As university crowds cheer Hamas, the intellectual left has rarely been less moral
Celebratory reactions to Hamas’ attack have helped me solve an old puzzle about how the Holocaust happened in highly educated Germany
Supporters of Palestinians gathered at Harvard University to show their support for Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, earlier this month. Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
The shock waves of the Oct. 7 massacre have reverberated through American institutions of higher education. In response to Hamas’ attack — which killed more than 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians — student groups supported Hamas before the blood dried, while universities quickly retreated into corporate vagueness.
The reaction was swift. Major donors closed their checkbooks. Academics decried the “moral failure of a liberal education.” Law firms rescinded offers of employment.
Unlike many other alumni of these institutions, my reaction is not anger or criticism or rage, but rather gratitude. I just want to say: thank you.
Thank you to my alma mater, Yale Law School, where student groups celebrated the attacks and “Palestinian resistance,” and to Yale professor Zareena Grewal, who says Israelis aren’t civilians.
Thank you to my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania — whose student body is 17% Jewish — where hundreds of students marched down Locust Walk shouting “there is only one solution.”
Thank you to the Harvard Jews for Liberation and the 30 other Harvard student groups who issued a statement saying they hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ attack.
Thank you to the hundreds of Columbia students who have cheered the killers of innocent Jews, and to Columbia professor Joseph Massad, who described the Hamas attack as “astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome” and “incredible.”
You’ve answered a curious historical puzzle, introduced to me by Professor Tom Childers on the first day of his famous college course at Penn, “The Third Reich.” Why, Childers asked, did the Holocaust happen in Germany — a country that prided itself on its art, its culture, its philosophy and ethics? How could more than half of the participants at the 1942 Wannsee Conference that decided on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — total extermination of all Jews — hold the title “Doctor”?
Childers didn’t have an answer, even after 40 years of teaching the same benighted subject. But you have given me one.
You’ve shown me that people can make grave moral errors not despite academic achievement, but because of it. Those who are really, really smart run the risk of being truly morally dumb.
Why? When you abstract away reality in favor of broad, sweeping ideas — work that belongs at the heart of many academic endeavors — dangerous things can happen. You can abstract away men, women and children, thinking of them only as bit players in a larger (and much more interesting) intellectual drama. Why bother with reality when it is the life of the mind that matters?
When I see very smart, very earnest individuals, including my fellow Yale and Penn students and alumni, either cheering on Hamas, or, at the very least, working to understand and sympathize with them, I know that many of these individuals are not true Jew-haters (though some are). They may not discriminate against Jews in their personal lives. They might not be peddlers of the Protocols, closeted Cossacks, or brazen blood libelers.
They’re something worse: intellectuals.
The hip intellectual move today is to see everything, everywhere, as an example of the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. The oppressor is perceived as privileged; the oppressed, marginalized. The oppressor has more power; the oppressed, less. The oppressor has agency but no feelings; the oppressed has feelings but no agency. The oppressor is automatically wrong; the oppressed, automatically right.
Since Hamas attacked Israel, the hip intellectuals have demonstrated the ultimate expression of this binary: The group that conducted a brutal attack on innocent civilians is good, and the group responding to try and ensure no such attack ever takes place again is bad.
The intuitive appeal of such black-and-white thinking is seductive. Is there anything better than feeling like part of an international movement of the underdog? What is more soothing than a wall-to-wall, all-encompassing moral vision? Such a vision divides the world into right and wrong, good and bad — and you’re always in the camp of the good guys.
Plus, for these intellectuals, the cost of this luxury belief is free. When you’re living in Brooklyn or Berkeley, you’re protected from the conflict itself. So you get the warm, fuzzy feeling of moral superiority while someone far away pays the costs. Best of all — it immediately simplifies our otherwise complex reality. You have power? Bad. You’re less powerful? Good.
What could be wrong with that?
Because it offers moralism without morality. Because it intentionally ignores reality in favor of an intellectual hologram. Because it justifies acts that, as President Joe Biden aptly put it, are “pure, unadulterated evil.”
Despite being so concerned with history’s judgments, the hip intellectuals today seem blithely unconcerned with the fact that a similar group of intellectuals in the 20th century also abstracted away reality. They, too, had an all-encompassing vision. Part of the right race? The right class? Good. Part of a different race? Bad.
Different intellectual paradigm, same rotten intellectuals.
Nor will this issue disappear. For hip moralists, Zionism will always and forever be verboten. Zionism is about reclaiming Jewish power — not disavowing it. When our enemies do attack us — an activity that, unfortunately, they seem to never tire of — we will protect ourselves without apology.
If you’re curious why really earnest, really smart Ivy League students can call someone a “Zionist” with the same vitriol of the Brown Shirts spitting out the word “kike,” it’s because having power in the early 21st century is the equivalent of being an inferior race in the early 20th. Both perspectives prefer Jews as the powerless victims.
There is a different story to be told. Every human has the ability to choose between good and evil. Even if you are part of a historically disadvantaged group, you can be evil. Even if you are privileged, you can be good. “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
Choose good. And do not excuse others for choosing evil.
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