In our politics today we often turn our disagreement into Manichean struggles, as if one side has all the arguments in its favor while the other has none. In fact, it’s not unusual for both sides to have at least a kernel of truth. That doesn’t mean, of course, that both sides hold equally valid positions; but it does mean that there are usually legitimate, competing claims to arbitrate.
Abraham Lincoln got at this better than anyone when he said, “The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”
But note the qualifier: “Almost everything.” From time to time there are situations in which the political and moral arguments are completely with one side and not the other. Such is the case with the war between Israel and Hamas.
Start with the two protagonists: on the one side, a nation of incredible intellectual, political, and moral achievements that has made more sacrifices for peace than any country on earth. On the other, an Islamic terrorist organization that ranks among the most vicious in the world and whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and Jews everywhere. (The Hamas propaganda slogan declares, “We love death more than the Jews love life.”)
As for the particulars of this current conflict, we face a situation in which Israel wants peace and Hamas wants war (and indeed started this war); in which Israel has accepted several cease-fires and Hamas none; in which Israel is bending over backwards to prevent civilian Palestinian deaths while Hamas bends over backwards to increase civilian Palestinian deaths.
These facts are not in dispute. Neither is this: Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, granting the Palestinians what they said they wanted: self-rule. In the process, Israel destroyed thousands of homes and public buildings owned by Jewish settlers who had lived in Gaza since Israel won the land in the 1967 war. Israeli troops even stormed the synagogue in Kfar Darom in order to remove Israeli settlers who did not want to leave. And what did Israel get in return for its unilateral withdrawal? Not an independent Palestinian state but a terrorist one that, among other things, has launched rocket attacks at the three largest cities in Israel (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa).
Yet despite all this, much of the world, including many Europeans, blame not Hamas but Israel. In dozens of European cities, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Amsterdam, “thousands of demonstrators thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters have depicted Israel as the aggressor and sought to isolate it internationally.” This is a grotesque distortion of reality.
In America, thank goodness, things aren’t nearly so bad. Still, it comes as a surprise to exactly no one that the Obama administration, while saying Israel has the right to self-defense, is continually applying pressure against the Jewish state for exercising that right. Team Obama’s frustration with Israel is palpable (see this clip from Secretary Kerry mocking Israel when he thought his conversation was private). We’re told the president, for example, has “serious concern about the growing number of casualties, including increasing Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza.” So do many of us. It is heartbreaking to witness. But the pressure should be applied not to Israel but Hamas, which started this war, which is attempting to escalate it, and which is using innocent Palestinians as human shields. Yet we get from this administration a kind of rough moral symmetry in which Israel is lectured to exercise restraint beyond anything we would ask of ourselves and in which both Israel and Hamas are said to be complicit in a non-stop “cycle of violence.”
This is moral idiocy. The proper response to this conflict is to stand four-square with Israel in its effort to decimate Hamas. That would be the right thing to do in every respect, including for the welfare of Palestinian children, who are merely pawns in the lethal game being played by Hamas.
To portray Hamas sympathetically and Israel as villainous is not simply irrational. It requires one to step through the looking glass, to hate the good and embrace the malevolent, and in doing so to enter a world characterized by at best moral confusion and at worst moral corruption.
