By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
You don’t hear much about Israel deliberately engineering
a famine in Gaza anymore. Only a few weeks ago, that allegation was nearly
ubiquitous. It dominated left-of-center discourse across the Western world,
and, among its participants, Israel’s caricatured wickedness was simply
assumed. Likewise, the tactical advantages Jerusalem was supposed to accrue
from this theatrically evil scheme were similarly presumed. The Jewish state,
it was widely surmised, must be just that villainous.
But the extraordinary claim persisted in the absence of equally extraordinary evidence for as
long as it could. In the ensuing weeks, the children – and it was almost
exclusively children – who were heralded by legacy media outlets and
anti-Israel activist organizations as the victims of Israeli malignance were revealed to have genetic conditions that accounted for
their skeletal frames. The pallets of aid rotting on U.N.-run platforms on Gaza’s borders cast doubt on the
institution’s claim that Israel was preventing aid from flowing into the Strip,
as did the U.N.’s increasingly dubious claims about the extent to which Hamas had never pilfered aid and throttled Palestinians’ access to it. The evidence in
opposition to the central claim against Israel continued to mount. Meanwhile, Israel’s critics marshalled
little in the way of counterevidence – retreating into the community of true
believers for whom no evidence of Israeli perfidy is necessary to buttress the
supposition that Jerusalem is forever in the wrong.
Outside those cloistered environs, however, many of the
activists and reporters who obsessed over the deliberate famine in Gaza just
stopped talking about it. Few who were taken in by this propaganda campaign
have expressed any mea culpas. Indeed, there aren’t many who are even willing
to acknowledge their fault. To her credit, Massachusetts congresswoman
Katherine Clark is not among them.
“Last week, while attending an event in my district, I
repeated the word ‘genocide’ in response to a question,” the House minority
whip told Jewish News Syndicate on Monday. “I want to be clear
that I am not accusing Israel of genocide.”
We have no reason to believe that Clark was engaged in
anything other than the thoughtless, robotic repetition of the tendentious
language with which Israel’s pathological detractors flooded the discourse over
the summer.
“We each have to continue to have an open heart about how
we do this, how we do it effectively, and how we take action in time to make a
difference, whether that is stopping the starvation and genocide and
destruction of Gaza,” Clark had said in her offending remarks, “or whether that
means we are working together to stop the redistricting that is going on,
taking away the vote from people in order to retain power.”
If you don’t quite understand what the allegations of an
anti-Palestinian genocide have to do with redistricting in Texas, you don’t
think like a progressive. Mary Harrington, the author and explicator of the
“all-encompassing omnicause,” described how environmental activism now overlaps
with income inequality, which overlaps with the Palestinian cause, systemic
racism, anti-monogamist activism, and so on. The only unifying feature she can
identify in them is that they provide a vehicle to express opposition to “the
ongoing supremacy of the American project.”
In short, this sort of agitation is not a thoughtful
endeavor. Its adherents discourage critical reflection on the tenets of their
universalist faith. The goal is to enliven and activate America’s critics, not
to arm them with convincing arguments. If you cannot persuade your opponents,
you might at least muscle them into quiet submission.
Clark deserves credit for at least recognizing that she
was merely mouthing the rhetoric that was expected of her without applying any
critical thought to what she was saying. Sure, her about-face was probably a
result of prodding by Israel-backing interest groups, but pro-Hamas
activists do not enjoy a monopoly on applying pressure to America’s elected
leaders. And at least now, Clark’s position benefits from the preponderance of
supporting evidence. Her backtracking is not an apology, but it’s better than
nothing.
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