As has become distressingly clear, many people blame the Israelis for the atrocities that Hamas terrorists perpetrated on Saturday, October 7, against hundreds of civilians, including women and children, across southern Israel. The Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, along with many other student groups at Harvard, declared that Israel’s “apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” The San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America condemned “Israel’s ongoing occupation and the apartheid regime” and affirmed “the Palestinian people’s . . . right to resist,” including by means of what it euphemistically called “this weekend’s events.” And the president of the Student Bar Association at New York University Law School opined that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,” because its “state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary.”
In one sense, these reactions to the butchery are more shocking than the butchery itself. History contains only too many examples of outrageous violence perpetrated against innocent people, Jews and non-Jews. But how could anyone, safely removed from the scene of a violent conflict, coolly seek to justify mass murder? Nor is this failure of moral judgment confined to a lunatic fringe. On the contrary, it characterizes a large slice of the academic and political left.
How can so many people have developed such a perverted sense of morality? Anti-Semitism is certainly a factor—a spiritual sickness as mysterious in its virulence as in its longevity. But anti-Semitism cannot be the complete explanation. Over the years, some people have similarly sought to justify the mass murder of Americans on September 11, of Cambodians in the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, and of Ukrainians in the Holodomor. Common to all these cases is a failure to acknowledge that some actions are always gravely wrong, regardless of the circumstances.
