She starts with this:
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
Lewis follows with a half-dozen examples of people and organizations that jumped to support of Hamas, and then walked back their statements when they either realized what actually occurred, or were shamed into doing so.
Reading this article reminded me how I was lucky enough to be invited to take a Political Science class at Brooklyn College while still in high school, decades ago, during the Ford Administration. At one point Ford fired a Cabinet member and we were outraged: we didn't like Ford, so we rose in defense of the Cabinet member.
Our Professor laughed. He reminded us that this Cabinet Member was appointed by Nixon and that we didn't particularly care for him until Ford fired him.
"You must always remember this," Professor Sunjo Han told us. It's the most profound and useful statement I ever heard in a poli-sci class, and I remember it still, nearly a half-century later:
He added later, in another response:
"Rather than stating that I am in solidarity with the Palestinian people - what does that actually mean? - I am not in solidarity with the Palestinians of Hamas, I would say that I am against the oppression of Palestinians. (Like I am against all forms of oppression.) That can be people living in poverty, refugees in the Middle East and Europe etc. I am also beyond thinking of one state or two states solutions. The Kurds handled it quite well when they were advancing the idea of a democratic confederation of communes in Syria and not a new Kurdish State there. And every form of nationalism in this issue should be rejected.
Rafa passed the Hamas test. Others? Not so much.
In The Atlantic article, Lewis gives an example from the UK where she lives.
"Ellie Gomersall, the president of the National Union of Students in Scotland, apologized for reposting content justifying Hamas’s actions. Two days earlier, Gomersall had accused the British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer of being 'complicit in the deaths of … trans people' for saying that 'a woman is a female adult.' Got that? A politician with an essentialist view of womanhood is complicit in the deaths of innocents, but a terrorist indiscriminately murdering people at a music festival must be understood in context."
Lewis writes that she "Will go to her grave defending the original conception of intersectionality, a legal doctrine advanced by the American critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw." But that conception has been warped beyond recognition.
Crenshaw herself said that "'This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content,' she told Vox in 2019. In escaping from the academy into the mainstream, intersectionality morphed into both a crude tallying of oppression points and an assumption that social-justice struggles fit neatly together—with all of the marginalized people on one side and the powerful on the other."
And that's how, as Lewis writes, "you end up with Queers for Palestine when being queer in Palestine is difficult and dangerous. (In 2016, a Hamas commander was executed after being accused of theft and gay sex.)"
I step back for a moment to note that nothing happens in a vacuum. For example, The Ayatollah's revolution in Iran came about in 1979 because the CIA engineered a coup in 1953. Zionism came about because Jews were being stripped of citizenship in late 19th century. One thing often leads to another that was worse than the thing before it.
To see Israel itself as an appropriated occupation without acknowledging the appropriated occupation of property and land taken from Jews in the countries around it, and in Europe and Asia, as I wrote earlier, just because they are Jews, is myopic. As Murray Bookchin used to say, to understand a thing you must know its history.
Middle East history is not confined to the area defined by either the British Mandate or the UN in 1948. It includes the entire Middle East, where Jews were forced to leave their homes and businesses and could not practice their religion after centuries of (relative co)-existence. It includes Europe and Asia, where Jews had land, businesses and citizenship taken from them -- appropriated -- occupied. There is no rectifying that. There is only what happens as a result of that. There are only consequences, the what happens next.
What happened when Jews became refugees in Europe is that they proactively invented Zionism. Zionism was invented because in the latter half of the 19th century, as nation-states were created, citizenship and land ownership was being defined, and Jews (once again) were being excluded. Jews could not be citizens or own property in these emerging nation-states. Also invented was "The Jewish Question," as if Jews ourselves were a question that could be answered for us.
"The Jewish Question" was a question taken seriously, or frivolously, by politicians and scholars during the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
Germany answered "The Jewish Question", proposing a "Final Solution" for all Jews, not just the ones displaced, but also for those they themselves were displacing.
After that, in 1948, the UN proposed that Israel was supposed to be "The Answer" to "The Jewish Question,' even though a sizable number of Jews, internationally, opposed the creation of it (you can look it up).
To look at the issue in terms of just the boundaries of Israel and Palestine, and just from the post-WWII time frame is myopic.
None of the above justifies the continued Occupation or any behavior of the Israeli State.
The question I leave you with, however, is this: why was "The Jewish Question" even a question? How different would the world have been without it?
The "Question" sadly is still open. On the same day of the Hamas slaughter, a police officer in Eqypt shot at Israeli tourists for the crime of being Jews in Egypt. Thugs in Charlottesville not long ago marched and chanted "Jews will not replace us." Jews and the Nation-state of Israel are consistently conflated, so that, when Israel does something people don't like, Jewish cemeteries are desecrated and people who look like Jews are beaten up or murdered, as if we are responsible for the actions of Netanyahu. More likely, the actions of Israel give people who hate Jews the license to act on that hate.
For hundreds of years, the joke around Jewish holidays has been, "They tried to kill us all. They failed. Let's eat."
Now Hamas along with Iran -- Iran which used to have a sizable Jewish population until their land and businesses were appropriated and occupied -- are trying to "Kill the Jews" yet again. They are not trying to just take back their land. They have, in just this one instance in history, dehumanized Jews as "the Other" and killed as many Jews as they could. Hamas would kill all the Jews within Israel and without, if they could.
“The Occupation” is a relatively recent occurrence. I remember the 6 Day War. The Occupation was not supposed to be indefinite. Land was supposed to eventually be traded back in exchange for peace. In theory anyway. Egypt accepted the Sinai back in exchange for a peace treaty, but it didn’t want to take back Gaza. Israel won’t give back the Golan Heights because they are not stupid. And they didn’t give the West Bank back to Jordan, less Jerusalem, because they were stupid.
Bruce Hoffman, also in The Atlantic, (“Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology”) examined Hamas’ founding documents:
The most relevant of the document’s 36 articles can be summarized as falling within four main themes:
- The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
- The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
- The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
- The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.
This does not excuse horrific acts by the Government of the Nation-state of Israel. But to not see that Hamas would kill every Jew if they had the means with which to do so is willful blindness.
And this brings us back to those who failed the “Hamas Test.”
Lewis concludes her piece with this:
"The sheer number of apologies and climb downs that followed the initial wave of inflammatory posts suggests that some of their authors issued knee-jerk statements of solidarity before they understood exactly what they were endorsing. As the full extent of the weekend’s barbarity becomes clear, some on the intersectional left are—to their small credit—revising their initial reactions. But others are doubling down. Confronted with real violence by genocidal terrorists, they failed the test."
The Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Always Your Friend.
That’s a lesson I learned in high school.
Some on the left — and, to be fair, on the right as well — have still not figured that out.