have long since moved on. The Abraham Accords definitively decoupled the Sunni Arab states’ geopolitics from Palestinian affairs; they have moved with stunning alacrity to normalize relations with Jerusalem without a resolution to the Palestinian conflict. The usual dogs that are not barking in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Rabat, Khartoum, and Amman should communicate to these progressives that they’re speaking only for themselves.
[Meanwhile], the New York Times reported, the bloodletting has “nevertheless bolstered” both Hamas and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, “the distraction of the war, and the divisions it creates between the disparate opposition parties currently negotiating a coalition to topple him from power, have given him half a chance of remaining in office, just days after it seemed like he might finally be on the way out.” The insinuation that, if he did not engineer the conflict, Netanyahu surely welcomes it, is a repulsive sop to the paper’s parochial progressive readership.
The world has passed these progressives by. The Arab world is not erupting over the hostile actions engineered by Hamas and its Iranian backers, whom they regard as the real threat to their security.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/noah-rothman/progressivisms-moral-atrocity-in-the-middle-east