There Is No ‘Both Sides’ Between Israel and Hamas By Jeffrey Blehar
One of the most common accusations I receive from readers on the left — for example, when discussing why a certain segment of voters likes Donald Trump, or why people are alarmed about Joe Biden’s potential corruption and concerned about his accelerating senility — is of “both-sidesism.” For those unfamiliar, this is a common term for the purported moral error of news analysis that makes the mistake of trying to “balance” something obviously good against something transparently evil. (“Adorable Kittens vs. Crushing Adorable Kittens: The Debate Continues.”) If the concept has any merit at all, it’s wholly inapplicable to all but the most extreme situations in American politics, and America, despite its numerous miseries over the years, is not subject to occasional wars of attempted annihilation.
So why do these same people retreat immediately into the very “both-sidesism” they otherwise criticize disgustedly, when the matter turns to Israel? Why were the first words out of so many people’s mouths this past weekend a pro forma condemnation of Hamas’s sneak attack used as prelude to the more important issue of how Israel brought this upon itself and should not defend itself against what is clearly an ongoing and rapidly developing threat? No, this isn’t Israel’s 9/11, this isn’t even quite analogous to the Yom Kippur War of 1973; it is far worse. The number of dead will likely turn out to be over a thousand — imagine if America had lost 30,000 mostly civilian lives on 9/11 instead of 3,000, with a further 2,000 carried away by al Qaeda to a nightmarish fate.
Moral equivocation in Israel’s war with Hamas and its backers is senseless. Strategic concerns remain as valid as always — nobody wants World War III — but yes, people are going to die in Israel’s war, some of them civilians. This is precisely what Hamas seeks. They will put innocent civilians in the way of the Israel Defense Forces for the same reason they captured (and apparently are now set to execute, on videotape) hundreds of Israeli men, women and children: Lacking all morality themselves, they are well aware that they can use their enemy’s scruples against them. I must insist upon this. This is not “the morality of the powerless.” This is a choice.
I will forever be amazed by the incongruity of the very same people who accuse others of “normalizing” distasteful American politicians, then turn around and explain in the next breath that Hamas’s murderous, hostage-taking, extensively planned razzia needs to be “viewed in context.” There really aren’t two sides to this story. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in the mid 2000s and hoped to never have to return, and Hamas immediately took over. To my leftist friends who keep telling me Trump Is Actually Hitler: Here’s a bunch of guys who are quite a bit like Hitler, with commensurate goals. The Hamas Charter spells this out explicitly and is not meant as mere words: Hamas is dedicated not only to the eradication of the Jewish state but to the wholesale liquidation of Jewry within the Middle East in the name of Islam. Theirs is an explicitly religious Islamist commitment to genocide, not a secular program of liberation. This is ignored in American-media discourse for reasons that have everything to do with (1) a patronizing failure of liberal Westerners to believe Hamas is sincerely attached to an incomprehensibly evil ideology, all of it (“Oh, it’s just a political bargaining position”), and (2) a misplaced sympathy (fortified by years of educational orthodoxy in younger generations) for anyone who can claim the mantle of “the oppressed.” Even if the underdog happens to be rabid, he’s still the underdog, and for many that’s what counts.
But Hamas’s bloodthirstiness is real, its use as a front by the similarly zealous (and far more dangerous) Iranian regime is real, its exterminationist intent is transparent, and this weekend’s barbarism demonstrates as much. Do not look away from the videos. Do not fail to read the stories. See what they have done. They want you to see. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have posted it to Facebook. The terrorists often used their victims’ own smartphones to videotape their murders or capture, and then (in what was clearly a pre-planned strategy) uploaded the videos to the people’s social-media pages. The cruelty on display from Hamas isn’t “the language of the oppressed” or any other such condescending agency-denying progressive cant. Cruelty is the language of the cruel. And with Hamas, the cruelty was transparently the point.
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