Among the Holocaust’s most searing images is the gut-wrenching photo of a small Jewish boy, hands In the air, at a Nazi’s gunpoint. He is on his way to extermination, joining six million of his fellow Jews who suffered the same fate.
We have seen so many photos like this in the 80 years since the Holocaust, and we have professed to wonder: how could this depravity be tolerated? How could so many be complicit by their silence?
Now we know.
For 20 years, Hamas has fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians in order to murder them or, failing that, maim them or, failing that, terrify them. In 2008-9, then 2012, then 2014, then 2018 and then again in 2021, Hamas, pledged to Israel’s annihilation, forced Israeli families into bomb shelters.
These were, of course, crimes against humanity. But the Left did not see it that way. Indeed, when Israel was given quite literally no choice but to try to stop the rocketing, and Palestinian civilians were unavoidably killed just as Hamas planned it, it was Israel that the Left blamed – not Hamas.
Now Hamas has fired 5,500 more rockets at Israeli civilians since Saturday, sent 1,000 butchers into a music festival and Israeli villages to execute Jews at gunpoint, chop their heads off, burn them alive, rape and abduct them — 1,300 dead, 3,500 wounded. Women, men, children, grandparents, babies and the disabled.
For 20 years the Left watched smaller versions of this take place, and said nothing – except to denounce Israel. In May 2021, when Hamas did a practice run of last Saturday’s massacre, U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) denounced not Hamas but Israel, comparing it to “white supremacists” who in trying to stop Hamas were committing “police brutality.”
She wasn’t alone. At Tufts University, Students for Justice in Palestine tried to force the student body to disavow any feeling of identity with the Jewish state. At Williams College the student government, which approved the formation of a pro-Palestinian group, denied students the right to form a pro-Israel one. At the University of Vermont a federal investigation was required to address the safe space afforded anti-Semites. “Is it unethical for me, a TA, to not give Zionists credit for participation?,” one instructor tweeted, boasting about her “serotonin rush at bullying Zionists in the public domain.”
There’s been all of this and much more, as self-styled progressives have coddled anti-Semitism or embraced it. The intimidation of Jewish students has been not only tolerated but encouraged.
So when last week’s massacre of Israeli innocents occurred, it wasn’t surprising to see some on the Left engage in their own form of depravity – cheering on a slaughter. At Harvard, over 30 student organizations announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible.” At Tufts, SJP praised the “creativity” of the slaughter.
And so it went. Many college presidents, cowed by the venomous anti-Semitism that they have permitted to engulf their campuses, were unable to denounce sheer evil. The prize for gutless pablum may go to the President of Smith College. “Dear friends,” she wrote, “I am profoundly saddened by the human capacity for violence that we have seen in our world over the past weeks. Ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Libya and Ethiopia; war in Ukraine; mass shootings in the United States; and the latest violence in Israel and Gaza show us that our work for a just world is ongoing.”
Banal drivel where moral clarity is required. And that’s how these things happen.
Jeff Robbins, a former assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, is a longtime columnist for the Herald.
