Hamas Goes to College

On Shifa, Orwell, Fanon, and the War of Ideas

© Photo by Bertie

Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City, can tell you a lot about the war in Gaza.

First, Shifa tells you about the ruthlessness of Hamas, which establishes command centers, rocket launch sites, and military depots in or beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques throughout the Gaza Strip. Was Shifa THE Hamas central command of Gaza City or just a regular military headquarters with tunnels, weapons, fighters and hostages? 

Hairsplitting.

I’ve worked in hospitals for much of my professional life, and it hasn’t always been fun. I can remember one morning when I was an intern, walking to my hospital, Beth Israel in lower Manhattan, at the crack of dawn, 36 hours of call stretching before me (this was before work hour limitations). As I passed Dunkin’ Donuts on Third Avenue, I could see a pimply teenager standing behind the counter. 

I remember wishing I was him.

But however much dread I may have felt at what lay in store for me, I can’t imagine how it would feel to know that I was heading toward a workplace, with its sick patients and medical staff, that was cynically being used as a shield to shelter combatants, or worse, to draw fire. 

That’s speaking as a doctor. I’ll leave it to kindergarten teachers and clergy to comment on how they might feel about such a prospect in their places of work.

Second, Shifa tells you a lot about the Israeli Army code of ethics. I say this not based on the lengths to which the IDF will go to avoid harming noncombatants - which is not only considerable but unique in the history of warfare - but rather based on the simple fact that Hamas finds civilians to be effective shields against Israel to begin with.

George Orwell (as usual) understood this best. In his essay, Reflections on Gandhi, Orwell pointed out that for a strategy like nonviolence to be effective, it could only be used against a moral enemy, like the British or the Americans. 

Nonviolent protest by Indians worked against the British because the British were loath to attack defenseless Indian protestors. It worked during the Civil Rights movement because Americans were loath to see the police beat and shoot defenseless Blacks.

Of course, no one would accuse Hamas of using nonviolent resistence. But likewise, the use of human shields works against the Israelis because Israeli soldiers are loath to harm innocent Palestinians.  

I know an Israeli who was in a commando unit during the Gaza war of 2014. He was injured during an ambush by a Hamas operative who came into his line of sight pushing a small boy in front of him. The Hamas gunman rested the barrel of his rifle on the boy’s shoulder as he advanced. The Israeli soldier didn’t shoot and in return took several bullets to his chest and legs. 

In other words, Israel is exactly the kind of enemy against whom it works to fire rockets from a hospital.

Third, Shifa tells you a lot about the moral confusion of progressives - including college students and their professors - who don’t seem to care about the difference between intentional targets and unintentional casualties. 

Of course, every civilian death is a tragedy. The inevitability of innocent casualties is one reason why war is always hell. But the question of intent is such a simple, basic moral principle, so fundamental to common sense, common law, and the laws of war, that the failure to acknowledge it requires explanation.

But the moral confusion goes deeper than equating the deaths of children caught in the crossfire in Gaza (or rather strategically put there by Hamas) with the murder of children hunted and gunned down in their own bedrooms.

How is it that supporters of BLM, who just a few months ago were marching to defund the police, now march in support of Hamas, which rules Gaza as a police state? 

How is it that supporters of Me Too, whose motto, “Believe Women”, demands that women’s allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault be accepted at face value, dare to question the documented rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7th?

How is it that LGBTQ activists, who have fought so that gay, trans, and queer people can live openly and without discrimination, march in support of Hamas, who condone throwing gays off rooftops?

And while we’re at it, how is it that anyone who purports to believe in freedom and justice can rip down posters of hostages? Is kidnapping babies really something that anyone is for?

In a mind-blowing tour de force, Hamas has somehow managed to align Jihadism with Progressivism, which should rightly be its biggest enemy. 

And young people are tripping over each other to jump on the bandwagon. According to the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, conducted November 15-16 with 2,851 registered voters, 45% of 18-24 year-olds support Hamas.

As a faculty member at Columbia with three kids at college, I have a front row seat to this phenomenon, which does not make it any easier to understand. I find the sight of college students and their professors cheering and chanting for Hamas to be not only perplexing, but alienating, and infuriating.

What are the planks of the bridge between Jihadism and Progressivism? One is academia.

Back is the 1980’s, when I was a college student, reading Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault and learning how to deconstruct stuff, I thought post-structuralist theory was just a game, a way for critics to get the upper hand over writers while taking all the fun out of reading in the process. 

But even back then, people were raising red flags about the moral relativism implied by viewing all texts solely on the basis of other texts, ad infinitum, with no truth or reality ever to be found underneath.

