The Left's Hollow Righteousness On Gaza
You Can't Support One Atrocity And Then Oppose Another And Call Yourself Better
This month, I helped a Venezuelan migrant and her husband find housing after two years of processing her asylum claims. She fled in 2021 after President Nicholas Maduro’s goons came into her rural village and massacred her neighbors in front of their children. No one knows what happened to the children. The goons took them. After that, anyone associated with those neighbors fled the village and, ultimately, the country out of fear that they were next.
Working with her for as long as I have, I noticed her expressions and how she talked and interacted with me and others. She studied in America, which gave her a good command of English and made her a likely target of the Maduro regime. She was traumatized by her experiences and what she saw.
Besides living under the oppressive Maduro regime, she shared with me how much the Venezuelan society she remembered as a child resembled American society today. She grew up in a reasonably upper-middle-class town and had every convenience a first-world country had. Her family believed in Hugo Chavez’s policies when he came to power in the 1990s, but they turned on him when his policies began failing. The Venezuela she left was incomparable with the one she grew up in.
As we were finalizing her lease, news broke about the election in Venezuela. It struck me how many progressives, who for months were screaming about “genocide” in Gaza and Israel’s brutality, ran to the defense of Maduro. It was hard to hold both the progressive view that Maduro is a force of good against American-led corporate imperialism and the stories my client told me about life in Venezuela. Does her story and those of millions of Venezuelans not matter? Why is Israel bombing Gaza as part of a war to root out Hamas worse than Maduro randomly slaughtering men and women in front of their children simply because they publicly criticized the government’s policies?
I’m older than most of the Free Palestine protestors. My progressivism dates to the George W. Bush era. Back then, progressives believed the only acceptable reason for the US to interfere in international affairs was to stop genocide. In the early 2010s, Bandar-al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, put that to the test. Faced with a domestic uprising, he slaughtered his own people and progressives, who finally had an opportunity to put their words into action, cowardly retreated.
I get it. Iraq and Afghanistan fatigued us, and a war in Syria to take down the Assad regime would have been a slog, but that wasn’t the reason progressives did not interfere. Their excuse was that it wasn’t our problem, it’s not our place ot interfere. Let the Syrians handle it.
In my lifetime, we sat back and allowed genocides to happen in Rwanda, Darfur, Syria, China, and Myanmar and did nothing. We stepped in to protect Albanians and Kosovo and were lauded as heroes. Progressives today consider that intervention “imperialism.” The crocodile tears from the left about Palestinians ring hollow to me. Suddenly, it’s all too much for you to bear. Suddenly, the “genocide” is too much? Why now?
The excuse, they argue, is that we’re funding Israel.
“Well, it only matters because we give Israel bombs.”
It seems like a good rationale, but it’s morally depraved. Besides the fact that we only account for less than a fifth of Israel’s military budget, the arguments imply they would have been able to stomach dismembered Palestinian children if it was Russia or China funding Israel and not us. This doesn’t make you look righteous; it makes you look hypocritical. Do Palestinian lives matter, or do they only matter if we have what we perceive directly influences the situation? Is this about Palestinian children, or are you hoping we can starve Israel of support so it dies?
I do not believe many of these activists sincerely care about Palestinians. I think most of these protestors, the same ones who marched out and yelled “kill the pigs” during Black Lives Matter and harassed people for “going to brunch” at the end of the COVID-19 Pandemic, are all either self-obsessed attention whores or antisocial misfits who exploit the pain and suffering of Palestinians to seek revenge on the society they believe rejected them.
If they want to do something for the plight of Palestinians, encourage more moderate and cool-headed leadership on both sides to move toward a peaceful resolution. That’s where we were in my day. We were so close to a deal 24 years ago, but it blew up essentially because Palestinians walked away. They believed, as they do now, that they could defeat and dismantle Israel and gain all of the land back. That delusion is the biggest obstacle to peace. You see it all over the internet: Prophetications about how Israel’s days are numbered and they are on the verge of destruction. A protestor this winter chanted that Palestinians were “on the verge of victory,” even as Gaza City was being reduced to rubble. This delusion is what leads protests to march around with Hamas flags and smoke-bomb political meetings in Harlem, costing them what little support they have with the American public.
The problem is, it's not going to happen; Palestinians are never going to win this if winning means the destruction of Israel. They’re facing a nuclear power with a solid Western alliance and an Arab world that would rather have a fruitful relationship with Israel than its destruction.
For the Palestinians, no one is coming to their rescue. No one in America has the power or numbers to change that, and their antics aren’t getting them any closer to that. The sooner activists can come to that realization, the more lives we can save.
If the left cared about the Palestinians they wouldn’t back Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Houthis, or Iran. All of those are oppressive totalitarian theocracies, who have ethnically cleansed all their minorities, and are abusive to women and LGBT citizens. In fact, every country dominated by the violence of Iran’s proxies is a failed state, and Iran is an economic basket case.
The left is simply scapegoating Jews and celebrating their suffering, and it has always done under communist guidance. Their antisemitism is indistinguishable from that of Neo Nazis. And all these protests are about fighting the allies of the US and howling for Jewish blood, nothing more. Progressives are useful idiots of sociopathic, racist, violent, genocide loving extremists.
Unlike the chilling examples of actual genocide or starvation you cite, nothing comparable is happening in Gaza. Simply put, the charges of genocide and starvation are factually unsupported by the available evidence and by the merest of inquiries.
In fact, the Hamas PR machine works at cross-purposes seemingly understanding its supporters desire to compartmentalize the disinformation it’s given. So, for instance, In every video coming from Gaza purporting to show Israel’s “indiscriminate” or purposeful bombing of civilians, not one of the Gazans in the scene appears even malnourished.
By now, Hamas’ strategy should be self-evident: it attacks Jews and then hides among its own people until the “international community” forces Israel to stand down. Wash, rinse, repeat. October 7, however, has shattered that paradigm because its depraved barbarity has changed Israel’s strategic goals.
What is going on in so-called progressive circles is also clear. Israel was always just the stalking horse, their real target is, as they now explain, Western Civilization itself. That explains much, including the deep seated delusions underpinning the movement. It is not meant to persuade but to impose. Hence the irrelevance of facts and logic.
Ultimately, it’s an attack on law and order and can only be defeated by the impartial application of the rules we have all agreed to live by in our society.