https://www.jns.org/hamas-weaponizes-sympathy-for-civilians-they-help-kill/?_se=YW5uZS1tYXJpZS5m
Suffering in Gaza is real, though the false victimhood narrative gives Hamas benefits and deflects attention from saving the hostages and defeating the terrorists.
It’s a difficult balancing act, but most of the talking heads and pundits are managing to pull it off. Unlike the hard left, most liberals and Democrats have not abandoned sanity and embraced the open antisemitism that has been expressed at rallies for “Palestine,” in which Hamas is not just supported but justified. To the contrary, at least for the moment, the old bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel seems to have re-emerged since the unspeakable terrorist atrocities on Oct. 7. The vast majority of Democrats and almost all Republicans are solidly backing Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas, even as many of them also speak of their concerns about Palestinian suffering.
But only a week after the slaughter of men, women and children in the Jewish communities along the Gaza border and at a music concert attended by young adults—and with Israel still sifting through the wreckage, finding bodies of the slain and tortured victims of these atrocities, and preparing to bury some 1,400 people—the conversation about the conflict is shifting. To no one’s surprise, the headlines are now all about a “humanitarian crisis” and not a hostage crisis, even though the fate of the estimated 150 people, including 14 Americans, kidnapped by Hamas is still unknown. The suffering of Palestinians—President Joe Biden has been at pains to try and differentiate from the terror group, stating that “the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Hamas”—has become the world’s top concern.
Callousness about deaths in Gaza is wrong. So, too, are overwrought expressions of rage about terrorist crimes that lead to talk about wiping out the Palestinians or turning a place where so many people live into a parking lot.
However, Biden is wildly overstating his case about the level of support Hamas can count on. More important than that, the seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of Western politicians to deny that Hamas represents Palestinian aspirations is linked to a wave of sympathy for the Palestinians that is bound to influence administration policy as the war continues.