We have been here before.
When victims of 9/11 and the brave responders who tried to save them were still being dug out of the rubble – even before their loved ones could gather for mourning – public sentiment began to shift.
The “We are all Americans now” headlines of day one morphed into “We had it coming” punditry by day five. If only Americans hadn’t been allied with various oppressive regimes, if only America didn’t support Israel, if only this and if only that... we would have been spared al-Qaeda’s harsh decree.
Victims of sexual assault, police brutality, and racial violence know how this works: Following moments of sympathy or public outcry, they are made to endure thinly veiled attacks on their integrity. Were you wearing that short skirt? What did you say to the cop who pulled you over? Why were you jogging in that neighborhood anyway?
Antisemitism is no longer surprising
So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that two days after the catastrophe of October 7, there were rallies in defense of the Hamas “martyrs.” Say that again? While Israelis began loading body bags with the murdered of Sderot and Be’eri, demonstrators and Instagram posts were calling for an end to aggression, against Palestinians.
Granted, these were actions by the extreme fringe of the anti-Israel movement (including, believe it or not, some Jews), whose virulent antisemitism doesn’t (yet) represent the mainstream.
A more subtle form of blame confusion appeared quickly on mainstream opinion pages. One well-known “expert” attributed the Hamas attack to the current right-wing Israeli government and to Israel’s efforts toward so-called normalization with Saudi Arabia.
It’s an intuitively appealing hypothesis, which has been repeated even by accomplished historians who know better. But it fails on factual grounds: Hamas was created roughly 20 years before Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister and 36 years before the current (admittedly abhorrent and extremist) coalition was installed.
The 1987 Hamas charter, softened slightly in 2017, was clear: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”
As for the Saudi effort, it was launched well after Hamas began planning the October surprise.
Indeed, facts don’t always play a big role in popular punditry: An advocate for abandoning the Zionist idea of a Jewish democratic state cleverly rehearsed the tiresome trope that Israelis had it coming, like the perpetrators of apartheid in South Africa before them.
Never mind that in Gaza’s “open-air prison” GDP per capita is roughly the same as India’s and only slightly lower than Egypt’s; education opportunities increased until Israel’s withdrawal in 2005; and public opinion polls in 2018 showed more Gazans blaming Hamas and the Palestinian Authority than Israel for worsening conditions.
Efforts to explain the terrorism of October 7 in terms of the geopolitical complexities of Israel’s statehood, its wars, or the occupation are devious maneuvers aimed at obscuring the harder question. Even if Israeli policy bears some responsibility for the suboptimal living conditions in Gaza, what code of justice allows for the random slaughter of innocent Israelis?
To even hint at such an equation is to abdicate moral clarity.
As a dear friend suggested: Did the punitive nature of the Versailles Treaty justify Auschwitz? Why is it hard for some people to grieve Palestinian suffering – which is likely to get worse in the weeks ahead – without excusing what its fascistic leadership carried out on October 7?
FORTUNATELY, there are leaders in the Muslim world who understand this better than some Jews and their demonic allies on the “progressive” Left who are still shouting “Glory to the [Hamas] martyrs…” And fortunately, there are analysts who infuse real knowledge into the barrage of commentaries flooding mainstream and social media.
The world's reaction to the October 7 massacre
Tragically, universities and academic societies, with notable exceptions, were complicit in this blurring of responsibility and blame. Some administrators seemed tangled in the complexities of “academic freedom,” scared about offending their stakeholders and determined to be “balanced” in their criticism. Leaders who wasted no time signaling their virtuous condemnation of other heinous crimes at warp speed, such as the murder of George Floyd, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the failed coup of January 6, all had parched throats after the Hamas pogrom.
The silent treatment was applied even in reaction, or shall we say non-reaction, to the outburst of anti-Israel mongering among fanatics of “liberationist” dogma. Anxiety about reactions from stakeholders, who may take umbrage from statements that don’t explicitly mourn the victims of all violence, leads to a paradox: Protectors of academic freedom suppress their own voices and seem unaware that their silence is interpreted as acceptance.
That such cowardice was demonstrated even by a Jewish academic association, adds salt to the wound. Ditto for an organization dedicated to ending antisemitism and racism, which wrote a 115-word email to friends and alumni without reference to Hamas, Israel, Jews, or terrorism.
To be clear, some distinguished institutions did not succumb to the temptations of appeasement. A letter to alumni from the chancellor of the City University of New York, for example, called out the Hamas attack for what it was. I am proud that at my university, the president issued an unequivocal indictment of the massacre, and then strongly denounced as antisemitic electronic graffiti calling for “Divestment from Zionist genocide.”
