The RP: Why My Fellow Liberals Should Support Israel in Her Conflict with Hamas

Check out The RP’s latest column for The Huffington Post:

As an American liberal who loves Israel because I’m a liberal, I’ve been disturbed by the recent diminishing trend of American progressive support for the Jewish State in its decades-long conflict with its increasingly hostile neighbors.

A recent CNN/ORC poll concerning the Gaza conflict intensified my anxiety:  While a plurality of self-identified liberals and Democrats support Israel’s right of self-defense in taking military action against Hamas, Democrats were three times more likely than Republicans to believe that the Jewish State is “not justified” in its targeted bombing campaign.

The roots of liberal sympathy for the radical, fundamentalist, brutal Hamas regime are as complex as they are troubling.  We liberals love the underdog, and a media that rewards conflict over context has helped promote the perverse notion that the tiny nation with the Star of David on its flag is really the Goliath in the popular Biblical metaphor.  This problem was exacerbated in Campaign 2012 when my fellow progressives watched a coterie of unlikeable, right-wing GOP presidential hopefuls proclaim their uber-passionate support for the Jewish State and try to use it as a political wedge against our beloved progressive President.

But amidst the shouting and finger-pointing, the fundamental reason behind the decline of American progressive support for Israel relates to a profound misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.  When confronted with an accurate accounting of the differences between the two sides in the conflict, a true liberal must be compelled to embrace the Zionist cause.

Here are but a few examples:

Israel Values Human Life; Hamas Does Not

There’s no moral value more important to American liberals than the preciousness of human life, particularly the lives of those in our society who are most vulnerable:  As Hubert Humphrey elegantly framed the liberal credo, “The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadows of life — the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Israel’s current intervention in Gaza is a living example of this principle.  Understanding that any military action would provoke its international enemies, Israel simply could no longer tolerate the danger posed to its citizens — Jews and Arabs — by the many months of unprovoked bombing of civilian targets in Southern Israel by Hamas militants.  Accordingly, Israel has engaged in a painstakingly-measured, precisely-targeted bombing campaign, using the most modern technology to carefully dismantle military targets and avoid civilian casualties.  On Monday, for example, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) used pinpoint accuracy to destroy the second floor of a Gaza City office building, killing only the Islamic Jihad military leaders who had been responsible for training terrorists, planning attacks on Israeli civilians and manufacturing weapons.

Click here to read the full piece at The Huffington Post.