Since Hamas’ brutal massacre of 1400 Israelis on October 7th, so called pro-Palestinian activists in the West have responded in a perverse way, by repeatedly invoking a particular idea: “context”. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has now joined them, stating that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Credit: Jewish News
Guterres, along with the overwhelming majority of these activists, was unable to issue a condemnation of the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust without qualifying his pseudo-condemnation by discussing the genuine suffering of the Palestinian people. These kinds of statements implicitly suggest that murdering Jews might not be all that bad, given the “context” of the situation. For instance, Owen Jones, a British left-wing journalist, argued that “if we don’t talk about the theft of Palestinian land and its illegal colonisation … horrors like this will seem to appear like lightning from a clear blue sky” and that “without context, without truth, it is impossible to understand why terrible things happen”.
Of course, few pro-Palestinian activists see the relevant context to be Hamas’ Islamist antisemitism or the fact that Hamas’ founding charter cites a hadith which states that “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them”, which might have something to do with the fact Hamas butchered almost 1400 Jews. Rather, apparently “it is … essential for scholars to situate the current war in its broad historical contexts, including those of settler colonialism”, in the words of the Department for Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto . This approach reeks of antisemitism: in the past, the context for massacring Jews was that they were Christ-killers, Communists or Capitalists – and now that they are colonisers. In the past weeks, Western anti-Zionists have cunningly and implicitly insinuated that it’s actually not unreasonable to murder Jews, given the “context” of the situation. The mere thought of contextualising such horror makes one nauseous.
Beyond the fact this selective contextualisation is sloppy on the analytical level – Muslims were massacring Jews in Eretz Yisrael long before the Israeli occupation – it is a sign of moral bankruptcy and philosophical illiteracy. The background of the perpetrators of evil is totally irrelevant to the moral assessment of their crimes. Therefore, any attempt to invoke context in a moral assessment of the October 7th massacre must logically suggest that the massacre was not actually that evil.
I cannot help but be reminded of the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941, where “context”, too, was invoked. Specifically, the antisemitic Judeo-communism stereotype used by the Poles when they murdered 1600 Jews by burning them alive in a barn. Could you imagine how absurd it would sound if someone would suggest that we ought to consider the broader picture of this atrocity? That perhaps we cannot understand the evil of this terrible event without discussing how the Poles suffered under communist rule? Maybe we should hear the Jew-burners out, and understand the broader context in which this all occurred? This is the exact logic of those aiming to contextualise Hamas’ murder of October 7th.
The Jedwabne pogrom is but one micro episode of persecution that the Jewish people have endured during their 2000 year exile. Throughout that exile, Jews vowed that, no matter how terribly they may be treated, no matter how greatly they suffer , they would maintain their morality. The exquisite paragraph from the Tachanun prayer timelessly encapsulates this commitment: “Gaze upon us from Heaven and see. Behold, we are mocked and scorned among nations. We are thought of as sheep to slaughter for tribute. Ones to kill and destroy and erase and to shame.
Yet throughout and despite all this, we have not forgotten Your name. Please do not forget us”.
This proclamation is a commitment to maintain moral conduct amidst the greatest of suffering – for not forgetting G-d encompasses maintaining morality. Contrary to the claims of Western anti-Zionists, evil cannot be morally contextualised or justified. The Jewish people were victims of the greatest crimes against humans, during exile. Yet despite all of this – they never forgot their G-d, their Torah and their Land. Judaism teaches that even throughout the most bitter of suffering, you must be moral. The broken moral compass of Western anti-Zionists deviates from this timeless wisdom. The veneer that covers their Jew-hatred has been removed once and for all.