I'm a Jew, a Lonely Jew... in America

Scott Horowitz | August 21, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | August 23, 2024
Wonderfully written, Scott. I wish you peace, and your family and your people peace.

I am ashamed of not having written anything on the subject since October 7. I've been saving articles and organizing my thoughts and preparing to write, but I let the opportunity pass for too long. Scott, I'm sorry for contributing to your loneliness and anyone else's by not speaking up.

In lieu of an essay as well-organized as Scott's, here is a list of things that I think are worth saying to my fellow American progressives who have called the current Gaza War genocidal and made clear their unilateral support for Palestinians in this matter (who, judging from what I see on Facebook, are a distressingly larger number of my friends than I would have thought):

• This situation is very old and very complicated, with countless moral shades of gray. Stop pretending that you can apply simple black-and-white morality to it. You come across as unserious.

• Similarly, stop pretending that you are an expert on this because you watched some videos on TikTok. Scholars who have spent their entire adult lives becoming experts on the subject do not agree about many factors involved. Your contributions to the discourse are inherently limited. I'm about to say some specific things, but I too am far from an expert on the matter and definitely don't have answers.

• Peace is a laudable goal, but not a realistic one. Iran funded Hamas's attack on October 7 in part because Israel's growing ties to the Arab world were a threat to Iran's influence and they needed to force Israel into a retribution so violent that it would disrupt that normalizing of relations, which succeeded. It would have been awe-inspiring if, on the night of October 7 when global sympathy for Israel was at its peak, Netanyahu had made a mournful speech to the world that rejected retribution because of Hamas's use of human shields, and instead asked every nation to join Israel in condemning political violence and enforcing aggressive new economic sanctions on any nation that gave money to Hamas, with the goal of isolating Iran politically and cutting off Hamas's material support. That's a warm and fuzzy fantasy, but wildly infeasible. Setting aside that Netanyahu had painted himself into a corner politically and had no other plausible options, can you imagine the American corollary actually happening? Picture the night of September 11, 2001, but with orders of magnitude more victims, and President Bush making a live TV appearance from the Oval Office to announce that America will "choose peace" and not respond with military force at all, and would only seek global partners in cutting off al-Qaeda's cash flow. Americans would demand a recall election or his head. "Peace was never an option" memes have made that phrase into a punchline, but it's true in this case.

• Calling for peace while siding with Hamas is something that I cannot reconcile. Their acts of violence are truly depraved, and designed to maximize shock for political purposes; it doesn't take a deep Internet search to find stomach-churning details of their conduct on October 7. I understand disagreeing strongly with Israel's misdeeds before and during this war (as I do) and with America providing military support in this war; I do not understand calling for peace while approving of such horror.

• For those protesting America's involvement in a foreign war, does it bother you even a little bit that this hill—the Jewish one—is the one that you have chosen to die on? America participates in all kinds of foreign wars and it's met with a shrug, but the one Jewish conflict is where you suddenly draw the line? I'm not saying that your position can't be principled; I'm just wondering if you have given full consideration to the possibility that antisemitism is affecting your judgment here, which would be all the more reason to stay out of this.

• At the risk of delving into "not all [x]" territory, not all Israelis support Netanyahu (to put it mildly) and neither do all Jews, any more than all Palestinians support Hamas. Subjecting Scott Horowitz of New Jersey to antisemitism because of something that Benjamin Netanyahu does on the other side of the planet is clearly unjustified. But then, we humans have a long sad history of hating one another based on the flimsiest of pretenses, so I can't say that I'm surprised even though I'm disappointed. :-(

I don't have answers for how to fix deeply entrenched, generations-old problems. I'm just trying to use logic to eliminate some of the simpler things that I've heard from the left in the last 10 months. I don't seek to minimize or dispute Israel's many mistakes; I just acknowledge that this situation is really complicated, and reducing it to simple one-sided calls for peace is so misguided as to be offensive (to say nothing of the deliberate antisemitism, which is flagrantly offensive and obviously deplorable). If nothing else, can we at least agree that it's sad that a great many people are dead and that the people mourning them deserve sympathy?

Lori Lancaster | August 31, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | September 10, 2024
What happened on October 7, 2023 was an invasion of Israel by Hamas that killed 1200 people and wounded 3400 more, and in particularly gruesome ways involving decapitation, rape, arson, and door-to-door murder sprees. Hamas designed the operation to be as offensive as possible, such as posting photos online showing groups of militants posing like celebratory trophy hunters over nude corpses of young women who had been gang-raped, in order to force a violent response from Israel. The losses made it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and proportionate to Israel's size, it would have been the equivalent of 40,000 civilians dead on our 9/11.

The problem is Hamas and the people who support Hamas (including IMHO very foolish Americans), not ordinary Palestinians who want to live in peace. Likewise on the other side, the problem is Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption and the people who endorse it, not ordinary Israelis who want to live in peace, and certainly not Jews around the world. And behind it all is Iran's manipulation and machinations. (I wouldn't normally share two articles back to back from the same publication, let alone the same author, but Thomas Friedman has produced exceptionally clear-eyed opinion pieces about this conflict from the beginning. Also excellent has been Bret Stephens, who justifies hawkishness by arguing why Israel has no choice but to keep fighting, what the true dimensions of the conflict are, and how futile America's half-assed, politically-safe "semi-involvement" in conflicts has been. I don't always agree with Stephens, but he writes with far more complexity and subject-matter knowledge than a lot of doves on this matter.)