The Anti-Israel Left and the Righteous Swastika

Scattered, unsettled thoughts on the ongoing war in Gaza—and how Israel's critics are responding to it

Members of the public hold an emergency protest in response to the destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital In Gaza on April 03, 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland. The IDF said it raided al-Shifa because Hamas had regrouped there. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

This is going to be an unusually disjointed post, no doubt because my thoughts and feelings on the topic are unsettled. But I nonetheless think the topic is important—and my views on it are very deeply embedded in my thinking about politics. I think it’s best to lay all my cards on the table in the spirit of fostering an open debate. As with my first post in response to Hamas’ terrorist invasion of Israel last October, I’m going to use frequent lined section breaks instead of a small number of titled subsections for this one. That seems to be an effective way of putting forth a more unsystematic series of assertions and arguments.

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The occasion for the post was an act of vandalism at a synagogue less than a mile from my house in the Philadelphia suburbs. CNN correspondent Jake Tapper shared the image with the wider world on Sunday afternoon: Someone on Saturday night had spray painted a swastika on a sign expressing solidarity with Israel.

I tweeted about the event myself, in anger, a few hours later. And then I thought—rather, I hoped—I could try and forget about it. But on Monday afternoon, I came across a tweet from inveterate leftist Malcolm Harris making an especially … provocative claim about the vandalism.

Lots of people responded by attacking and defending Harris’ tweet in crude, predictably vituperative ways. But I was especially interested in the civil back and forth that opened up among a couple of other very-online leftists.

Here were several passionate, highly educated political analysts motivated by intense commitment to justice respectfully debating whether it is in fact the case that the circumstances of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza had managed to turn the world’s pre-eminent symbol of eliminationist anti-Semitism into an expression of moral righteousness.

And here is my response to this suggestion, written through gritted teeth: No, it has not. Israel is at war with Hamas. Hamas is an organization that aims to destroy the state of Israel and either expel from the region or murder every Jew currently living there so it can establish an Islamofascist caliphate much like the one the Islamic State tried to build a decade ago in the deserts of Syria and Iraq. The appalling events of October 7, 2023 confirmed that this, and not the creation of either two states living peaceably side by side or a single binational state including all of the region’s Jews and Palestinians, is Hamas’ goal. Defacing a sign with Nazi imagery outside a synagogue in the United States is thus, as always, an expression of solidarity with wannabe successors to the Nazis.