On October 9, New York Times published opinion writer Bret Stephens Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity. In it he noted that Mamdani:
“[S]et off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” Stephens stepped in to assist Rabbi Hirsch, claiming that Mamdani’s statement was in fact, “a moral obscenity.” He then proceeded to “count the ways.” Stephens tells us:
It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Undiluted evil. The term is often used interchangeably with “pure,” or “unadulterated evil.” It implies committing a harmful act solely for the sake of causing destruction or suffering. It is characterized by purely sadistic intent or terrorizing others for the sake of terror. But was this really the case here? Hamas told us their reasons for the October 7th attacks in a pamphlet entitled Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. In Hamas’ view, the Palestinian people have been in a “battle against occupation and colonialism” since 1918. This included thirty years of British occupation and then seventy five years of “Zionist occupation.” Hamas points out that even as the British occupation was coming to an end, in part because British occupation forces were being attacked by Jewish paramilitary organizations like the Irgun, Lehi (aka the “Stern Gang”), and the Haganah, Jewish settlers still occupied only about 6% of the territory of Palestine and constituted roughly 30% of the population.
Curiously Hamas makes no mention the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, which awarded roughly 43% of Palestine to a proposed “Arab State,” while the remaining territory, almost 60% was to be allotted to a “Jewish State.” Not surprisingly, both the Palestinians and Arab U.N. member states (at this time Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria) rejected this as grossly unfair. Instead, Hamas jumps straight to what Palestinians remember as the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) or what has been described as the “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veteran turned historian Ilan Pappe. As Pappe recounts in his book of the same title, this was a pre-planned forcible eviction of Palestinians from the territories designated for the Jewish state by the U.N., along with proposed Arab state territories seized by Israel both before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel. Hamas tells us, “Zionist Gangs destroyed over 500 villages and towns” and “committed dozens of massacres” against unarmed civilians. Pappe’s research, which included examining declassified official documents, state papers, military records from the 1948 period and pre-state Zionist intelligence and mapping projects, which cataloged almost every Arab village in Palestine, agrees with Hamas.
Hamas tells us that in 1967, “in continuation of the aggression, Israeli forces occupied what remained of the territory the U.N. had slated for the Palestinian state, in addition to the Sinai Peninsula (returned to Egypt in 1982, following the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty) and the Golan Heights (seized from Syria and effectively annexed by Israel in 1981). We are often told that that State of Israel has “a right to exist,” which actually has no basis in international law (this is true for all nations, not just Israel). Major international legal bodies, as well as the vast majority of countries view the occupation as illegal under international law, though the Israeli government strongly rejects this view. However, peoples and nations subjected to colonial domination, alien subjugation or foreign occupation do have the right to struggle for liberation by all available means, including the use of armed force. But this is not an unlimited right. Committing atrocities, taking hostages or collective punishment is unlawful. Hamas and allied Palestinian armed groups did commit such crimes on October 7, though the level of barbarity (beheaded infants, systematic mass rape carried out on the orders of Hamas leadership etc.) has been falsified by the Israelis and their allies in Western governments and media, particularly Stephen’s own New York Times. In addition, the IDF in Gaza, and armed Israeli settlers on the West Bank have carried out similar crimes of their own. While deploring the crimes of Hamas committed on October 7, 2023, is it really “morally obscene” to deplore those committed by Israelis in the years that have followed? Some October 7th survivors and victims’ families have vocally opposed the levelling of Gaza. A larger number of Israeli human rights organizations, academics, writers, and citizens have explicitly described it as genocide. I wonder if Bret Stephens would chastise all these people for being “morally obscene?”
And consider the morality of the following. As the World Socialist Website informed readers in December 2023, Israeli intelligence had obtained Hamas’s operational plan — code-named “Jericho Wall” — more than a year before the attack. WSWS notes further that in the days before the attack, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval, two of the three battalions guarding the Gaza border were redeployed to the West Bank for the Sukkot festival, leaving roughly 800 soldiers to guard a 51-kilometer border. The vaunted Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit was put off duty for the weekend. The result was that Israeli civilians in the south were left without military protection for ten to twelve hours — and that Israeli tank and helicopter forces, rushed into civilian areas, fired indiscriminately, further swelling the Israeli death toll.
“The purpose of this conspiracy,” WSWS concluded, was “aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza. The attack was the occasion for Israel and US imperialism to launch the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians and a regional war that has since spread to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran. Netanyahu had been promoting his ‘new Middle East’ plans — displaying a map at the UN that included the West Bank and Gaza within Israel’s borders — just two weeks before the attack.”
As noted in a December 2023 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSI), part of the explanation for the October 7 attacks may be that what Hamas saw as previous gestures toward moderation brought it few rewards. CSI notes:
Hamas publicly rebranded in 2017, releasing an updated charter in which the group signaled its acceptance of a two-state solution as an appropriate temporary measure. The charter still contained many hateful and bellicose components, but it was a change from the group’s 1988 founding statement, which fundamentally rejected any accommodation with Israel.
Hamas seemed to back up this perceived change with actions. Before October 7, the group not only limited its own rocket attacks on Israel but also publicly punished those who instigated attacks within Gaza to break the fragile ceasefires. Hamas has let the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fight Israel alone, not joining the fray between Israel and the PIJ in August 2022 or in May 2023. CIS poses the question as to whether this was just a front while Hamas planned the October 7 attack. But there was no major shift on the part of Israel or the international community in response to Hamas’s new moderation. At the same time, there was incendiary far-right political rhetoric and rising levels of violence against Palestinians. Both 2021 and 2022 set records as the deadliest years for Palestinians, as the Netanyahu government green-lit the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and settlers themselves conducted pogroms against Palestinians. CIS notes further:
The Israeli government also made clear its disdain for Hamas. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ripped up Hamas’s revised charter in front of the camera, advocated for the defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and gave a platform to far-right ideologues such as Bezalel Smotrich. This lack of incentives for moderation probably increased the attraction of a large-scale attack. This reality was reflected in Hamas official Basem Naim’s interview after the October 7 attack, where he stated “We knew there was going to be a violent reaction. . . . But we didn’t choose this road while having other options. We have no options.”
Of course, Naim’s words do not in any way convey how bad this “violent reaction” was likely to be. Hamas’s leadership was heady at the prospect of igniting an Islamic “ring of fire” surrounding Israel, an existential war that would defeat it militarily and bring about its downfall. All other considerations were secondary. At the same time, Netanyahu, and his cabinet of racist, religious extremists had their own dream of ejecting the Palestinians from Gaza, once and for all, and then moving on to the West Bank, thus finally completing the work that began in 1947-48.
As with all conflicts of this type, throughout history, it is difficult to see where morality lies in any of this.
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