Nat Turner in Gaza?

Photo by Ömer Yıldız on Unsplash

A few weeks after Hamas’s October 7th surprise attack on Israel, in which Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel from Gaza and murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians, political scientist Norman Finkelstein published an essay titled Nat Turner in Gaza, in which he compared Hamas’s attack to Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt in Virginia — the largest slave revolt in American history.

For 48 hours, no white was spared the slaves’ accumulated wrath, according to Finkelstein. Whole families — dads, mothers, daughters, newborns, and schoolchildren — were butchered, thrown into heaps, and left to be devoured by hogs and dogs. Finkelstein noted that a book on Turner’s life was included in the “Black Americans of Achievement” biography series for children in 1988, indicating that Nat Turner had an honored place in American history more than a century after the revolt.

This compelled Finkelstein to declare, “It’s still high noon and thus too soon to resolve what verdict history will cast on the slave revolt in Gaza on October 7, 2023.”

Finkelstein later took part in a debate concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The moderator recalled Nat Turner in Gaza and said it sounded like Finkelstein’s essay aimed to establish a psychological defense for the Hamas attackers by pleading down from premeditated murder to manslaughter to justifiable homicide.