Not every silence is a sign of latent anti-Semitism
The Western values that lead us to condemn Hamas unequivocally demand we question some actions of the Netanyahu government’s military operation in Gaza.
This week at a conference in London, Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her story of moving from a Muslim culture in Africa to a Western society in The Netherlands when she was old enough to choose. Barely four weeks after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, slaughtering 1400 innocent Israelis and kidnapping more than 230 more, the Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician spoke about how “a story is also a moment when you are forced to make choices”.
“I think we find ourselves today, right now, in a moment where we have to make a moral choice,” she said. “I sit here and I can say, today, given what’s going on, I support Israel. No buts. No ifs. Unequivocal.”
Hirsi Ali is a brave, intelligent champion of Western values. She knows better than most the difference between the stifling Islamic culture she was born into and the Western society she embraced as an adult. Still, I was unsettled by her words. If this brilliant woman says no ifs, no buts, to Israel, won’t this become a battle of opposing cliches between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel forces?
If Hirsi Ali meant that apropos Hamas and Israel, she stands unequivocally with Israel, then so do I. So must we all. The devastating evil perpetrated on October 7 provided a moment of startling moral clarity. When terrorists invade a country, butcher and burn entire families, behead babies, murder young people at a music festival, take grandparents and children hostage, there are no ifs, no buts.
October 7 was the easy test of our morality; what comes after is much harder. Those same Western values that lead us to condemn Hamas unequivocally demand we question some actions of the Netanyahu government’s military operation in Gaza. Why should anyone give, or be expected to give, Israel unconditional support? I can’t, just as I wouldn’t give any person, any prime minister, any country – even my own country – unequivocal support.
Many will stay quiet because when there is no longer clarity, only fog, it is hard to know what to say. But one of the greatest virtues of the West is our freedom to hold our governments to account. That freedom attaches to ignorant as well as thoughtful people. Hence, the studied stupidity of the most highly educated students at Harvard, members of student bodies that signed a collective letter condemning Israel after October 7. Their actions showcased their staggering level of historical illiteracy to the world and to prospective employers. They should learn that words carry consequences.
The Harvard ship of fools is part of an ill-informed global armada. Ahead of a pro-Palestinian rally on October 23, Melbourne art group This Mob Arts Collective displayed a banner from a workshop at the Collingwood Yards arts precinct that read: “Free Palestine from the colonising dumb white dogs!! Abolish Israel.” They had nothing to say about Hamas terrorists. Another banner read “From the river to the sea.” Did the author understand that this chant demands the death or deportation of nine million Israelis who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – in other words, an end to the state of Israel?
After complaints about these foul banners, Collingwood Yards acting chief executive Nail Aykan condemned anti-Semitism. Asked why he didn’t condemn the Hamas attacks, Aykan said “word count matters. It was really a matter of keeping it succinct and keeping the word count down; otherwise, it becomes beyond people’s attention span.”
It takes five words to say: “We unequivocally condemn Hamas terrorism.” Once your organisation becomes a mouthpiece for gratuitous political commentary, you would be expected to say something about atrocities. Silence in these circumstances would be seen, rightly, as a form of clandestine anti-Semitism. Words matter more than word counts.
Putting side the idiocy of Collingwood Yards, not all silence is inherently wicked. Not every university, company or arts organisation enters the political domain, and even if they are beneficiaries of Jewish largesse, there is no reason for them to condemn Hamas violence against Jews any more than to condemn the barbaric treatment of Uighurs. If there are strings attached to donations, those strings should be disclosed upfront. Donors can always take their money elsewhere.
One can read about the right to self-defence, about just war, and what Michael Walzer has said about proportionality not meaning tit for tat, as in a family feud, and still wince at the uncertainty of these terms. Proportionality, writes the Jewish American intellectual and author of Just and Unjust Wars, doesn’t mean “the Hatfields kill three McCoys so the McCoys must kill three Hatfields”.
He says: “The use of the term is different with regard to war, because war isn’t an act of retribution: it isn’t a backward-looking activity, and the law of even-Steven doesn’t apply. Like it or not, war is always purposive in character; it has a goal, an end-in-view.”
Israel’s goal is clear, simple and justified: the destruction of Hamas so Israelis are safe from terrorism.
But Israel’s right to self-defence is not so simple in the real world. The Israelis told Palestinian civilians to move south, giving them time to escape bombardment of northern Gaza. But the Israel Defence Forces also have attacked southern Gaza in their quest to destroy the Hamas terrorist network. And Hamas put roadblocks in the way of an exodus to the south. And the IDF bombed the Palestinian refugee camp at Jabalia in northern Gaza declaring there were legitimate Hamas targets there. And if, as one brave Arab journalist said this week, Hamas had built underground safe houses for civilians while building its headquarters for terrorists, more civilians would be alive.
How can there be certainty when real information is so incomplete? Even with perfect information, the dilemma remains: if we reward Hamas’s strategy of using Palestinians as human shields by saying this must limit Israel’s right of self-defence, aren’t we guaranteeing this evil will become the strategy of choice for every insurgent group?
What is happening in Gaza is not genocide, either. As Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote in The Atlantic last week: “The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like it. The Israeli goal in Gaza, for practical reasons, among others, is to minimise the number of civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organisations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximising the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest.”
One should be sickened by comments by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, when he tried to blame Israel for Hamas terrorism – The Wall Street Journal was right put him on a special pedestal “in the every-expanding hall of shame for propagators of global disorder” – and simultaneously be squeamish about IDF operations that may embolden another hundred years of Hamas-led grievances by killing thousands of innocent people.
One can pore over thousands of words about the establishment of Israel, including this from Daniel Finkelstein in The Times: “A century of slaughter and oppression of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, had made the case for a safe space for Jews unanswerable. And the repeated failings of other states to open themselves to Jews, even when they knew of mass murder, meant that this safe space would have to be a Jewish state. And the UN reached the same conclusion. In 1947, having toured Palestine and visited Jewish refugee camps in Europe, it proposed to divide the land between Jews and Palestinian Arabs with a state for each. The Jews accepted, the Arab states launched a war. And the Palestinians are still fighting this partition plan.”
And still, if Israel eradicates Hamas in Gaza, the same ideology exists elsewhere, across the Middle East, in Europe, Britain and likely Australia, too. By killing thousands of Palestinians in its quest to destroy Hamas, Israel will also empower a ragtag team of useful idiots, the so-called progressives in the West who cannot distinguish between the moral clarity of October 7 and what follows.
Many, especially Jews, are dismayed our streets have been overrun with pro-Palestinian protests. But the price of freedom is that we will hear from people with whom we disagree. Disagreement, unlike incitement to violence, is not illegal. And the term hate speech should not be exploited to dull our ability to deal with disagreements.
After October 7, many of us are grasping with moral confusion. I admit to reservations about writing this column. Many of my friends are Jewish. Colleagues I respect do important work in Jewish organisations, working across faiths. But some Australian Jews appear to want unequivocal support for what Israel is doing.
The unsaid refrain harks back to 9/11: either you’re with us or you’re against us. I hope Australian Jews understand that not every silence is a sign of latent anti-Semitism. And that our ifs and buts about the bombardment of Gaza come from embracing the finest traditions of the West.
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