QOTD: Empathy For Gazans Can't Absolve Hamas

The Washington Post's sage columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., devotes this column to discussing the need to support both Israel's absolute right to be free from Hamas' terrorism, and to support the increasingly fragile cause of a two-state solution, especially on the progressive left:

"Little pockets of sympathy for Hamas will have no effect on U.S. politics going forward. The important contrast is between the moral and strategic seriousness of Biden’s response and the petty, unhinged and self-involved rantings of Donald Trump. Maybe, just maybe, Americans pondering a vote for the former president will see more clearly that returning him to the White House would be an act of democratic suicide.

But liberals and supporters of the democratic left like to pride ourselves on being sensitive to injustice, decent in our instincts and capable of making distinctions. To rationalize the sadistic crimes of Hamas meets none of these standards. Doing so also undercuts the arguments that the vast majority on left wants to make about the future of Israel and Palestine.

It’s true that years of right-wing governance in Israel, the spread of settlements on the West Bank and the assault on democracy by the Netanyahu government have altered the balance of forces on the left. Older liberals such as Biden (and, yes, I’m in that camp) have an unshakable and ingrained sympathy for the survival of a Jewish homeland in Israel, while also empathizing with the injustices and suffering that Palestinians confront. We continue to support an increasingly distant two-state solution precisely because we want the Jewish homeland to be democratic and we want Palestinians to have a democratic government of their own.

But the destruction of Israel would be a moral catastrophe, and Hamas longs for that outcome."  (our emphasis)

As the conflict moves into even more destructive stages, it's well to remember that Hamas' only goal is the destruction of Israel and its people, even to the point of using their own people as human shields and bloody propaganda fodder in Gaza for an international audience all too eager to excuse it.