‘I’m sorry if this is a graphic thing to say, but when I’m trying to make arguments in favour of, you know, for Israel, I realise I’m talking through a wall of dead children.’ These are not the words of someone having a crisis of conscience, realising that it is no longer possible to defend the indefensible. They were spoken earlier this month by Sarah Hurwitz, a former speech writer for the Obamas and author of As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame and Try to Erase Us (2025). What troubled Hurwitz was not the dead children but the fact that living children might see them. And the problem with that, she made clear, was not that they might be distressed but that they might have their minds turned against the state of Israel: the sight of dead Palestinians was arousing emotions that get in the way of mature, rational thought. The solution? Simple: take away their smart phones. Stressing the need to shield Jewish children in particular from seeing the ‘carnage’ wreaked by a state that claims to act in their names, Hurwitz urged that ‘Jewish day schools should absolutely say: no child owns a smart phone until senior year. We’ve got to give our kids’ brains a chance, and their mental health a chance, before they start getting really warped.’
The idea that being appalled by a genocide is symptomatic of a ‘warped’ mind – whereas casually referring to tens of thousands of dead children as an obstacle to one’s efforts to proselytise on behalf of the state that killed them is not – is about as warped as it gets. But by this stage, it is not easy to be shocked. We are accustomed to the dehumanising, openly eliminationist rhetoric of Israeli politicians. Besides, such utterances are nothing new: recall in 2014, when soon-to-be justice minister Ayelet Shaked posted an article on social media calling for the killing of the mothers of Palestinian martyrs and the destruction of their homes lest they raise more ‘little snakes’.
In a sense, though, Hurwitz’s comment is more disturbing than the overtly demonising language of Netanyahu, who described Palestinians as ‘children of darkness’, or Gallant, who called Gazans ‘human animals’. Hurwitz’s words are cooler, more banal. The problem with Palestinian children is not that they are evil but that they a PR challenge. They are a ‘wall’: an impediment; in her way. Consider that one rarely hears equivalent complaints about the difficulty of advocating for Palestine ‘over a heap of dead Israeli kids’. Dead Israeli children do not form ‘heaps’, or any other kind of undifferentiated mass, as Palestinian children do. This is partly a matter of racism, partly of numbers (which is also a matter of racism). Thirty-eight children were killed in Israel on October 7, some by Israeli forces. At least 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel in Gaza since then (the true figure is likely much higher). As the line misattributed to Stalin goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Thus one way to get away with murder is just to keep killing. Part of Israel’s modus operandi is to normalize the suffering of Palestinians so thoroughly that the world loses interest.
The problem is that it’s not working. Large and growing numbers of people see what is in plain sight, and despite strenuous efforts to bend the narrative in Israel’s favour, fewer and fewer are buying it. Hurwitz is not wrong to identify the internet as part of the reason. People can see for themselves what mainstream news channels have failed to show them in any but the most partial and distorted way. But Hurwitz views the issue differently. In comments a few days later, she argued that social media is ‘smashing young people’s brains’ with images of Gaza, rendering them impervious to ‘sane conversation’ using ‘data and information and facts and arguments’. This was in a similar vein to recent remarks by CNN commentator Van Jones, who claimed that Iran and Qatar are orchestrating a disinformation campaign to manipulate young Americans into caring about Palestinians. To audience laughter, Jones summarised the typical content of social media feeds: ‘Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy [the recently jailed US rapper], dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby.’ (Jones has since apologised for his ‘insensitive’ language but not retracted his analysis, which he claims was ‘easily misunderstood’.)
What is perhaps most significant about these interventions is that they do not come from the hardcore Zionists of the Israeli or American right. Jones is a civil rights advocate and a Democrat who has also worked for Obama (as Special Advisor for Green Jobs). Figures like Hurwitz and Jones are, we have always been told, not monsters but moderates: caring, thoughtful people who eschew extremes. Anyone who questioned whether such ‘centrist’ figures are really so different from the fascists or populists of the right could expect to be roundly chastised, accused of recklessness and urged again and again to vote for the lesser evil to keep out the greater one.
If one of the things the genocide in Gaza has done is unmask the state of Israel, exposing it for what it always was, it has also unmasked the liberal establishment in Western countries. We have now seen what such people do in the face of every imaginable horror it is possible to inflict on human beings: something far worse than nothing. They have aided and abetted the slaughter, arming and excusing the state of Israel at every turn, and reserving their ire for anyone – the young especially – who has dared to dissent. In the UK, the Labour government has provided Israel with intelligence and weapons, while cracking down on the right to protest – and now seeks to dispense with jury trials, regarded as overly sympathetic to activists.
The idea of ‘grown-up politics’ is a recurring motif of these supposed moderates. In the second of her speeches, Hurwitz employed mock-childish language as she lamented the way in which young people have misunderstood the lesson of the Holocaust. Holocaust education in the era of social media
may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big strong Nazis hurting weak emaciated Jews, and they think ‘Oh, antisemitism is like anti-Black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless Black people.’ So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think ‘Oh I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel, you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.’
How unsophisticated of them. The true meaning of the Holocaust, we might infer, is not that it was bad because the strong were hurting the weak, but because Jews were the victims. When the victims are Black or Palestinian, it’s different.
Hurwitz’s online defenders were quick to point out that her comments about the ‘wall of dead children’ need not be taken to imply that the deaths of Palestinians are anything less than tragic – merely that things are more complicated than the emotive images suggest. Images can mislead, of course, particularly when devoid of context. And it is indeed possible to be confused by dead children. The mere mention of (non-existent) beheaded babies on October 7 ‘confused’ some people into cheerleading for a genocide. The trouble for Hurwitz, however, is that if the pictures aren’t on her side, the ‘facts’ and ‘data’ are even less so. The more we see of them, the worse Israel looks.
In a public lecture last week, Alex de Waal discussed the forms of denial that Israel and its supporters have mobilised in the face of the images of starvation coming out of Gaza. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Stanley Cohen, he distinguished three levels of denialism. First, there is simple factual denial: the photos are fake or staged – those people are actors, the blood is not real. This was tried early on in Israel’s war. Second, ‘interpretive denial’: it’s happening, but it’s not what it looks like – those dead children had pre-existing conditions, or Hamas stole their food. We have seen plenty of this type, too. Finally, what Cohen called ‘implicatory denial’ works by attempting to give a different meaning or context to atrocities in order to justify them: yes, we are starving them, but it’s necessary – to defeat Hamas, to get the hostages back, to prevent another October 7. The fact that denialism about Gaza is increasingly reaching this third level is a sign of desperation. The world is seeing what ‘grown-up politics’ looks like.
Read on: Lorna Finlayson, ‘On Lesser Evilism’, NLR 145.