In June 2023, an American woman became the 16th victim of a Hamas terror attack that occurred nearly 22 years earlier. Chana Nachenberg had been in a coma since the summer of 2001, when she took her young daughter to a pizzeria in Jerusalem and a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated a bomb killing 15.
I knew Chana Nachenberg, and I knew the suffering her family had been put through for two decades. Her daughter survived the bombing—she was three years old the day her mother was left comatose by the attack, 24 the day her mother died.
I also knew that Hamas was responsible for the attack—they were proud of it, as always—and that one of the key planners of the attack was released in 2011 as part of a deal in which Hamas freed captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. That perpetrator of the pizzeria attack was freed, in fact, along with, among others, Yahya Sinwar, who went on to plan the Oct. 7 massacres that took place four months after Chana Nachenberg died. The Oct. 7 attack would see Hamas kill dozens of Americans and take other Americans hostage.
So I continue to feel a combination of puzzlement and contempt when I see commentators frame the recent crackdown on pro-Hamas activists as something being done “to protect Israel from criticism,” or some similar version thereof. Puzzlement when I see it from people smart enough to know better and contempt when I see it from people who have devoted their lives to the advancement of evil.
That is different from opposing individual cases of, say visa revocation or detention. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the punishment fits the offense, but immediately blaming Jews and Israel for anti-Hamas enforcement is a strange way of declaring one’s ignorance of all the American blood Hamas has on its hands, and of the fact that the group is still holding U.S. hostages.
Chana Nachenberg wasn’t the only American killed in the Jerusalem attack. The pizzeria was the Jerusalem franchise of Sbarro, the American chain where one could expect to find tourists and expats. Killing Americans is not incidental; Hamas often goes out of its way to do so.
Hamas has killed Americans in an assortment of gruesome terror attacks over the years. The single deadliest bombing of the second intifada was one such example. In 2002, Hamas blew up families having their Passover seders in the Park Hotel in Netanya, killing 30, including Americans. Months later, Hamas blew up the cafeteria at Hebrew University; five of the nine killed in that attack were American.
I could go on but the point is made. In addition, Hamas is an arm of imperial Iran, which has been killing Americans for decades through its various proxies. One such proxy murdered three Americans in Jordan last year in retaliation for America’s attempts to get back its hostages from Hamas. Which is to say, the number of Americans killed because of Hamas can be added to the number of Americans killed by Hamas.
The protests on campus and in major U.S. cities in support of Hamas were explicit about their support for “anticolonialist” actions against the U.S. as well. The people tearing down hostage posters weren’t differentiating between American hostages and others. And these were American institutions being vandalized, occupied and covered in Nazi graffiti on behalf of Hamas’s cheering squad in the U.S.
Now, obviously many of the people ignoring this are doing so purposely, so I can’t say I was surprised to see Glenn Greenwald call Brianna Wu an “Israel loyalist” and a “freakish authoritarian pig” operating on behalf of a “foreign country on the other side of the world that you worship” for supporting the detention of someone the administration claimed was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”
Of course, maybe the administration is wrong! Perhaps the suspect was not, in fact, engaging in support of Hamas. But only one type of person believes anything done in America’s name by Americans is actually the result of foreign Jewish puppeteers. Similarly, there is the contention by the Nation’s Jeet Heer that Columbia has appointed as its new acting president Claire Shipman “in order to protect a vicious client state from criticism,” because Shipman apparently attended an AIPAC conference.
The belief that American Jews aren’t actually Americans but constitute a disloyal, foreign subnation is an old idea and not a surprising one to encounter, of course. But we should still point it out when we see it.
The specific problem here is not that anti-Zionist lunatics will behave like anti-Zionist lunatics but that they will shame people with normal, functioning brains into believing Israel is too toxic to support by convincing them that Hamas and anti-Semitism have nothing to do with Americans.
Billy Binion, a smart, fair, and principled writer for Reason magazine, was outraged by a video of ICE detaining a woman who says she never supported Hamas but only wrote an anti-Israel op-ed once. I would expect the traditional libertarian response to be something like: If she is telling the truth, then she did nothing to materially support a proscribed terrorist organization. Instead, Binion posted: “I’ve always considered myself pro-Israel. But if that now means arresting, jailing, and deporting someone whose only ‘crime’ we know of was writing a pro-Palestine op-ed, then count me out.”
Since ICE field agents aren’t taking orders from Jerusalem, I think it’s still safe to consider oneself pro-Israel by this particular, previously unknown standard. This is simply a case of Americans carrying out American policy. But the whole thing is a sign that even good, honest people are getting fooled into thinking that the terror group holding Americans hostage isn’t America’s problem.
