Why Did Hamas Attack Israel? By Philip Carl Salzman

PJ Media : If Israelis expected the world to be horrified at the atrocities committed by Hamas and by Gazan civilians against Israeli citizens, they were quickly disabused of such a hope. Shockingly, celebrations of the Hamas attacks were widespread, followed by justifications of the atrocities offered by officials, politicians, academics, and mobs of Arabs, Muslims, and leftists around the world.

Common to the justifications were characterizations of Israel as colonial settler state implementing apartheid and engaging in genocide against the Palestinians. These statements are the reduction of academic postcolonial theory to a few political slogans.

No facts support these claims, but I will not list the realities that refute them, because these claims do not in fact refer to reality, but are shibboleths signaling identification in opposition to Israel. I will point out only that Israeli Arab citizens fly immediately into fury at any suggestion that they might wish to change boundaries and abandon Jewish Israel to live under the Palestinian Authority. Some apartheid; some genocide. 

It is worth remembering that Arab culture, and the Islamic culture built on it, rely on the fundamental concept of structural opposition that is at the heart of foundational Bedouin culture. The rules of Bedouin politics are twofold: Always uphold solidarity with your kin and always side with the closer relative against the more distant.

Arabs should always side with Arabs, and Muslims should always side with Muslims, no matter what. In conflict, you use whatever weapons you can. In propaganda wars, you use whatever claims advance your case. Truth doesn’t come into it. Progressives and the far left, their tribes being identity classes, have adopted these principles.

Some non-ethnic apologists for Hamas formulate general arguments. Like many “progressive” academics, Laura Mullen, chair of the literature and creative writing department at Wake Forest University, justified the atrocities this way: “So it’s kind of a Duh but if you turn me out of my house plow my olive grove and confine what’s left of my family to the small impoverished state you run as an open air prison I could be tempted to shoot up your dance party yeah even knowing you will scorch the earth.”

She went on to explain, “When 9/11 happened, I was asking myself and others, ‘What did we do to make people want to come and do that to us?’ That is how my mind works.” Finally, Professor Mullen summed up her justification: “despair leads to violence…a human truth.” Note that Professor Mullen’s approach would be like asking an abused wife, “What did you do to deserve being beaten up?”

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