These are my thoughts about how I’m dealing with October 7th. I deal with my emotions by processing them through writing.
October 7, 2023 was the worst day for Jews in over half a century. When I first heard about it, it seemed like a horrible surprise terrorist attack. This was the 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. It was a devastating attack that took place while the government was wrapped up in political games, with Netanyahu trying to neuter the Judiciary to stay out of jail. I was wrong. It was a well-thought-out and planned terrorist attack.
I wasn’t alive since Israel was in a war for its own survival. There was never a doubt that Israel was going to survive and be an eternal homeland for the Jewish people. But this was a true existential terrorist attack rather than a military one. As Condoleezza Rice said, “It would be like after the planes hit on 9-11, the terrorists went through New York City and started murdering people in their homes.”
This was not a military action. As Tom Friedman said, “Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.”
As the Israeli writer Ari Shavit told Fridman, “These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party,” Shavit said. Continuing, “[For Hamas,] Israel’s mere existence is a provocation.” Like in 1948, 1967, and 1972, this is about Israel’s right to exist. The Hamas charter, along with a number of other Arab organizations, don’t believe that Israel has the right to exist and it is their goal to destroy it.
This wasn’t a military operation but a hunt for Jews. This felt less like the Yom Kippur War of 1972 than the Russian Pogroms where Jews were just indiscriminately killed. The way to get rid of the Jews is to destroy their country and kill them.
The Bright Line of Morality
As the war drew on, it is important to understand the base morality that we stand for. As smart and educated people who live in the United States, we want to believe that people are generally good. We want to believe that everyone just wants to live safe and prosperous lives and that if the Gazans could just live good lives, we wouldn’t have these problems.
The leaders of the US Government get it. Joe Biden gave an empathetic speech supporting Israel and condemning the terrorists. The National Security Council’s John Kirby held back tears on TV when talking about the horrors of the situation.
But as the war drew on, there were many people that tried to create a sort of moral equivalence on what was going on. When the Soviets would do this it was called whataboutism. This was a Soviet Propaganda technique which tried to distract from the real issues. For example, when the US criticized Russia on human rights abuses, the Russians would reply with, “What about your crimes of racism, colonialism, or imperialism?” Or when questioned about the Chernobyl disaster, they redirected by discussing the Three Mile Island accident in the US.
Some people have been using whataboutism to justify these attacks. They talk about occupation and colonization. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and Hamas took over leadership in 2007. They use it to distract from the primary issue of October 7th, that terrorists killed and kidnapped women and children in their homes. When 260 people are slaughtered at a music festival, this is not a war of liberation, but a terror campaign. When people are murdered in their homes and naked women are paraded in the back of a jeep, this is not about liberation. These were not “freedom fighters” looking for a better life for the Palestinians, but terrorists looking to kill Jews.
As Anne Applebaum writes in the Atlantic article There Are No Rules, “Hamas and its Iranian backers run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger.”
When people do this, it makes me feel like they like the idea of Jews a lot more than they like actual Jews. The clearest example of this is Anne Frank. The most quoted words in her diary are, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” And then she was then murdered by those same people along with 6 million other Jews.
This should have been something that everyone could get around. Terrorism and murder is a horrible thing. But even though there is a clear and moral correctness here, many people still did not stand behind Israel in this horrible time.
Progressive Left’s Abandonment of the Jews
For my whole life, I’ve skewed liberal. I’m moderate but tend to think that government can do good things for us and we should all come together and help each other out. I want to believe that people are generally good and that if we could all just understand each other better, we things would be OK.
That’s why I was saw disappointed and appalled at the progressive response to the atrocities that were perpetrated by Hamas. While antisemitism was climbing to an all-time high even before the war, the progressive left saw Jews as “Just some more white people” who don’t deserve to be protected. This lack of empathy is the hardest thing about being a liberal Jew these days.
Israel was created specifically because no one wanted Jews in their country. There are 20 Islamic countries around it. Yet somehow Israel needs to take sole responsibility for the Palestinians and is now part of the oppressor class. As a liberal, and as a human being, I feel horrible for the Palestinians in Gaza. I want a free Gaza where people can live a wonderful life. But allowing Gaza to be run by a terrorist group will not make their plight better. We need to free Gaza from Hamas.
I want peace. Hamas does not want peace. In fact, Hamas wants a permanent state of war. They attacked on October 7th because there was likely to be a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia that likely would have restarted the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
I can’t help but see this as antisemitism exceptionalism as highlighted in the Atlantic article The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test by Helen Lewis. Lewis starts:
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?
The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test by Helen Lewis
Lewis continues by talking about how the left now defines itself by Intersectionality. This concept is one of those things that makes a lot of sense. Kimberlé Crenshaw created the concept to point out that a black woman is more discriminated against than a black man or a white woman. But intersectionality wouldn’t always stay so clear.
However, Crenshaw herself has expressed surprise at how the meaning of intersectionality has changed through its invocation in pop culture. “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.
That’s how 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.) It’s also how you end up with candidates for Labour Party leadership signing a pledge that insists there “is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights,” even when—as in the eligibility rules for women’s sports—some wins for one group plainly come at the expense of the other.
The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test by Helen Lewis
The problem here is that the Jews opted out of this competition for victimhood. We can be given the most horrible situation and create something beautiful out of it. After 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust we were given some land in the desert, surrounded by enemies that would surely destroy us. We turned this into a vibrant and green democracy. That doesn’t mean that we’re a minority being attacked.
