Over the course of my more than 20 years of blogging about Volokh, commentators have often wondered why I focused my attention on what I considered to be unjust attacks on Israel, rather than on Israeli policies that I disagreed with and that might pose obstacles to a future peace agreement. My response was consistent: debates over specific Israeli policies were a sideshow. Israel’s staunchest critics simply wanted Israel to cease to exist, and since this goal could probably only be achieved through genocide, I chose to focus my attention on that. My commentators were also quite consistent, claiming that I was paranoid, that the vast majority of critics, even the harshest ones, wanted a two-state solution, not the elimination of Israel.
We’ve had a sort of test of this debate since 7/10. Hamas is a terrorist theocracy with explicitly genocidal goals. It achieved a glimpse of those goals on 7/10, and its leaders vowed to repeat those atrocities again and again until the “Zionists” were driven out of Israel.
So whatever one thinks of Israeli policy, or of Israel’s possible response to 7/10, one would think, based on the position of my interlocutors, that critics of Israeli policy would still agree on one thing: Hamas must be deposed, one way or another. There is no plausible two-state solution with Hamas in power; the harsh critics are almost all self-styled progressives, and there is nothing progressive about Hamas’s policies toward freedom of religion, LGBTQ rights, women, militarism, anti-Semitism, and so on, nor its constant theft of humanitarian rights. The Hamas government in Gaza is essentially every progressive’s worst nightmare.
Yet, at least since 10/10, when it became clear that Israel’s reaction to Hamas atrocities would not be a capitulation, harsh critics have been almost unanimous in calling for Israel to essentially surrender (“immediate ceasefire”). with Hamas still in power and almost no one has called on Hamas to surrender and abdicate. (And self-styled human rights organizations have felt free to invent human rights laws, even contradicting their past public positions in other conflicts.)
I must admit that I underestimated the lie of these people. As much as I knew they hated Israel far more than they were concerned about the well-being of the Palestinians, I didn’t imagine they would be willing to interfere with, if not openly support, Hamas, certainly not after Hamas had its say. brutality and genocidal intentions on display for all the world to see. I would have expected something more along the lines of “immediate ceasefire, but the world must work to replace Hamas with something else”.
Of course, there are those who support the latter position, or Biden’s position, which is to support Israel but be critical of specific wartime policies and the lack of a long-term plan. But the remarkable thing is that I have not yet seen this stance taken by the hard left: “I would like Hamas to surrender and release the hostages, because it would be good for all parties, but since I don’t think it is possible to get Hamas must surrender, I think Israel must give up for humanitarian reasons.”
Indeed, if you ask senior figures in that he or she would prefer Hamas to surrender. Israel’s defeat is more important than ending the suffering of civilians in Gaza, any kind of peaceful resolution to the conflict (which obviously requires the end of Hamas rule), the release of innocent hostages, or anything else. If you’re a progressive and you find yourself carrying water for a truly reactionary and genocidal organization like Hamas, perhaps it’s time to do some soul-searching.