Why no Jewish Lives Matter movement?
Dan Hannan
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When a black man was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, it was treated as an attack on black people everywhere. From Baden, Ontario, to Bridgetown, Barbados, to Bangalore and Bloemfontein, statues of white men were taken down. Police officers around the world sank to one knee. Corporations, charities, and arts groups endorsed Black Lives Matter.
The massacre of women and children in Israel has led to a very different response. No university has offered Jewish students special consideration in their exams, as many did to black students in 2020. No one has been fired for saying that Palestinian lives matter.
The killings in Israel were no less traumatic — on the contrary, they were both more numerous and more disturbing, the instinct to protect babies being among the most powerful in the human psyche. Nor were they any less racist. American police officers sometimes abuse their powers, and black men can be disproportionately on the receiving end of it, but this is not the same thing as slaughtering hundreds of civilians purely on the grounds of their ethnicity.
One of the things I most disliked about the BLM spasm was its racial collectivism, its insistence that black people, whether in Minnesota or Mali, were a single bloc. The whole world got dragged into an essentially American argument. In Britain, all discussion of race has since been peppered with references to klansmen, Uncle Toms, segregation – terms that have nothing to do with us.
Have Jews broken free from racial collectivism? Not exactly. The horrors in Israel are seen as the concern of Jewish communities everywhere. But, instead of leading to a global JLM movement, they have led to vandalized synagogues and extra security at Jewish schools. An attack on Jews in Israel is seen not as a metaphysical attack on the worldwide community, but as a trigger for literal attacks on Jews elsewhere.
The difference between BLM and these atrocities lies in the “decolonize” doctrines that dominate our discourse. Society is conceived as a pyramid of privilege. Any group deemed to be oppressed is allowed to hit out at those imagined to be above it. Jews generally, and Israelis particularly, are too successful to be victims. Indeed, the state of Israel exists precisely because Jews had had enough of playing that role.
This way of thinking is why several BLM chapters reveled in the slaughter, posting images of the Hamas bulldozers and paragliders used in the attacks, and identifying black people with Palestinians. It also explains why parts of the Left have struggled to take sides unequivocally — even for babies and against their murderers.
Those who spent years decrying political opponents, disagreeable phrases, and challenging books as “violence” say nothing about physical violence of the most depraved and sickening kind. Those who use the word “Nazi” with abandon are reluctant to condemn the Hamas Einsatzgruppen that set out to slaughter Jewish civilians, not in settlements, but in land that was Israeli from 1948.
Some take refuge in conspiracy theories, telling themselves that Hamas must have acted with Israeli connivance. Others condemn the violence itself, but blame Israel for having provoked it. This was the position taken by, among others, 30 student bodies at Harvard. The refusal of the university authorities to challenge them prompted Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, to remark that he had never felt so disillusioned in his 50 years of involvement. Yet it was the steady march of the decolonize movement, not least during his tenure, that led directly to today’s moral idiocy.
Pro-Palestine demonstrators who came out on the day of the attack did not have the cover of protesting against an Israeli response, for there had not yet been a response. They were cheering the slaughter of families, pure and simple.
“Then the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees,” says the Hamas Covenant, “and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’” The young people fleeing from the wreckage of their music festival were hunted down as they literally hid behind rocks and trees.
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Don’t pretend that the Hamas apologists stand for human rights or justice. The pathology of anti-colonialism, of punching up, of identity politics, has led them to endorse mass murder. All their talk of peaceful collaboration has been exposed as a lie.
“Free Palestine!” chant the crowds. And we all now understand exactly what they mean: free from Jews. If you make excuses for Hamas, that is now what you are endorsing. We see you.