Those Who Condemn Hamas Lack Empathy And Humility

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Whenever I see someone going out of their way to denounce the Palestinian resistance while expressing some vaguely pro-Palestine sentiment, I take it as an admission that they aren’t capable of basic human empathy. They look at October 7 and think “I can’t imagine myself doing that,” and conclude from this that the perpetrators of October 7 must be worse people than they are.

They stop their examination there. They never ask themselves what it would have been like to live the life of a young man who ended up joining Hamas. They never ask themselves what it would have been like to live one’s entire life in a giant concentration camp under the thumb a genocidal apartheid state which routinely murders and abuses your countrymen. They simply look at the actions of October 7 from the prism of their own experience as a comfortable western suburbanite on the other side of the world and think, “I would never conduct such an attack; I am much too virtuous and compassionate.”

No you’re just too comfortable and coddled, and you’re too much of an emotional infant to consciously put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Any one of us who lived their life in Gaza would have experienced the effects of the tyranny and abusiveness of the Israeli regime, and our worldview would have been shaped accordingly. You would come to hate those who hate you. If they were sufficiently abusive toward you and your loved ones, at some point you would probably experience the desire to return some of the violence your people have been receiving.

This would not make you a bad person. It would not mean that you are less moral or righteous than some white westerner sitting on their couch condemning Hamas on social media between mouthfuls of doritos. It would simply mean you were shaped by the conditions of your life, just like everyone else.

You can understand Israeli violence using the exact same empathy tools, by the way. Rather than viewing Israelis as innocent little victims responding defensively to unprovoked attacks by murderous savages, or doing the opposite and viewing Jewish people as an inherently wicked race, you can simply ask yourself what it would be like to grow up in an apartheid state whose existence depends on dehumanizing those who don’t belong to the group which that state empowers.

How would it shape you to be raised in a very young ethnostate which was dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization whose people never accepted that they ought to be displaced, deprived of basic rights, and live as a permanent lower caste just because they’re a different ethnicity? How would your mind and conscience be formed if you were indoctrinated from a very young age to believe there’s a perfectly good reason why you’re living a much better life than the people in that other group, and that the reason is because the other group is inherently inferior to yours? How would the formation of your worldview play out if you were always being told that you’re surrounded by mindless barbarians who want to kill you because of your religion and can only be brought to heel by brute force?

If you think you’d be any better than the average Israeli after such an upbringing, you’re fooling yourself. With a little empathy and humility you can understand that both the Israelis and the Palestinians are conditioned in different ways by the circumstances of their lives and the systems under which they live.

The existence of this inherently racist and tyrannical state shapes everyone who lives under it. The creation of a state which cannot be sustained without nonstop violence and abuse was always going to give rise to hatred, trauma and enmity. We were always headed for this point.

Between the Palestinians and the Israelis there is a very clear victim and a very clear victimizer, but that’s not because anyone involved is inherently evil. It’s egoically comfortable to sit on our high horse and see Virtuous Good Guys over here and Villainous Bad Guys over there, but real life doesn’t work that way. In real life, any of us could have been Hamas, and any of us could have been a genocidal IDF soldier. If you can’t see this, it’s because you lack empathy and humility. That’s a character flaw, and you should do what you can to change that about yourself.

As with so much else, it’s not about the individuals, it’s about the system. The unjust system upon which the Zionist state is based has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it can never exist without nonstop violence and abuse, so that system needs to be dismantled and replaced with something radically different, just as was the case with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. And just as was the case with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, external pressures will probably need to play a role in forcing that change to take place.

That’s the only way forward. That’s the only way there can be peace.

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Feature image via Mart Madigan (CC BY 2.0)