NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} distressing number of Americans, especially in academia and media, are effectively siding with Hamas against Israel. Some of them do so with horrifying specificity. Some do so by repeating Hamas propaganda and slogans (such as “from the river to the sea”) or accepting the premises of that propaganda. Others are cannier about not saying it quite out loud but make plain that their sympathies, their prescriptions, and their willingness to believe the evidence are unequally against Israel.
If you drew a Venn diagram of the Americans siding against Israel and the Americans who embrace the woke worldview, it would overlap very substantially. That correlation would become even tighter if you looked at who embraces academic ideas such as “settler colonialism” and “decolonization” or political demands for reparations for African Americans, which might at first glance seem to have nothing to do with Israel, but which rests on the same worldview.
Turning Back the Clock
Wokeness, as I’ve defined it at length, has five identifiable core elements:
- Woke ideology elevates immutable identity-group membership over the individual.
- Woke ideology obsesses over hierarchies among identity groups.
- Woke ideology is all-encompassing in interpreting human interactions through the lens of identity-group hierarchy.
- Woke ideology is revolutionary in arguing that its preferred hierarchies must supplant current hierarchies.
- Woke ideology aims to be constantly evolving rather than a fixed doctrine.
Those elements — especially the combination of group identity, a hierarchy of “oppression,” and a devotion to revolutionary creation of new group hierarchies — form the identical ideological foundation for theories of why Israeli Jews should be displaced from the nation they have made their home.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, writing in the Atlantic, described decolonization theory in terms of those same premises:
The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”
This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”
This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities — and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor — has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians.
Set aside the extent to which decolonizing Israel of Jews is historical nonsense (a point Montefiore also explores at length). Whether or not they point to real historical injustices in the past, believers in these theories must necessarily see members of groups as less than human individuals. If someone belongs to an “oppressor” group, they must be degraded in the hierarchy, regardless of their individual merits.
This line of thinking proceeds along the same track as the urge to seek reparations, which is group-obsessed, determined to keep alive old group grievances, and contemptuous of the practical obstacles presented by ordinary human beings having made lives in the world as it exists. Those smallest minorities — the individual, the family — make homes and find jobs and raise children on the basis of currently existing realities. The world, of course, never remains unchanged, but conservatism considers all changes in light of the impact they will have on actual human beings. In order to envision revolutionary change, one must disregard the lives of real people. The revolutionary thinks that, if one must ignore a century or five of history, the wreckage of everything built in the interim is a small price to pay.
In light of the ideological affinity between “decolonization” by means of ethnically cleansing Jews from their own ancestral homeland and reparations that aim at remaking America at the expense of people already living here, it is unsurprising that one of the public figures most associated with the reparations movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has come out on the side of Hamas.
1619 A.D. vs. 70 A.D.
That brings us to another of the public figures most associated with that cause: Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times. While Hannah-Jones wields great power within the Times organization and essentially can’t be fired, she writes for the paper and its magazine infrequently enough that one must look to social media for her opinions.
Her Palestinian partisanship goes back a long time. In 2012, when the U.N. granted the Palestinian Authority “Non-Member Observer State” status and the Associated Press headlined it as “UN General Assembly votes to recognize the state of Palestine,” Hannah-Jones tweeted “This is big.” Never mind that the Palestinian Authority’s government was evicted by violence and assassination from Gaza by Hamas several years earlier.
In June 2021, Hannah-Jones signed a journalists’ open letter, “U.S. media coverage of Palestine,” on “Why reporting on Palestine has to change.” Among its assertions:
Later that same month, an article in the controversial anti-Israel 972 Magazine celebrated anti-Israel statements by radical progressive Democrats such as Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Ayanna Pressley, connecting them to the “Black radical tradition” and the “Ferguson-St. Louis-Gaza nexus.” The article quoted sentiments such as “something so familiar about the oppression and experience of Palestinians — that marginalization, what it means to be targeted as this subject population,” lionized the “anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace,” and concluded with Bush promoting “Black-Palestinian solidarity to dismantle apartheid.” Hannah-Jones tweeted out the article, quoting its tagline “Black-Palestine solidarity is making its way to Capitol Hill.”
