Few who were taken in by this propaganda campaign have expressed any mea culpas.

You don’t hear much about Israel deliberately engineering a famine in Gaza anymore. Only a few weeks ago, that allegation was nearly ubiquitous. It dominated left-of-center discourse across the Western world, and, among its participants, Israel’s caricatured wickedness was simply assumed. Likewise, the tactical advantages Jerusalem was supposed to accrue from this theatrically evil scheme were similarly presumed. The Jewish state, it was widely surmised, must be just that villainous.

But the extraordinary claim persisted in the absence of equally extraordinary evidence for as long as it could. In the ensuing weeks, the children – and it was almost exclusively children – who were heralded by legacy media outlets and anti-Israel activist organizations as the victims of Israeli malignance were revealed to have genetic conditions that accounted for their skeletal frames. The pallets of aid rotting on U.N.-run platforms on Gaza’s borders cast doubt on the institution’s claim that Israel was preventing aid from flowing into the Strip, as did the U.N.’s increasingly dubious claims about the extent to which Hamas had never pilfered aid and throttled Palestinians’ access to it. The evidence in opposition to the central claim against Israel continued to mount. Meanwhile, Israel’s critics marshalled little in the way of counterevidence – retreating into the community of true believers for whom no evidence of Israeli perfidy is necessary to buttress the supposition that Jerusalem is forever in the wrong.

Outside those cloistered environs, however, many of the activists and reporters who obsessed over the deliberate famine in Gaza just stopped talking about it. Few who were taken in by this propaganda campaign have expressed any mea culpas. Indeed, there aren’t many who are even willing to acknowledge their fault. To her credit, Massachusetts congresswoman Katherine Clark is not among them.

“Last week, while attending an event in my district, I repeated the word ‘genocide’ in response to a question,” the House minority whip told Jewish News Syndicate on Monday. “I want to be clear that I am not accusing Israel of genocide.”

We have no reason to believe that Clark was engaged in anything other than the thoughtless, robotic repetition of the tendentious language with which Israel’s pathological detractors flooded the discourse over the summer.

“We each have to continue to have an open heart about how we do this, how we do it effectively, and how we take action in time to make a difference, whether that is stopping the starvation and genocide and destruction of Gaza,” Clark had said in her offending remarks, “or whether that means we are working together to stop the redistricting that is going on, taking away the vote from people in order to retain power.”

If you don’t quite understand what the allegations of an anti-Palestinian genocide have to do with redistricting in Texas, you don’t think like a progressive. Mary Harrington, the author and explicator of the “all-encompassing omnicause,” described how environmental activism now overlaps with income inequality, which overlaps with the Palestinian cause, systemic racism, anti-monogamist activism, and so on. The only unifying feature she can identify in them is that they provide a vehicle to express opposition to “the ongoing supremacy of the American project.”

In short, this sort of agitation is not a thoughtful endeavor. Its adherents discourage critical reflection on the tenets of their universalist faith. The goal is to enliven and activate America’s critics, not to arm them with convincing arguments. If you cannot persuade your opponents, you might at least muscle them into quiet submission.

Clark deserves credit for at least recognizing that she was merely mouthing the rhetoric that was expected of her without applying any critical thought to what she was saying. Sure, her about-face was probably a result of prodding by Israel-backing interest groups, but pro-Hamas activists do not enjoy a monopoly on applying pressure to America’s elected leaders. And at least now, Clark’s position benefits from the preponderance of supporting evidence. Her backtracking is not an apology, but it’s better than nothing.