Haviv Rettig Gur on ideological peccadilloes

This is going to sound trite and cynical, but it's nevertheless true.

The vast outpourings of rage over Gaza around the world are not really, ultimately, about the death toll or the suffering in Gaza.

There are, obviously - of course - countless decent people who responded authentically to the suffering itself with genuine compassion. But they do not stop to wonder why there's only one case of suffering that's so systematically and viscerally brought to their attention when other cases of death and suffering at a larger scale, some of them happening as we speak, are ignored.

These vast ranks of decent people aren't to blame. Their anger over Gaza is real. And I don't blame them. Even if their rational brain can concede the point about media and political elites pushing only ideologically validating cases of suffering and politically correct narratives of mobilization, the suffering in Gaza is nevertheless real and urgent. That human suffering looms larger than such abstractions.

To these decent people, the Israelis might be right about the antisemitism driving the attention and still wrong about IDF actions in Gaza. The two points are not necessarily contradictory. I get this view and I respect it.

But here's the thing. The hypocrisy matters. Not in some abstract Kantian sense, but in the most practical and tragic terms. Palestinians pay a direct cost for this hypocrisy, a cost that is part of Gaza's present tragedy.

It matters that Israelis believe that deep down, the rage is driven by antisemitism, by a Western leftist ideological fantasy about Jews abetted by an Islamist version of the same, and so this rage explodes over Gaza but not over any other case of suffering in the world, including ones with higher death tolls than Gaza.

It matters because if Israelis don't believe the global protests are authentic - an intercession on behalf of Gazan civilians rather than a taking of sides in a larger Islamist war against Israel's very existence - then they will shrug it off and soldier on, convinced that the hypocrisy underlying this rage is just what it looks like: That old, wretched, pathetic thing on whose altar Europe once decimated its own politics and culture and which still suffuses the political imagination of the Arab world.

If it looks to them like an expression of your own ideological peccadilloes rather than genuine concern about the human toll, then your rage becomes meaningless to Israelis - and thus useless to Palestinians.

If the target of rage doesn't experience it as fundamentally fair, they will respond to it not as a rebuke but as an attack.

Want to help Palestinians? Give a damn about Sudan.

Everything said here is true if the Israelis are right, and doubly true if they are wrong.

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