Israel, Hamas, and the War of Absolute Enmity

Located about a mile from Gaza, Kibbutz Kfar Aza is a lush communal farm reminiscent of a quiet suburb. When I visited in April, our guide, a Kibbutz member, told us to “ignore” the sound of artillery fire as she recounted to us the massacre that took place six months before. We were standing among the small, square homes that members would move into as single young adults; the volunteers who restored the Kibbutz had left them untouched to stand as a memorial. 

On Saturday, October 7, terrorists disguised in IDF uniforms rode motorcycles through the border and systematically entered each home to rape, murder, and kidnap the residents. It took the IDF until Tuesday to clear the area of the terrorists who stayed to fight. The homes were then marked for casualties; red dots were painted near the doors, one for each life lost. I peered into some of the homes, seeing the ravaged rooms of victims. One had a poster that said, “Life is short. Laugh Wildly. Never Regret. Smile.” Nearby lay a laptop, exploded by gunfire. There were row after row of such devastated homes. The Kibbutz lost sixty-one lives. Nineteen were taken hostage.

Kibbutzim, meaning “gathering” in Hebrew, are intentional communities founded upon socialist and egalitarian ideals. Their members are predominantly leftwing and include some of the most prominent supporters of Palestinians. Like other Kibbutzim, our guide explained, the members of Kfar Aza had petitioned the government to allow Gazans to work at the Kibbutz. They even provided them with food, money, and healthcare. But the Palestinians betrayed them, informing Hamas where each member lived, the layout of their homes, and the location of safe rooms.

Our guide, who mercifully wasn’t in the country on the morning of the attacks, pointed to where the terrorists had hidden on her rooftop and where they had boobytrapped her house with grenades. She also showed us where the children of Kfar Aza had been gunned down. Some were killed while they were playing in the playground. Others were killed as they ran away. Another child was killed on our guide’s lawn.

At Kibbutz Holit, another socialist farming community, I spoke to the parents of Adi Vital-Kaploun, a mother of two who was murdered on October 7. Adi’s father, Yaron, visited her home that fateful morning. When the rockets fell, he hid in the guest house’s safe room. For a brief moment, he saw the terrorists coming through the Kibbutz, carrying grenades and RPGs. He remembers noticing that the door to his safe room had no lock—the rooms were meant to provide cover from rocket blasts, not terrorist invasions—and worrying for his daughter and grandsons. Like in Kfar Aza, the terrorists had maps and names of everyone in Kibbutz Holit, courtesy of the Palestinians who worked there. Yaron was not targeted because his name was not on the list. But for those whose names were written, like Adi and her children, hiding in a safe room made them sitting ducks. 

A few hours later, the IDF came into the guest house where Yaron was hiding. He rushed to the main house, looking for his daughter, and discovered her corpse—boobytrapped with almost fifty grenades. Yaron is only alive today because one of the grenades placed on the door failed to trigger. Adi had tried to fight off the terrorists but was shot to death in front of her two sons. The boys were then kidnapped and forced to walk to Gaza. Yaron would later watch in horror as his grandchildren were used as propaganda by Al Jazeera to show how “humane” Hamas was in holding children with pretend mothers. 

Even though mainstream media has covered the Kibbutz attacks (the New York Times reported on Kfar Aza, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed the Vital Family), many leftists in America continue to defend Hamas. Widely circulated statements, such as those of students at Harvard and Columbia, may appear extreme, but they are indicative of leftist thought. “Personally, I too felt horror at some of the things Palestinians did on that day,” writes Andreas Malm, the communist author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. “I also don’t particularly enjoy reading about the killing of civilians at the hands of the FLN, the Mau Mau rebellion, the Nat Turner revolt, the Haitian revolution. . . . And yet we, on the Left, commemorate the Haitian revolution as the greatest single act of emancipation in the New World, perhaps even in the modern era.” The shattered communities, the kidnapped children, and the slaughtered parents are part of the “struggle for freedom.” For the left, the Kibbutzim’s love for the Palestinians and commitment to socialism means nothing. As Israelis, they are still the “rightful” object of Palestinian rage.

Jodi Dean, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, puts it bluntly: 

The images from October 7 . . . were for many of us exhilarating. Here were moments of freedom, that defeated Zionist expectations of submission to occupation and siege. . . . Defending Hamas, we take the side of the Palestinian resistance. . . . Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed.

“This may suggest Carl Schmitt’s classic formulation of the political in terms of the intensification of the friend/enemy relationship,” Dean continues. “But where it differs is in its recognition of hierarchy. Colonial occupation and imperialist exploitation produce enmity; enmity isn’t the affective setting of equals in conflict. . . . It’s a war of oppressed against their oppressor. . . . The division constitutive of the political goes all the way down.” Dean’s extension of Schmitt contains the essential core of the left’s logic. Schmitt, who has been experiencing a renaissance on the right, is notable for his claim, first made in The Concept of the Political, that the distinction between friends and enemies constitutes politics: “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.” The enemy is a public one who stands against the people's way of life. 

