The One Simple Question That Determines Everything: Part II

This post is Part II in a two-part guest series from Andrew Pessin, Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College and Campus Bureau Editor for the Algemeiner.

In Part I, the question (Q) “Is it acceptable to slit babies’ throats, rape little girls, chop off of the hands and feet of teenagers, gouge out eyes, murder children in front of their parents, murder parents in front of their children then kidnap the children, bind entire families together then burn them alive, and livestream all the above—and worse—on a mass scale—in the pursuit of some political aim?” was posed.

Read Part I here.

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3. How Would You Respond To An Openly Genocidal Terror Group That Doesn’t Care About Its Own Civilians?

So far I’ve argued that every decent human being must answer (Q) with an unqualified “no,” and that the “no” answer reveals the true nature of the Palestinian movement as a genocidal Islamist movement seeking to murder all Jews and destroy the West. Once you understand this then everything about the “conflict” looks different including, now, how one might think about Israel’s response to October 7.

If you can’t answer “no” to (Q), then you do not understand the actual threat that Israel faces, and thus cannot understand (and ought not to criticize) Israel’s response.

It’s common for anti-Israelists to insist that people have the right to “resist” their oppression, adding “by any means necessary” as a sanitized way to answer “yes” to (Q), thus justifying violence against Israel and Israelis. But now if people have the right to “resist” their oppression, people surely have the right to “resist” their extermination, and “by any means necessary.” On this view there would literally be no moral limits to what Israel can do in response to Hamas.

That the threat Hamas poses is precisely that of extermination is indisputable. From its founding charter to nearly every action and statement since, as we’ve seen, its goal has been clear. Hamas murdered and wounded many thousands of Israelis throughout the 1990s and 2000s in suicide bombings and other attacks. Since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza Hamas has launched tens of thousands of rockets and started five full-fledged wars, in addition to perpetrating many individual terrorist attacks. Each war ended the same way, with Hamas still in power—after which Hamas then took the intervening time to rearm and get militarily stronger. October 7 escalated their program to a whole new, barbaric level, and they have promised to do it again and again until every Jew is eliminated.

It is indisputable that Hamas will never accept any peaceful “solution,” beyond the elimination of all Jews. If Israel is to defend itself from this genocidal program, then, it can only be by the elimination of Hamas. And since Hamas gets stronger with each interval, there is no longer any reasonable option but to eliminate Hamas—now, because next time they might have biological, or chemical, or even nuclear weapons, supplied by Iran.

If the State of Israel is to protect its citizens, then, it has the moral obligation of eliminating Hamas.

The question is how.

Well, how would you fight a genocidal enemy that has no concern for its own civilians, and would even be happy to sacrifice them as long as it destroyed you? By conceding to them? Empowering them? Giving them a state?

Or would you fight them “by any means necessary”?

Of course most anti-Israelists condemn any measure that Israel takes to contain Hamas’s genocidal threat, including the non-violent ones. These include the blockade Israel imposed after Hamas took power and began firing rockets, which, in an inversion of reality, anti-Israelists now claim is a justified cause of the violence Hamas perpetrates against Jews rather than its justified effect. These also include many of the policies and actions that anti-Israelists attribute to “the occupation,” such as the separation fence, checkpoints, even settlement activity in Judea and Samaria (which they ironically refer to by the Jordanian colonial name of “West Bank”). When you answer “no” to (Q) and thus recognize the actual threat Israeli Jews are up against, these measures are more accurately seen not as “the mechanism of occupation” but as necessary measures of self-defense.

Still, these non-violent measures obviously don’t test the limits of the phrase “by any means necessary,” so it’s Israel’s military responses that draw their special ire, for example due to the inevitable civilian casualties that result.

That topic requires its own substantive essay, but here are just a couple of brief points.

First, again, those who answer “yes” to (Q) are not in much position to complain of the other side killing civilians. If they endorse civilian casualties when these are the direct target of the attack they can hardly object to civilian casualties as collateral damage from the targeting of military threats.

More importantly, eliminating Hamas without any civilian casualties at all is obviously impossible, both by all the general norms of warfare and by the fact that Hamas embeds itself among civilians, uses them as human shields, blocks their efforts to evacuate, has rockets that misfire and kills them itself, and more. These multiple war crimes in fact make Hamas morally and legally responsible for any civilian casualties that result from strikes targeting Hamas.

Does that then license the unlimited slaughter of civilians, the utter destruction of Gaza?

Of course not, at least to those who answer “no” to (Q).

In fact Israel, unlike Hamas, makes extensive efforts to follow the international “laws of war,” which allow civilian casualties in the relevant proportions and under the relevant conditions. This is not the place to defend that claim, except to note (1) how remarkable is the degree to which Israel conforms to international law with an enemy who flouts it entirely at the same time as (2) the international community relentlessly charges Israel with flouting those laws while ignoring Hamas’s actual blatant violations.

