Choosing Sides in the Hamas/Israel War
Allowing political expediency to get in the way of simple principle is never a good idea.
Initially, the answer seemed like a no-brainer; the war was triggered by the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israeli territory bordering the Gaza Strip, storming private homes and brutalizing — with torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder — thousands of unarmed Israeli civilians. It was terrorism on a grand scale.
Then politics entered the picture, and now we’re not so sure.
We Americans instinctively take sides every chance we get. As grade school kids, we’d begin every recess by “choosing up sides” by some arbitrary method (hand over hand on a baseball bat was a favorite) for whatever game was to be played. Within minutes, fierce competition would break out between the two arbitrarily selected teams.
As adults living in difficult times, the choice of which side to take on tough issues is more deliberate than the schoolyard version, but on occasion it is just as arbitrary and often lands us in the wrong place. In recent days, we’ve watched some elected leaders and thousands of Americans championing the cause of the war’s Palestinian victims, and by extension supporting the Hamas rapists and murderers.
More often than not, the side we choose on tough issues is preordained by our political alignment and party affiliation. That may work fine on purely ideological issues, but not when real-world complexity comes into play.
On the Hamas/Israel war, the underlying facts are clear:
Hamas is the instigator, launching a premeditated, vicious attack on unsuspecting, unarmed Israeli civilians.
Hamas is a terrorist organization, and proud of it. It avows, openly and often, for the complete destruction of Israel.
Although the October 7 assault was unprecedented in its brutality, attacks by Hamas on Israel are nothing new. Hamas routinely sends suicide bombers and lobs rockets into areas populated by their Israeli neighbors.
The Gaza Strip population is primarily Palestinian, but Hamas is its political and military leader. Despite a long history of Israel/Palestine conflict, the Palestinians are not combatants in this war — they are pawns, caught in the middle and used effectively as human shields by their Hamas overlords.
In sorting through this ugly episode, it is helpful as well to keep in mind the remarkable history of the post-World War II creation of a Jewish state in Israel.
Under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, the latent anti-Semitism in Germany was deliberately transformed into state-sponsored genocide, with the express objective of exterminating the entire race. Compounding the crisis, German Jews were on their own; no other nation stepped up to help. Those who learned of the ongoing Holocaust looked the other way, dismissing it as an internal issue and/or presuming the reports of genocide to be exaggerated. WWII was not fought to save Germany’s Jews; it was fought to stop the Nazis’ quest for world domination.
Fortunately, the Allied victory interrupted the genocide. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust established their new state in the area surrounding Jerusalem — a place with deep historical significance to both the Jews and Arabs. Over the years, they have built it into a thriving homeland.
It is no surprise that the establishment of a Jewish state was not warmly received by the Palestinians — nor is it any wonder that the new Israelis, having barely escaped extinction, resolved to secure and defend their ancestral homeland, fiercely and forever.
The net effect has been constant discord, periodic eruption of warfare, and the unhelpful intrusion of third parties — hence the daunting challenge of achieving true Middle East peace and the more immediate need to keep the Israel/Hamas conflict from bubbling over into worldwide conflict.
With a presidential election just one year away, the U.S. political calculus was inevitable. There are plenty of both Jewish and Arab American voters in our nation. President Joe Biden’s initial, very visible support to Israel was right on target, but then some members of his own party began urging active support for the Palestinian position.
Allowing political expediency to get in the way of simple principle is never a good idea. And as complicated as the real-world dilemma of Middle East stability is, the fundamental principles that should drive America’s stance on the Israel/Hamas conflict remain clear.
Our nation does not support terrorism. We do not support anti-Semitism. And we surely do not endorse invasion, kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder as acceptable responses to Israel’s actions, however harsh.
Choosing sides on this one is not hard at all.
