The Democracy of Terror

When we ignore causes of terror and concentrate only on its effects, the moral landscape seems to flatten out: fear and rage roll across like a hurricane, leveling everything in sight. Stumbling in shock through the wreckage of death and devastation, we can’t make sense of things: foundations of justice, grounds for vengeance, constructions of evil or good intent, right versus wrong – all shattered and reduced to rubble, the debris of our hopes scattered about, indistinguishable beyond recognition.

In that disaster zone, all that matters is how to cope with fallout from actions, never to understand reasons for them; not the forces of malevolence and apathy behind the terror, but only the terror itself. No one’s anguish having greater claim upon human sympathy than anyone else’s, all suffering now equal in value.

Innocents – children, women, non-combatants – caught in the cross-fire are an apparent exception, eliciting unlimited professions of pity. Their special status is, however, a mirage: They’re not spared a grisly common fate but held up as proof of how it spares no one – not even “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). Overall, terror has been democratized.

Yet, good is still good, evil remains evil, and “victims” of terror who brought it upon themselves by acting on, or going along with, malicious intentions don’t deserve sympathy, which rightly goes to the targets and helpless pawns of such intentional malice. The assumption that all suffering is equal in value is, in political terms, wrong. Compassion exercised indiscriminately invites abuse, turning democracy into mobocracy.

Those who won’t recognize these facts, even while they’re touting and parading evenhanded compassion, are caught in a terrible irony: They’ve wielded the democratic principle of majority rule to pick favorites, a practice they’d thought to oppose!

Thus, they elevate ones who suffer more over ones who suffer less. Concern for the larger population of sufferers overshadows and even replaces concern for the smaller population. The competition for victimhood has winners and losers – with a chilling impact on Jewish people’s day-to-day life.

I assume that you share my (and most Jews’!) loathing of authoritarian/fascist rule, that you believe in democracy and need no lectures from me on the dangers right-wing, Jew-hating extremists pose. Danger on the left is harder to discern, easier to let slip past one’s notice: There’s susceptibility – among pro-Palestine Progressives – to arguments that condone terror through its democratization.

According to their thinking, Israelis/Jews may not claim victimhood status since, even dismissing Hamas’s dodgy reporting methods, there’s no doubt that this war has inflicted more misery, in sheer amount of carnage, on Gazans than Israelis. Majority rules! The vote on who’s suffering most from the terrible course of events favors Palestinians in a landslide.

Reckoning with terrorism turns, then, into a zero-sum game of winners and losers. There can be only one winner in the “democratized” schema of blame attribution and victimization. Yes, Palestinians win hands down in the winner-take-all referendum over who is terror’s real victim.

Could – within the muddled framework of universal rights advocacy that doesn’t privilege one side over the other (except when it does) and where all are equally deserving of respect (except when they’re not) – a tit-for-tat response to Hamas’s terror have evened the playing field?

Would the election over who’s the real victim have come to a draw if the IDF had responded by going into Gaza on October 8 and shooting, burning, beheading, raping and kidnapping the same number of Palestinians as Hamas had of Israelis on October 7? Would that satisfy the demands of proportional justice?¹

Terror’s democratization gives Palestinian forces (and an outside fan club egging them on) cover to evade responsibility for carrying out their attempt to destroy Israel.

Outrageous though this may sound, it is now all the rage. I vote for opting out of the murderously farcical plebiscite.

1. Thanks to Martha Hurwitz for conceiving of and framing this rhetorical question as well as for her editorial insights and advice. Readers who are curious about Martha’s writing will find it on her website “Wrestling With Angels” at cultivatingdignity.com.