Much of my nearly-25 years as a working journalist has been spent trying to get the world at large to care about issues it would just as soon ignore.
In Haiti, the country where I’ve spent the greatest amount of my time, I’ve spent years reporting on the struggles of disenfranchised communities in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the countryside as they tried mightily to ameliorate their situations in the face of structural and systemic political and economic problems that helped lead the nation to its current sad state. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where far more than the frequently-quoted 5.4 million death toll have perished in a succession of wars that have gone on for nearly 30 years, many of them provoked by the ethno-supremacist dictatorship that squats over neighboring Rwanda, I traveled through areas like Ituri and North Kivu trying to bring forth the reality of what the nation’s long-suffering citizens were enduring. In Indian-controlled Kashmir, I reported on the extrajudicial executions and abuses against what felt like an occupied population by India’s central government. In Ethiopia, I tried to raise awareness of the abuses of successive regimes on the population there and to raise the alarm about Abiy Ahmed’s scorched-earth war against the population of Tigray. From a greater distance, I worked to focus the world’s attention on the terrible atrocities committed against the Syrian people by dictator Bashar al-Assad and the forces of Iran, Hezbollah and Russia that have assisted him in his campaign of mass slaughter there. But as Hezbollah committed horrific ethnic cleansing against Sunni Arabs in Al Qusayr and other areas, Russia’s military blew up hospitals and Assad murdered civilians in Ghouta with napalm, cluster bombs and chlorine, the world at large remained silent. In Sudan, I worked to raise awareness about the genocide in Darfur and, more recently, about the terrible suffering of civilians during the civil war there.
I mention all this to give a window onto how troubling it was to see so much injustice around the globe for so long and wonder why the world at large did not care more to try and help those in need. When atrocity after atrocity was live-streamed from Syria over the last 12 years, for example, and a part of the world that didn’t ignore the struggle of the Syrian people instead wrapped themselves up in gibberish about the anti-imperialist and multipolar world to defend its rulings sectarian crime family, it seemed to me that the global body politic had reached a Rubicon of moral failure akin to that which it experienced during the Spanish Civil War.
But when Hamas launched its genocidal pogrom against Israeli kibbutzim and a music festival on 7 October - an attack marked by mass murder and mass rape - the world suddenly seemed to rediscover its conscience.
It did not, by and large, discover it for the Jewish victims of the attack. No, there was barely even a breath taken in to acknowledge that crime. Rather, when the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - itself a squalid, corrupt and bigoted enterprise - responded with predictable ferocity and anvil-like subtly by attacking the Hamas heartland of Gaza, the world at large and the International Professional Activist Class Inc™ in particular decided that human life mattered in a way they certainly never had before. But only a very particular kind of human life.
I have been a longtime fierce critic of successive Israeli governments, which have pursued a policy of ghastly collective punishment against the Palestinians while at the same time enthusiastically embracing the insanity of expanding settlements on Palestinian land and populating them with wildly violent fanatics. I wrote scathingly against Israel’s 2008-2009’s Operation Cast Lead, concluding that, “In the name of defending its citizens against rockets that have, during recent weeks, killed two people, Israel has killed over 300 people killed in Gaza in the last three days, and has done a good job of playing into the hands of Hamas, who have seemed during recent years only too happy to serve up Palestinian civilians on a silver platter to the Israeli war machine.” In 2014, I protested in Miami against Operation Protective Edge, a protest at which a member of United West, an organization designated as an “anti-Muslim hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed up with a handgun.
During all of this time, in all of those years of strenuous opposition to successive Israeli governments and their mad, often criminal policies, no one mistook me or could mistake me for an antisemite because my critiques distinguished between A) The Israeli government B) The state of Israel and C) World Jewry as a whole. Attacking specific governments and specific policies is not the same as calling for the destruction of Israel, which was created by United Nations Resolution 181 in November 1947 and isn’t going anywhere, and even less is it equivalent to seeing hidden Jewish conspiracies of power behind events as different as the defeat of former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (which France’s execrable Jean-Luc Mélenchon blamed on “the influence networks of Likud”) or former Pink Floyd leader and former human being Roger Waters now being more known for being a geriatric crank spreading Jew-hating and anti-Syrian conspiracy theories than his music (conspiracies that are incidentally frequently supported by oft-quoted United Nations official Francesca Albanese).
The protests we have seen since 7 October, however, have had a different tenor altogether.
