Why So Many on the Left Bought the Lie of Israel Bombing a Gaza Hospital

Many years ago, when I was still a Member of Knesset on behalf of the Labor party, I was sent on a mission to the European Parliament to meet with our “fellow” socialist members (that’s when I still naively thought that the socialist left was the ally of Israeli Labor).

After leaving one meeting with a senior member from Germany who spent the entire meeting lamenting Israeli evil, I turned to the Israeli EU Embassy staff member and said: “I get it, it’s clear, they still can’t handle what they did to the Jewish people, and so they need to find a way to cleanse their sins by retroactively projecting onto Israel all of their sins. So let’s just be done with it, we’ll tell them we forgive them in return of them just leaving us alone.”

The wise staff person responded, “But you know what will happen: they’ll pocket our forgiveness and keep projecting their sins on us. They need this too much to let go.”

This is the context for the complete submission of so many on the left in media and politics to the Hamas lie that it was Israeli attacks (no, it was another Gaza terrorist group – Islamic Jihad) that destroyed a hospital in Gaza (it didn’t, not even close– it was the parking lot) and led to hundreds of innocent dead (the figure is not grounded in anything). For eleven days now, pillars of the global left from the “Squad” to Corbyn to many in the media had to deal with the collapse of their entire theology, which placed unique Israeli-Zionist evil at the core of their worldview. Without this one certainty of their political lives they do not know how to be in this world. It is the one idea that gives sense and order to who they are.

But the glee with which Hamas terrorists and “ordinary Palestinians” (remember Daniel Goldhagen’s “Ordinary Germans” also known as “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”?) proceeded to engage in the greatest possible atrocities against families and people of all ages, from babies to grandparents, was to them first and foremost a massacre of their entire theology. They did not know who they were anymore without “Evil Israel.” They especially could not handle the terrifying possibility that evil lies on the Palestinian side — the people whom they have elevated to Jesus-like sacrificial and saintly status.

And so the lie handed to them by Hamas that included all the elements they needed – Israeli evil, innocent Palestinian victims – allowed them to restore their theology. All was right with the world again. Israel/Zionism/Jews were thereby restored to their proper place in their theology as the epitome of unique evil.

This is the reason why the intense energy released was not simply of tribal loyalty or “anti-Israel bias.” Rather, it was the collective relief of people whose entire worldview was endangered for eleven long days, and which they – thanks to the failure of Islamic Jihad and the lies of Hamas – could finally restore.

Dr. Einat Wilf is an author, speaker, former Labor member of Knesset and a scholar on Zionism and the Palestinian conflict.