Katie spoke with the writer behind this provocative piece.
Eric Levitz writes about politics and economics for New York magazine, and in an October 11th piece that quickly went viral, he examined what he views as the grossly insensitive reaction from some progressives — that somehow Israel deserved the brutal massacre that took place one week ago today. His op-ed, “A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed” inspired both vociferous disagreement and deep praise. But for Levitz, the correct moral stance is clear: “Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.”
I wanted to speak to him and untangle his thesis, and explore the notion that an explanation is dramatically different than a justification. I also wondered why dialectical thinking — the practice of holding two seemingly contradictory ideas at one time (i.e. the brutality and depravity of the Hamas massacre is an atrocity and the Palestinians have suffered because of Israeli policies) — has been sadly, inexplicably missing in many quarters during the past week. Here is a portion of our conversation, edited for length.
Katie Couric: Your article got a lot of attention, didn’t it?
Eric Levitz: Yeah, I was pleasantly a little bit surprised by the scale of the attention.
You’re a writer for New York magazine. Tell me more about your background.
I grew up in central Connecticut and went to school in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins University. I write about politics and economics in New York magazine, and I’ve done that for about eight years now.
Your piece is a very impassioned address, of sorts, to a subset of the left who’ve refused to condemn Hamas’s attack on Israel. What moved you to write this piece?
I think that in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s incursion into Israel and its atrocities, especially in the initial phase, any responsible observer was already aware that we were looking at mass murder. But the reports had not been really extensive yet, and the images were not quite everywhere. I think there was an impulse on the part of some left-wing people who identify with the oppressed and with the powerless in any given conflict to see a sense of catharsis in this assertion of an oppressed people’s desire for freedom, and for a greater degree of autonomy and self-determination.
But very quickly, as more information came out, this became deeply perverse. When it became clear that we were looking at the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust — with militants going door to door in some villages and killing entire families — I think that [the supporters make up] a small minority of people on the progressive left.
But precisely because their speech was so incendiary, they were amplified by the nature of social media platforms, where the way to get a lot of engagement on X — formerly known as Twitter — or on Instagram, is to say something controversial that people are going to want to speak back to. So we had a situation where for a couple of days, I think people who had broadly left-wing social networks like myself were exposed to a lot of speech either celebrating Hamas’s atrocities, describing them as decolonization, suggesting that settlers are not civilians — and that the Jewish Israelis, by occupying stolen land, were fair targets for murder. And a bit more commonly, [there was] a sort of anti-anti-Hamas sentiment — a sense that publicly saying it’s not our place to condemn Hamas’s actions because this is an oppressed group that is trying to resist really unjust conditions. And to me, this is both morally kind of sick, and politically just self-defeating. Because those who are more staunchly in defense of the Israeli government and all of its policies, its occupation in the West Bank, in its blockade of Gaza — the people in that corner have forever tried to suggest that to criticize Israel, to call for a Palestinian self-determination, is tantamount to not caring about the security of Jewish Israelis.
That has been one of their primary attack lines against progressives on this issue. And what I feel a lot of leftists were doing was effectively affirming what is largely a smear that doesn’t characterize the vast majority of Israel’s critics. But a loud minority was basically really tarnishing the left’s ability to speak credibly on this issue. And I think it’s important for them to be able to do so because I think what we’ve seen in the last 48 hours is really indiscriminate bombing of Gaza that is generating civilian casualties in excess of the number potentially generated by Hamas in the initial attack.
And so this is something where we really need to have people who can speak with authority in defense of the lives of all civilians, whether they’re Palestinians or Israeli.
You feel that not condemning the Hamas attack — and this massacre of women, children, and families, as you said, in the most barbaric of ways — really puts a hole in their argument.
I think it robs them of the moral authority to say that fundamentally all human lives matter, regardless of their ethnicity. And that this is, I think, the most powerful basis on which to launch a critique of Israel. We have a situation where in Gaza, there are 2 million people, a majority under 18, who — for various reasons related to the threat that Hamas poses, but also related to more intense export controls and restrictions on economic activity imposed by Israel — are living in poverty. An 80 percent youth unemployment rate, 60 percent of people food insecure. This is a situation that’s really unacceptable from a humanitarian perspective, and then perhaps even more clear-cut in the West Bank, where Hamas is not in power. We have an Israeli settlement project that has steadily dispossessed Palestinians of land that they’re entitled to under international law.
