No Excuse for Terror
Progressives blithely refer to Israel as an apartheid state. This trivializes apartheid, of course. Within Israel, Arabs and Jews have equal rights. Gaza and the West Bank are not inside Israel, so the conditions of life in those places are not representative of the civil rights situation in Israel.
The purpose of defaming Israel this way is to recast the actions of Hamas as “resistance”. This is why progressives fall all over themselves to “contextualize” the events of 10/7. The Secretary-General of the UN did this when he told the Security Council that ”the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.” But killing innocent people, which has been the Palestinians’ primary method to redress grievances, is not a legitimate form of resistance.
The US during the Jim Crow era was a fascist apartheid state. We don’t talk about it in those terms, but they certainly apply. Enforced segregation is apartheid. But African Americans did not resort to killing civilians to resist that apartheid. Martin Luther King Jr. did not call for suicide bombings or the indiscriminate killing of white people. That’s because he wasn’t a terrorist and because terrorism is not an appropriate response to oppression.
There is a serious moral perversion at play when progressives say that this is what decolonization looks like. Since when has decolonization entailed gunning down children in their homes? Gandhi did not liberate India by killing British civilians. No, abducting babies and hurling grenades into shelters full of concertgoers is not what decolonization looks like. It’s what terrorism looks like.
Why does the world lower its ethical standards when it comes to aggrieved middle-easterners? Is it a form of orientalism? Do progressives secretly believe that Palestinians can’t be held to the same moral standards as everyone else because of an inherent moral inadequacy? Liberals must reject this racist double standard. We must apply the same moral standards to all oppressed people. No context explains or legitimizes terrorism.
