Mass Murder Made Easy

Hamas’ Brer Rabbit Approach to Terrorism and the Moral Myopia of the Identitarian Left

Welcome to the Briar Patch

I am writing this on what is likely the eve of an Israeli ground invasion. The architects of the Hamas incursion could easily have foreseen and probably planned that the sadistic horror show they visited upon Israeli civilians would induce a reciprocal blood lust for vengeance against the citizens of Gaza. The self-evident reality is that Hamas views their own people as expendable meat puppets as much as they do Israelis. As with all terrorists, people are things – utilitarian chess pieces to be moved around or sacrificed depending on the strategic advantage conferred.

On the surface, they warn Israel against attacking Palestinian non-combatants. But on another level, their fondest wish is that the Israeli army will enter the Gazan briar patch where innocent civilians will be murdered directly or as “collateral damage” and thereby undermine any sympathy the recent pogrom may have generated, and, by extension, incite a multi-front war on Israel. Hamas knows that Israel's aspiring autocrat, Netanyahu, is aligned with his country's fundamentalist, ethnonationalist fringe and that his likely response would be a continuation of the policy of collective punishment but with an exponentially higher body count.

So far, the IDF has given Gaza’s bloodthirsty but strategically smart holy warriors precisely what they wanted – an unrelenting spectacle of civilian slaughter and torment. For Hamas, the mass death of fellow Palestinians is simply a tactic for demolishing what little may be left of Israel’s moral authority after decades of colonial behavior toward Palestinians.  Their hope is to excite a wider war, just as the US invasion of Iraq squandered any goodwill engendered by the 9/11 attacks and created a state of war that lasted a generation. And even without a ground invasion, the IDF bombing of civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure and the massive death toll inflicted on children alone, compassion for Israeli victims is steadily eroding worldwide.

Hamas Atrocities Meet Left Identity Politics

Following the mass murder, rapes, and beheadings of Israeli civilians along the border with Gaza, a merciless massacre by Hamas that included infants and frail elderly, a "pro-Palestinian" rally was held in Manhattan. One "progressive" speaker described the attacks with a bemused snicker. "And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters." That was followed by a chorus of marchers chanting, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The attendees at that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) event echoed Hamas itself. They seemed to agree with Hamas’ founding covenant that said Palestinian emancipation from Israeli control required “killing the Jews.” Similar sentiments were expressed online by erstwhile allies of those victimized by bigots and autocrats.

How could leftists – activists devoted to fighting against oppression of all kinds – sign on to the aims of misogynist and anti-gay Islamic zealots seeking to ignite a region-wide jihad against non-Muslims and expand their authoritarian rule? How could they conflate Palestinian liberation with domination by Hamas? The answer can be found in the same dynamics underlying other manifestations of left identitarian illiberalism and reverence for "left" dictators – a fundamentalist frame of mind. There is a desperate longing for saints and devils, unambiguous good guys and bad guys, pure-hearted liberators, and soulless and malevolent oppressors.

Of course, the current Middle East conflict does have clear victims and perpetrators. Palestinian and Israeli civilians are the victims of both regimes. Both governments have taken the position that civilians are not innocent. In their founding documents and most recent actions, Hamas has been explicit about that. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said of ordinary Gazans about the attacks, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Cutting off food and water to its Palestinian residents, a punishment not even inflicted by most nations on death-row inmates, is a logical expression of that moral position. Those are exterminationist moves that were rightly condemned as war crimes when implemented by Putin against Ukrainians.

Rather than face the nightmare of a war in which the leaders of each group are malignant and self-serving, a contest between Jewish and Islamic Jihadis, some on the Left feel compelled to construct one set as freedom fighters. In the wishful fantasy of DSA, Hamas is the “resistance” devoted to Palestinian emancipation, rather than the willing grave diggers of their fellow Gazans. Similarly, they can't see Israel as a complex mix of pro-democracy advocates of Palestinian rights on the one hand and fascistic ethnic cleansers seeking to turn their country into a Jewish theocracy on the other -- and multiple shades in between. Instead, they prefer a two-dimensional enemy, a homogenous nation of racist colonizers down to the last baby, whose annihilation they can celebrate.

A related dynamic facilitates that – the left identitarian impulse to cling to rigid notions of ethnic/racial identity. We can recognize this as a more typically conservative aversion to complexity. The longing for purity leads to a reductionist idea of ethnicity, in this case, the essentially noble Palestinian victim and the essentially colonizing Israeli Jew perpetrator.

They each have predictable traits, interests, and motives. Ironically, for a perspective that fetishizes difference, differences internal to each tribe are elided, as are all tensions between their respective citizens and leaders. All conflict between those groups gets reduced to a war of opposing stereotypes.

Lastly, I don't want to give the impression that left identitarians only impose their black-and-white ethnic schemas in ways that demonize Jewish Israelis and idealize Palestinians. Sometimes, the dichotomy is reversed. A Facebook "friend," whom I don't know beyond his social media persona, regularly posts impassioned screeds denouncing the endless assaults on America's multi-racial democracy by MAGA politicians and their voter base, a proclamation I could not argue with. But after Hama's terror attacks, he published long, meandering posts attacking the notion that Palestinians even constituted a people with a history, a culture, or a legitimate claim to land and sovereignty.

That argument is a twist on the more common approach to devaluing a rival ethnic group, whereby the outsider tribe is the object of negative projections. Instead, the aim here is erasure, an ontological iteration of ethnic cleansing. Palestinians? They never existed. How can people who never existed claim rights to anything? The poster's assertion was not simply the idiosyncratic rantings of an isolated individual. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in March of 2023, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history." He even called for the West Bank town of Hawara to be "erased" after right-wing settlers attacked it to avenge the killing of two Israelis.

Some discerning readers may hear in that an echo of Russia's justification for colonizing Ukraine, put forth by Putin – another autocrat, as I noted above, that some leftists in the US and around the world contort themselves into supporting (or at least not opposing), claiming he is a warrior against the worst depredations of the American empire. When not calling Ukrainians “Nazis,” Putin argues for their non-existence as a nation or a people with a history distinct from Russia. What may look to the rest of us as genocide really isn’t because you can’t exterminate a group that was never there in the first place.