I don’t agree with E.J. Dionne all the time, but I admire his moral compass which always seems to be pointed in the correct position. He strikes me as the most decent person in our nation’s capital who writes opinion pieces for a living. And he’s always thoughtful and measured. His take on the war between Israel and Hamas strikes me as close to perfect, considering his generation is different from mine, and mine is different from the new left that is coming behind us.

I think the growing skepticism about Israel he describes is a gradation that can be tracked with each generation. I was in middle school when the Lebanon war began, in high school during the first intifada, and finishing college when the Oslo Accords were signed. I don’t remember the Labor Party’s heyday or the Yom Kippur War. I never had a romantic view of Israel, but I did expect them to play their part to make a two-state solution succeed. What I’ve seen, instead, mostly under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is a relentless and bad faith effort to ensure that a two-state solution is impossible.

I’ve also watched the Israeli electorate, driven mostly by demographic changes, move steadily to the right, to the point that both the country’s domestic and foreign policies are objectionable to my moral sensibilities. Worse, I can’t imagine a situation where this will appreciably change for the better. As Dionne says:

The sharp turn to the right in Israel that Netanyahu engineered has undercut support for the country among younger Americans in the United States. Most of these increasingly vocal critics have resisted supporting Hamas, but the gut liberal sympathy for Israel has largely disappeared among those born after Biden’s generation and mine.

All of this makes it difficult to unconditionally support Israel. But I’m mindful of why Israel exists. After World War Two, it was clear that Jews could not rely on some other religious majority to protect their existence, let alone their interests. They needed to be in charge of themselves. Personally, I would not have chosen historic Israel for this mission for reasons that never cease to be obvious. But would settling in Kenya or the Sinai, as Theodore Herzl considered, not have displaced indigenous populations, too? There was no ready-made land available for a Jewish state. My country eventually green-lighted the Israel project, and it’s a commitment that can’t be abandoned without tragic consequences. I do feel, however, that we have the right to set some conditions, and in my view we’ve cowered from that responsibility in the face of Netanyahu’s relentless effort to annex the West Bank.

Part of Netanyahu’s strategy has been to keep the political leadership of the Palestinians divided between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and so he encouraged Hamas’ domination of Gaza.

Netanyahu thought he could keep Hamas in check and ignore Palestinians, who, like so many of the Israelis slaughtered in the south, were willing to take risks for peace. The strategy of containing Hamas and privileging settlements on the West Bank has failed in an abysmal and tragic way.

That cynical calculation is what the newest generation of leftists have witnessed for the last decade and a half, and so it’s inevitable that sympathy for Israel in the face of Hamas’s attacks is at its lowest ebb with young people. It’s also why I’ve argued that Netanyahu needs to go. His strategy backfired in every way a strategy can backfire and he has no credibility on any level, and this is true whether you opposed him from the start or trusted in his leadership. It’s almost unfathomable that he doesn’t resign.

But as hard as it is to look past all this, there is simply no excuse for what Hamas did. If you support the Palestinians, you should see the attacks as a complete catastrophe. They’ve lost the moral high ground, and now the world is trying to rally together to limit the collective punishment Israel is set to mete out. Again, Dionne has this right:

The left should not stop advocating on behalf of justice for Palestinians. And Israel’s center and left should not stop demanding that Netanyahu’s plans to undercut the country’s judiciary be shelved permanently. But terrorism will not create a more democratic Israel or lead to self-determination for Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is rife with ambiguities and conflicting moral claims. This cannot be said of what Hamas did. Its actions are, exactly as Biden said, unambiguously evil.

I’d allow that armed struggle against Netanyahu’s policies can be seen as legitimate after all peaceful efforts have proven hopeless, but what Hamas did went beyond armed struggle and straight to wanton, deliberate slaughter. No one on the left should condone it or even excuse it. As you can see here, it is possible to assign some responsibility for it to Netanyahu’s policies without at the same time legitimizing it.

Currently, we have an absurd situation where Netanyahu is still in charge of fixing the problem he created by encouraging and empowering Hamas. But it still a problem that must be fixed, and no one should think that any Israeli government can go back to the status quo ante with a border fence and Iron Dome supposedly protecting its citizens. It’s sounds stupid to say, but the best way to protect innocent Gazans is for Hamas to release the hostages and surrender to Israel en masse. No one even suggests this because it’s so implausible, but much of what people expect Israel to do now is equally implausible, like calling for a cease fire.

One thing I hope Israel does soon is go beyond the military and intelligence failure that led to this war and look at the whole trajectory of the country’s strategy from at least the Lebanon War on. Pretending to be for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians while actually seeking to make such a settlement impossible was always going to face a day of reckoning. The whole annexation project has led to this, and it has to be reconsidered.

Whatever Israel does in Gaza now will not fix the underlying problem, but it might be so horrendous that Israel, like Hamas, loses sympathy and good will.

Here’s Dionne’s most important point:

…liberals and supporters of the democratic left like to pride ourselves on being sensitive to injustice, decent in our instincts and capable of making distinctions. To rationalize the sadistic crimes of Hamas meets none of these standards. Doing so also undercuts the arguments that the vast majority on left wants to make about the future of Israel and Palestine.

This is absolutely correct in my view, but the sadistic crimes of Hamas also cannot be used to rationalize “bouncing the rubble” of Gaza as Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas advocates.

As Dionne says ,we need to be “decent in our instincts and capable of making distinctions.” Decency requires we understand why Israel exists and have some understanding of its tragic plight which includes the plight of Palestinians who have paid the heaviest price for Israel’s existence. And it absolutely requires that we can distinguish between legitimate self-defense on both sides, and barbarism.

Every generation should agree that it’s wrong to target civilians.