Antisemitism Against a Country
It’s common for people to say things, especially on college campuses like, “I’m not antisemitic, but I’m just Anti-Zionist” or, “This is just a political thing.” As a liberal, I used to think that this meant, “I don’t agree with the policies of the Israeli government.” Being against Israeli policy can be very pro-Israel. I was OK with it and thought that BDS was on campus to make a political statement. But this was different. It really meant “I don’t believe that Israel should exist.” It’s like saying I’m against America because I don’t like Joe Biden. Imagine in the US if people said, “I’m not against the American people, but I am against America.”
The word antisemitism has an interesting history. While it now means Jew Hatred it was created to mean something else. It was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, who created a political party, the Antisemites’ League, to ensure that Jews could not conquer the non-Jewish world. Traditional prejudice and the occasional pogrom was not good enough. They needed political parties, grassroots organizations, lobbying agencies, newspapers, learned journals, and a variety of voluntary associations to deal with the Jews. In short, you can be an antisemite and not hate individual Jews.
So how does this relate to Israel? Israel was created in the early part of the 20th century when the European powers cut up the world and gave it to various different groups. Unlike most of the former colonies in Africa and Asia that became independent nations, Israel faced a unique challenge. Its Arab neighbors did not accept its existence as a legitimate state and refused to recognize it.
In a true case of exceptionalism, a whole new definition of refugee was created. All of the refugees in the world are handled by UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After the war of independence of 1948, a new organization was created specifically to handle Palestinian refugees, the UNWRA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. While the standard definition of a refugee is based on a fear of persecution and serious harm, this new definition for Palestinian Refugees is based on losing their homes in the 1948 conflict.
So Palestinian refugees are somehow different than everyone else, including the Jews. While Palestinian refugees under UNWRA have the right to return to their homes pre-1948, there’s no place for the Jews to go. This is extremely different than colonization in South Africa. In this case the Jews are the indigenous people. Colonists have a place to go back to. While it is horrible for anyone to have to leave their homes, the calls for Jews to “Go back to Poland!” don’t make sense. Most of the recent immigrants to Israel from countries like Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Iraq are in Israel because they were expelled from their home countries as a collective punishment for the creation of Israel. But you never hear, “Go back to Egypt!” or “Go back to Iraq!” But that doesn’t make sense. They just want the Jews to go away.
While people can say anti-Israel sentiments or anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism they’re not thinking it through. They need to remember why Israel was founded and what Israel is. Israel was created to give Jews a place to go when we were persecuted in all of the other parts of the world. As Wilhelm Marr knew in Germany, hating individual Jews only gets you so far. With Israel, there’s an opportunity to persecute a large swath of Jews together.
Where to Go Next
This is a very complicated situation. As Tom Friedman says in the New York Times, there are three different wars going on simultaneously:
- A war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group
- A war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future
- A war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies
Let’s start with the first one. Yossi Klein Halevi has a good article about this in his blog What this war is about. This is an existential threat for Israel. There are many words that are thrown around in this war like genocide. While Israel’s bombing campaign has led to horrible suffering, Israel’s goal is not the destruction of Gaza and all of its people. Hamas’s stated goals, on the other hand, is the destruction of Israel.
While Israel might be able to do more to protect civilians, I don’t know enough to judge that. I do know that Israel is not wantonly attacking Gaza. It is having a proportional response to the attack. According to international law, it is taking into account the nature of the threat and civilian lives. The problem is that it’s being attacked by a genocidal enemy hiding behind civilians. This means that many are unfortunately killed when Hamas uses them as human shields.
It’s clear to everyone that “Someone should do something about this. We can’t have a terrorist origination leading 2 million people.” Just in case you still had doubts about Hamas’s leadership before the war and how regular citizens felt, take a look at Whispered in Gaza, a series of animated interviews with Palestinians. As Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, writes that all the Arab leaders he knows (except Iran) believe that Hamas has to be destroyed. They say this in private because the war is an ugly one, they don’t want to get Palestinian blood on their hands or be seen as supporting Israel.
But though it’s imperative for Israel to destroy Hamas, there needs to be a path forward to counteract Hamas and create a Palestinian government that can rule Gaza with the goal of helping the people of Gaza rather than the goal of destroying Israel. This will be a challenge for Israel and the international community. Tom Friedman sums it up well in the Times:
There’s a single formula that can maximize the chances that the forces of decency can prevail in all three. It is the formula that I think President Biden is pushing, even if he can’t spell it all out publicly now — and we should all push it with him: You should want Hamas defeated, as many Gazan civilians as possible spared, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his extremist allies booted, all the hostages returned, Iran deterred and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reinvigorated in partnership with moderate Arab states.
Tom Friedman, Understanding the True Nature of the Hamas-Israel War, November 23, 2023
Coda
After the attacks, there was this desire to intellectualize the attacks. The New York Times wrote After Attack on Israel, Politicians Are Asked, ‘Which Side Are You On?’
They quoted Rachel Timoner, the Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope and a well-known voice for progressive Jews.
In a phone interview, she said that Hamas had always been dedicated to the destruction and murder of Jews and that Israel had “every right to defend itself and defend its people.”
“On another day let’s talk about oppression and what is the path to safety, determination, and freedom for both peoples,” she added. “Today, let’s not protest people who are in the midst of being murdered and kidnapped.
After Attack on Israel, Politicians Are Asked, ‘Which Side Are You On?