The deafening silence of Europe's progressive left must be condemned - Opinion

The Jewish blood at Kibbutz Be'eri has not yet dried up, and the mutilated Jewish bodies from Nahal Oz have not all been identified, but the streets of many European capitals are shouting for a "Free Palestine." This level of ignorance is extremely dangerous, but those who protest either don't understand that or are full of hate, or both. 

Demonstrations began in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Berlin when Israel started to intensify aerial attacks on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. Since the Israeli government has vowed to destroy Hamas in its entirety, the progressive left has promised to "end 75 years of oppression and Israeli Apartheid." No word about raped women, no banner showing solidarity with kidnapped babies, and no compassion for Holocaust survivors who were dragged into the hell of Gaza.

Apparently, the morality police of our time just happened to have missed the news where Hamas massacred Jewish men, women, elderly, and babies with the most abominable methods. For the first time since the Holocaust, Jews were raped, decapitated, and burned during a surprise attack by Hamas terrorists, and more than 240 people were kidnapped. The progressive left is regressively silent. Or even worse, in some cases, they started cheering for the perpetrators!  

In the Netherlands, where I live, the leader of the combined list of the Workers Party and the Green Party, Frans Timmermans, directly condemned the brutal attacks of Hamas and acknowledged Israel's right to self-defense. Just a short time later, the party published a statement in which it regretted having reacted so quickly to the events without thoroughly analyzing it. In other words, their electorate was so angry that they had to withdraw their statement. I must admit that at first it seemed a pleasant surprise and it was unexpected. Now that they have withdrawn their statement, they are back at their usual position –  that of a broken moral compass.

This complete misjudgment comes from a position of arrogance and guilt. The renowned historian Simon Schama wrote a striking op-ed in a prominent Dutch newspaper along the lines of: 'for whatsoever reason, European progressives see the Jewish people as white people in a region where they do not belong. Therefore, they must be colonial, and we should support anyone who resists. Resistance against a colonial power can never be called terrorism.'

Following this analysis, it seems that some important facts of history are not taken into account. The connection of the Jewish people with the land of our ancestors is not acknowledged, and neither is the necessity for the Jewish people to have their own state, which they can defend. Of course,  Jews are permitted to live in the Middle East, but only if they are subordinate to the people living there. And for an even more bizarre reason, many of them believe that a situation of equal rights will be reached as soon as Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea. 

So, according to the progressive morality police of our age, equal rights for Jews and Arabs can only be reached when the land is "free from the river to the sea." But they forget something crucial: in that case, the land will also be free of everything except for Islamic Hamas terrorism. There will be no place for human rights, LGBTQ acceptance, or any other form of tolerance. And if you prefer that over the current reality, what does that make you?

Raouf Leeraar is a 1st Lt. (res) in the IDF and a Policy Advisor on Israel and the Middle East at the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI)

This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Adiel Cohen.