The “no” answer also gives one more important result.

Protesters in NYC Oct. 9, 2023 (Lev Adin/Shutterstock)

Already in the first days of Israel’s response to October 7 the calls for “de-escalation” and “ceasefire” began. Anti-Israelists called for these while condemning alleged Israeli “genocide” of Gazans in the form of civilian casualties. But wasn’t Hamas’s mass sadistic slaughter itself an escalation? And part of an explicit campaign of, literally, genocide? How does one come out for “de-escalation” only after the Jews start responding to the slaughter of Jews, without even acknowledging that slaughter? How does one come out against “genocide” only after the Jews start responding to openly genocidal activity against them, and do so without acknowledging that activity? Think about what that behavior reveals: they have no objection when Jews are attacked, but they condemn Jews when they respond. Or maybe: genocide is dreadful, except when it’s perpetrated against Jews.

Further, to call for ceasefire now simply means that Hamas wins, and can just use the interim once more to increase its power for the next round of conflict. That’s not a genuine ceasefire; that is ultimately to prolong the fighting with almost surely a much greater civilian toll in the long term. Empirical experience, after five wars in 16 years, clearly demonstrates that to be true.

Moreover, there is a whole other mode of de-escalation, and genocide prevention, that these anti-Israelists are obviously ignoring. They could demand that Hamas return all the hostages immediately and surrender, and then the war is over, instantly. It is telling that this is not the mode they are calling for.

Their calls for ceasefire are, then, calls for the victory of Hamas.

If you answer “no” to (Q), and condemn the Hamas slaughter full stop, then you recognize the absolute unacceptability of the continued existence of Hamas, which in turn justifies a massive Israeli response to Hamas even despite tragically significant civilian casualties—which are in any case entirely Hamas’s responsibility.

And if you answer “yes”?

Then by your own reckoning the Jewish people may “resist” their extermination “by any means necessary,” and you have no standing to object.

4. Delegitimization and Dehumanization

We turn to the final result from the “no” answer to (Q): we are compelled to examine exactly how it has come to pass that so many on our campuses are answering “yes” instead.

Let’s begin with this observation from Vassar College Russian history professor Michaela Pohl from 2016:

The atmosphere at Vassar … is troubled. I am not Jewish, but even I have experienced an increase in hostility and strained silences among students and colleagues … I have been called a “f--king fascist,” “Zionist” and “idiot” for speaking out against Vassar’s BDS resolution and speaking up for Israel and for US policy. I have seen Jewish students profiled and singled out at a BDS meeting. I have felt the icy silence that reigns in some departments … Academics who suggest that Israel is harvesting organs … earn [approving] tweets and clicks—and deal in hate speech … It is speech that angers and mobilizes and that relishes its effects but denies that the effect was ever the intention.

As for the long-term effects of such an environment, Pohl noted that “students look down at their desks when I say things about Jewish emancipation [in Russia] … [there are] embarrassed silences in class while discussing Jewish history.”

This may be America in 2023, but what we’re seeing is an old story, dressed up fresh for the 21^st century Western world.

Years of lies, fertilizing the soil, all deliberately designed to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jew, to label the Jew as inhuman, demonic, pure evil. Once you are convinced that the Jew represents evil, then persecuting Jews, even killing Jews, becomes not only acceptable but obligatory. If the Jew is evil, then you in turn must be a very good person in persecuting and killing him. The ancient and medieval Christians did this for centuries, portraying the Jew as the fleshly embodiment of evil for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. The Germans and the Nazis did this for decades in racial terms, inspired and justifying their actions by the antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even developing a whole academic discipline to demonstrate the evils of the Jews and thus inspiring the book title, as apt today as ever, Hitler’s Professors. After some decades of this program, killing actual living Jews isn’t merely easier but becomes an act of virtue.

The newer lies are merely superficial variations on the older lies, aiming to better reflect the specific evils of today. The charges of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and more recently, right out of Goebbels’ playbook, “Jewish supremacy”—not to mention probably every single thing most people believe about Gaza as an “open air prison”—all of these are lies, in fact easily documentable and demonstrable lies for anyone who takes a few minutes to honestly evaluate them. These charges don’t have to be true, they just have to be widely circulated, widely repeated, and widely believed, so that the Jew becomes the embodiment of whatever is considered most evil today.

And this is what the Palestinian movement, with its many “progressive” allies, has successfully accomplished.

After almost twenty years of the campus “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel, orchestrated by the 200-plus campus chapters of SJP, their short-term goal, that of damaging Israel economically, was a bust; but the long-term goal, the real goal, has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Whether or not a particular BDS resolution passes or fails on a given campus, the campaign itself soaks the campus in all the lies above for weeks on end, year after year. Most students don’t really follow the details, but come away thinking, man, those Jews with their genocide, apartheid, and supremacy, must really be pretty evil.