The National Academy of Education posted an eloquent message of grief. And a group of mostly religious colleges (Christian and Jewish) joined in a strongly-worded statement condemning Hamas. These examples could be helpful to other leaders who for whatever reasons stumbled in their initial reactions and would like guidance on what to do in such situations in the future.
Perhaps a crisis consortium could be established, enabling participating presidents and their communications teams to confer quickly across institutional lines; that such an approach might embolden them toward quicker and stronger stances or further dilute the strength of their messages is, of course, a risk.
Regardless, all of higher education (along with much of civil society) needs to do some soul-searching. Is expressing unconditional contempt for genocidal terrorism off-limits? Is this the model we offer our students – that the “broader context” may justify the stabbing of Jewish babies and the mass murder of music lovers?
Coming from institutions that aren’t shy on other topics, tiptoeing around the flames of jihadi fanaticism means acquiescence with, or at best uncertainty about, its essential evil. President Joe Biden has this right.
Yet another example of the tendency to hold victims culpable is the finger-pointing at Israeli military intelligence. There is no question that a big political reckoning is in store. But let’s not allow this pursuit of democratic accountability – in its proper time and venue – to slide into yet another excuse for blame confusion.
If there was an intelligence lapse, as most experts in and out of Israel now acknowledge, it was not the cause of the attack.
As hard to believe as this may be, pro-Hamas speakers in a recent webinar couldn’t conceal their schadenfreude at the apparent failure of Israel’s vaunted hi-tech intelligence and security systems. What went unstated was the inconvenient counter-factual: had information about the impending attack been detected, interpreted, and communicated in time, Israel would have likely struck first, in self-defense.
Is there any doubt what world reaction would have been? (To this day people still argue about whether Israel was justified in opening fire in advance with knowledge of the impending attacks by Egypt and Syria in 1967.) One way or another, the blame-shifters worm their way in.
Reminiscent of past tragedy
THE EVENTS of October 7 evoke memories that we thought were stored in vaults marked “Never again”: Jewish babies beheaded, unarmed Jews loaded onto transports at gunpoint, Jewish women raped, Jewish families murdered, Jewish neighborhoods burned. Even those of us who don’t like Holocaust comparisons couldn’t help it. And just as survivors of Nazi brutality had to endure sly accusations of their complicity and passivity, today’s second-order psychological treachery is inflicted on the victims of Hamas barbarity – by silence, innuendo, or critique.
There are political, religious, and ideological underpinnings to the actions of Hamas and its defenders, for whom Palestinian “liberation” means total destruction of Jews (as well as the Jewish state). If that’s not antisemitism then I’m not sure what is. But the world’s oldest hatred comes in its passive mode too: unwillingness to denounce barbarism against Jews is evidence of a latent strain of the sickness, of a “bystanderism” that we have learned about the hard way.
Let me suggest a perhaps more charitable explanation. Among those who seem stymied in their reactions to the massacre or inclined to what is essentially a “yes-but” reflex, is there a deeper explanation?
I’m not a psychologist, but maybe good and sane people – not necessarily antisemites – find comfort by convincing themselves that “it can’t happen to me because I’ll know what to do.” Primo Levi, the great chronicler of life in Hitler’s camps, recalled how a fifth-grader showed him, on a sketched map of Auschwitz, how to escape.
When my father, of blessed memory, talked about life in Buchenwald, he often detected a whiff of reproach, sometimes directly phrased as: “Why didn’t you fight back?” (Subtext: “I would have.”)
I lived in Jerusalem during the Yom Kippur War and today have family, friends, and professional colleagues who are in and out of their bomb shelters, whose sons and daughters are at the front line, and who have already lost loved ones at the hands of the Hamas butchers.
The world should be grieving
But my horror at the October 7 attack – the greatest single-day act of genocidal terrorism targeting Jews, because they are Jews, in 80 years – transcends personal ties. Everyone should be grieving. (I had no relatives in the Twin Towers and I didn’t know Trayvon Martin, but I wept and protested.)
As I was writing this, President Isaac Herzog was restarting the famous printing factory at Kibbutz Be’eri. Yes, the Jewish people have endured horrors before, and we will bounce back.
But what about the rest of civilized humanity? Our moral clarity is being tested. As a close relative in Israel put it, “We will somehow crawl out of this nightmare and rebuild. But we will remember those who failed to walk alongside us as we did.”
The writer is dean and professor of education policy at George Washington University and past president of the National Academy of Education. His most recent book, Can Schools Save Democracy? Civic Education and the Common Good, is being released this month. The views expressed in this commentary are his own and do not necessarily reflect the position of George Washington University.