The insidious nature of the left is to label Israel not just an enemy of “Palestine” or “Hamas” but an enemy of all mankind. That is, they have taken the friend and enemy distinction and declared Israel not just a public enemy but an absolute one, an enemy of all humanity. Schmitt warns of the perils of such a move: “To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”

For leftists like Dean, Malm, and students at prestigious universities across America, Israel and its supporters constitute an absolute enemy that must be completely negated. In Theory of the Partisan, a continuation of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt cites Lenin as the innovator of the concept of the absolute enemy, with whom all manner of war is justified. “Lenin . . . recognized the inevitability of force and bloody, revolutionary civil war and state war . . . as a necessary ingredient of the total revolutionary process. . . . The goal is the communist revolution in all countries; what serves this goal is good and just.” If bringing about revolution is de facto just, then any action for that end is just. In this case, since the terrorists are attacking the settler-colonial-imperial-capitalist state, they are freedom fighters. Since the Kibbutz members do not want their homes burned and children murdered, they are enemies of revolution—enemies of humanity. 

But the left conceives of “humanity” narrowly: Only the “oppressed,” the revolutionary class, count as human. Only war waged by the “weaker” against the “stronger” is just. Because Hamas is the weaker opponent, everything it does is permissible, and any aggression it incurs is a violation of “human rights.” These rhetorical gestures are on full display when the left talks about “human rights” and “civilian casualties.” Hamas embraces civilian casualties as both an instrument in their PR campaign and as a matter of religious principle. To die a casualty against Israel is to achieve martyrdom. As their charter says: “Death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” With our Western concern for civilians, we consider Hamas cowards because they hide behind women and children. They consider us cowards for being unwilling to give up everything, including our civilians, to fight a war. Hamas knows that the left’s concern for “oppressed humanity” will hold Israel solely responsible for civilian casualties, so they intentionally maximize their number, on both sides. The left’s commitment to “human rights” is a tool to rationalize violence against their enemies. Betrayal, rape, child murder, the systematic massacre of civilians, hostage-taking—all is permissible to those the left deems human. 

The war of absolute enmity knows no limits. But it also engenders the greatest possible unity. In an article published in 1930, Schmitt writes, “The political unity is the highest unity . . . because it decides and within itself can prevent the other contradictory groupings from dissociating to the most extreme enmity (e.g., to civil war).” Schmitt recognizes that antagonistic groups can be united by hatred for a common enemy. By declaring Israel an absolute enemy, the left reveals its essence as a movement. Make no mistake, the college students at our elite schools would not survive a day under Hamas’s regime. Despite this, Western leftists and Hamas share a mutual enmity: the Israeli state. This hatred provides the basis for an intense unity, and for antagonism against supporters of Israel, even supporters who are like them in almost all respects except this one. (Witness a leftist activist hold up a sign in front of her peers, calling them Hamas’s next targets.) 

More broadly, Schmitt's comments help us see that the coalition of the “woke” is united by this common enmity. From this absolute hatred comes even the extreme irony of queers supporting a terrorist group that wishes their death, because they cannot be for the oppressed unless they hate Israel and support its enemies. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley captures this sentiment well: “‘Free Palestine’ has been etched into my political vocabulary. In the movement circles that nurtured and trained me, ‘Free Palestine’ rolled off the tongue as easily as ‘Free South Africa,’ ‘Free the Land,’ ‘A Luta Continua,’ ‘Power to the People.’” Hatred of Israel isn’t an ancillary or quirky part of the left: it constitutes it. 

Israel stands as the concentrated symbol of all the left wishes to negate. Activists are right that feminism, trans rights, LGBTQ+ rights, global warming, black liberation, and the like are all interconnected. They are unified by their shared enemy: the American/Western way of life, what leftists call “settler imperialism and capitalism.” Israel is the object of leftist ire because it represents Western civilization, which is predicated on the Decalogue, which, then and now, stands as an affirmation of human life and rejection of pagan brutality. Our laws, from the earliest state constitutions, rely on the legal code of the Jews. Even the laws of military conduct that we consider “just” find roots in the laws of Moses. Francisco de Vitoria, in his classic articulation of just war, cites Deut. 20:10–20 and Exod. 23:7 to demonstrate the unlawfulness of intentionally killing innocent persons in war. This applies even to great enemies: “Even in wars against the Turks we may not kill children, who are obviously innocent, nor women, who are to be presumed innocent at least as far as the war is concerned.” Western civilization is built on affirming the human dignity of even our worst enemies. Schmitt calls this “the negation of absolute enmity.” By renouncing the bedrock of our civilization, the left consigns itself to accepting profound horrors. When the principles of the Decalogue are abandoned, only power and hatred rule, and for the left that rule is absolute. It is no surprise, then, that some Jews who moved from the U.S. to Israel tell me they feel safer in the war zone than in America. They would rather deal with a controlled, geographic enemy than one who walks among them.

But mutual hatred cannot be the response. Instead, we must affirm universal human dignity. The medical professionals at Barzilai Hospital in the Gaza Envelope provided a striking example of this affirmation in the wake of the October 7 attacks. The hospital had been ravaged that morning. Its maternity ward was even hit by a rocket. And yet the hospital staff treated wounded terrorists, the same terrorists who slaughtered their friends. One of the head doctors told me that though this caused a scandal in Israel, the hospital itself remained resolute in its promise to provide care no matter who came through their doors. This originally Western and Christian policy speaks to the profound care for human life that undergirds Western civilization. Enemies, even if they declare their enmity to be absolute, are still human. To accept their terms of absolute warfare is to justify their whole cause. It is to be caught in the mimetic cycle that threatens only to multiply horrors.

Stiven Peter is an M.Div. student at Reformed Theological Seminary-NYC.

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Image contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data, 2023. From Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.