After October 7
The October 7 atrocities have not deterred Hannah-Jones or caused her to rethink any of this. Quite the contrary. She continues to claim, 18 years after Israel abandoned Gaza to Hamas and forced thousands of its own people at gunpoint to abandon their homes there, that “Gaza is an occupied territory.” On Sunday, she linked to an essay and poem on “the ongoing catastrophe of Zionist land theft and mass displacement initiated around 1948, from which most Gazans are refugees.” The introduction to the poem, arguing against the view that “history began with Hamas militants storming the fence enclosing Gaza,” instead contends that the poem
refuses to indulge empire’s relentless present tense, insisting on the now not as a territory cordoned off from what came before, but as an accumulation of persistent pasts that have sedimented into the brutal common sense of our world order. While liberal equivocations are laundering the current genocide through civic procedures of legislation and polite conversation—offering cover for the more explicit articulations of fascist racism—Brand names the complicity between these supposedly opposed schemes. She thus opens space for a grief that holds dear what empire would render disposable, including the more than 7,300 Gazans Israel has killed in the past three weeks. In rejecting the terms of the colonial present, the poem calls out toward a livable future for all that empire would banish outside the realm of care. (Emphasis added).
Hannah-Jones responded: “I read these words . . . and can’t get them off my mind: ‘empires relentless present tense’ where we’re forced to insist ‘on the now . . . as a territory cordoned off from what came before.’ That’s what we are being asked to engage in: empire’s relentless present tense.”
In other words: Hannah-Jones endorses the view that Israel is engaged in a “colonial present” of a “current genocide” and “fascist racism” against Palestinians. On October 15, she blasted Tom Cotton for criticizing Biden administration pressure on Israel: “By pressuring Israel, he is talking about pressuring Israel not to cut off water — a basic life necessity — to 2 million people, something many consider to be a violation of international law.” Never mind that cutting off food, water, power, and other sources of supply is a tool of sieges as old as antiquity, one that was used with devastating effect by the Union during the Civil War in sieges such as Vicksburg.
It is difficult to summarize the cumulative anti-Israel, pro-Hamas slant of her Twitter feed, much of which is comprised of retweets of pro-Hamas sources. Her own words tend to be framed in “both sides” terms, as if the two are at all comparable in the aftermath of a colossal anti-Jewish pogrom launched by Hamas out of the blue without warning. So, on October 12, she lamented: “We justify some deaths, but not others. Innocent people being killed should be equally devastating no matter the justification given.” On October 16, she argued that “In this time, it is most critical that journalists uphold our charge to reflect truth and not just power.” But when one looks at what information she is broadcasting over Twitter to her 675,000 followers, the context of both of these arguments is simply that Israel should be held to a standard not applied to those who wish it and its citizens destroyed.
Thus, the “justify some deaths” tweet follows an effort to draw an equivalence between Israeli military responses and the Hamas terrorist tactic of targeting civilians:
Hannah-Jones has repeatedly amplified claims of Israeli atrocities retailed by the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is an arm of Hamas notorious for its fabrications. Even the Washington Post has questioned the reflexive reliance upon this infamously dishonest terrorist mouthpiece:
Hannah-Jones has also freely retweeted antisemitic claims that the Israeli government engages in “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “genocide”:
As for her purported dedication to skepticism and relentless pursuit of the truth, it is decidedly one-sided. While she swallows whole the claims of Hamas front groups, she jumped to just ask questions about things on which the Israeli government has been slandered by obvious disinformation, such as the fake “hospital bombing” story:
It should not surprise us that, like Coates, Hannah-Jones has followed the straight logical line from reparations to decolonization. Ibram X. Kendi, unsurprisingly, can be found on the same path. Once you accept the logic of reparations regardless of where Americans came from or what they personally did, it is a short step to backing decolonization of Israel even at the cost of defending those who massacre Jews, and insulating those people from any effort to prevent a recurrence. When your North Star is the grievances of the past, you divide the world into groups without regard to individuals, and you don’t care who pays for the real or imagined sins of the past, you are handing power to man’s most brutal impulses.