And I think that the best way to advocate for the Palestinian cause, in both of these realms, is to insist that they deserve the same rights to prosperity, self-determination, and political freedom that Israelis do. I think if you instead take the tack that the oppressed have a right to commit violence, and the oppressor — such as Jewish Israelis — has rights that do not need to be respected by the oppressed, then you end up in a situation where anyone can make their own arguments for why some people have rights, and others don’t.
And fundamentally, if we enter into a space where some groups are allowed to do whatever they need to in support of what they believe is right, I think you end up in basically a might-equals-right type of situation. And in that situation, I don’t think Palestinians can win, because Israel is one of the most powerful militaries on the face of the earth. It has nuclear weapons, and the backing of the most powerful country in the world, the United States. And the Palestinians are a largely economically embattled people without a military. So you’re just not going to win in terms of brute force.
You write that the responses by a subset of the left, “constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values.” Talk about this idea and the disconnect you believe you’re seeing.
I think that fundamental to what I understand to be left-wing values and progressive values is, again, this idea of egalitarian universalism. That we’re all in some sense possessing equal dignity, and there’s nothing about an inherited group identity that makes one person more valuable than another person. This undergirds the left’s perspective on race, and on racial equality. It informs, in the United States, its support for immigration: The idea that people who are fleeing really awful situations in their home countries have as much right to dignity and prosperity as anyone else. And so we’re going to try to take them in. I think that’s really fundamental.
And I think when you say by virtue of the fact that somebody was born in Israel as a Jew, that they can be shot to death while dancing, and that’s an act that’s either just or that we can’t condemn because of the surrounding geopolitical context, I think you’re betraying that fundamental value. And I think that’s completely misguided.
Where do you think the acceptance of this kind of violence is coming from?
I think it’s coming from a few different places. One is, as I referenced earlier, the sheer fact that this occupation in the West Bank has been going on for more than a half-century. In Gaza, we’ve had a blockade in place that has been economically devastating for nearly two decades. This is an incredibly desperate situation that the Palestinian people have been living in, and the nonviolent forms of resistance the Palestinians have pursued have been really undermined in various ways in the United States.
There’s the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which people can disagree about. But that is a nonviolent civil movement that aims to put pressure on Israel to yield to Palestinian demands through boycotts. That’s been outlawed or legally restricted in various U.S. states. And so there is a sense among some on the left that the Palestinians have been left with no choice but to resist violently.
Also, [there’s a sense] that fundamentally, mainstream discourse on this subject is so biased in favor of Israel. So to add their voices to the chorus condemning Hamas’s actions would be to somehow heighten their complicity in Israel’s crimes. I think that that’s one line of thought. There’s a less-charitable view that I’m sometimes inclined toward, where I think that in some left-wing leftist subcultures, there’s status in differentiating oneself from ordinary liberals — from demonstrating that one is more hardheaded and thoroughgoing in their commitment to Palestinian solidarity than a regular progressive.
So this leads people to look for dividing lines. And if there are a bunch of progressives condemning Israel’s actions generally, but also condemning Hamas and expressing horror at these atrocities, then one way to differentiate yourself, and establish that you are more left-wing, is to say that there’s some reason why you can’t condemn these atrocities, or why doing so represents a failure of solidarity or principle.
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and Hamas was democratically elected in Gaza in 2007. Those are points that many have been making after this attack. I wonder if you can explain why Israel’s withdrawal was in your view, not enough, and the other measures that have been implemented that are hurting Gaza.
So it is true that Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005. What is also true is that Israel still exercises de facto control over the Gaza Strip. As I said before, it maintains a blockade against Gaza, which effectively controls what goods Gaza can both export and import. It also controls the flow of people, prevents Gazans from being able to visit family in the West Bank, and it also maintains a buffer zone between Gaza and Israel.
In other words, it prevents Gazans from entering a large area that is still within the Gaza Strip legally and technically, but that is bordering with Israel. And that area at various points has gotten so large as to encompass a third of Gaza’s arable land. And so this is not an occupation in the classical sense, but it is arguably, under definitions of international law and occupation. At the very least, it is fundamentally exercising considerable sovereignty over the strip.