And now in 2023 no one blinks an eye when SJP asserts baldly, as if factually, on their recent social media celebrating the mass slaughter of Jews, that every single Israeli Jew is a "settler"—even the ones who live within the internationally recognized borders of the U.N. member State of Israel, even the ones whose lineage in that land might well trace back to Biblical times. In today’s campus vernacular, “settler” is a slur rivaling in evilness the slur “Nazi” (which they also repeatedly sling against Israelis). If every Israeli Jew is a settler, then every Israeli Jew is evil, and therefore legitimately murdered. That includes the babies, and the grandmothers, and the unarmed dancing teenagers, and by the way it also justifies torturing them and raping them before you murder them.

Nor is an eye blinked when George Washington University’s SJP, for example, goes even further and openly declares that “We reject the distinction between 'civilian' and 'militant' … Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.” The assault on language and intelligence here is almost as bad as the physical assault on Jewish civilians that it justifies. That adorable four-year-old boy, born in that land to parents who were born in that land to parents who were born in that land (and beyond, maybe even back to Biblical times), splashing in the waves as his loving mother looks on: that little child is an aggressor, a soldier, an occupier, a—settler.

Every Israeli Jew is guilty. And if every Israeli Jew is guilty, is evil, then so is every other Jew who supports them and may even be related to them. Since approximately half the world’s Jews live in Israel and the significant majority of the other half supports Israel, feels connected to it, has relatives and acquaintances who live there, and so on, then the result is clear:

There are no innocent Jews.

Every Jew is evil.

But even this is only part of the story.

To this now two-decade-old propaganda campaign was added, in full force in the past decade or so, another ideological movement. Going by various names—Wokeness, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—this ideology has taken campuses and many other institutions by storm, especially after the 2020 death of George Floyd and the massive public response thereto. The antagonism this movement shows not merely toward Israel but towards Jews in general is well documented, but the simple summary is this. Members of Western societies, including America, divide into two basic classes, it claims, the oppressor and the oppressed, with one’s membership determined primarily by one’s race. As such, “white supremacy” is understood as the fundamental evil responsible for all disparities between white people and all people of color (in income, health, admission to elite universities, police interactions, etc.). Where there are such disparities these are due to “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” where the oppressing whites employ various mechanisms to maintain their oppression of those of color.

What does this have to do with the Jews?

Since Jews, on average, “do well,” then Jews are “white supremacist oppressors of people of color.” (Never mind that many Jews do not “do well,” have long been disproportionately targeted for discrimination and violence, and are persecuted by actual white supremacists for not being white; or that many Jews are actually racially indistinguishable from other people of color.) In fact since Jews “do well” on average compared even to other “white” groups, Jews are sometimes considered uber-white: the worst of the oppressors. If the SJPers and BDSers label Jews with the defamatory slur of settlers, the CRTers and DEIers label them with the equally defamatory slur of being uber-white.

Between these two sets of ideologies so dominant on campuses then, Israeli Jews, American Jews, European Jews, Jews simpliciter—are simply evil, full stop, the same full stop that should accompany the “no” answer to (Q).

There are no innocent Jews, not in Israel, not elsewhere.

The actual Nazis couldn’t have orchestrated it better.

Those “decent” faculty members, who say nothing while 1200 Jews are slaughtered—do they remain silent because they too believe these Jews actually—deserve this?

The victims included babies, children, teenagers, the elderly.

Are there no innocent Jews, who don’t deserve this fate?

If you can’t condemn this with a full stop “no” to (Q)—if you remain silent—then you must believe these Jews deserve it. I can draw no other conclusion. Is it possible that my academic colleagues, sophisticated, refined, “experts” in values—for they daily proclaim their expertise in values, in their anti-racism, their anti-hate, their commitment to diversity, inclusion, tolerance—is it possible that the people we work with, share offices with, who teach our children, share the belief and value system of the ancient and medieval Christians, the modern Nazis?

And of Hamas?

“We are all Hamas!” the young woman in North Carolina screamed—speaking, perhaps, for all these administrators, faculty members, students who remained silent.

Is there any other identity group about which it would be acceptable to celebrate their mass slaughter, and campaign to bring that slaughter to your campus? What exactly are all those diversity and inclusion administrators paid to do, if not to prevent this?

Or at least condemn it?

But silence is what we got on my campus, and on many campuses—like the silence in Prof. Pohl’s class whenever the topic of Jews come up.

If ever silence is complicity, then it is here, for it is equivalent to a “yes” answer to (Q), at least when the victims are Jews.

(Q) is a simple yes or no question, but everything follows upon how you answer it.

The American campus of 2023 has overwhelmingly answered “yes.”

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This is a revised version of a piece first published here.

Andrew Pessin is Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College and Campus Bureau Editor for the Algemeiner. His books include Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS, and Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America, as well as the novels Nevergreen and Bright College Years, documenting the campus experience. More information about him and his work may be found at andrewpessin.com. Follow him on X and on Instagram.