Thread by @GREENESJ333

@lordbuckly The Left Abandoned Me
After the brutal violence committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, I looked around for my friends on the left and felt alone.
By Gal Beckerman
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"The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians last Saturday broke something in me.
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1)

@lordbuckly But these stories aren’t what broke me. What did was the distance between what was happening in my head and what was happening outside of it. The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur.
2)

@lordbuckly They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background.
3)

@lordbuckly But I quickly saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of concrete.
4)

@lordbuckly The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t fit anywhere for them.

The callousness was expressed in so many ways.
5)

@lordbuckly There were those tweets that did not hide their disregard for Jewish life—“what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers”—or the one that described the rampage as a “glorious thing to wake up to.”
6)

@lordbuckly There was the statement by more than two dozen Harvard student groups asserting, in those first hours in which we saw children and women and old people massacred, that “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
7)

@lordbuckly And then there were the less explicit posts that nevertheless made clear through pseudo-intellectual word salads that Israel got what it deserved: “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—
8)

@lordbuckly these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” I hate to extrapolate from social media—it is a place that twists every utterance into a performance for others.
9)

@lordbuckly But I also felt this callousness in the real world, in a Times Square celebratory protest promoted by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, at which one speaker talked of supporting Palestinians using “any means necessary” to retake the land...
10)

@lordbuckly "from the river to the sea," as a number of placards declared. There were silences as well. Institutions that had rushed to condemn the murder of George Floyd or Russia for attacking Ukraine were apparently confounded.
11)

@lordbuckly I watched my phone to see whether friends would write to find out if my family was okay was okay—and a few did, with genuine and thoughtful concern, but many did not.

I’m still trying to understand this feeling of abandonment.
12)

@lordbuckly Is my own naivete to blame? Did I tip too far over into the side of universalism and forget the particularistic concerns to which I should have been attuned—the precarious state of my own tribe?
13)

@lordbuckly Even as I write this, I don’t really want to believe that that’s true. If I can fault myself clearly for something, though, it’s not recognizing that the same ideological hardening I’d seen on the right in the past few years, the blind allegiances and contorted narratives...
14)

@lordbuckly even when reality was staring people in the face, has also happened, to a greater degree than I’d imagined, on the left, among the people whom I think of as my own. They couldn’t recognize a moral abomination when it was staring them in the face.
15)

@lordbuckly They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name.
16)

@lordbuckly And they couldn’t acknowledge hundreds and hundreds of senseless deaths because the people who were killed were Israelis and therefore the enemy.

Xochitl Gonzalez: What happened to empathy?
17)

@lordbuckly As the days go on, the horrific details of what happened—those babies—seem to be registering more fully, if not on the ideological left, then at least among sensible liberals. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling of aloneness.
18)

@lordbuckly Does it take murdered babies for you to recognize our humanity? I find myself thinking—a thought that feels alien to my own mind but also like the truth. Perhaps this is the Jewish condition, bracketed off for many decades and finally pulling me in...,
19)

@lordbuckly I don’t want to forget how alone I felt as a Jew these past few days. I have a persistent, uncomfortable need now to have my people’s suffering be felt and seen. Otherwise, history is just an endless repetition. And that’s an additional tragedy that seems too much to bear.
20)

@lordbuckly The Left Abandoned Me"
21)

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