Moral Tourism

A friend recently send me a forty year old article by the late Charles Krauthammer that offers a sharp insight on the Left's present-day siding with Hamas. In it, he echoed Nobel and Pulitzer winning writer Saul Bellow in describing the behavior as "moral tourism."

[T]he Middle East has become, in Saul Bellow's words, the "moral resort area" of the West: "What Switzerland is to winter holidays and the Dalmatian coast to summer tourists, Israel and the Palestinians are to the West's need for justice." The West Bank alone offers the moral tourist a sandbox full of paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities too neat, and cheap, to refuse. For the Israeli these are questions of life and death; for the traveling moralist (lives there a columnist who has not made the hajj?), they are an occasion for indignation and advice, the consequences of which are to be observed safely from overseas.

Pondered through this filter, it becomes easier to understand how people who would be subjugated, jailed, or killed by those who would rule over "Palestine" (see: women, non-Muslims, gays and gender-nonconformists, political dissenters, to name a few) are taking to the streets to demand a ceasefire. Or, worse, that Israel surrender herself en toto and become "Palestine," after which all the Jews will have to leave. Really, that's what the "From the river to the sea" chanters want. At least those who've actually thought about it, rather than simply bleating it in Orwellian-sheep fashion.

There's even a trendy name for it: diasporism. As in, Jews should move out of Israel to everywhere else. Oh, how our progs love their newspeak. Still a fringe notion, I expect it'll gain steam, because young leftists looooove new-and-trendy ideas.

It's not that new, though. I've seen, across the years, some loathsome types openly saying stuff like "Give the Jews some desert in Arizona, and move them all out of the Middle East." At this juncture, it's worth reiterating that Israel has agreed to, many times, a two-state solution, and has been rebuffed at every turn. Yasser Arafat had a chance at that, but would likely have been murdered by his own people should he have made that sort of peace with the Israelis.

Now, or at this moment at least, a two-state outcome has become the stuff of utopian navel-gazing. Hamas doesn’t want it. The other terrorist groups don’t want it. Iran doesn’t want it. And Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recognizing the other side’s murderous intransigence, pretty much told the West to **** off in its demands that Gaza be restored to some degree of autonomy.

In other words, Israel's not going to leave Gaza, even after Hamas's ability to wage war has been neutered. What Gaza will look like a year or five years from now is beyond my ability to prognosticate beyond a SWAG (that’s an old defense acronym for “super-wild-ass guess,” as in one of my bosses telling me "Peter, why don't you take a SWAG at this"). A friend thinks they will have no choice, given that American aid will increasingly come with pressure to do so, but I suspect that Israeli determination on this front will override the dollars-with-strings.

The pro-Hamas protests in America will continue, and they will get loonier. Already, some are stopping traffic on highways and major thoroughfares, as if such behavior will build sympathy for their cause.

The demand?

Cease-fire, now.

After that? I expect more "river to the sea" demands, and a blind eye to both Hamas's reorganizing, rearming, and rebuilding.

Two blind eyes for that which they choose to ignore: the hostages. As of now, Hamas still has 107 hostages (and the bodies of 25 more). Best I can find, 18 are women and 2 are children. I don't see the cease-fire demanders also demand that Hamas release all the remaining hostages as part of that cease-fire, nor do I see any mention of the utter brutality inflicted upon either the hostages or the 1200+ Israelis killed in the initial attack.

If you have 30 minutes and a strong stomach, give this a watch.

I am reminded of a quote from the movie Gandhi, where Martin Sheen's (fictional) journalist character Vince Walker was narrating his report of the Salt March. Here, I substitute "Left" for "West."

Whatever moral ascendancy the [Left] held was lost here, today.

Some might see Palestinians in the role of the Indians during the Raj, but as I noted above, they could have had freedom, peace, and a homeland at multiple junctures across the past few decades, simply by accepting Israel’s right to exist. No, it is the Israelis, and by extension Jews everywhere, who have been subjected to attack and oppression. From Arab and Muslim nations, from the United Nations and its anti-Israel obsession, and now from the Western Left that Jews used to call their political home.

While it is certain that there have been times and places to criticize Israel in the past, and while it is also certain that Israel has been far from perfect in its response to the 10/7 attack, the coddling of Hamas, the denial of the atrocities committed, and the audacity of demanding that Israel just give up and take whatever torment Hamas and other terrorist organizations (and nations) choose to inflict are themselves moral atrocities.

Moral tourism, like regular tourism, involves picking and choosing what you visit and what you skip. While some regular tourism is simply “too many sights, not enough time,” there are many examples of destinations where tourists stick to the "nice" parts and bypass the less savory areas. On some Caribbean islands, tourists are cautioned not to venture off the resorts. In New Orleans' French Quarter, going "above" Bourbon Street (i.e. away from the river) is a really bad idea at night. Moral tourists, however, don't have to worry about risks. Already safe in their echo chambers, and already in a land where free speech is protected and physical danger from voicing Hamas support is trivially low, they can pretend to some moral high ground by demanding actions and outcomes totally at odds with reality.