The left often portrays itself as being the natural guardians of human rights, who view all lives as equally valuable, and denouncing the war-mongering nationalism of the right.
That mask has often slipped. After 9/11, a significant number of people on the left did not condemn the attacks, arguing that America had it coming, and that this was the consequence of its own supposedly imperialist foreign policy.
They just couldn’t get themselves to denounce a terrorist attack deliberately aimed at civilian targets, and intended to kill as many innocents as possible.
On 7 October 2023, what might become known as the Second Yom Kippur War was started by Hamas, a terrorist group that nominally governs the Gaza Strip, when it invaded Israel and went on a brutal mass murder spree, slaughtering 1 300 people, of whom more than 1 000 were innocent civilians.
They spared nobody. They killed entire families, raped teenagers, tied up children before setting them alight, and murdered babies. When they had time, they tortured their victims first.
Yet many on the pro-Palestinian left (see here, here, here, here, here and here) simply cannot get themselves to denounce this attack for what it was: a war crime, and a crime against humanity.
‘Stratospherically spectacular’
A journalist, who writes for Daily Maverick, confronted me on X (ex-Twitter), about last week’s column in which I criticise the failure of the ANC and the government to condemn the attack, describing it as, ‘Another stratospherically spectacular two-dimensional analysis from @IvoVegter who is apparently still living under his neoliberal-clad rock.’
I don’t consider ‘neo-liberal’ to be an insult. It is merely a left-wing epithet for classical liberals. And ‘stratospherically spectacular’ is something I’m going to put on my next book jacket.
She also denounced my piece as ‘bar-room ranting’, and asked whether I got paid to write propaganda. (Not an original thought crosses these lefties’ minds, it seems. If you don’t agree with them on anything, you must be a paid propagandist.)
Despite giving her several opportunities to do so, she would not condemn the Hamas attack. Her final excuse for failing to do so? ‘I have a day job.’
Tyrants and terrorists
Cyril Ramaphosa and the entire ANC National Executive Kleptocrats (NEC) doubled down on their initial statements, incorrectly donning traditional Middle-Eastern headdresses (kaffiyehs) as scarves, and waving little Palestinian flags made for them at great expense by a connected comrade.
The Department of International Relations and Cooperation with Tyrants and Terrorists, which also couldn’t bring itself to condemn the violations of the Geneva Conventions by Hamas, did manage to rouse itself to, ‘[condemn] in the strongest possible terms Israel’s violation of the Geneva Conventions and the abandonment of International Humanitarian Law in Gaza’.
The ANC added the anodyne: ‘The ANC remains steadfast in its commitment to advocating for enduring peace between Israel and Palestine. The ANC calls for meaningful dialogue and a dedicated pursuit of a two-state solution.’
Would that be like the dialogue about a peaceful two-state solution that Israel has been pursuing for decades, and which the Palestinians have rejected time and time again?
Ramaphosa offered the ANC’s ‘condolences to Palestine and Israel’.
How lovely. But it entirely ignores the elephant in the room: the nature of the attack by Hamas.
And soon enough, they too turned to the supposed crimes Israel has not yet committed: ‘President Cyril Ramaphosa says the Israeli government’s call for 1.1 million people in Gaza to evacuate will lead to genocide’.
That’s not only whataboutery, but it’s a propaganda trick.
Israel’s evacuation call is designed to minimise civilian casualties when it invades Gaza to destroy Hamas, as it has vowed to do. If Israel did not call for an evacuation, it would stand accused of causing excessive civilian casualties. If it does call for an evacuation, it stands accused of ‘genocide’. The only option that would satisfy Ramaphosa (and the UN, for that matter) would be not to respond at all to the attack by Hamas.
In fact, Ramaphosa’s warning plays straight into Hamas’s hands. It has always had a strategy to put civilians in harm’s way and use them as human shields, so it has a cudgel with which to beat Israel. Supporting Hamas’s call for civilians not to evacuate is, effectively, support for Hamas’s human shield strategy.
Unqualified condemnation
The thing is, this isn’t about Israel, or Israel’s past actions, or its future behaviour.
This is about expecting an unqualified condemnation of the war crimes Hamas members committed (and which it tried to blame on ordinary Palestinian civilians who just happened to wear Hamas attire).
Personally, I support the Israeli right to exist and defend itself. I have little sympathy for the Palestinians, who have expressed genocidal intent against the Jews, made war against Israel, and rejected peace overtures at every opportunity for 75 years.
My view is simple: if Palestinians lay down their weapons, there will be peace. If Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be genocide.
