Two days after the assassination of the Lebanese president-elect Bachir Gemayel, the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, who had watched their country destroyed at the hands of the Palestinians, and who suffered multiple October 7s against their people, carried out an attack on the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. It was a massacre. Civilians were killed. The Israeli army was in Lebanon at the time, as part of Menachem Begin’s plan for a 40-kilometer buffer zone, and Ariel Sharon was minister of defense. The Israeli army did not carry out the massacre. But the fact that it had allowed the Phalangists to enter and do it became a scandal in Israeli society. The Knesset held hearings. Israelis protested in the streets, hundreds of thousands of them. Begin, who had just received the Nobel Peace Prize, saw his record stained. The Kahan Commission found Sharon personally responsible and forced him from the defense ministry. Now consider the gap between Israeli society and the Palestinians. The Israelis could have ignored it. It wasn’t their doing; their soldiers hadn’t pulled a trigger. But morally they knew the Christians could not have carried out the massacre if Israel had said no, and that was enough to convulse the entire country. The Palestinians would have made Sharon and Begin into glorified heroes, exactly as they made a hero of Sinwar, and of every terrorist before him. They would not merely have ignored it. They would have named streets after the perpetrators and immortalized the act in their schoolbooks, as they have done with every massacre they authored. People in the West struggle to see this contrast, because when they hear how Israel responded, they assume it is simply the normal thing, the expected thing. It looks normal to them because Israel and the West share the same ethical world. They can't feel how extraordinary it is. There is an enormous gap between Israeli society and the Palestinians, and it is a moral one. That is why, as someone who can actually see the contrast, I mean “useful idiots” literally, not as an insult, but as a description. They are idiots in the precise sense: they can't tell the difference between a society that puts its own leaders on trial for a massacre it merely permitted, and a society that builds monuments to the men who commit them.