October 7

I will not be discussing here the misdeeds, as severe as they are, of the Israeli government. Fault for the failure to achieve peace exists on both sides of the conflict, as there are people who profit by continuing the violence while innocents suffer, and as there exist malevolent bigots in every ethnic and religious tradition. However—and I say this as a non-Jewish leftist—I am afraid that many of my fellow leftists are currently overlooking a fact so hideous and yet so obvious, an insight about last month’s massacre that changes much once seen and that should terrify every person of conscience, and it is this: The twelve hundred innocent people who were murdered in Israel were not killed because they live in a country whose government has done reprehensible things. (All governments, especially in a capitalist world, do reprehensible things.) No, they were killed because they were Jews. Western Israel just happened to be accessible to Hamas; that is merely as far as they were able to get. This is not to say that all Muslims hate Jews (obviously, not true) or that Gazans hate Jews, but Hamas—led by cowardly billionaires who live in Qatar—foments Jew-hatred because endless violence suits its objectives. World sentiment toward Palestinians and their suffering was at an all-time high on Oct. 6, 2023, and Hamas intentionally blew it; violence is Hamas’s raison d'être.

We can debate the exact chain of events—really, it is more of a tree, crowded with branches, than a chain; it is a tree of death—that led to this outcome. I, personally, would still pin ultimate fault on capitalism, not to indict it by its restricted definition—market mechanisms are still defensible at scales for which socialist machinery has not yet been discovered—but the broader one, the world system in which zero-sum players and serial defectors drive out everyone else, the imperialist one in which the remnants of Ottoman and British and even Roman malfeasance (it is ancient Roman property law on which modern capitalism was founded) fester. There could be a world without poverty, without miseducation, and without the hatreds—such impulses might never go away entirely, but would be deprived of numbers and therefore force—those former two engender, but that is not, alas, the world we have today. Instead, we have one where people truly believe their poverty and humiliation are the fault of a vulnerable religious minority, rather than that of an entire world system that has abandoned them. And tens of thousands of people are now dead for no reason. On the recent matter, it is important to say it again. The twelve hundred people whose died in the first chapter of this catastrophe were not killed because of a justified indignation at Netanyahu’s policies. They were killed because they were Jews.

That is what most Jews immediately see, but too many of us non-Jewish liberals and leftists miss, in the recent massacre. This does not mean one cannot protest for peace. It does not mean one cannot criticize the method and degree of Israel’s retaliation. It certainly does not mean one cannot feel solidarity with Muslim victims of the numerous atrocious states that exist in the Middle East. Still, one should make no mistake: a pogrom, straight out of the bad old days, just happened.

A global political realignment is taking place. I don’t know what it will look like, but we on the Left—to put it in plain English—cannot fuck this up. We are already on the ropes; we have been divided into weird warring camps squabbling about pronouns and bird names while billionaires and despots and deranged clerics rape the world. We cannot afford to get this wrong, and we cannot abandon a vulnerable minority simply because the fads of the current day might make it less fashionable to support them. Israel has already possessed as much “right to exist” as France or the U.S. or Australia or Zimbabwe “have the right to exist,” but recent events have shown that, in some form, it needs to exist. It needs to be there to protect people whom, historically, no one else has. And the conduct of all of the other Middle Eastern states, including toward their own subjects, is so terrible that, to be honest, Palestinians would have better prospects in a better and more inclusive Israel than under any other accessible arrangement. So let us not take foolish stances or say foolish things.

Am Yisrael Chai.