You wouldn’t have learned it from Loyola’s administration, or from reading the Maroon, but the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust took place in October. Almost immediately after Hamas tortured children in front of their parents, shot at close range whole families, and raped teen girls before parading their naked, mutilated bodies through the streets of Gaza, misguided and misinformed voices on the fringe of the political left dismissed these atrocities by suggesting they took place in a (vague and undefined) “context.” Dr. Samar El-Rifei Sarmini filled in some of that context in her November 3 letter to the Maroon. I feel constrained now to recall more of the context that Dr. Sarmini pointedly left out. It’s true that Arab populations have suffered in the years since Israel founded a Jewish State (a little one) alongside the 20-plus independent Arab Muslim states in the Middle East, which span thousands of square miles. It’s also true that the administrations of long-serving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been disastrous for peace and justice in the region. Still, blame for the suffering of Arab peoples since 1948 can’t be pinned solely on Israel.
Immediately after Israel declared itself a state, in the vacuum of retreating European colonial powers, their Arab neighbors attacked them, with the aim of driving all the Jews there into the sea. They attacked again, with the same aim, in 1967 and 1973. All along, the narrative pushed by the autocratic dictatorships bordering Israel was that Jews didn’t belong in the Middle East, that they were essentially a European people with no legitimate roots there. This is a typically anti-Semitic Big Lie.
In fact, the substantial majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim, Middle Eastern Jews, not Ashkenazy (European) Jews. This means that the majority of Israeli Jews are themselves “indigenous people of color,” Middle Eastern people living in their ancestral homeland. Yes, there are also immigrants, including Jews with European backgrounds and Jews with African roots (the 200,000 Ethiopian Jews who migrated to escape persecution in the 1990s). 20% of Israel’s citizenry are Arab Muslims: Palestinian citizens of Israel, represented by their own duly elected members of the Israeli parliament.

That’s the broad backstory, but the more immediate one is that, on October 7, Palestinians from Gaza viciously murdered well over a thousand men, women and children, many of whom had dedicated their lives to justice for Palestinians. They also took hundreds of hostages, including children as young as 2, whom they still hold. Israel is going after the murderers and kidnappers, an obvious necessity for their self-defense, since Hamas has always made clear that they will never relent in their mission to kill every Jew in the Middle East. Hamas is also willing to kill thousands of innocent civilians under its control in order to realize its genocidal bloodlust. Israel knows that it can’t take out these modern-day Nazis without also harming the unwilling human shields Hamas hides behind.

Ever since Hamas took over Gaza, Israel’s increasingly indiscriminate aerial bombing campaigns have exacted an unacceptably high toll of civilian deaths, now more than ever before. But we can’t pretend that the aim of this war–to destroy Hamas, one of the world’s most repressive and violent right-wing movements–is unprovoked or unreasonable. If people in the Western left want to help bring peace to the region, they should stop calling for the erasure of the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, and instead support the elements in that democracy that have been fighting all along for peace and justice for Palestinians as well as Israelis. Netanyahu can be removed through democratic means, but only foreign force or local insurrection can remove Hamas. Only after these obstacles are removed will the path to peace—so promising in the 1990s—once again become feasible.