I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum. Our last biological epidemic — COVID-19 — was a tiny invisible pathogen that made us physically sick. This epidemic of moral cowardice is right in everybody’s face and it’s eating away at the civic bonds that hold societies together.
Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
While this may seem an odd grouping, its elements have more in common than you might think. The neo-Nazis in the Republican camp want a white Christian America from sea to shining sea — empty of as much diversity as possible. The radical settlers in the West Bank want a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — empty of as many Palestinian Arabs as possible. And Hamas jihadis also want an Islamic state in Palestine from the same river to the same sea — empty of as many Israeli Jews as possible.
What else they have in common
Those three examples have other things in common. One is they just don’t care anymore about hiding their excesses or their agendas. It’s all out there online or on YouTube. They are not embarrassed.
Another is how much they feed off one another — how each uses the worst behavior of the others as both justification and fuel for their own twisted views. Republican neo-Nazis exploit global condemnation of the Israeli settlers’ violent behavior in the West Bank — on top of Israel’s excesses in the Gaza Strip — as license to now openly flaunt their antisemitism.
Jewish supremacist settlers, and those in the Israeli government who support them, use Hamas’ savagery as a moral permission slip for their own lawless marauding against Palestinians in the West Bank. Lately, the Israeli right has begun a vociferous campaign to prevent the prosecution of Israeli prison guards caught on camera abusing a Palestinian prisoner.
Hamas, meanwhile, has cited what it claimed were Israeli efforts to take over Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — Islam’s third holiest site — as well as the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli jails and violence by the Israeli army and settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, as part of its justification for its mass murder of Israeli Jews on Oct. 7.
But what really makes me sick is the third thing they have in common — how much their behavior is now excused or normalized by adjacent members of their own political communities.
The uprooting of ‘mangroves’
Put them all together and it becomes obvious that we are watching a broad breakdown in the liberal, humanistic order that dominated Western democracies after World War II. It’s the wholesale uprooting of what I call our societal “mangroves” — the unwritten norms that are necessary to restrain, filter and buffer aberrant behaviors and hatemongering, even when technically legal.
Anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler’s henchmen shortly before his concentration camp was liberated by the Americans, is often said to have described the moral implications of this kind of behavior: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
But that is precisely what is going on today. Just look around — and listen to the silence.
I totally respect those on the left, right or center who have protested Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians as collateral — and sometimes seemingly deliberate — damage in Israel’s retaliation/revenge campaign against Hamas. Such protests are a sign of moral health.
But I am still shocked by the declaration signed by more than 30 Harvard University “Palestine Solidarity Groups” late on Oct. 7 two years ago. It stated: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” That was only hours after Hamas’ indiscriminate killing of some 1,200 men, women, children, soldiers and elderly people in Israel — including more than 360 people at a music festival, and the kidnapping of some 250 more. That Harvard declaration was issued well before Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation.
When pro-Hamas protesters blame everything on Israel and give Hamas a free pass for its murder, sexual abuse and kidnapping; when they ignore everything else that Hamas stands for — its anti-LGBTQ+, antidemocratic, antisemitic, women-subjugating Islamist ideology that should be anathema to everyone; and when they ignore past and current attempts by moderate, non-Hamas Palestinians to forge a two-state solution with the Jewish state, as an alternative to armed struggle — in my view they are essentially telling the world: It’s not Israel’s actions that motivate us, it is Israel’s existence. Therefore, the project of eliminating Israel must come before any critique of Hamas.
That is warped — and don’t kid yourself, it’s a view not confined to only a very few on the far left.
The pillars of Israeli security
Unfortunately, too many Israelis and diaspora Jews have put on similar blinders. A day does not go by without a report like this recent one from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
“The attacks of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza also ignited a lethal conflagration of settler violence in the occupied West Bank. Over the same two-year period that Israeli forces killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. New settler outposts have been constructed with rapid speed, displacing entire Palestinian communities — a process often facilitated by Israel’s army. … In the face of this reality, there appears to be a concerted campaign on the part of the pro-Israel right to deny it.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his fellow travelers — and here I include the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which has flown air cover for Netanyahu in Washington, D.C., for his 18 years in office — have done more to undermine the long-term security of Israel and the Jewish people than any Hamas fighters.
Why do I say that? Because they have presided over and abetted the shattering of the three most important pillars of Israeli security. I speak of Israel’s national unity — Bibi has deliberately tried to govern by division not addition — as well as Israel’s long-standing commitment to democratic values and judicial independence and its commitment to fighting its wars, albeit inconsistently applied over the years, with a humanitarian ethos.
All three are being shredded by Netanyahu and his allies in pursuit of the insane obsession with annexing the West Bank. Israel is now in grave danger — and all those threats are from within.
Nothing to see here?
And then there’s us. Politico recently broke the story about what was being said in a Telegram group chat involving leaders of Young Republican groups in four states: “They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.” Plenty of antisemitism was stirred in as well.
Ho-hum, said Vice President JD Vance, nothing to see here: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”
Yes, teenagers will be teenagers, except that Mother Jones discovered that eight of the 11 Republican operatives who took part in the offensive chat appear to range in age from 24 to 35.
Of course, President Donald Trump also didn’t even whisper a hint of condemnation. Just as he had no problem with the recent lovefest/interview between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, promoting Fuentes’ white nationalist neo-Nazi sympathies.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s defense of Carlson centered mainly on his own ego. He’s “said good things about me over the years,” the president said of Carlson. So nothing else should matter?
Trump could have said that Carlson has a right to interview anyone he wants, something that should never be suppressed, but that he was very troubled by the open contempt being directed by Fuentes at Jewish Americans. But neither Trump nor Vance said that — because they undoubtedly know that a not insignificant minority of their voters hold these racist, antisemitic views and they don’t want to alienate them before the midterms, which are expected to be very close.
Dishonor will remain
How far we have fallen. We’ve had political movements in the past use antisemitism to try to get to the White House — for example, those who wanted well-known antisemite Charles Lindbergh to run for president in 1940 — but until Vance and Trump we have not seen it being normalized to try to stay in power. We have seen Jewish supremacists, like Rabbi Meir Kahane, get elected to the Israeli Knesset, but we have never seen them setting Israeli defense policy, until Bibi gave them the keys. We have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations aplenty over the years, but never ones, as far as I recall, that gave such a complete pass to Hamas after its mass murder of Israeli civilians.
This is how norms collapse — and take their societies down with them.
So, to Trump, Vance, Netanyahu and the pro-Hamas protesters, I have one message. It’s the one offered by Liz Cheney to her fellow GOP House members who turned a blind eye to Trump’s stoking of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.
