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Israel’s defenders and enemies seem to agree on one thing—the strength and prowess of Israel. After Hamas’ massacre on 10/7, Jewish people around the world took pride in the courage of IDF soldiers and the resilience of Israelis facing wartime conditions. Advocates claiming to support the Palestinian cause, meanwhile, have used Israel’s military strength to demonize the nation as genocidal. They depict Israel as an evil empire crushing a resistance movement—a narrative inconveniently undermined by Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields. The allegations of genocide are ridiculous on their face. Genocidal regimes don’t usually use leaflets to help civilians avoid strikes or allow humanitarian aid into war-torn areas. But as a liberal, I want to address the significance of Israeli strength from a social justice perspective—and why the left can’t seem to see it.
In 1948, Jews reclaimed their religious homeland after enduring one of the most devastating genocides ever recorded. Jewish history, until that point, had been marked by centuries of exile and persecution. Israel gave Jews the opportunity to change the course of that history. As a tiny democracy within a sea of hostile Muslim autocracies, Israel has endured and gained strength over decades. That strength distinguishes the circumstances of the 10/7 pogrom from the violence Jews have faced for centuries. Hamas’ attacks rightfully drew comparisons to the Holocaust; not since the Shoah had so many Jewish civilians been murdered on a single day. But there’s one critical difference. In this moment, Jews have the military and political strength to inflict a reckoning on the terrorists who want to exterminate them. That’s why Israeli strength is not privilege; it is the promise and the legacy of Never Again.
To any self-respecting liberal, this should represent a triumph of social justice. I joined the progressive movement because I thought it meant fighting for marginalized communities. But what are we, exactly, if we condemn a marginalized community for making progress? We’re supposed to care about the vulnerable. Do they cease to matter if they take action to improve their lives? If this movement were functional, that wouldn’t be the case.
I believe liberals have betrayed ourselves by embracing an extreme, distorted version of the noble principles underlying progressivism. People have referred to this mindset as “wokeness” or “DEI,” but I think labels matter less than identifying the fundamental pathology. The progressive worldview now consists entirely of feeling bad and categorizing the world based on those feelings. Liberals instinctively feel sympathy for poor, brown-skinned people, so the country they’re fighting must be evil. Military force and civilian casualties make leftists feel sad, so it must constitute genocide. This might feel simplistic, but the college kids and hipsters chanting “From the river to the sea” aren’t deeply versed in the geopolitics of the Middle East. If you don’t believe it, ask them and find out. What you’re seeing in those protests is the pure, head-spinning rush of idealism with zero context. Wokeness gives you all the self-satisfaction of fighting the power with none of the hard questions about consequences or trade-offs.
If feelings define your reality, a strong nation like Israel must be villainous. Helpless victims have the greatest appeal to trauma porn addicts, and Israelis are not that. But it doesn’t take much poking around to make woke narratives fall apart. Take the calls for a permanent ceasefire, for example. This “humanitarian” solution becomes anything but when you explore its implications. Ending the conflict would make woke liberals feel better and give them an excuse to stop paying attention to the Middle East. But for people in the region, life would go on. People in Gaza would remain at the mercy of Hamas, to be used as human shields in future conflicts for years to come. Terrorists around the world would learn that you could destroy the West’s resolve, even after a brutal massacre, by endangering civilians. That wouldn’t have long-term consequences, right? Hamas would emerge emboldened, knowing Israel let them live after the viciousness of the 10/7 massacre. Israelis would be forced to co-exist with a group that has promised to repeat the horrors of 10/7 “again and again” until Israel is annihilated. None of this is particularly humanitarian. But it’s telling how many people’s definition of “humane” involves endangering Israelis in perpetuity.
The only people who would uncritically endorse all this are the kind who see the world through the lens of their own emotions. Anything that makes a woke liberal feel sad must be evil, and anything that contradicts their ideology can’t be real. That’s why mainstream progressive leaders have ignored or trivialized the rape of Israeli women by Hamas. It’s why defacing and tearing down Israeli hostage posters has become a common tactic of the pro-Palestinian left, including on elite college campuses.
The reality of the Israel-Hamas war is more nuanced than the trendy left-wing idea that power determines who the villains are. Palestinian civilian deaths in this conflict are a tragic, inevitable result of fighting terrorists who embed themselves into schools and hospitals. But their deaths don’t erase the right of Israelis to defend themselves. There is no moral position that forbids a society to respond after an unprecedented and devastating invasion. By the logic of pro-Palestinian advocates, no Western society has a moral mandate to protect itself from terrorism. How many of us really want to live in that kind of world? Ultimately, activists who blame Israel for Hamas’ brutal sacrifice of civilians are achieving one thing—strengthening homicidal rapists at the expense of the world’s only Jewish state. There is no justice in that.
Committing to social justice requires standing by moral principles, especially when it’s hard. It’s easy—and therefore meaningless—to support Jews fighting antisemitism when there are no serious trade-offs involved. As liberals, it costs us nothing to point out bigoted behavior from figures like Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson. It’s far more painful for us to acknowledge the consequences of fighting monsters like Hamas, who sacrifice their own people to spur international outcry against Israel. None of that justifies obscuring the truth; Israel’s ability to fight antisemitic violence is a social justice achievement that honors the legacy of Never Again. This past weekend, the world commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As activists urge us to demonize Israel, this is our chance to prove the West will not repeat its mistakes. It’s time for liberals with strength in their convictions to acknowledge Jewish humanity outside the distorting lens of wokeness. In doing so, we have the opportunity to not only stand against extremism, but to redeem our own movement from its clutches.