I need make no grand loyalty statements. I have no such requirement because my views on this conflict have been plain for many years: the moral imperative is that we create total legal and political equality for all people in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, as basic democratic principles demand, and that all people in that land enjoy safety and prosperity. Hamas’s attack has put a dent in both, for Israel, and destroyed them in Gaza; clearly, this is contrary to my demands. We must have freedom and safety for all, which of course includes Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Arabs as well as African migrant workers as well as various Christians and Druze and every other kind of person, again due to absolutely bedrock democratic principles. Hamas is a theocratic body, and I am opposed to theocracy, and whatever your perspective on political violence, they have harmed the interests of Gazans and all Palestinians. They killed innocent people, which I can’t ever countenance, and by the way they’re contributing to terrible outcomes for their own side in doing so. The attack made greater Palestine more violent and less free. I don’t need to denounce the attack because it comes pre-denounced by my moral values.
The esteemed representative of the Positive Outcomes Only, Please party has spoken. You may recall that it was only a couple weeks ago that we observed this oblivious moron repeating his longstanding wish for a worldwide Marxist revolution. Given history, and given human nature, we can safely assume that the results of said revolution would dwarf the October 7th massacre, but never fear, our public intellectual would be standing athwart the chaos just as he is now, shouting, “Gentlemen! I do not countenance this! This is contrary to my demands!” This cognitive dissonance, this remarkable inability to learn anything from experience, this radiant talent for using a lot of words to say less than nothing of substance, is what you need if you want to be a Substack Superstar. “Ah! The nuance! The complexity! What a subtle thinker!” exclaims Andrew Sullivan, as he strokes his chin and readies the podcast invitation. You boring normies with your conventional opinions, like “Marxism has never worked and never will,” or “The Middle East is an intractable mess which will only end badly if it ever ends at all,” will never understand.