Sarah Hurwitz Strikes Again: Gaza Genocide Claim Is Akin to Great Replacement Theory

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz is building quite a reputation for herself as a delusional genocide apologist. Hurwitz first attracted attention by lamenting that advocacy for Israel among young Jews has gotten hard due to the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel — over 20,000.

Hurwitz didn’t find the fact of Israel’s crimes to be the issue, but merely their visibility, and lamented that the mainstream media no longer has the gatekeeping power to cover up Israel’s misdeeds due to the proliferation of social media. Hurwitz’s solution: ban phones from Hebrew school.

Now, Hurwitz, speaking on a Zionist podcast, accused the left of mimicking the far-right’s antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are engaged in white genocide:

“If you actually look at the two of them, the tropes are kind of the same, right? The right is saying that Jews are doing a white genocide, and the left is saying they’re doing a genocide in Gaza. It’s like the same, it’s very similar tropes.”

It’s hard to imagine someone this mentally obtuse, but here we are. Hurwitz sees no difference between the credible claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza — something that is readily visible both in the mainstream media she praises and the social platforms she decries. Anyone can see Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, its sniper killings of civilians seeking food parcels, its use of starvation as a weapon of war, and the genocidal rhetoric of Israeli public officials and military officers that preceded the attacks on Gaza.

Now compare that to the far-right’s Great Replacement Theory: an absurd, utterly unfounded idea that Jews are midwifing mass Black and brown immigration into Western nations to kill off the white race. These are the “Jews will not replace us” people with tiki torches at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. There is no basis to this claim. The far-right is antisemitic and believes Jews are behind everything they hate, and racist against non-white immigrants, and in the Great Replacement Theory, these two hatreds come together. The Great Replacement Theory was the animating motive behind the worst antisemitic attack in American history, when a white nationalist opened fire and killed 11 at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.

The claim that Israel is guilty of the crime of genocide in Gaza is not some imaginary, hateful exercise, but is backed up by credible claims made by countless human rights organizations, including Israeli ones, and the United Nations, and borne out by eyewitness accounts on the ground from journalists to medical officials. Genocide and Holocaust scholars have accused Israel of genocide. Forty percent of American Jews, it bears emphasizing, believe Israel has committed genocide.

Hurwitz is free to dispute that Israel’s war crimes rise to the level of genocide, but to conflate the accusation of genocide in Gaza with the conspiracy theory of the far-right reflects an incredible inability to grapple with substance, to see antisemitism lurking behind every criticism of Israel, and to fail to recognize the difference between a far-right implacably hostile to Jews as Jews and a left that is upholding the values of human rights against a political actor. No one is accusing Jews of genocide in Gaza, but the state of Israel.

But this is the logic of someone who believes that Israel is always right and therefore any criticism must be rooted in hatred of the Jewish people.

A final note: Hurwitz is a Harvard graduate twice over: undergrad and law school. She should ask for her money back, since the institution failed to teach her basic logic and reason. As for human decency, you can’t teach that. You either have it, or you don’t.