Now the strip is controlled by Hamas, a militant group that has just proven its contempt for Israeli life. A lot of people will say, “Look, this is devastating economically, these measures, but you need to keep weapons away from Hamas.” I think that when you look into the details of the blockade, certainly it is motivated by security concerns to a degree. That you see things like, I believe as of 2018, Gazans were allowed to export tomatoes and eggplants, but not spinach or beans. There are all these arbitrary rules, some of which I think reflect agricultural interests within Israel. For example, there was a shortage of palm fronds one year, which Jewish people use to celebrate Sukkot. And in order to address that shortage, palm fronds were removed from the list of things that Gaza was not allowed to export. Palm fronds just suddenly became not dangerous or not easy to conceal weapons all of a sudden, when there was a shortage. So I think that some of the controls on Gaza are arbitrary.
And I think that, at the very least, if you want to posit that Israel finds itself in a position where in order to establish security for its people, it has no choice but to inflict misery on 2 million predominantly young people, the very least you can do in that situation is try to undermine the popular legitimacy of Hamas — by honoring your obligations under international law and giving less credence to the idea that only violent resistance can bring justice. And for various reasons, the Israeli government has gone in the opposite direction, in my view. This is why the withdrawal is not, I don’t think, adequate to alleviate Israeli responsibility for the conditions in Gaza.
This is a militant organization that has an ugly ideology.
How much blame does Hamas deserve? They mistreat Palestinians living in Gaza: Amnesty International outlined a whole series of injustices that Hamas inflicts on the citizens of Gaza. Additionally, my understanding is that millions of dollars in aid have been given to Gaza, and instead of helping the people of Gaza, Hamas has used it for the construction of underground tunnels, and for missiles, and other weapons.
Hamas was democratically elected in 2007, and there have not been subsequent elections. So most of the people of Gaza have not had the opportunity to vote for Hamas, let alone to support them. I think it is true that Hamas does not prioritize the humanitarian and economic interests of the Palestinian people above its project of violent resistance to Israel and potentially to its own corruption. In my understanding, some of Hamas’s leaders live very well in Qatar. So this is a militant organization that has an ugly ideology.
I think it also has some internal corruption, although at least it has a reputation for being somewhat less corrupt than some other Palestinian authorities, which is part of how it got popular legitimacy, initially. I think that ultimately, there are two ways of thinking about Hamas’s responsibility. On the one hand, if you had a leadership in Gaza that foresaw violence, that accepted Israel’s right to exist, etc., that plausibly would lead to a lifting of the blockade.
I don’t think that any government of Gaza, with the blockade in place, would be able to prevent really terrible economic conditions not just from the blockade, but also the way that the blockade inhibits the capacity to rebuild, which is sadly necessary because every few years we end up with an uptick in this conflict and a lot of bombing of Gaza’s infrastructure. And when it’s so difficult to get goods in and out of the strip, that creates a situation where you’re almost never catching up with the damage that was done each time.
I’m curious to hear what you thought of this joint statement that was released by a coalition of Harvard students, just a day or two after Hamas attacked Israel, and signed by a number of pro-Palestinian groups. They blamed Israel for the attack and called on Harvard to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.
I don’t think that was the most egregious statement that was issued on that day. I do think that, as I said earlier, it just seems pointless to me and counterproductive to not affirm — in the immediate aftermath of the mass killing of hundreds of Jewish civilians — to not say that you condemn that act and that you place responsibility for it on the people who committed it. If you do that, I have no objection to contextualizing this by saying, we’re in this situation where quite likely part of the reason why there’s any support for these sorts of groups and actions in Palestine is because of these background conditions that Israel is responsible for.
But there’s this distinction between explanation and justification, where I think the left is often in a position where we really want to emphasize that distinction. Where, in the aftermath of 9/11, nothing that the United States did in the Middle East justified the 9/11 attacks. Is it the case that America’s military presence in the Middle East was what triggered bin Laden’s obsession with attacking the United States?
It is not the case that after a certain level of oppression, human beings automatically become incapable of not mass-murdering people. So I think it’s wrong analytically, but it’s also just so politically counterproductive. Because if your goal in putting out that statement as a Harvard student group is to direct attention toward injustices you see in Israeli policy, all you’ve done by not merely adding some sentences at the top of your statement — saying that you’re horrified by the killing of hundreds of Jews — is put the focus on why you’re not doing that, instead of on the policies that you wish to criticize.