This intellectual rubric makes it hard to think in terms of right and wrong, or good and evil, divesting students of the moral clarity and conviction necessary to confront malignant ideologies.

That’s one academic extreme. 

The other extreme is exemplified by Frantz Fanon, author of the highly influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, which I read as a History major at Princeton. Fanon was one of the fathers of post-colonialist studies and a major influence on the revolutionary Left.  

As opposed to the post-structuralists, Fanon had no problem whatsoever thinking in terms of good and evil. Among others, Fanon’s intellectual heirs include proponents of intersectionality, whereby all global conflicts are reduced to a binary of powerful colonialist oppressors versus powerless colonized oppressed.

This intellectual rubric makes it all too easy to think in terms of right and wrong or good and evil, even in cases where such categories are intellectually lazy or absurdly over-simplistic.

Another plank of the bridge between Jihadism and Progressivism is antisemitism.

The wave of Jew-hatred that is sweeping the world began in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, before a single bomb was dropped on Gaza. That clear association strongly argues against any meaningful distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Or at best it’s like the difference between a line and its asymptote: whatever separation exists, they ultimately merge as one.

But go ahead. Thread the needle. Even if it were possible to be anti-zionist without being antisemitic, that distinction means nothing to Hamas. 

As opposed to their progressive Western allies, Hamas is very clear, explicit, and not at all conflicted about their genocidal hatred for all Jews. You can’t be pro-Hamas without being antisemitic. It’s like trying to be pro-KKK without being racist.

Furthermore, labels don’t matter much when it comes to cognitive bias. 

The Halo effect is when positive impressions of something or someone in one area bias you to positive impressions in a different area. The Horn effect is the corollary, when negative impressions in one area bias you to negative impressions in a different area. 

When it comes to progressives cozying up to Hamas, both effects are at play. The Horn effect - negative impressions of Jews or Israel (take your pick) - biases progressives not only against all of Israel’s actions no matter how justified, but also attributes a corresponding Halo effect to Hamas. 

In other words, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Yet another plank of the bridge between Jihadism and Progressivism is ignorance.

My 10th grade daughter recently interviewed Columbia students about the war in Gaza for her High School newspaper. Expecting a diversity of opinions, she was surprised to find that the vast majority shared a single one: no comment. 

It’s complicated, they said. Or, it’s just so sad. Or, I don’t really know enough to say. Or, I feel bad for both sides. These are comments from students at one of the top universities in the country, whom you might expect to be better informed.

When I pointed out that her article would have been more interesting if she had interviewed actual student protestors at a rally or march, I got the side-eye from both her (what? criticism??) and her mother, who was less than thrilled at the idea of Georgia wandering around in a pro-Hamas mob asking people their opinions on Israel.

Fair. 

But despite the flaws of her sample group, maybe Georgia was onto something. 

I get it. Some things are complicated. Multivariable Calculus. Organic Chemistry. And the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, with two peoples, one indigenous (Palestinians), and one re-indigenized (Jews) vying over the same land.

But then again, some things are not so complicated. 

It shouldn’t require an advanced degree to understand that weaponizing civilians and kidnapping hostages is wrong. Or that sexual violence, torture, gleeful mutilation, and wanton murder is evil. 

It should be self-evident that when it comes to barbarism, the attempt to provide “context” adds insult to injury. That savagery like that of October 7th is beyond justification. 

“By any means necessary,” a slogan coined by Frantz Fanon, made famous by Malcolm X, and a perennial favorite of wannabe revolutionaries everywhere, has it exactly wrong. The ends never justify the means; but some means utterly discredit their ends.

Academia, antisemitism, ignorance - that’s a lot of planks and we haven’t even touched on the internet and social media….

Let’s zoom out a bit. Maybe the specific planks of the bridge between Jihadism and Progressivism matter less than the simple fact that the bridge exists.

I may be critical of Frantz Fanon, but he got one thing right. Fanon understood that it is possible to colonize not only land and bodies but minds as well. In his book, Black Skin White Masks, he brilliantly explores the way colonialism imposed a psychology of inferiority on the colonized man, woman and child.

I wonder if even Fanon appreciated the extent to which the colonialization of minds can be a two-way street, with the colonized colonizing the colonizers.

Ideas matter, maybe more than anything.

If progressives, professors, and 45% of young people look at terrorists and see heroes; if they look at savagery and see resistance; if they look at crimes and see justice; then we are losing them in a war of ideas.

Can we win them back? I think so. We’ve done it before. Anyway, the stakes are too high not to try.

In the meantime, what an irony that those who symbolically link arms with Hamas on campus, believing that they are fighting against “colonialists” thousands of miles away, are instead demonstrating that Western minds can be “colonized” right in our own backyard.

Fanon must be laughing in his grave.