The moral absurdity of anti-Israel protestors

It’s a safe bet that those anti-Israel protestors on college campuses and in the streets of American cities see themselves as virtuous. They see their protests as righteous. They think they can do just about anything because their cause is just.

So in Manhattan late last month they glued themselves to Sixth Avenue and blocked the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to show support for the people in Gaza. A few hours later they vandalized the facade of the New York Public Library’s main building, doing about $75,000 of damage, according to news reports. A few days after that, they burned an Israeli flag outside the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.

And before the month was out, hundreds demonstrators waving Palestinian flags tried to disrupt the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Rockefeller Center. One protestor carried a sign showing a swastika. Fights broke out. Arrests were made. As Dan Henninger put it in the Wall Street Journal, “Apparently baby Jesus is also complicit.”

But you know who wasn’t complicit? Hamas.

Have you noticed how these progressive protestors make demands only on Israel and demand nothing of the terrorists who slaughtered more than 1,000 Israelis on October 7?

None of those protestors in New York, or the ones on so-called elite college campuses, carried signs demanding that Hamas release every hostage — immediately. Instead, some of them blamed Israel for the war that Hamas started. 

I’ve seen no signs, heard no chants, about how Hamas terrorists violently sexually abused women they took hostage. 

How is it that so many feminists believed every unsubstantiated sexual allegation made against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — but have gone silent on the documented evidence of sexual violence against Jewish women by Hamas terrorists?

No one at those demonstrations demanded that Hamas stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields. No one said it’s morally wrong to hide weapons of war in or near schools or hospitals.

No one has shown empathy for the families and friends of the Israelis killed in their homes on October 7. If there’s been anything at those rallies condemning Hamas for murdering babies, I’m unaware of it.

No one is holding up signs demanding that Hamas simply acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist. On this point, the reason is simple: because many of them don’t believe Israel does have a right to exist. Chanting “from the river to the sea” isn’t an ambiguous message. It means Israel must be eradicated.

How — in the name of standing up for humanitarian values — can they accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing” while ignoring Hamas’ founding charter that calls for the annihilation of Jews? The absurdity — the hypocrisy — is breathtaking.

Why is Israel — the lone democracy in that part of the world — the only “villain” worthy of their righteous indignation?

Here’s an explanation from Lance Murrow in the Journal: “Students at Harvard and Columbia don’t protest the region’s routine inhumanities. They do so only when there are Jews around to blame and to hate. It’s the Israelis’ Jewishness that brings the demonstrators out. This isn’t ‘a new antisemitism.’ Antisemitism is never new. It’s an ancient beast that awakens from time to time and exhales such filth as ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Hitler was right.’’

Murrow is right, of course, about antisemitism not being something new, but now it’s actually become fashionable — even cool — to don a keffiyeh (a scarf that has become a sign of Palestinian “resistance”), join like-minded Israel (and often Jew) haters on campus or in the streets, wave Palestinian flags, toss fake blood on buildings and chant slogans like “by any means necessary” — presumably meaning even the cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians on October 7. 

Demonstrating against Israel’s policies, even the scope of its military response in Gaza … fine. But demonstrating against supposed Israel’s “war crimes” and “genocide” … while it may be a way for anti-Israel progressives to signal their virtue, in reality it’s a way to trash what matters most to them: their moral standing. It’s tough to be taken seriously when they so easily ignore Hamas’s atrocities while turning Israelis, the victims of the October 7 massacre, into the monsters.

If anyone still needs proof that Israel has a reason to exist, their enemies here in America and around the world are providing it.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.