By Harry Storm
I recently watched an hour-long discussion between Glenn Loury, a conservative professor of economics at Brown University, and Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message, about half of which describes Coates’ reaction after visiting the West Bank sometime before Oct. 7, 2023. Curiously, it was the more liberal McWhorter who was critical of Coates’ explanation for conditions on the West Bank, calling it lazy and simplistic, whereas Loury, the conservative, appeared to have unquestioningly accepted Coates’ assertions.
I haven’t read The Message yet (though I’ve placed a hold on it at the local library to avoid adding to Coates’ profit), but this article isn’t about the book. Rather, it’s about how the demonization of Israel has become so normalized that even well-meaning conservatives like Loury now repeat the same talking points and claims by anti-Israel activists.
Although I suspect Loury isn’t the only non-left, non-woke scholar critical of the war in Gaza, it’s still jarring to hear a noted conservative academic express such one-sided and simplistic opinions about the war in Gaza and by extension, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, particularly in view of his elation at the election of Donald Trump – who has often proclaimed his admiration and support for Israel – to the U.S. presidency for a second time.
One of Loury’s main arguments in defence of Coates is that “there are things that need to be said about the humanity of the Palestinians because we’re killing them by the boatload. Tens of thousands. The babies, the innocents, the collateral damage.” He believes the U.S. media hasn’t given voice to “the Palestinians’ story, to lives otherwise invisible”; nor has the media, in his opinion, revealed how entangled the U.S. is in Gaza’s plight.
“The discourse here in the U.S. is not what it might be,” Loury says. “If you listen to how events in Gaza etc. are discussed in the mainstream media, you won’t learn about the humanity of the Palestinians, or about American participation in their dehumanization.”
So if not in the legacy media, then where? Loury points to “experts” he says have “the moral clarity of seeing apartheid for what it is.” His use of the term “apartheid” in relation to Israel should be a clue as to who these experts might be: As it happens, they include the same array of Israel-hating academics, pundits and international bodies that anti-Israel obsessives always quote to back their claims of Israeli crimes and misdeeds. These include, among others, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights groups (presumably B’tselem and other like-minded groups), and the International Court of Justice.
He also points to Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, and to anti-Israel obsessives like Jeffrey Sachs and Glenn Greenwald, and “realists” such as John Mearsheimer and Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief-of-staff. (The latter two regularly post interviews on Youtube that seem to emanate from precisely the same unknown source, claiming that Israel is losing in Gaza, in Lebanon and against Iran, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
In other words, Loury believes that to understand the true tragedy of the Palestinians, the go-to people are the so-called anti-imperialists. But these people are institutionally hostile to Israel, as are such UN-affiliated bodies as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. The UN itself is hostile to the Jewish state, as evidenced by their passing more resolutions against Israel than all other 170 member states combined, including China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and many other dictatorships.
As for Human Rights Watch, it uses an altered definition of apartheid in order to accuse Israel of it. (In its 2021 publication A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, HRW maintains that “the international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context.) Citing this organization as evidence that there really is apartheid on the West Bank, rather than an occupied people who refuse to sincerely negotiate an end to the occupation, is disingenuous.
In fact, this assortment of Israel-haters actually says little about the humanity of the Palestinians; their interest is squarely focused on the inhumanity of the wicked Israelis, not only in Gaza since Oct. 7, but since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
And although few people would deny the sorry plight of the Palestinians, the idea that they lack a voice is bizarre. News coverage of events in Gaza, both in the U.S. and internationally, is one-sidedly sympathetic to the Palestinians, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank.
Take The New York Times, for example. A comprehensive study conducted at Bar-Ilan University in Israel revealed a massive bias toward Palestinians in terms of empathy and criticism. To cite just one example, the 72 op-eds in the NYT critical of Israel were written by Jews, Muslims, Israelis, Palestinians and Christians, whereas the 23 op-eds that were critical of Hamas were mostly written by Jews or Israelis. Not one was written by a Palestinian or Muslim.
The massive bias toward Palestinians and their plight didn’t stop The Intercept, a left-wing online publication, from publishing a study that purported to show the opposite. This study, which only looked at the first 6 weeks following Oct. 7, when feelings about the massacre in southern Israel were still raw, studied several publications and focused on the subjective use of words used to describe Israeli vs. Palestinian casualties and actions. This study was seized upon and amplified by other leftist outlets like The Jacobin, which also criticized a belated New York Times article on the rape of Israelis on Oct. 7. An interesting choice, since this article, in a newsroom filled with #metoo supporting staffers, wasn’t published for more than 2 months after Oct. 7 and only after the UN finally (and rather grudgingly) conceded that rapes had occurred. (Many pro-Palestinians continue to maintain that no rapes occurred on Oct. 7.)
But one doesn’t have to look at studies to determine that news outfits like MSNBC, CNN, the NYT, WAPO, the BBC, the Guardian and most of the rest favour the Palestinian narrative. Hamas’ casualty claims, for instance, are routinely accepted and published at face value, attributed to the “Gaza Health Ministry” or “Gaza officials”. Occasionally, the fact that both are “Hamas-run” is noted, but even here, usually without also noting that the figures may well be false. Israeli claims about the number of Hamas fighters killed – which brings down the count of civilians killed significantly – are rarely mentioned, and often cast in doubt or are said to require verification.
