Who-whom, as Lenin said: How you assign blame for violence depends on who has done what to whom.
Sympathy for innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed under the Israeli bombardment of Gaza? By all means. Who doesn’t feel that? The mirror neurons of any decent person must respond at the sight of child-sized body bags in the ruins of a Palestinian hospital; the stunned, unbearable grief on the faces of those still alive. The conscience recoils and cries, “Stop!”
But wait. Draw back. Who-whom, as Lenin said: How you assign blame for violence depends on who has done what to whom. The Americans didn’t bomb Yokohama on Dec. 7, 1941; the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And the Japanese were responsible for what followed.
Why did Hamas attack on Oct. 7? Israeli oppression? Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007, two years after the Israelis withdrew. Under decent, intelligent leadership—with a touch of vision, with investment by oil-rich Arab states—Gaza might now be a Mediterranean Singapore. Instead, Hamas has maintained Gaza as an anguished slum, an ongoing dramatization of the Palestinian victimhood that is the source of Hamas’s power and raison d’être.
Although it seems grotesque to say so, the casualties in Gaza have been relatively light by neighborhood standards. More than 300,000 of Saddam Hussein’s own people ended up dead or missing during his 24-year rule. In Syria under the regime of the Assads, father and son, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and nearly 13 million people—more than half the country’s prewar population—have been turned out into the world as refugees.
Students at Harvard and Columbia don’t protest the region’s routine inhumanities. They do so only when there are Jews around to blame and to hate. It’s the Israelis’ Jewishness that brings the demonstrators out. This isn’t “a new antisemitism.” Antisemitism is never new. It’s an ancient beast that awakens from time to time and exhales such filth as “Gas the Jews” and “Hitler was right.”
[i]Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”[/i]
