Israel's Moral Purpose

And the Pathological Empathy of the West's pro-Palestinian Movement.

I’m not alone in how the horrific pogrom of October 7th, the bloodshed in the aftermath and the turmoil of the ongoing war and conflict have occupied so much of my days and nights in the past year. That this chapter in the ongoing calamitous saga of the Middle East has occupied much headspace probably comes as no surprise to 3am Thoughts readers given the word count devoted to the Israel-Palestine conflict, now stretching to seven essays (ordered chronologically here). If you're a new reader, I would stress reading the first four in order.

On October 7th, 1,200 Israelis were murdered, the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah. They were butchered with the grotesque sadism and unadulterated delight in violence that only Islamist fundamentalism and the doctrine of jihadism can produce. Dead Jews were dragged back into the Gaza Strip to be kicked, spat on, and desecrated, and 251 live hostages disappeared into Gaza’s tunnels. Hamas knew that it was sealing the fate of so many Palestinian citizens supposedly under their care; they openly stated that “we [Hamas] are the ones who need this blood [of Palestinian women and children], so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit.” Ask and thou shalt receive, with imprecise estimates of the death toll so far at over 40,000 in a war waged in one of the densest urban environments in history against an enemy imbued with the twisted ideologies of Islamism who view every civilian death as a “martyr” in their Sacred Cause. A year on, we’ve had two salvos of inter-state warfare between the Islamic Republic and Israel, over 8,000 rockets fired into Northern Israel by Hezbollah, and now at the time of writing Israel’s tentative incursions into the western Iranian province known as South Lebanon. Not since the 1973 Yom Kippur War has Israel faced a multi-front war in the ongoing fight for its existence. And 101 hostages remain in tunnels in Gaza.

Pathological Empathy and the Western Pro-Palestinian Movement

A year on and it is difficult to even get a sense that Jews were slaughtered this day last year. Swathes of the Western media, in particular outlets like the Guardian, have gone out of their way to make the past weekend, and today, about the consequences of October 7th, not the pogrom itself. This sole emphasis on Israel’s actions is nothing new; this is par for the course for how the West views the Middle East generally, which is to say that no one in the West gives an iota of fuck what happens, or how many people die, or which regime represses the rights of its citizens, once it has nothing to do with Israel. Where were the mass protests and cries of “genocide” as over 300,000 Syrian civilians were killed, with estimates of ~200,000 of those killed by Assad's regime and Russia? On the contrary, the Western Left, led by dullards like Jeremy Corbyn, took to the streets to protest for Assad’s regime and against the West intervening to prevent chemical weapons from being used against civilians. Where was the UN, which drew its “Blue Line” after Israel withdrew from Lebanon, when Hezbollah spent the intervening decades repeatedly violating the demarcation zone? Or the media when an average of seven Hezbollah attacks per day into Israel since October 7th have forced the evacuation of >70,000 Israelis from their homes in the north? But the “pager bomb” retaliation by Israel is front-page fodder for the Israel-Outrage Complex. And so it goes for October 7th; the war in Gaza is depicted as a random, wanton act of aggression by Israel with no cause, no genesis. Social media asked everyone to have “All Eyes on Raffah”, but no eyes on the six Israeli hostages in the tunnels below Raffah that Hamas executed anyway.

The Guardian's '7 October: one year on.' Minus the events of October 7th.

I’ve made little secret of my utter disgust and disdain for the manner in which people in the West who self-reverentially refer to themselves as Leftists or political “Progressives” responded to October 7th (see here, here, and here). I also realise that these responses were, and are, not random; they are a feature of the postmodern corners of the Left rather than a bug, and they betray the utter lack of substance, the rot at the core, of identity-based “Social Justice” politics. They betray the hollowness of this insipid worldview because a fundamental characteristic of principles and values is universality, i.e., that we hold certain views at the level of principle to apply in all circumstances, even when circumstances do not at that moment in time, or for whatever reasons, permit the realisation of the principle. In simpler terms, principles are not qualified; they are absolute. This is why human rights are termed “universal”; there is no qualifier to the entitlement of any human being to those rights based on any arbitrary criteria, especially any identity-based criteria such as creed or colour. This is what distinguishes principles and values from opinions and perspectives, the latter of which are influenced by facts, circumstances, and experience.

