How Did Support for International Humanitarian Law and Norms Morph into Support for Hamas and its Goals?

At his Substack, Shany Mor reflects on the revealed preferences since 10/7 of the Western NGOS, individuals, and governmental institutions “united by loosely overlapping commitments to global and transnational justice.” This group, which he dubs “Humanitarians,” could have responded to 10/7 in one of four general ways:

H1: Humanitarians, especially including scholars of international law regarding armed conflict, are neutral regarding the belligerent parties in the war, and the Humanitarians collectively are genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of civilians and noncombatants among both Israelis and Palestinians.

H2: Humanitarians are indifferent to the humanitarian needs of the Israelis but genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. Operating on imperfect information in rapidly changing conditions, and limited by what is allowable in international law and what is politically or materially feasible, they seek whatever can be done to reduce or eliminate loss of life or suffering on the part of Palestinians either as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.

H3: Humanitarians are indifferent to the immediate humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, but they fervently wish to see Israel defeated in the war Hamas started on October 7. They fervently believe that the only moral conclusion to the war is one that is a net gain for the Palestinians and a net loss for the Israelis. To this end, they endeavor to act as force multipliers both in theatre to preserve Hamas’ power and, especially, in Western states, to push for policies that limit Israel’s freedom of action, cut it off from military supplies, and apply pressure on it.

H4: Humanitarians are indifferent to the war’s strategic outcome and prefer to see more death and more suffering on the Palestinian side, not as an end in and of itself but rather as a means to confirm beliefs in Israel’s essentially demonic nature, and as a way of mobilizing hatred and social isolation of Jews in the West. In particular, there is a preference for any rhetoric or political action which removes what are believed to be the unfair social privileges which western Jews hold due to the memory of the Holocaust.

As Mor elaborates: “Overwhelmingly … the majority of the real-life actions of the Humanitarians are in line with the predictions of H3, with a substantial minority also in line with H4. More strikingly, only a tiny amount are plausibly aligned with H2 and virtually none with H1.”

This isn’t news to anyone who has been paying attention, but it does beg the question: why? Why did concern about international humanitarian law and norms morph into support for Islamist terrorist groups and visceral hatred for Israel and often Jews in general, and a general lack of concern for the actual humanitarian needs even of the side they implicitly or explicitly support (H2)?

The simple answer is that the movement was taken over by a far left strongly influenced by a combination of anti-Western “anti-colonialist” theory and the massive investment of the late USSR is spreading “antizionist” propaganda. But how and why did the relevant institutions, once proudly “liberal” in the broad sense (e.g., Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) get taken over by the far left? There is a good book to be written on this, if anyone is so inclined.

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