The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
In the wake of the brutal events of Oct. 7 and the horrible war in Gaza that Hamas leaders purposely incited, Americans reacted. In one November poll, 61 percent sympathized more with Israelis, while 30 percent sympathized more with Palestinians; 38 percent thought Israel’s military response was appropriate, while 17 percent thought Israel was doing too little and 38 percent viewed it as too much.
While public opinion generally backs Israel, the American left includes a segment that is vociferously anti-Israel. While these progressives want to make things better for Palestinians, they’re getting a lot wrong, and I believe their rhetoric, silence and actions are harming this cause.
In Bangor, pro-Hamas posters showing masked individuals with military weapons were put up near Congregation Beth El. This synagogue has held interfaith events with the Muslim community and, in my admittedly unscientific estimate, most of its members (including me) care about the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians, are critical of both Palestinian and Israel leadership, and want peace with land for both peoples.
According to the Bangor Daily News, one poster “lists names of dead Hamas members,” praised “Palestinian martyrs” and, instead of using the word Israel, referred to it as “the Zionist enemy.” Another showed paragliders, a method Hamas used to enter the dance festival on Oct. 7 to attack, kill, rape and kidnap people who were simply enjoying themselves.
By placing them close to the largest synagogue in Bangor, these flyers come off as antisemitic and threatening. As such they are highly counterproductive for any group that desires to build or maintain a political coalition in the United States that can improve the lives of Palestinian people.
While some large marches have expressed support of Israel, I’ve seen more reports of small and big protests opposing Israel. Chanting “from the river to the sea,” protestors proclaim Palestinians should control all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This would mean that little Israel, the only majority Jewish nation in the world, in which half of the world’s Jews live, should no longer exist.
The message that Israel should be wiped off the map expresses a fantasy and is not a realistic possibility. The nearly 10 million Israelis are not going to pack up and leave. Also Israelis living in a combined state with Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank is not a viable plan if there is still a segment that backs Hamas’s goal of creating an authoritarian, theocratic state without Jews. The result would be many terrorist attacks. And, as a recent Israel Democracy Institute poll found, while today both Arab and Jewish Israelis want hostages returned, another consensus goal with strong majority support is restoring deterrence from further attacks.
There’s plenty to criticize about how the Israeli government acts toward Palestinians, such as the high civilian death toll in Gaza. But the only pragmatic path to peace with security is co-existence through a two-state solution. Thus, when the anti-Israel left uses eliminationist language, they are making negotiations that could lead to peace less possible and are prolonging pain and suffering.
The anti-Israel left also looks hypocritical when it comes to Hamas and women. Take the #MeToo movement and those who rallied to Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford. As six feminist authors recently wrote in Slate, “Of all of the horrors coming out of the Israel-Hamas conflict, among the most horrible are the barbaric murders, rapes, sexual assaults, and kidnappings of women and young girls in Israel during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. And yet, deepening this distressing event, there has been a disheartening silence about, or worse, denial of these evils; reticence from the voices here at home in the U.S. who have, in the recent past, embraced other women who needed their support.” This quiet is deafening.
Looking forward, there can be real, pragmatic solutions. The ceasefires linked to hostage returns give hope.
Meanwhile the anti-Israel left, which says it stands with Palestinians, marginalizes itself and undermines prospects for peace and justice by calling for the dismantling of Israel, using offensive and hyperbolic rhetoric and images, and defending or refusing to call out Hamas.