There have always been divisions within the left and the right. How is the division you’re describing seemingly different, and perhaps even more consequential?
Personally, I wouldn’t say that the differences are more consequential, but I think that these distinctions that divide ideological groups can be very vicious in some sense. I think that they occupy, for the politically engaged, a great deal of our time, because in this social media era, we find ourselves often in sort of closed-off ideological communities where we’re not seeing that much from people who are really far away from us.
But so then, the questions that divide our ideological group internally drive tremendous engagement and attention. And it can be very heated. With an argument between a liberal and a conservative, no one’s identity is threatened by the disagreement. When a liberal and a conservative are arguing over abortion policy, the fact that the conservative comes back and says, “Every fetus is a person and must be protected,” doesn’t threaten the liberal’s sense of self-political identification or their sense of their values. Because they know exactly what they think about that subject. They know that their values are just different than the values of the conservative.
Whereas in an argument between people who insist that they have the same values of egalitarianism, of support for the oppressed, this can be really intense and personal. When someone tells you that you’re betraying your values and you’re misunderstanding the dictates of the principles that you claim to hold, that gets very bitter. And so that’s one way that those disagreements are distinct, from my perspective.
What role do you think Bibi Netanyahu has played in this, in terms of the way he has run his government — both as a distraction that perhaps prevented the Israeli army and intelligence agencies from being prepared, and his moving to the right in Israel? I’m curious if you think that he set the stage, in some ways, for this terrible incursion.
I think so. I mean, I don’t have detailed access to exactly what went wrong with Israeli intelligence. It seems mind-boggling for the American security state and the Israeli security state that this kind of an attack was possible. I’ve seen quotes that suggest that Hamas was shocked by its own success and did not think that it was going to be able to execute an attack of this scale, that it would have been turned back much sooner.
Potentially implicated in that fact is the reality that Israeli security forces have been distracted by domestic unrest at Netanyahu’s corruption. Also, as you suggested, in order to form a governing coalition that could insulate him from corruption charges, Netanyahu moved even further to the right and embraced right-wing parties that are willing to protect him from the war. And this has meant elevating individuals to cabinet positions who are former literal supporters of Jewish terrorism. The national security minister, I believe, was not allowed to serve in the IDF because of his ties to terrorism. You’ve had others who have called for wiping Palestinian villages off the map.
A member of Netanyahu’s party, shortly after the attacks, called for a second Nakba, which refers to the original ethnic cleansing of Israeli Palestinians — the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. So these are extremists and what they have done is give all manner of provocations for this sort of attack, disrespecting Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem.
There was an interesting report in Haaretz, a Jewish newspaper a few days ago, about how Netanyahu and some in his circle have sought to in some ways prop up Hamas because it is, from the Israeli perspective, politically convenient to have Palestinians divided between two different authorities — one in Gaza, one in the West Bank — and to have as their foil in Gaza, this terrorist group that no one can blame Israel for not seeking peace with.
I’m not saying Israel singlehandedly keeps Hamas in power. But I am saying that I don’t think it’s disputed that Israel, to an extent, has in some ways nurtured Hamas’s rule. So yes, I think that Netanyahu bears a great deal of responsibility. And it’s worth noting that in the polling that I’ve seen, a vast majority of the Israeli public agrees.
How do you see this all shaking out?
I think it’s important to try to maintain some sense of hope and political possibility; there’s a phrase, “a pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” I don’t think I should be the grand authority on this region or conflict, but I have trouble seeing how things don’t get considerably worse before they get better. The situation in Gaza is horrific right now. I’m not confident that Israel can destroy Hamas in the way that it wishes to, especially if we understand Hamas as one iteration of extremist violence among the Palestinians. I think that you kill a lot of terrorists when you level whole city blocks, perhaps, but you also create more terrorists from the children who see their families wiped out.
It’s a very old story in human affairs, the cycle of violence and vengeance, that makes everybody potentially worse off. And right now, I think it’s a very bleak situation. I think the United States should use its authority to encourage Israel to show greater concern for civilian casualties in Gaza, and that we should figure out a way to address the root causes of this conflict, and the Palestinians’ legitimate rights and interests in self-determination, while also finding ways to to limit Hamas’s power and its capacity to project violence into Israel. But right now, things look fairly bleak.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