Yet my support for Israel does not make me incapable of criticising Israeli policies, or the Israeli government, or the actions of the Israeli Defence Force when they carelessly or recklessly cause avoidable civilian casualities. (Although I think that happens far less often than the pro-Palestinian media would have you believe, and is often the result of civilians being used as human shields by armed Palestinian groups.)
While I support the objective of destroying Hamas, it disturbs me when Israeli officials respond to the Hamas attack by shutting off necessary supplies to Palestinian civilians, or denouncing all Palestinians as ‘animals’, or promising ‘another Nakba’, which is the word Palestinians use for the displacement of Palestinian Arabs after they went to war against the newly-founded Israel in 1948). Dehumanising the enemy and promising ethnic cleansing treads a very dangerous moral line.
Terrorism against civilians
For those who, unlike me, denounce Israel and support the Palestinian cause (inconsistent and unclear though it may be), it should be equally possible to do so while also condemning the inhumanity and war crimes of Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation cut from the same cloth as ISIS.
It is entirely possible to support a struggle for liberation without supporting terrorism against civilians.
No reasonable person should find themselves so partisan that every action of their own side, no matter how awful, must be defended, and every action of the opposition must be recast as a crime.
I can only assume that the journalist who harangued me thought that my ‘two-dimensional analysis’ would gain dimensions (or something) if I had placed the Hamas attack in the broader context of the colonialism, oppression, occupation, apartheid, siege or settlement, or whatever she no doubt accuses Israel of, and which she no doubt believes to have ‘provoked’ the attack.
But even if she were right about Israel, there is no provocation, ever, that can justify the deliberate rape, torture and murder of a thousand unarmed men, women and children.
What Israel did or didn’t do is entirely irrelevant to the morality of it all.
Contrary to Ramaphosa’s trite ‘condolences to both Palestine and Israel’, there is no equivalence here.
The Israelis do not, as a matter of policy, attack civilian gatherings in Palestinian areas, trying to kill as many innocent Palestinians as possible. When Israel’s actions do cause civilian casualties, it is always in pursuit of a legitimate military objective, such as eliminating rocket positions or pursuing terrorist commanders.
But even if Israel had done exactly the same to Palestinians, the attack by Hamas would still be unconscionable, and should still be condemned without any ifs or buts.
The inability to condemn the Hamas attack, in and of itself, without qualification, exposes the moral vacuity of the pro-Palestinian left.
Be like Amnesty
Why can’t they be like Amnesty International, which has (wrongly, in my opinion) declared Israel to be an apartheid state, but to its credit clearly and openly condemned the Hamas attack.
It says: ‘Palestinian armed groups must be held accountable for deliberate civilian killings, abductions and indiscriminate attacks’, adding, ‘Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups flagrantly violated international law and displayed a chilling disregard for human life by carrying out cruel and brutal crimes including mass summary killings, hostage-taking, and launching indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel.’
It is no supporter of Israel, but it has the moral clarity to call out barbarous war crimes when it sees them.
The Global Imams’ Council, which represents 1 470 Islamic imams and scholars, leading over 800 Muslim communities in 38 countries, has ‘proclaimed solidarity with the Jewish people’, and has chosen to condemn the ‘barbaric and terrorist acts committed by Hamas against Jewish, Christian and Muslim civilians in the Jewish state’.
It points to a Fatwa issued against Hamas by the Islamic Fatwa Council in March this year, charging it with ‘corruption and crimes against humanity’, and ‘forbidding Muslims from supporting, joining, donating to or praying for the terrorist organisation’.
Take it from a leftie
If these people, who surely are not patsies for Israel (or paid propagandists), can have the humanity to denounce the war crimes of Hamas, why can’t the ANC, or left-wing journalists, do so?
The left is sacrificing its moral credibility on the altar of partisanship. Instead of defending the human rights of oppressed people against the depredations of powerful regimes, they find themselves ignoring, rationalising, or even defending crimes against humanity.
And if you won’t take it from me, take it from another pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli left-winger, who warns that ‘a left that refuses to condemn mass murder is doomed’, and says ‘these responses constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values’.
Quite right. They do.
PS: After this column was filed, the journalist who took me to task on X eventually reverted with a response saying that ‘of course’ she condemns ‘the killing of innocent people’. She also condemns, she hastened to add, my spreading ‘misinformation’, namely my claim that the ANC blamed the victims. In her opinion, I ought not to refer to the state of Israel as the victim. That this semantic quibble was worthy of condemnation in the same breath as a condemnation of war crimes by Hamas was startling, to put it mildly. She then proceeded to qualify her condemnation of the Hamas killings by saying they were a ‘predictable’ response to civilian casualties caused by Israeli strikes in Gaza. Of course.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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