EXPLAINING PRO-PALESTINIANISM

HOW ACTIVISTS DOUBLED DOWN ON A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.

When you’ve made a horrible error, scream louder!

The marriage of “pro-Palestinian” and progressive activists may be the moral blunder of our era.

As the Israel-Hamas war rages, progressives, feminists, gay rights campaigners and human rights activists have made common cause with the most violent, misogynistic, homophobic, regressive, intolerant forces on earth. Not only that — we’ve made it our top international affairs priority.

In fact, we’ve made Palestine so central to our worldview and activism that we ignore every other issue on earth. While we rant about a concocted “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine, actual genocides and ethnic cleansings go unnoticed.

How could this happen? How could the very people who claim to be the moral compass of our societies and political movements have so thoroughly sided with antisemitism, terror, hatred, and perpetual war over coexistence, peace, antiracism and human decency?

There are too many reasons to delineate. Perhaps the most obvious one is that, given a choice between siding with a movement that betrays our commitments to women, queers, democracy, nonviolence and peace, or siding with Jews, we’ve decided to go with the former.

That plays a role in the following theory. But it’s a bit more complex.

In a little more than a month — on September 28 — we will mark the 24th anniversary of the era we are currently in: The post-Oslo era. It was on that date in 2000 when the Palestinians overthrew the negotiating table that was leading to a two-state solution and launched the Second Intifada.

In that moment, the world — most of all, peace-seeking activists, antiracists, progressives who in every other instance endorse talk over violence — should have risen as one and demanded that the Palestinians reject violence and return to negotiations.

We didn’t.

There are a few reasons for that. I’ll get to those in the coming weeks.

The bottom line is this: In that instant, when we chose violence over negotiated peace and coexistence, the global left veered off a cliff. On this most fundamental value — violence versus dialogue — we sowed the seeds of destruction for our moral legitimacy.

Then what?

In life, sometimes, we see friends make grievous life choices. We try to guide them back to sensible approaches. They dig in their heels. They double down. They refuse to acknowledge their error and they destroy their life by insisting that the worst decision they ever made was, in fact, the right one. They invent fantastical scenarios to justify their errors.

That’s the path of destruction the global left has been on for 24 years.

The short explanation is that we never really thought the violence that exploded on September 28, 2000, was a turning point. We didn’t know it would lead to a quarter-century of terror and war — including the Gaza War we are now wringing our hands over but for which we, the global left, are almost as much to blame as the Hamas terrorists who started it.

Thinking it was a last spasm of violent strategy before a resolution, we decided to condone the violence that began that day, thinking that the Palestinians would return to negotiations with a strengthened hand if the Israelis knew they were prepared to revert to violence if necessary.

This was a fundamental misunderstanding. Palestinian violence wasn’t a diversion from the path. It is the path. Palestinian leaders know only violence and terror. They do not understand negotiation. 

Indeed, despite the fact that progressives always esteem talk over violence, a core tenet of the “pro-Palestinian” narrative is that dialogue was never going to work in this instance. Why? Because no one stands a chance against those people in a negotiation. 

Of course, this is a jagged pill to swallow for people whose self-identity is completely wrapped up in self-congratulatory visions of peace, coexistence and antiracism.

So we needed to justify our crime by inventing a narrative of Israel that was so venal it excuses our betrayal of every value we claim to endorse.

The global left, in cahoots with radical Islam and far-right antisemites, set out to devise a perversion of the facts that would excuse our grievous moral transgressions. We had to invent a mythology of Israel so degenerate that it exempted us from culpability for our indefensible corruption on an issue as central as endorsing mass murder, rape, beheadings, immolations and the assorted mayhem summed up by the popular chant “By any means necessary.”

We started with “apartheid,” a smear so preposterous that it should have disqualified the left from any serious engagement on this issue. And yet, because of the astonishing gullibility of the people we are talking about, this actually gained traction, leading activists to throw anything against the wall to see what stuck.

If you have read my precious gems in the past, you will know that one of my hobby horses is confronting the nonsense that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Here is a perfect example of where that assumed tautology falls down.

The relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not “We hate Jews, therefore we hate Israel.” That’s not how this works. No. The way antisemitism impacts on anti-Zionism is that we come from a civilization (humankind) that is predisposed to believe the most outlandish lies about Jews. So when we hear the most despicable mistruths about Israel, we think, That seems about right.

When haters saw how quickly the apartheid libel was swallowed by susceptible minds in the activist set, they started throwing everything including the kitchen sink.

They accused Israel of “settler colonialism” and “imperialism” — terms that a first-year political science student with any brains would recognize as completely inapplicable.

Again, though, the target audience for these fabrications are so ravenous for rationalizations to validate their endorsement of violence and hatred that they latched on to these idiocies with relish.

Finally, having engaged for years in the most hysterical hyperbole humankind can invent, we finally arrived at the summit: Genocide.

We come from a civilization where Jews have, for centuries, been accused of perpetrating the greatest crimes known to humankind. Across history and geography, Jews have been accused of being literally the embodiment of the devil on earth. That extraordinary race-hatred is in our civilizational DNA. And we see it constantly today in images of Jews (Israelis, if we want to be specific, but that is precisely the conflation that proves my point) with horns, fangs and other demonic characteristics.

Genocide is literally the greatest crime known to humankind. It is also a word that had to be invented to describe the 20th century history of the Jewish people. And it is no coincidence that it is now debased and instrumentalized against the very people for whom it had to be created. It is yet another example of our society’s mental disorder around anything Jew. We are unable to assimilate the societal lessons of the Holocaust, so we dodge that little moral conundrum by accusing the victims of perpetrating the crime. Hey Presto! Two-fer-one: We don’t have to think about that pesky Holocaust anymore — and we get to win the Palestine contest by playing as dirty and low as a cheater can go.

The moral depravity is almost unimaginable.

Reasonable people have spent a great deal of time trying to understand how progressive people could align with the most regressive movement on the planet. Queers for Palestine. Feminists affiliating with the most woman-hating oppressors on earth. Peace activists endorsing rape, live burnings of human beings and decapitations as “resistance.”

Trying to make order out of what is, at root, a psychosocial disorder is a losing battle. It is trying to make sense of the nonsensical. The Palestinian movement — at least the part made up of erstwhile progressive activists — is the embodiment of a social sickness. We cannot explain it or reason with it.

All we can do is acknowledge it — because we have not seemed to articulate this disorder.

The first step to resolving a problem is admitting that you have one.

If you, like me, are on the left, look inside yourself. At least stop doubling down. In the next month, I’ll be harping on this topic some more. Together, you and me, we’ll get this moral dystopia whipped into shape.

Well, at least we’ll understand better how the people we thought were our friends could go so wildly off the rails.