Many have noted the conspicuous silence of the “ceasefire now” crowd following the announcement of the United States-brokered peace deal in Gaza. President Donald Trump’s central role in the deal doubtlessly plays a part in that silence. After all, it’s difficult to tip one’s hat to “literal Hitler,” even if Hitler does, as the Babylon Bee hilariously noted, bring peace to Israel.
PHASE TWO OF THE ISRAEL-HAMAS DEAL REQUIRES TRUMP’S PATIENT FORTITUDE
But there’s an even more obvious reason the Left isn’t cheering the ceasefire and aid deliveries they’ve spent two years howling for: they wanted Israel to lose this war, or at the very least suffer greatly.
Having swallowed whole the ideological gibberish about the evils of Zionism and the oppressive, “settler-colonialist” regime Palestinians supposedly lived beneath prior to Oct. 7, 2023, the Left came to regard the destruction of Israel, or at the very least, the extreme punishment of Israel, as a moral imperative, even if they masked their intentions with euphemisms like “liberation” and “justice.”
Indeed, as hostages and prisoners are exchanged and humanitarian aid floods into war-torn Gaza, the Left’s true goals remain unrealized: Palestine is not free “from the river to the sea” because Israel is still on the map. The intifada has not been globalized. The dream of righting the supposed wrongs of 1948 and returning the land to its “indigenous” population seems further out of reach than ever. And this infuriates the Left.
Though they’ve rarely been pressed to admit it explicitly, most left-wing activists believe that the Oct. 7 attacks constituted a form of legitimate resistance against an oppressive “occupying” force. A small faction, such as Black Lives Matter of Chicago, admitted this from the beginning, celebrating the attacks by immediately circulating images of the Oct. 7 terrorists descending on hang gliders with the caption, “I Stand with Palestine.”
Certain university professors also celebrated the attacks openly. Richard Rickford from Cornell congratulated Hamas for challenging Israel’s supposed “monopoly of violence” and stated that he found the attacks “exhilarating,” while Joseph Massad of Columbia hailed the attacks as a “major achievement” because they dealt a “death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”
But mainstream progressive figures were forced to play coy. Most of the commentary that flowed from the Left over the preceding two years merely gave an implicit approval of the attacks. By accepting and promulgating the notion of Israel as an illegitimate nation of occupiers and oppressors, high-ranking Democratic politicians gave more cover to the terrorists.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who had disparaged Israel as an “apartheid state” for years leading up to the attack — in 2021, she tweeted that “Apartheid states aren’t democracies” — denounced “the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under the occupation” by Israel three short days after Oct. 7. Her political mentor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has likewise repeatedly blamed the attacks on Israel, explaining them away as a consequence of its “illegal occupation” of Palestine.
In a 2024 Democracy Now! interview, Sanders explained, as he did on many occasions, that “The root of this conflict lies in Israel’s 56-year illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which has dispossessed millions and fueled cycles of violence.” Hamas’s barbarity, in this view, is simply the natural and even necessary outgrowth of Israeli injustice.
And while both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders issued condemnations of the Oct. 7 attacks, with the former calling it an “atrocity” and Sanders describing it as “horrifying,” these characterizations defy their own logic. Is it really an “atrocity” to commit violence against an occupying force that is, in the words of Ocasio-Cortez, inflicting “grave injustices” on the Palestinian people? Is it really “horrifying” for people who’ve been illegally and brutally tyrannized to fight back?
The Left has attempted the same logical jujitsu in relation to the assassination attempts on Trump. Democrats have labeled Trump a fascist, a Nazi, and every other possible historically reviled political designation for an entire decade. But when bullets finally began flying toward his head, they pretended to be horrified. But why should anyone be upset about Hitler being shot at? It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t now in relation to Israel.
Progressive activist and CNN contributor Cornel West, who once described Oct. 7 as “a tragic outburst of rage against an occupation that’s been strangling Palestinians for generations,” has inched closer toward justifying the terrorist attacks as a legitimate form of political resistance.
On a recent appearance on CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Philip, West remarked that “Hamas or Hamas-like resistance” will continue to exist as long as Israel continues to “oppress” Palestinians.
The implication that Israel is principally to blame for the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the war legitimizes not only those attacks but future ones. The false charge of “genocide” against Israel in the previous two years is sure to inspire more deadly attacks. We can be sure that the same voices on the Left who falsely accused Israel of genocide will blame Israel for future attacks, too.
The reason few on the Left are celebrating the ceasefire is because they believe Israel deserves to be punished, not only for the suffering of Gazans following the Oct. 7 attacks, but also for “oppressing” Palestinians for decades.
It doesn’t matter that Hamas, with the financial help of Iran, planned and perpetrated Oct. 7 with the explicit goal of derailing U.S.-brokered normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This doesn’t even enter into their thinking. For the Left, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a morality tale about a brutal oppressor receiving their just desserts for decades of evil deeds.
UKRAINE HOPES TO BENEFIT FROM TRUMP’S GAZA MOMENTUM WITH ITS OWN PEACE
Sanders released a statement welcoming the ceasefire while condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his “barbaric campaign” against Palestine and denouncing the U.S. for its role in “this extremely dark chapter.” As of Wednesday evening, Ocasio-Cortez has not commented on the matter.
The fact that Israel stands strong today infuriates them. Only they can’t say so out loud.
So they just remain silent.
