The Volokh Conspiracy
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Hamas Depravity Feeds Antizionist Intellectual Depravity
For those of a certain ideological bent, Hamas atrocities show just how evil *Israel* is.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the traveling Nova exhibit in DC, memorializing the torture, rape, murders and kidnappings of hundreds of peaceful young Israelis by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. The exhibit brought back the emotions I felt in July 2024, visiting the site of Nova, Kibbutz Nir Oz, and other sites where Hamas gleefully committed the worst imaginable atrocities against any civilians they encountered: Hamas, like the Nazis, represents a sort of depraved evil that is almost impossible to fathom.
Yesterday, I had a long thread on X explaining why the antizionist ideology of people like Peter Beinart inevitably leads them to support genocidal policies toward Israeli Jews. I noted that Beinart had a brief period of soul-searching immediately after 10/7, and then went back to business as usual.
Shany Mor then pointed out that Beinart and others similarly-situated ended their brief period of soul-searching when Israel was alleged to have killed five hundred civilians in a direct attack on a hospital in Gaza. It turned out that the alleged attack never happened; rather, an Islamic Jihad missile aimed at Israel fell short, hit the hospital parking lot, and killed or wounded several dozen people. All the details implicating Israel were fabricated. Nevertheless, the initial attack provided Beinart et al. with an opportunity for a Two Minute Hate, and thereafter they snapped out of their October 7 funk and resumed their prior role as Hamas apologists and Israel-haters.
Shany then reminded me of a post he had written before the hospital-massacre-that-never-happened: "In the suicide bombing years it was precisely at the moment of a Palestinian atrocity that the rhetorical demonization of Israel would escalate. It's transparent cognitive dissonance reduction: if Palestinians just did THAT to them, then the Israelis must be even more evil."
So let's roll with that. Hamas has been a remarkably evil, depraved terrorist group at least since the 1990s, when it blew up school buses and the like to undermine the Oslo Accords and present itself to the Palestinian public as a "resistance" alternative to Fatah. But even with that as background, even five minutes of reading about or watching videos from the 10/7 atrocities, proudly filmed by Hamas terrorists themselves, gives you a window into a level of depraved evil that is hard to fathom.
As a rule, even the Nazis didn't proudly film themselves committing atrocities against children, but instead generally tried to cover it up. The natural reaction of normies to such depravity is to conclude that Hamas is, like the Nazis, an evil that must simply be eradicated. There is no possibility of it reforming, of living alongside it, of excusing it, or of justifying it.
That's normies. But if you are of a particular ideological bent, you assume the people you designate "brown" (regardless of actual hue) and "colonized" are inherently innocent. But since you reasonably can't deny Hamas's crimes (especially since they themselves filmed and uploaded them), you have to explain them. And since Hamas's terrorists' are inherently the good guys, being brown and all, the only explanation was that they were driven to madness by their oppression, by Israel. It *has* to be Israel--the putative "white" "colonizer" that's at fault, so it has to be that.
Islamist ideology? Antisemitism? Constant dehumanization of Jews in Hamas media and education? Feh! It can't be that, that would make it Hamas's fault.
So, in an amazingly daft intellectual slight of hand, Hamas's atrocities don't show how evil Hamas is, they show how evil Israel is. This is why you then must tear down posters of hostages, lest they create cognitive dissonance by portraying Israelis as victims.
And this is why they not only believe Hamas's lies and exaggerations of about Israeli conduct of the war, they actually emotionally *want* Israel to be massacring and starving Palestinians, because this then confirms their view that the entire thing, including Hamas's atrocities on 10/7, is Israel's fault.
Hamas is shrewd enough to understand this dynamic, and affirmatively welcomes civilian casualties, because it plays into the narrative that the "antizionists" want to believe, indeed must believe to sustain their ideology.
If you think this is implausible, consider the intellectual knots that Stalinists in the West from the 1930s to the 1950s (and sometimes beyond) tied themselves into, to excuse or justify Stalin's crimes. The leftist antizionists today are their intellectual, and not uncommonly literal genetic, descendants.
[Cross-posted at the Times of Israel]
UPDATE: For related thoughts, see this post by Andrew Fox, The Gaza War and the West's Reckoning:
The erosion of moral clarity within Western institutions, as revealed by the Gaza war, is deeply rooted in the intellectual decline caused by postmodern thinking. At the core of this crisis is a shift from objective truth to subjective ideology, where facts become subordinate to feelings, and moral judgment is replaced by a hierarchy of perceived victimhood.
As they say, read the whole thing.
