Hamas vs. Humanity

‘Y ou could have said that last week. You can say it next month. Why are you saying it now? The man just died.” That’s my paraphrase, from memory, of a Facebook comment that John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, wrote in response to a bitter denunciation that someone had just written of Alvin Dark, a former shortstop and longtime manager.

Dark made his major-league debut in 1946. MLB was still racially segregated. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier the next season, and Luke Easter and other recruits from the Negro Leagues soon followed. According to much hearsay and on the evidence of an atrocious remark of his quoted by a newspaper columnist in 1964, Dark was racist. He offended and angered most notably Orlando Cepeda, who described him as hostile to Latin American players. Dark may have mellowed as he matured, but accounts of his alleged moral ugliness in his prime persisted. If they were true, he was wrong.

So was the attempt to have a discussion about it on November 14, 2014, the day after his death. John Thorn is a man of the Left and presumably in some sense on “the side” of the Facebook commenter who, to call out racial injustice, railed over the warm corpse of a man reputed to have been a famous bigot in his day. Thorn’s response would not have been noteworthy in a better world, but here we are. Say what you will about his political opinions. He’s a mensch.

To everything, a season. There’s a time to look backward, to the past, in search of how the way things are came to be. There’s a time to look forward, to the future, to determine it, in both senses of that word. And there’s a time for zooming in on the present moment and looking it straight in the eye.

“Don’t be too quick to tell us about the ‘context’ of this attack,” Ben Wittes wrote in a Substack post on October 7, hours after the Hamas massacre of civilians in southern Israel. “There’s a place for that conversation, of course; it’s ongoing every day; and it’s legitimate. But 9/11 was not the day to discuss the errors of US foreign policy. The day ISIS attacked Paris and killed 100 people was not the day to lecture France about its sins.”

He wrote that he was “not certain what the right way to respond to the horrific, murderous surprise attack launched last night from Gaza is” but that some ways are obviously cold and to be avoided. He identified seven. A sampling:

Do not use any sentence that begins with anything like, “I oppose violence against civilians and terrorism, but . . .” You need to be able to end the sentence before the “but.” What comes after it may be right and valuable. But it’s not valuable today and probably won’t be valuable tomorrow or the day after that. . . .

If you’re American, don’t use the murder of Israelis as a means of going after your political enemies domestically. I don’t care who they are. This wasn’t Donald Trump’s fault. It wasn’t Joe Biden’s fault. It had nothing to do with the recent deal with Iran.

He concluded with a reminder: “There’s no requirement that people say anything about it all. But keep in mind,

if you do choose to speak about it, that hundreds of innocent people are dead, and many more — Israelis and Palestinians both — are going to die in the days to come. Is it really the right time for your call to vengeance or your whataboutism or for settling some unrelated score?

Further recommended reading: this brief essay by Gal Beckerman, an editor at the Atlantic. He has relatives in Israel and, being emotionally invested in it, is critical of its government. “I deplore the occupation,” he writes, for what it has done to Israeli society as well as to Palestinians. You get the picture. Then something happened. To the attacks of October 7, friends and allies of his on the left responded with a “callousness” that “broke” him:

The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background.

But

the same ideological hardening I’d seen on the right in the past few years, the blind allegiances and contorted narratives even when reality was staring people in the face, has also happened, to a greater degree than I’d imagined, on the left, among the people whom I think of as my own. . . . They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name.

President Biden in his speech on Tuesday spoke the word “Palestinian” only twice. (“Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination” and, “They use Palestinian civilians as human shields.”) The effect was to underscore that Israel’s war is with Hamas, not Palestinians. In that, he followed the example set by President George W. Bush, who in an address to Congress shortly after 9/11 emphasized that America was at war against terrorism, not Islam. “I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world,” he said.

We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. . . . The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.

Some criticized Bush for overstating the case and underestimating the support for Islamist terrorism among Muslims worldwide. The critics may have been right, but Bush was not wrong either in his assertion that peaceable Muslims are numerous or in his discernment that the occasion called for him to give them a warm shoutout. To everything, a season.

On a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv five years ago, I sat near two nuns from Bethlehem in the West Bank. One of them spoke English. I asked her about interreligious tension in her day-to-day life there. She raised her outstretched hand above her head, palm downward, and said that most of what I was asking about happened “up here,” among armies and activists, politicians and pundits. I imagined her running errands around town, buying groceries for her community, doing friendly business with familiar faces, mostly Arab, Muslim and Christian, and interacting on occasion with Israeli soldiers or officials, Jewish and Muslim and Christian — everyone civil, even sometimes kind, no heated arguments about politics or religion.

Roughly half of the 15 million people living in Israel and the Palestinian territories are Arabs. Roughly half are Jews. All of them are human.