Hamas’s Useful Idiots

False equivalencies and the war behind the war in the Middle East

I edited a fantastic piece in Queer Majority by Armin Navabi on the problems with imposing Western identity politics onto the Israel/Palestine conflict: “‘Queers for Palestine’ and the Death of Irony.”

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In the celebrated 1985 science fiction novel Ender’s Game, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a “third” — a third child born to a family granted special permission to flout the future-Earth’s two-child policy. His very existence is seen as a sign of privilege and unfairness, and it doesn’t go unnoticed by his peers. Finding himself confronted by several other boys in a violent altercation, Ender dealt the ringleader a devastating beatdown that landed him in the hospital. Asked afterward why he had retaliated with such force, Ender responded, “Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too, right then, so they’d leave me alone.”

I find myself thinking back to those early chapters of Ender’s Game when contemplating the 2023 Israel-Hamas War. On Saturday, October 7th, militants from the Palestinian jihadist group Hamas invaded Israel and perpetrated a modern-day pogrom, complete with the most medieval displays of savagery and inhumanity imaginable. Citizens were kidnapped and held hostage. Families were murdered in front of each other or burned alive. Women were raped and their mutilated corpses paraded naked through the streets of Gaza to jubilance. Small children and even infants were massacred and beheaded (yes, the reports have been corroborated and confirmed¹). It was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. In the wake of this barbaric carnage, Israel has vowed, as Jews so often have over the years, “never again.” Israel aims not merely to knock Hamas down, nor to win one fight, but, like Ender, to win all the next ones, too — to deal their enemies a blow so crippling that no one will ever mess with them again.²

Yet even as Israel fights to protect its people against rabid jihadist butchers, public opinion, initially so sympathetic to Israel, is already beginning to shift under the influence of their meticulously documented bombardment of Hamas. There has been a vocal segment of the Western left that, even in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, were justifying and even cheering the slaughter of Israeli civilians. They mercifully remain a minority. The shift we are seeing is not so much a movement toward Palestine as much as it is away from Israel. The 24-hour news cycle’s endless coverage of what it looks like in practice to uproot a murderous terrorist group that deliberately uses human shields and hides among civilians is nudging public opinion toward a murky gray zone of moral equivalence. What began as sympathy for Israel is fast becoming an attitude of “both sides are equally bad.”

Last week I wrote an article titled “Intentionally Killing Civilians is Bad. End of Moral Analysis”, which criticized the Hamas apologia within parts of the Western far left. It received over 3,300 comments across platforms, the overwhelming majority of which expressed some variation of “Sure, Hamas is bad, but Israel is no better.” We see these attitudes reflected in recent polls as well. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that while a mere two percent of Americans want the US to take Palestine’s side in this conflict, only 41 percent favor supporting Israel. The remaining 58 percent want neither. That’s in the US, the most pro-Israel Western nation. Likewise, the mainstream media, whose increasing bias has induced a death spiral of public trust, seems to have curiously rediscovered their strict, down-the-middle neutrality in covering this conflict, and this conflict only. It is surreal to visit mainstream newspapers to see claims from Hamas, a known terrorist organization, presented alongside opposite claims made by the government of Israel or third parties in a manner that conveys the sense that both are equally credible. So much for the Jews controlling the media.

Hamas has orchestrated a lose-lose situation for Israel. On the one hand, Israel can do nothing and allow jihadists to continue intentionally slaughtering civilians. On the other hand, Israel can defend itself against an enemy that uses schools and hospitals as military bases, hides among their own civilians, and advises them not to evacuate when Israel warns of an attack, even placing road barriers and bombs to prevent people from fleeing. Israel either backs down and invites further attacks, or it defends itself and becomes seen as the villain. There simply is no way to wage a war against an enemy that nihilistically spends the lives of its own civilians with such reckless abandon without innocent people being inadvertently caught in the crossfire. “Both sides kill civilians” is a true statement that leaves out so many crucial details it becomes a lie of omission. The same could have been said of World War II or the US Civil War. To publicly advance the notion that there is any sort of moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies is to do Hamas’s bidding in delegitimizing Israel’s right to defend itself. It is to be just as much of a useful idiot for Hamas as any cretin posting images of paragliders and chanting “glory to the resistance fighters.”

Israel does kill civilians, and that is bad. Israel does not, however, intentionally kill civilians as part of its policy. One can argue that they don’t show enough restraint, but they do show restraint. One can argue that they don’t take enough steps to minimize civilian death, but they do take steps. There is a moral asymmetry and double standard in the ways in which these two parties conduct themselves. Israel is not a nation of saints. Nor are its supporters, a minority of whom have said some truly egregious and indefensible things in anger. Israel’s political right wing has held far too much power for far too long. Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt, warmongering crook whose zombie-like political career has likely risen from the dead for its final shamble, given the massive intelligence failure that occurred during his watch. Israel is flawed. They are not, however, morally equivalent with Hamas.

• Israel does not choose its targets on the basis of inflicting maximum suffering to non-combatants. Hamas does.

• Israel does not torture and execute families and then upload footage of the killings to their relatives’ social media feeds to gloat. Hamas does.

• Israel does not parade corpses through the streets. Hamas does.

• Israel does not use human shields. Hamas does.

