(Dobbs) Don't Equate Sympathy for Palestinians With Sympathy for Hamas
I haven’t seen a single report of Israeli soldiers laughing with joy at the pain they’ve brought to Palestinians.
Last night, as every night, I crawled into bed under soft sheets and a cozy duvet. The bedroom was warm, dark, and quiet. The bathroom, with a tap that dispenses safe drinkable water and a toilet for use only by two of us, my wife and me, was twenty steps away.
Then I started thinking. I started thinking about everyone in the world who barely has a bed to crawl into, everyone who can’t get warm and can’t get peace when they try to sleep. I thought about the more than half-a-million homeless in America, many of them shivering in their tents. I thought about the estimated five million Ukrainians displaced within their own nation by Russia’s war, many of them having no cozy home to go back to. I thought about the upwards of two million Palestinians packed into increasingly small spaces in Gaza, people who have to scrounge for food and whose water now bears disease, refugees who have to line up behind hundreds of others just to use a toilet.
No matter how these people became so miserable, no matter why they are so desperate, no matter who’s to blame, I can’t help but feel heartbreaking sympathy for their suffering. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. Especially for the children, for if we know one thing only, we know that this isn’t their fault.
Yet in the case of Gaza, there are those who equate my sympathy for these civilians, who are victims of the war, with sympathy for Hamas, which started it. An American named Joshua Hoffman, who writes a newsletter on Substack called “Future of Jewish,” apparently is one of them. In yesterday’s edition, he claimed that in news coverage of the war, “Sympathetic reporting about Hamas is becoming more common.”
There are two problems with that. One is, if I show you a photograph like this…..
….. it’s not sympathetic reporting about Hamas, it’s sympathetic reporting about Palestinians. Every member of Hamas is a Palestinian, yes, but not every Palestinian is a member of Hamas. Those who aren’t deserve our every ounce of sympathy. It is directed at victims of the terrorists, not at supporters of the terrorists. The other problem is, simply “reporting about Hamas” is seen by some as “sympathetic reporting about Hamas.” I can’t count the number of times over the years that people who believe they are on the right side of an issue have told me that it’s immoral to even allude to those who are on the wrong side. By their way of thinking, if you so much as mention them, you are “sympathetic.”
I am of the school of thought that believes, all sides should be covered. The good guys, the bad guys, and everyone in-between. How can we possibly understand a crisis— let alone make informed choices when we elect leaders who will deal with the crisis— if we haven’t seen the issues from every side?
Which takes me back to Israel and Gaza. Two comprehensive stories these past two days— one in The New York Times and one in The Washington Post— hammer that home.
The Times piece carries the title, “How Hamas weaponized sexual violence on Oct. 7.”
This is the same New York Times, by the way, that is constantly condemned for a pro-Hamas bias. The story begins, “At first, she was known simply as ‘the woman in the black dress’.” It tells of what Times reporters saw in a video, shot by Israeli responders to the massacre: a half-naked woman “lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition.”
It goes on to describe another woman who was shot that dreadful day but survived by hiding in tall grass, doomed to watch in horror as Hamas kept committing atrocities. “The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her… and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.” Then she watched another woman “shredded into pieces” by the terrorists. “While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.”
The Times reporters saw photos of yet another woman “with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.”
When it comes to sympathy, Israelis deeply deserve it. But so do Palestinians. Hamas does not.
The piece in The Washington Post is a collection of the world’s most “Enduring Images of 2023,” and when it came to this war, they are pictures that truly are worth a thousand words. The caption on this one is, “Bodies were still being discovered on Oct 11 in the Beeri kibbutz.”
It is a visual metaphor for the agony in Israel.
The caption on this one: “A father prays on Oct. 26 near the body of his child.” It is a metaphor for the agony in Gaza.
I sympathize with those who mourn the losses in both photos. Although in so many ways their plights are not parallel, one thing is: through the eyes of victims on both sides in this war, they have had their 9/11.
But this final photo from the Post piece underscores a decisive difference.
It is a photo of an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander named Zoufi, with his son on his lap, and the caption reads, “He said he awoke on Oct. 7 to the news of Hamas’s rampage and asked his wife to slap him to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Then he laughed with joy.”
Like Hamas, Israel has a lot to answer for in this war. Evidence suggests that it has not attacked its enemy as surgically as it could have, maybe even should have, which has left a civilian death toll that’s bigger than it probably had to be. But I haven’t seen a single report of Israeli soldiers laughing with joy at the pain they’ve brought to Palestinians. And I haven’t seen a single report of Palestinian women deliberately raped and mutilated by Israeli soldiers.
That’s the difference, not between Israelis and Palestinians but between Israel and Hamas. On a personal level my heart breaks for everyone who has suffered unbearably, including those who’ve survived but barely have a bed to crawl into. However, when it comes to the morality of the combatants, I’m not torn. Hamas acts with relish. Israel acts in self-defense.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
“Hamas acts repulse”
Greg, beautifully and sensitively said and very very true. Thank you and if possible have a Happy New Year.