Loury also appears to support Coates’ argument – also promulgated by Muslim comedian Dave Chappelle – about what happens to people who have been viciously victimized by history (he means Jews) when they get power, and the “corrupting influence” of that power, implying that what Israel has done in Gaza speaks volumes about the heinous crimes humans can commit even in the wake of their own horrible victimization.
But the idea that the survivors of Nazi extermination efforts then turned around and had no humanity toward the Palestinians is nonsense, at least in terms of the vast majority, including those who formed Israel’s early governments. They defended themselves against Palestinian violence from 1920 onward. They accepted partition, both in the 1930s and in 1947. Both times, it was rejected by the Palestinians. They fought a war of independence against an exterminationist enemy that included Palestinian militias and neighbouring Arab armies whose aim was to strangle the Jewish state before it came into being, and lost 1% of their population defending themselves against those who would push them into the sea.
Nevertheless, they welcomed the Arabs who remained and gave them full civil rights. They made peace offer after peace offer, only to have them rejected and met with terrorism. They unilaterally evacuated Gaza in 2005 only to have the Palestinians elect Hamas as their government. Hamas then used any resources donated by a generous world community that its leaders didn’t keep for themselves to buy weapons, rockets and tunnelling materials with which to attack Israel. That experience made the Israelis loath to do another unilateral evacuation, but there has been no Palestinian partner; every deal offered by Israel has been rejected by the leaders of the Palestinian Authority – Yasser Arafat and later Mahmoud Abbas, neither of whom ever even made a counteroffer.
Hence the continuing occupation. The root cause of this conflict isn’t the lack of humanity shown to Palestinians, or even the settlements (which only began in 1967), but the original, longstanding and continuing rejection by the Palestinians and many other Arabs and Muslims to accept Jewish sovereignty on any portion of the land.
Israelis and their supporters like me are well aware of the tragedy that has engulfed the Palestinians, but see no other way for Israel to protect its own citizens from tragedies that its enemies would surely inflict.
War is the biggest enemy of humanity; that’s why they shouldn’t be started. Hostilities were initiated against Israel by 1) Hamas, on Oct 7; 2) Hezbollah, on Oct. 8, (3) the Houthis, who immediately began attacking Israeli and other Western ships entering or leaving the Red Sea, and in July, launched a cruise missile at Tel Aviv that caused a deatha few months later; and (4) by Iran (missile barrages in April and October 2024 ordered by an Iranian leadership not terribly concerned about the humanity of Israeli civilians, though fortunately most were intercepted). Had these hostilities no occurred, there would be no humanitarian disasters in Gaza or Lebanon.
But Hamas and Hezbollah did initiate these hostilities, something left-wing and Muslim anti-Israel activists and obsessives who accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza choose to overlook or forget entirely. The Hamas terrorists who rule supposedly occupied Gaza, which in fact hadn’t been occupied since 2005, (1) viciously slaughtered 1200 people in the most gruesome ways possible and kidnapped 250 more; (2) embedded their fighters with their own civilian population and used those civilians (and the hostages) as human shields; (3) built no bomb shelters for civilians and refused to let them shelter in the vast tunnel network it built for its fighters only; (4) forced civilians to remain in areas they were warned to leave by the IDF; (5) put arms depots and military HQs in, under, or near residences, schools, hospitals and mosques; and (6) stole food aid for themselves or to resell at vastly inflated prices.
These activities – all of which may be classified as war crimes – mislead gullible Westerners such as Loury into decrying the inhumanity of the Israeli state, when in reality, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and its actions since then leaves Israel with two choices, best described and summarized by the brilliant Coleman Hughes – who, ironically, is much admired by Loury – during his conversation with Joe Rogan in late 2023:
“What’s unique about this war, unlike every other war that I could think of, is that you have an army, in Hamas, that has perfected the art of embedding itself, enmeshing itself with civilians, so you cannot hit them without hitting the people around them. Other armies have done this, but none have perfected it to the extent that Hamas has. No army that I know of in military history has had 15 years to build 300 miles of tunnel underneath a city that they don’t use to shelter the civilians, but they use to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten, right under a mosque.
“So this is a challenge no army has faced. And so that’s what makes this war different. And yes, I agree with all of the tragedy and suffering of the Palestinian people, but what creates that is the way Hamas fights. And we can say one of two things: we can either say, ‘well, Israel doesn’t have a clean shot, and so they have to let Hamas get away with it because it’s too much to bear. But then we are essentially creating a situation where terrorists have found the perfect solution. Which is that you can cross the border, go house to house slaughtering your enemies, and then hide behind your own people and they can do nothing about it.
“It’s a perfect strategy. Can we live in a world where we allow that to be an acceptable strategy? I don’t think so. And it’s very ugly to watch, it’s heartbreaking, and I completely understand why people don’t think the way I think when they see the videos. I completely get it, but I don’t think we can actually live in a world where that’s allowed to be a strategy.”