• Israel warns Gazan civilians of planned attacks and urges them to evacuate. Hamas tries to prevent their civilians from leaving while themselves launching surprise attacks.

• Israel has agreed to a two-state solution five times (1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, 2008). The Palestinian leadership has rejected all five.

• Israel has LGBT rights. The Palestinian territories under Hamas don’t.

• Israel has women’s rights. The Palestinian territories under Hamas don’t.

• Israel is a multi-ethnic and pluralistic society where Arabs and Muslims serve both in the Israeli government and military.³ The Palestinian territories are an Arab-Muslim monoculture.

• Israel’s intentions are not genocidal (they have had the capability to commit genocide for generations and have never done so.) Hamas’s founding documents and current ethos are.

It’s worth revisiting the subject of human shields. If Israel is indeed “just as bad” as Hamas, why don’t they use human shields? Why doesn’t Israel embed their military installations within schools and hospitals? Why don’t Israeli soldiers hide among civilians? The reason is simple. Human shields are only a deterrent to an opponent concerned with minimizing civilian casualties. Hamas’s use of human shields is advantageous because it prompts Israel to wage war in extraordinarily constrained ways. Now imagine if Israel used their own people as human shields with the expectation of any sort of strategic advantage. The result would be so astoundingly and predictably tragic as to cross over into dark comedy. Every onlooker knows in their bones that Israeli human shields would not engender a microsecond’s hesitation from Hamas. This single point alone should be sufficient to demolish any delusion of moral parity between Israel and Hamas. 

Consider also what would happen if the balance of power in the Middle East were reversed. Of the thousands of responses my previous article received, one comment was a gem of clarity within a sea of moral confusion:

Amid all the cacophonous discourse on Israel/Palestine, and all the asinine calls for Israel not to defend itself, one straightforward resolution to the conflict is hardly discussed: Hamas and all of its forces can simply throw down their arms and surrender. The fact that this notion is all but absent from the conversation; the fact that despite how polarized the debate is, everyone seems to agree that Israel must be the one to take the high road if tensions are to deescalate, is a de facto acknowledgement that these are not two morally analogous parties.

As I have previously written, Hamas knows they cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield. Their real war is one of public relations, not of soldiers, bullets, and rockets. They shamelessly sacrifice the lives of their own civilians simply to weaken Israel’s standing, legitimacy, international relations, and ultimately their right to self-defense. That doesn’t require widespread support for Hamas. Simply muddying the waters to the point where enough people see no meaningful moral distinction between the two is more than enough to achieve this objective. Peddling a false moral equivalence between Israel and Palestine and exclusively scrutinizing Israel’s military conduct under a microscope is, whether one wants to admit it or not, doing public relations for Hamas. It is tacitly sending the message that Israel does not have the right to defend itself.

This is not to say that nothing Israel has ever done or could ever do in the name of self-defense is perfectly justified, but it’s worth taking a moment to really think through what self-defense entails against an enemy like Hamas in an environment like the Middle East with a history like that of the Jews. And it’s worth applying the same fine-tooth ethical comb to Hamas.

The appeal to declare that both sides are equally bad is understandable. It absolves one from having to seriously wade into the details and engage in real-world moral reasoning. It’s an easy, safe position to take. It makes one feel smart and above it all — and since both sides have done bad things, it arms one with ample ammunition to obfuscate long enough to save face and escape any confrontation. But it’s an act of lazy cowardice that carries water for avowedly anti-Semitic, genocidal maniacs.

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I have always believed that Israel has a right to exist and that the Jewish people have a right to a home. I have also always believed there were legitimate grievances and sins on both sides of this conflict — and I still do. For all that, I am not the sort of person who has ever been particularly animated by the Israel/Palestine issue. My ambivalence died on October 7th, 2023. In witnessing the shocking brutality of these attacks; the appalling display of solidarity with Hamas from swaths of the Western far left; the massive anti-Israel protests that have swept the globe; the endless, gaslighting false equivalencies; and the disturbingly pervasive double standard that Israel, alone among the nations of the world, does not have the right to defend itself, I am a changed person. A quiet voice within me has been kindled. It grows stronger and louder by the day, and it repeats the same three words:

Am Yisrael Chai.

See also: “Letter to Young Americans”

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1. Even if these reports had gone unconfirmed, arguing that babies were merely shot and burned, not beheaded, as many critics of Israel have done (and continue doing), isn’t exactly the “checkmate, Zionists” you think it is.

2. The analogy between Israel and Ender breaks down after the early chapters of the book and is not intended to be carried further. The rest of the novel is about a war between Earth and ant-like aliens whose psychology is inscrutable to humans — a dynamic wholly unlike the situation at hand. Hamas isn’t some unknowable enemy whose motivations must be gleaned by preternaturally empathic child generals. Their motivations are crystal clear and endlessly expressed: the destruction of Israel, the eradication of the Jews, and world domination.

3. 18 percent of the Israeli population are Muslim and are afforded equal rights under the law and represented throughout Israeli society. That’s not to say bigotry and prejudice don’t exist (they exist everywhere), nor to say that Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank have never been mistreated, but to call this state of affairs “apartheid” just steamrolls over basic facts and the workings of language.