It isn’t progressive to enable Hamas’ atrocities against Israel and the Palestinians | Opinion

I have to believe you don’t know what you’re doing. I have to believe that with every social media post spreading misinformation, every poster of Israeli hostages ripped and torn, every chant of, “From the river to the sea,” that you don’t know what you’re doing. That you don’t know you’re explicitly calling for the annihilation of Israel and its people. That you truly believe the hostage posters are simply “propaganda,” not images of real human lives in captivity for over a month now. That for you, a post on social media is as good as proof and verification of what you believe, not just echo chamber validation of the side you insist on taking.

I have to believe you think you’re a true progressive. That you think your activism will result in better lives for Palestinians, even as you rally around Hamas, supporting and enabling a terrorist group that terrorizes them, too. I have to believe you actually think you’re on the right side of history, the side of justice, equity and liberation, even as your actions online, on college campuses and in the streets actively threaten, and have now also taken Jewish lives in America.

I have to believe you don’t see that attacking American Jews for events half a world away proves that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. That you’re proving there is no distinction for you between the perceived evils of the Jewish state and the Jews themselves. I have to believe your demands for a cease-fire come from the misguided belief that this is a reasonable request, even as some 240 hostages, including children and babies, have yet to be returned to their families. Even as the atrocities committed by Hamas have left human remains so unrecognizable that some of the dead can hardly be identified.

I suspect you don’t know what a Jew is, and I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. I know that when you look at us, you see white European colonizers. I have to believe you don’t know that we are indigenous to the land of Israel, despite the availability of overwhelming evidence you perhaps haven’t sought to explore. I have to believe that when you equate Zionism with all the world’s evils, that you don’t know what that word means, either. The Zionism you’re against bears no resemblance to the Zionism of my family, of my people, to the movement for Jewish liberation in our ancestral homeland.

I have to believe you’d be willing to learn. I have to believe we live in a world in which we value truth and human dignity, and perhaps you just didn’t realize you’re sacrificing both.

Because the alternative is simply too painful. Because the alternative is that you simply hate Jews, and that what’s happening in and around the Jewish state is just a convenient excuse for you to express that hate.

I have to believe you don’t know what you’re doing. I have to believe if you knew, you’d have the courage to change.

This story was originally published November 15, 2023 at 4:35 AM with the headline "It isn’t progressive to enable Hamas’ atrocities against Israel and the Palestinians | Opinion."