At a demonstration in Philadelphia the day after the Hamas atrocities, activists claimed that “All of us here are proud of what has occurred yesterday!” and that Hamas were “heroes'' whose campaign of mass murder was “a job well done.” Protests in London, a great world city with a large Jewish community, saw the city for many weekends become a sewer of anti-semitic incitement, including chants such as “Khayber Khayber O Jews the army of Mohammed is coming” and the supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a fanatical Islamist political organization that seeks to re-establish the caliphate as well as global implementation of sharia, chanting “jihad.” [Last weekend’s march against anti-semistism there was a welcome antidote.] In Chile’s capital, Santiago, protests were marred calls such as "Death to Israel” and “Fuck the Jews" as well as anti-semitic graffiti. In New York City, probably the world’s greatest centre of Jewish culture outside of Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters caused nearly $100,000 in damage to the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman building, where some carved reliefs may need to be replaced at a time when New York’s libraries are facing steep budget cut and have already been forced to cancel Sunday service. At Hillcrest High School in the New York borough of Queens, a barely-literate mob of hyena-like students forced a Jewish teacher to hide in her locked office for hours while they demanded she be fired for attending a pro-Israel rally.
Any reasonable person would be aghast at the human toll of the Netanyahu government’s war against Hamas, which has exacted a horrific toll on the civilians of Gaza as Hamas leaders sit comfortable as millionaires in the safety of Qatar and Lebanon. In addition to thousands of other civilians, an irreplaceable number of journalists in Gaza have been killed due to the Israeli assault. Some of Gaza’s best and most humanitarian creative souls - the artists Heba Zagout and Mohammed Sami Qariqa and the poet Hiba Kamal Abu Nada - have been killed. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has collected heart-rending testimonies of the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. In a grotesque Op-Ed whose tone would have been at home in Rwanda’s genocide-era Kangura magazine and which The Jerusalem Post should have been ashamed to publish, Israel's Minister of Intelligence, Gila Gamliel, explicitly advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and argued that the international community should pay for it.
Any person committed to liberal democracy would likewise be repulsed by what the Netanyahu government has been doing in the West Bank since returning to office in December 2022, abetted by a deeply grotesque set of hirelings that include Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who helped whip up the climate of incitement that culminated in the November 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and who venerated Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. For the last year, mobs of Israeli settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns, torching homes and property, and sometimes killing people in the presence of Israeli soldiers, part of a campaign that the the Israeli website 972 has characterized as one of “raiding rural communities…assaulting Palestinian residents and threatening them with more violence if they do not leave their homes." Earlier this month, Haaretz, the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel, reported that Israel's army planned to recruit settlers with no IDF experience and criminal records to defend Ultra-orthodox West Bank settlements As he did with Yitzhak Rabin before Rabin's assassination, Ben Gvir has also attempted to foment violence against Haifa Magistrates’ Court judge Ahsan Kanaan, charging “this is what internal enemies look like" With so much war-mongering and empire-building to attend to, one would think that the most illiberal, racist regime Israel has known would have its hands full enough to not bother strangling the free press, but Israel's Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi has also threatened Haaretz with criminally penalizing its Gaza war coverage.
And yet.
Revulsion at the current Israeli government is one thing, but today this too frequently and too loudly curdles into war-crimes denial and a willingness to make common cause with some base and evil fellow travelers, indeed.
The horrific accounts of sexual assault during the Hamas attack, for example, have been largely met with mute non-reation by the usual “intersectional” suspects, with one French feminist collective formed to speak out for Israeli victims of sexual violence from Hamas attacks saying it was kept away from Paris demonstration opposing violence against women. The fact that so little criticism is directed against Hamas - who infamously shook hands and laughed with dictator Bashar al-Assad even after his years-long siege of the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, killed upwards of 4,000 Palestinians (an odious crime the world responded to with a collective shrug) - is a moral and intellectual indictment of the activist left. An extensively detailed report in The Washington Post outlining how “Hamas meticulously planned and prepared for a massacre of Israeli civilians on a scale that was highly likely to provoke Israel’s government into sending troops into Gaza” left little doubt that mass slaughter was the group’s intention. Hamas official Ghazi Hamad freely told Lebanese television that the group woul repeat its 7 October attacks until Israel was “annihilated,” meaning that frequent calls for a “ceasefire” willfully more or less demand that the Israelis continue living next to a genocidal political-religious group committed to its destruction. And as Simon Sebag Montefiore noted in The Atlantic, as per current “decolonizing” discourse, “Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as ‘settler-colonists’ ripe for murder and mutilation.”
It is rapidly becoming a toxic miasma. Some of the worst apologists for the atrocities of dictators like Assad and Putin - such as the failed U.S. political aspirant Jackson Hinkle - have recycled images from Assad’s crimes in Syria in an attempt to pass them off as images from Gaza (as if the actual images are not terrible enough), and have found their accounts boosted by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Department of International Relations, something that hardly helps the latter’s credibility. Ubiquitous images of the cultish Neturei Karta sect as “good Jews” are shared because of their opposition to the state of Israel even though the group has also supported Iran's deranged and violently misogynistic theocracy and participated in Holocaust denial conferences sponsored by it. Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian writer glowingly profiled in The New York Times and with a Twitter following of nearly 60,000, gleefully mocked the murder of Israeli children by Hamas.