As a case in point, the principle of self-determination is universal, one in which I believe. This means that as I hold this principle to be true for Israel as the world’s sole sovereign Jewish state, I equally hold that to be true for the Palestinians, i.e., that they have the right to self-determination in their own state. Same for the Ukrainians, the Scots, and the Taiwanese. But to the Western pro-Palestinian movement, the right to self-determination that they appear to so passionately believe in for the Palestinians is denied to one nation alone, the world’s only Jewish state. Principle should also dictate that anyone who ever uttered the slogan “MeToo” or brandished the hashtag #believewomen be vocally and stridently against the rape of women, ever or as a weapon of war. Yet Western girls in keffiyehs were willing to make an exception for Jewish women. When footage circulated of girls at the Nova festival with blood stains between their legs, our brave Western pro-Palestinian “activists” decided we were not to believe those women. They wanted evidence, demanded that Jewish women prove they had been raped. The same concepts - evidence and proof - that they have no interest in when it comes to the weighty charge of genocide against Israel under the Genocide Convention where a few Instagram reels from Middle East Eye are all the proof they need.

Principle dictates that if you believe that one has the right to recognition of their humanity and to live with safety and dignity, you hold it for all. Yet before the blood had even dried into the kibbutzim earth, the response to October 7th was a celebration of dead Jews. On October 8th, before a bomb had dropped on Gaza, a UK pro-Palestinian activist called the pogrom “beautiful and inspiring.” Nearly 2,000 academics from institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, signed an open letter stating Hamas’ actions were justified by “context”. And for the past 365 days, we’ve been subjected to the mass psychosis of delusional idiots utterly convinced in their self-reverential moral narcissism that they are the epitome of Virtue and RightSideofHistory™, while chanting “glory to our martyrs”, and watching as synagogues are set on fire and Hezbollah flags waved in the streets of New York and London. The lack of principle in the Western pro-Palestinian protest movement is frightening, although unsurprising given the warped victimhood ideology of “Social Justice” politics underpinning it. Imagine if Black students at an American university had to lock themselves in a library because of a marauding mob. Imagine if any other minority group fetishised by “Social Justice” ideology was subject to the treatment Jews have been subjected to for the past year.

Hezbollah and Hamas flags waved alongside the Palestinian flag by keffiyeh-clad idiots in New York.

These self-styled “humanitarians” are seemingly oblivious to the fact that qualified humanity is not humanitarian, and selective “empathy” is not empathetic. What is on display is pathological empathy, where the Palestinians and their death and suffering are leveraged against the death and suffering of Jews, and where the pro-Palestinian movement becomes the Trojan horse for the most vicious and virulent Jew-hate we’ve witnessed in over half a century. Every attempt is made to strip Jewish suffering and death of humanity and dignity. In May earlier this year I went to the Israeli Film Festival in London to watch the documentary on the Nova festival massacre on October 7th, the massacre that the Democratic Socialists of America held a rally to celebrate. I knew it wasn’t going to be any old popcorn cinema trip; the cinema doors were defaced by pro-Palestinian protestors with red graffiti earlier that day. Thankfully the cinema was in north London within strongly Jewish neighbourhoods who came out in numbers to surround and protect the cinema so the screening could go ahead; across the street were the frothing pro-Palestinian protestors and it was hard not to think, what exactly were they there to protest? “We object to your screening of Hamas murdering kids at a music festival!”

Why it is so important to the Western pro-Palestinian movement to strip Jewish suffering and death of humanity, to wash it from view? This pathological empathy stems from a core characteristic of Western victimhood ideology in which there can only be one Victim, one Oppressed, and the perma-victimhood status of the Palestinians must be preserved at all costs; the Palestinians must hold a monopoly on oppression. What principled humanitarian, what person who claims to value human life, rights, and dignity, would truly hold such a view? The truth is that the pathological empathy of the Western pro-Palestinian camp can only exist because they are in the West, safe and insulated from the consequences of their zero-sum reductionism. These are not “humanitarians”, they are grievance merchants trading in the stock of other people’s death and suffering. A sign held in the Jewish crowd at the London film festival read, “Rape is not resistance”; because to the Western pro-Palestinian movement, this actually needs to be said. Why this movement seems incapable of navigating this conflict without resorting to ahistorical revisionism, a complete denial of the ideologies underpinning pan-Arabism and jihadism, and excusing and equivocating on brutal regimes (i.e., the Islamic Republic in Iran) and terrorist groups with zero regard for the lives of their people, is beyond me.

