by Joe Miller
Three years ago, Ham-as launched the third-deadliest terrorist attack in modern history, killing around 1,200 people across the state of Israel. Nearly 70% of those killed were civilians.
Here in the United States, those attacks set off a chain of events that have resulted in historic shifts in American attitudes toward Israel.
The percentage of Americans with unfavorable views of the Israeli government rose by 11 percentage points – from 42 to 54 percent – in the two years following the October 7 attacks.
That shift has been driven largely by Democrats, whose disapproval of Israel jumped from 53% to 69%. Republican disapproval grew by a more modest, but still statistically significant amount.
Those changing attitudes are the result of what many Americans would describe as Israeli overreach in the wake of the attacks. Both the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli Defense Force estimate that Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed somewhere between 73,000 and 74,000 Gaza residents – and some independent counts put the toll even higher than that.
That is around 60 Gaza residents killed for every person killed in the October 7 attacks, with women, children and the elderly making up around 4 in 5 of those v-violently killed.
There are a number of ways to define an act of terrorism, but the generally accepted standard in the literature of just war theory – and the one I used in teaching classes on the subject – is this: Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of noncombatants to achieve a political end.
Osama bin Laden attacked civilians in the World Trade Center in the belief that inflicting heavy casualties would cause Americans to withdraw from the Middle East. That is about as clear a case of terrorism as you can ask for. (It’s also a shockingly poor read of American political will, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Hamas’ attack on Israeli community buildings and public events to force Israel to withdraw from Gaza is similarly an attack on noncombatants for a political end.
Israel’s response of attacking pretty much the entirety of Gazan infrastructure to force Hamas to capitulate looks a lot like an act of state terrorism.
I suspect that readers of this column have different views about the root causes of the Israel-Palestine dispute. I could write 800,000 words without doing much more than scratching the surface of that particular problem. I’m certainly not going to solve it in 800 words.
But I do know that there is a natural tendency to “well, but” the sins of those whose aims we find sympathetic. Some of you may well be marshalling arguments about Hamas deliberately hiding in civilian areas. Others are pointing out that Israelis share a collective guilt for the oppression of Palestinians, rendering the very idea of noncombatants problematic.
It’s uncomfortable to think about our side doing the same kinds of things our opponents are doing.
So mostly we end up not really thinking about it too much. We don’t get terribly upset when our allies drop bombs on civilian power plants or launch missiles into the heart of densely populated cities.
We get even less upset when we’re the ones doing that kind of targeting. If you want to see a classroom full of people get really defensive, ask them to think about the political aims of the allied firebombing of Dresden!
That tension is playing out in political campaigns across the country right now.
Those aligned with the Palestinian cause often refuse to acknowledge that October 7 was a despicable act of terrorism.
Meanwhile, those aligned with Israel claim self-defense without grappling with the fact that when almost 80% of the dead are noncombatants, you’re either stunningly incompetent or you’re doing it on purpose.
The Israeli Defense Force is many things. Stunningly incompetent has never been one of them.
It’s uncomfortable acknowledging that people you support – people whose cause you think is just – are using terrorism to advance their cause.
It’s even more uncomfortable to acknowledge that Americans have been the perpetrators of terrorism, not just its victims.
But the best way to honor those whose lives were lost to acts of terrorism is to call out acts of terror whenever we see them, even – or perhaps especially – when it’s done by those whose cause we support.
