By Blake Downs, Editor-in-Chief
It is easy to hate the villain in a story. Many times, however, the villain is not always who it may seem.
Israel is in an all-out war to eliminate the threat the militant group Hamas poses after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. In response, massive protests have been growing across universities and urban areas and many progressive activist groups are taking sides and painting Israel as the aggressor. However, much of their arguments are self-defeating and illogical as Israel is a beacon of human rights in the Middle East and a country that is more progressive than the militant group it is fighting.
Those who would argue against Israel and her right to defend herself are usually influenced by the ideas of intersectionality. This worldview categorizes people in light of their victimization and claims that there can be multiple layers of oppression and disadvantage in individuals. The more victimized groups one belongs to, according to proponents, the more one is oppressed.
Many view Israel as the aggressor in the current conflict because of its stronger military position. Since Israel occupies territory that they regained in 1948 from what many progressives believe was the country of Palestine, they argue that Israel is a colonizer that oppresses the rights of Palestinians. Because of this and the ideas of intersectionality, many groups who consider themselves to have been historically persecuted feel kinship with the people of Gaza.
However, the assumption that Israel took the land from a thriving and unified political and economic state is simply not true as Jews are indeed indigenous to the area. As former president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute Alex Lumberg points out, there has never been an official country with the name Palestine. This designation came from a Latin version of a name given to the area by the Romans to spite the Jews after the former had sacked Jerusalem and dispersed the latter in A.D. 70; it was named after Israel’s historical enemy, the Philistines.
At no point between this expulsion and the reinstatement of the Jewish state in 1948 did the Arabs in the area unify to form a single independent nation. Israel, on the other hand, had lived in the area for over a thousand years, between the time of the Jews’ exodus out of Egypt in the 15th Century B.C. to the time of Christ.
The cognitive dissonance of the progressives who support Hamas is evident when one considers the human rights violations Hamas and Palestinian leaders have inflicted as rulers of the area, especially those against women and members of the LGBTQ community.
Women continue to be considered second-class citizens in Palestine, specifically Gaza, a fact which was exemplified by the 2021 case of a Hamas court declaring that women are not legally permitted to travel without the accompaniment of a male guardian.
Hamas has not removed the original British laws that outlawed homosexuality, even enforcing them with their form of justice and iteration of Shari’a law. There have been numerous murders of gay individuals in Palestine since Hamas took control. Of note are the 2016 execution of military leader Mahmoud Ishtiwi in Gaza and the 2022 decapitation of 25-year-old Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh in the West Bank.
On the other hand, though its approach to human rights is far from perfect, the state of Israel is much more progressive and adherent to the modern notions of individual liberty and self-autonomy. The fact that the nation holds regular free elections differs from Hamas who have not held a single presidential election since 2005. In Israel, women are not treated as second-class citizens and are free to legally roam about the country on their own.
Members of the LGBTQ community are free to live openly without fear of death or punishment from the government, which is evident by the Pride parades held every year in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As Israeli journalist Hillel Fuld put it in an interview with The National Desk, “I welcome the LGBTQ community to go to Gaza. Let them bring their flags, let them go to Gaza and let them fight for human rights there and let’s see what happens,” adding that they would most likely be killed.
The handling of the deaths of members of the World Central Kitchen by Israel on April 1 demonstrates that the nation is willing to own up to its mistakes. Israel fired two commanding military officers and reprimanded three others after the incident. This is in stark contrast to Hamas who has shown no remorse for the attacks that started the whole conflict–in which they entered Israel, murdering, kidnapping and raping civilians, especially women.
There can be much to criticize about how Israel is handling its retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks and most people would justifiably feel empathy towards the civilian victims. However, siding with a militant organization who repeatedly uses those civilians as cover to its own aggressive actions and whose stated goal is to wipe out Israel and implement an extreme version of Shari’a law is not a logical position for freedom-loving individuals to take.
If those who support progressivism want it to prevail, they should concentrate their efforts on working to liberalize laws and policies in Gaza rather than blindly attacking the side of the conflict that supports their basic human rights.
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