I have no qualms or issues with anyone who protests on behalf of the Palestinians, but enough of the “few bad apples” or “every side has its idiots” narrative to excuse or wave off the behaviour of this movement. When people tell you who they are you should believe them and we have a sample size of 365 days now that tells us exactly who this movement is and what they stand for; the slogans, the rhetoric, the jihadist flags, the Islamism cosplaying, the Jew-hate, these are not random acts, they are a consistent feature that have shown up week after week for a year. There is no excuse for this; if you believe in a cause, and you believe that you’re someone with principles and values in humanitarianism and compassion, it is incumbent upon you to very clearly and unequivocally distinguish yourself from nefarious actors and ideas who attach themselves to your movement. There is not a single excuse to be standing in a march with Hamas flags chanting “glory to our martyrs!” or “Intifada revolution!”. I’ve had so many pro-Palestinian Westerners say to me something like “well, I don’t believe that/don’t support Hamas", but this misses the point entirely; even if these pathological idiots are a small proportion of an overall movement, they can wreck the legitimacy of a movement against the genuine intentions and bona fide aspects of the original cause. It was incumbent on the Western pro-Palestinian movement to very clearly and publicly root out the pathological idiots in their midst. Not only did they fail to do this, but they’ve also been completely silent on the rot and Jew-hate their movement has sanctioned and promoted. For a movement that thinks “silence is violence” and throws the word “complicity” around with reckless abandon, the hypocrisy is fucking breathtaking.

I’m not even convinced that much of the Western pro-Palestinian movement is about the Palestinians as much as it is about Israel and the Jews. Consider a counterfactual where the territory of Israel forms part of Egypt and the Palestinians find themselves in the same position they are right now, in this moment, between Gaza and the West Bank; no one in the West would give an iota of fuck. There would be no mass protests, no calls of “genocide”, no Hamas flags being waved in the streets of London and New York, no fetishisation of Palestinian perma-victimhood. We know this because no one cared when Jordan annexed the West Bank and no one cared when Egypt operated Gaza as an “open-air prison”, and we know this because almost every other incidence of oppression and/or violence in the Middle East that doesn’t include Israel, or is directed at Israel, is excepted. The worldview of Western Progressives cannot understand or accommodate any oppression, aggression, or violence, that is non-Western (including Israel) in origin. It is why we heard crickets when the Taliban banned girls from education (which Western Progressives probably view as merely “indigenous ways of knowing”), and it’s why the slaughter in East and West Africa at the hands of jihadi militant groups like Al-Shabaab or Islamic State West Africa Province is unremarkable to the Western media and Progressive Social Justice Causes.

To repeat, I have no qualms or issues with anyone in the West who protests loudly and passionately on behalf of the Palestinians and their legitimate right to self-determination. However, there is a very simple litmus test for selective, pathological empathy and qualified humanity that can be applied to this movement: where were they on October 8th 2023? If they were equally forthright in their protest and posting, decrying the vile slaughter by Hamas and showing some solidarity with Jewish people that the most minimal level of empathy could see were hurting, then I’ve no issue, because that is what is meant by universality. But the truth is I haven’t met a single pro-Palestinian Westerner who can talk about October 7th without adding some qualification, some specious reasoning or pseudo-justification. And as if the pogrom itself wasn't bad enough, Jews all over the West had to watch as swathes of the West celebrated in the streets and their Tweets. Jews all over the West have had to watch as hate and vitriol are mercilessly directed at them for the sole reason that they are Jews.

And this brings us to the crux of the issue, because it shouldn’t matter who October 7th happened to; their humanity should not be qualified by their creed, colour, or any other arbitrary identity label. Except, as lofty an expectation as that is, it does matter. Because October 7th didn’t happen to anyone: it happened to Jews. The Holocaust didn’t happen to anyone: it happened to Jews. The 1972 Munich Massacre didn’t happen to anyone: it happened to Jews. It happened, all of it, because they are Jews. What part of this is so hard to understand? And the 1948 War, the Six-Day War, the Yom-Kippur War, Islamist ethnocentric anti-Semitism, the Second Intifada, and the PLO, all happened because the Jews can’t be “there”, in the Middle East, in their exiled land pined for over two millennia, according to the doctrines of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. It all happened because the Jews can’t be here, existing as Jews. And this fundamental reality is the entire raison d'être of Israel.

