patrick.net

You might think that an atrocity like Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel would lead opponents of the Jewish state to temper their attacks. Instead, from college campuses to mainstream media outlets, elite left-wing circles have responded to the terror group’s barbarism by intensifying their denunciations of Israel. That may seem counterintuitive, but it’s typical. The worst demonization of the Jewish state has typically followed the worst atrocities against it.

Recall the Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign in the early 2000s. Then, as now, many in the West responded to the carnage by criticizing the Jews. International nongovernmental organizations resurrected the Soviet-era claim that Israel is an “apartheid” state. The United Nations joined the chorus and in 2001 met for a global conference “against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in Durban, South Africa. Denunciation of Israel dominated the agenda.

Fast-forward two decades and Jews experienced the deadliest attack since the Holocaust. In response, many in the West have accused Israel of being a genocidal nation. The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah wrote on Oct. 13 that the U.S. “cannot stand by as Israeli officials engage in genocidal language and describe genocidal intent against Palestinians for the actions of Hamas.” England’s Guardian published at least three opinion pieces this week warning the same. Hundreds of international-law scholars from around the world signed a statement reporting that they’d found signs in Israel that “warn of a potential genocide in Gaza.”
One such “sign” is the Oct. 9 statement by Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, that Israel is “fighting human animals” Mr. Gallant was speaking about Hamas, not the Palestinian people, and the Israel Defense Forces have deliberately attempted to minimize damage to civilians in Gaza.

In one respect, this response is transparent projection. Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Jews and Israel. By kidnapping, raping and slaughtering innocent civilians, the terrorist group gives every indication that it believes what it says. Yet its sympathizers in the West aren’t merely projecting. Their behavior is an example of cognitive-dissonance reduction, the process by which people reconcile new information that contradicts their firmly held priors. The result is an ostensibly coherent system of thought.

Western activists for Palestinians are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome. Each precept is grounded in longstanding—and borderline racist—conceptions of Jews and Arabs.

This cognitive trap expresses itself in how Israel’s opponents in the West speak about the conflict with the Palestinians. Concern that “time is running out” for reaching a two-state solution never leads to calls for the Palestinians to hurry up and accept a negotiated compromise. They ignore that the Palestinians rejected statehood and peace in 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2014. They ignore that Hamas’s belligerence is the cause of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, a defensive measure by a nation under assault.

Hamas’s gruesome attack poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.

This was the playbook 20 years ago when Palestinian terror groups sent young men and women to blow themselves up in Israeli buses, restaurants and cafes—immediately after they rejected offers of an independent Palestinian state, including the Gaza Strip and more than 90% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The only way to make sense of the violence was to imagine an Israel even worse than what was already believed.

The Oct. 7 pogrom raised the rhetorical stakes. If the only thing that can explain a Palestinian action is Israeli evil, then Israel’s opponents have to imagine a level of Jewish evil commensurate with what Hamas did—shooting children in front of their parents, setting houses on fire with residents inside, raping women, beheading innocent people, mutilating bodies.

When it is forbidden to criticize murderers or the society that created them, all that is left is to defame the victims. The accusation that Israel is committing genocide the week after Hamas’s massacre is entirely predictable. It tells us nothing about Israel and much about its enemies.

Mr. Mor is a lecturer at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel.