Although much has already been said, I can't not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust.
What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime's mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are.
So what's the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish. Moreover, they should have learned that Jews by definition can never constitute the oppressor. Therefore, TikTok'ers are wrong to think of the Holocaust when they see videos of powerful Israeli soldiers harming weak Palestinians in Gaza. Or so Hurwitz believes. See for yourself. (By the way, Ms. Hurwitz, in both cases, the mass murderers did not only harm weak, emaciated victims; they made them weak and emaciated in the first place.)
All this perplexes Hurwitz and others in the American pro-Israel constituency. Young people have drawn broad rather than narrow lessons—and she equates that with antisemitism. Of course, this is buncumbe. Abstracting—drawing generalizations—from real events is a virtue, not a vice. It is quintessentially human. Ayn Rand disparaged persons who refuse to abstract as "concrete-bound." We think in concepts, and we wouldn't be able to do much thinking without them. Concepts are abstractions. We observe reality, note differences and similarities among entities, and integrate similar things into a conceptual hierarchy (for instance, chairs, furniture, manmade things). This facilitates efficient thinking by economizing on mental units. (Rand explained all this.)
Of course, we can make mistakes. We can misclassify things. We're not infallible, which is why logic and reason are indispensable guides. If Hurwitz thinks that certain generalizations drawn from the Holocaust are fallacious, let her argue for her opposing position. However, she can't get away with the libel of attributing those generalizations to "people who don't really love Jews." For one thing, many Jews have drawn those generalizations. At demonstrations protesting Israel's destruction of life and property in Gaza, Jewish participants have held signs reading, "Never Again Is Now." Hurwitz thinks that "Never Again" means only that Jews should not be persecuted or exterminated. Apparently, she also believes that if officials and military forces of the Jewish state seem to be committing those crimes, it can't really be so, no matter how it looks. "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" said Chico Marx.
Only an idiot or a demagogue could draw those conclusions. (I've drawn an additional lesson.)
Hurwitz might have made a stronger—though not valid—argument. She might have said that young people don't know the full story of Gaza because their generation is post-literate and video-oriented. All they know is what they see on TikTok: nonstop images, day in and day out, of Israeli military violence against helpless Palestinians. She does not challenge the authenticity of the videos, but she is frustrated that her pro-Israel arguments stand no chance against those images. (Hillary Clinton—she still shows her face?—shares the same concern.) As Hurwitz put it, "I'm talking through a wall of dead children." Yes, she is.
However, Hurwitz overlooks the fact that many videos from Gaza have been posted by Israeli soldiers—on TikTok—with audio sadistically celebrating their violence. Young viewers may not read, but I'm sure they hear.
Let's concede that an image may not tell the whole story. If you saw a man taking a watch from another man, you would not know by that scene alone whether you were witnessing a robbery or the recovery of stolen property. But that's not what we have with Israel and Gaza. The images of Israeli violence have not only been graphic, but they have poured out in an unending stream since Oct. 7, 2023. Gaza looks like August 1945 Hiroshima. Many tens of thousands of children and old people, as well as other noncombatants, have been killed, maimed, starved, and traumatized. Medical facilities have been destroyed, making the treatment of survivors and other sick Gazans virtually impossible.
Viewers of this material will properly ask, "What could justify such total violence over such a long period?" Viewers may also have heard that many international authorities on genocide and Holocaust studies, including Israelis, believe that Israel is committing genocide as the law defines it. (See this from Omar Bartov and this from Raz Segal.) The burden falls on Hurwitz and her colleagues to do more than repeat official Israeli propaganda, but that's what they have done.
Yes, Hamas and other groups launched a brutal attack on Oct. 7, 2023, inexcusably committing atrocities against Israeli noncombatants and seizing hostages. But it is also true that Hamas, an abhorrent organization judging by its never-repudiated antisemitic charter and record of crimes, did not exist before the late 1980s, long after the wholesale dispossession, expulsion, and subjugation of the Palestinians began. Moreover, Israel encouraged the growth of Hamas, hoping it would weaken the Palestinian cause by becoming a religious rival to the leading faction, Fatah, which is secular. Later, Benjamin Netanyahu permitted Hamas to collect money, since he could use the group's presence as a reason for not allowing a Palestinian state
This history does not excuse the Oct. 7 crimes, but neither do those crimes excuse Israel's indiscriminate destruction of the people and places of Gaza.
The Europe-based Zionist movement has abused the Palestinians for more than one hundred years. Moreover, imperial Britain helped boost Zionism beginning in 1917. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to see Zionism as just another episode in a long-running story of Western imperialism, the solution to which is (presumably) worldwide de-Westernization, or "global intifada." The history of Zionism has too many distinguishing features, including the real persecution of Jews at the hands of Europeans and the real, partially carried out "Final Solution" at the hands of the National Socialists.
Moreover, Jewish supremacy (so identified by Israeli human-rights organization B'Tselem) is not held to be generally applicable. Rather, it is a political device intended to guarantee Israel's existence as a haven for Jews should virulent antisemitism arise elsewhere in the world. Thus goes the argument: in Israel (but not other places), Jews must be legally and politically privileged or else the Jewishness of the state will not be assured.
I don't mean that the Zionist program—punishing Palestinians for what Europeans did—was the correct response to the historical record, only that this episode is importantly distinguishable from other colonial episodes, despite the similarities. The critics of Zionism who target Western civilization per se are attacking a strawman. If anti-Zionism is portrayed as anti-Western, Zionism wins. On the other side, Zionists who reject universalism in favor of blood-and-soil tribalism unwittingly make common cause with antisemites, who also reject universalism in favor of blood-and-soil tribalism.
Bottom line: supporting the individual natural rights of Palestinians—who are individuals before they are members of "a people"—to live where they have lived continuously for millennia is not anti-Western. On the contrary, it is in line with the glorious and, yes, superior liberal Western Enlightenment ideal (still to be fully realized) of individual sovereignty.
(See my Coming to Palestine.)