Israel’s Moral Purpose

I recently took a trip to Budapest and shared some photographs and thoughts on social media, and a friend suggested I write about it here. On this October 7th, it seems fitting to write about it now because it is a reminder of the fundamental purpose of Israel, of the world’s only Jewish state.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Hungarian Jews comprised ~8-10% of the total population of Hungary, numbering around ~800,000. Hungarian Jews were prominent at every level of Hungarian society and had fought in enormous numbers in the First World War in what was then the Austro-Hungarian army. By the Second World War, Hungary had taken a different trajectory and formally joined the Axis powers allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, participating in the invasion of the Balkans and Russia. More particularly for Hungarian Jews, the alliance allowed for Hungarian fascism in the form of the Arrow Cross party to flourish; anti-Semitic legislation was passed, the Jews in Budapest ghettoised, and eventually, murdered both at the hands of Arrow Cross militia and in the Nazis’ concentration camps. The rounding up of Jews and deportation for extermination was enthusiastically overseen by the Hungarian government, police, and militia groups. Through 1943 and into 1944, however, elements of the Hungarian government sought to sue for peace with the Allies, and on discovering this Hitler ordered the invasion of Hungary in March 1944.

What followed was perhaps one of the most rapid programmes of deportation and murder in the entire war; within 8 weeks ~424,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auswchitz-Birkenau and by the end of the war, in less than one year, ~565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered in the Shoah. There is something particularly harrowing about the murder of Hungary's Jews, although it is an exercise in futility to split hairs on which European country’s Jews suffered more. But the rate at which the Nazi machinery by 1944 was capable of murdering 70% of all Hungarian Jews in less than a year, and the fact that they did this in the face of certain military defeat, is startling. Even with the walls crumbling in on the Third Reich there remained complete conviction in murdering as many Jews as the remaining time of the regime's existence would allow. The photo below has always struck a cord, from the infamous “Auschwitz Album” taken by an unknown SS officer, the picture shows Hungarian Jews waiting in the birch tree grove (“Birkenau” in German) near the gas chambers, and a child has picked a flower and reaches forward in a gesture to the other child to take it.

Budapest’s most striking memorial to the murder of Hungarian Jews is the Shoes on the Danube Bank. The monument commemorates Budapest’s Jews murdered by the Arrow Cross militia, who marched thousands of Jews from the nearby ghetto to the bank of the river and shot them into the Danube. They ordered the Jews to take off their shoes before being shot, and would often tie children to adults to save bullets; shooting the adult, the body would drag the child into the river to drown. It is estimated that up to 20,000 Jews were murdered in this way.

When I visited in August, there were yellow ribbons tied around shoes (see the photo, below) to commemorate the hostages taken on October 7th; a poignant reminder that 80 years later, Jews are still not safe to be Jews; that the world’s oldest hatred never quite dies. The phrase “Never Again” has been a lynchpin of Holocaust memorials, but never again is right now; never again started this day last year and we’ve 365 days of never again, of the only Jewish state in the world in an existential fight to keep Jews safe. Because Jews can’t rely on you for their safety, or me, or any goyim, or our governments. This is the lesson learned in the hardest of ways, learned with bullets on the bank of the Danube and with ovens in Auschwitz, that the only people Jews can rely on to ensure that they can live with safety and dignity as Jews is their own tribe. This is the fundamental moral purpose of Israel; that Jews should never be expected to live as a minority relying on the forbearance of another majority people for their safety and dignity, because all the world has done is fail at this task.

Above the main door of the Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest, the second largest in the world, reads an inscription of Exodus 25:8 in Hebrew:

“And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”

Budapest failed as a sanctuary; Berlin failed; Warsaw failed; Tunisia failed; Iran failed; Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, and Russia, failed.

So the Jews made a sanctuary that they may dell among each other, and they called it Israel.

On this first anniversary of October 7th, there is only one thing suitable to say: Am Yisrael Chai.

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