Some groups present at the recent protests also have troubling histories. The Palestinian Youth Movement co-sponsored an October rally in New York City’s Times Square where attendees chanted “Resistance is justified when people are occupied” in an apparent reference to the Hamas attacks. [In addition to the massacre itself, forensic teams that examined bodies of victims of the 7 October pogrom found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities.] A recent Haaretz article outlined how by “legitimizing and even glorifying the atrocities perpetuated by Hamas, and by showing no empathy for fellow Jewish students grieving for the victims” the group Students for Justice in Palestine, which praised the the Hamas killers as “martyrs,” had “crossed the line from anti-Zionist to antisemitic.” There also seems to be a decent chunk of the left that now uses the term “Zionist” beyond its traditional definition the way the right uses the term “globalist.” They don't come right out and say it, but we all know, en masse, who they mean. They’re not just talking about the current government of Israel.
Two important left-wing activist groups in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace Action (a sibling organization of Jewish Voice for Peace) and IfNotNow, have also seriously risked exploding their own credibility by joining forces with the Democratic Socialists of America (another co-sponsor of the grotesque Times Square protest), which, despite its name, is neither democratic nor socialist but rather a campist micro-entity that has repeatedly defended state terrorism, dictatorship, torture and mass murder in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and even gone so far as to inveigh against the The Caesar Act sanctions against Syrian government officials for their crimes against the Syrian population.
On one level, of course, it makes sense that activists in the United States, in particular, would be exercised about the situation in Israel and Palestine. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign military financing in the world, and last year the United States provided $3.18 billion total aid to the country. What goes strangely unmentioned, though, is that since April 2021, the United States has also provided over half a billion dollars in assistance for the Palestinians, including more than $417 million in humanitarian assistance for Palestinian refugees through UNRWA, $75 million in support through USAID, and $20.5 million in COVID and Gaza recovery assistance. This despite the fact that neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas have submitted to national elections since 2006. The silence of activist groups on the abuses that Palestinians suffer through the hands of Palestinian actors - in the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority brazenly murders critics like the anti-corruption activist Nizar Banat or in Gaza, where Human Rights Watch has characterized the rule of Hamas as being on characterized by “due process violations, coercion, and torture” as well as the group having “summarily executed scores of other people without any judicial process” - speaks of a yawning moral double standard. Are Arab, Muslim and Palestinian lives valuable, or are they only worthy when they are taken by Jews?
And the parts of the world I focus on? As activists focus solely on Israel’s misdeeds in Gaza, Rwandan-backed rebels with a horrific human rights record nudge ever-closer to the eastern provincial capital of Goma while another group with links to the Islamic State massacres civilians with impunity. Paramilitary forces in Sudan commit atrocities as fighting in the country’s civil war spreads. In Syria, Assad and his Russian patrons continue to kill large numbers of civilians while Assad himself has been welcomed back into the risible dictator’s club that calls itself the Arab League and has been invited to the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai by the depraved and decadent monarchy that runs the United Arab Emirates, this despite an outstanding arrest warrant issued against him in France for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Needless to say, there have been no marches or international opprobrium or hashtag activism to defend any of the these victims.
What to make of such a political moment? Palestinian lives are worth no more or less than Congolese or Sudanese or Syrian or Israeli lives. They are equally worth defending. But if the current wave of activism surrounding the conflict of Israel and Gaza wants to be taken seriously and be effective, it needs to exorcize the poison of anti-semitism and monomaniacal apologia for mass murder that is currently spreading from its edges to become more and more a defining feature of whatever movement it claims to be. And it must expand to realize that the lives of people in places like Congo, Sudan and Syria and elsewhere - who have died and are dying in far greater numbers than those in Israel and Palestine - are also worth advocating for and also have value, something they have failed to do in any real way for years. Either that or they must admit to themselves that this is not about human rights or human life or Palestinian kids at all, but rather about having a convenient club to wield against their consuming obsessions: Anti-Americanism, anticapitalism, “postcolonial” whatever-it-is-this-week and, increasingly, a generalized, conspiratorial hatred of Jews.
The people who perished in the Hamas attack on 7 October and those who have died in Gaza deserve better than this, for, like it or not, we are all connected by the fragile thread of our shared humanity, and we are doomed to share this planet together during our fleetingly brief time on it. And I can tell you after two decades reporting on war and conflict that however we wrap up these vessels we inhabit here on earth, we all “shit the same, scream the same, and die the same.”