FAN FAVE #9: HARVEY MILK IN PALESTINE

ICYMI: MILK KNEW THAT HOPE WAS OFTEN ALL AN OPPRESSED PEOPLE HAVE. PALESTINIAN LEADERS ENSURE THEIR PEOPLE HAVE NONE.

Hope.

“You have to give them hope.”

This was the animating mantra of Harvey Milk, the assassinated San Francisco city supervisor who is an icon of the modern gay liberation movement. It is a simple statement and a simple idea — and it plays a massive role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yeah, I know, it’s quite a stretch to quote Harvey Milk in an essay about the Palestinian people and their fight for freedom. Modern-day Harvey Milks wouldn’t last as long in an independent Palestine as Milk himself did after his fellow board member Dan White snuck into San Francisco City Hall with a gun on November 27, 1978.

But Milk’s words are relevant here.

The history of Harvey Milk is sort of a formative experience in my life. His assassination, which I heard about on the kitchen radio in East Vancouver, was cataclysmic. The recording of Dianne Feinstein (then acting mayor and later US senator) making the announcement that Milk and Mayor George Moscone had been murdered by fellow politician White elicited screams from the assembled journalists. As a 14-year-old who was becoming aware that he was gay (although more conscious, I would say, that I would come out as a journalist) I was alerted to the magnitude of the story by the reaction of the assembled media. The message, as I learned more about who the assassinated politician was, told me what can happen if you go around telling people who you are inside.

The mid-1970s was a bleak time for a teenager to be gay. The bullet that killed Harvey Milk is certainly testament to that bleakness.

It was also, of course, a time of immense hope. A gay rights movement of which Milk was one of the most visible faces was emerging defiantly.

Still, I am 99% sure that there wasn’t a gay person alive in 1977 who dreamed that they would live, as I have, to see the extraordinary political, legal and social advances we have made toward LGBTQ+ equality. I honestly can’t believe that we have accomplished such unimaginable advancement. I truly never saw it coming, even in my most determined moments of activism.

The reason I bring this up is that Harvey Milk, apparently, knew that in order to build a movement that was sustainable and constructive, you needed to have an ideal, a goal to strive for. The great leaders of our time understand that you have to be not just against something, but for something, even if what you are against seems so dominant and insurmountable that hope seems naïve.

And here is a core problem of the Palestinian movement — in Palestine as well as in North America, Europe and the rest of the world.

The Palestinian movement has precisely no narrative of hope. They chant “Free Palestine” but these are among the emptiest words in the English language (or any other, if translated). An independent Palestine would be anything but free — and the positive-sounding “Free Palestine” is really just code for “Destroy Israel,” because there is precisely no plan for what would actually create a “free Palestine” or for what would happen the day after independence.

Of closeted kids in rural America, Milk said: “The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us’es, the us’es will give up.”

For a movement to succeed, no matter how uphill the fight, its adherents require a degree of hopefulness. If you read Nelson Mandela’s memoirs, his decades in prison were sustained by hope. Martin Luther King foresaw his own death but had hope that the fight would succeed without him.

The Palestinian movement is nearly unique in the history of human activism. It is founded on hopelessness. It is almost entirely negative. Its deliberate strategy of convincing young Palestinians that death is preferable to their current condition is as nihilistic as a movement could get.

It’s not that the Palestinian leaders and their overseas allies do not understand the centrality of hope in a successful nation-building (or any other) endeavor. It’s that Palestinianism is not a nation-building endeavor.

When I say that Palestinianism is not a nation-building movement, I mean that its primary objective is not the creation of a Palestinian state but the elimination of the Jewish one.

Giving Palestinian people hope would undermine the strategy of the Palestinian movement. People with hope do not self-detonate. People with hope do not lose their humanity to the extent that they can decapitate babies and immolate families alive. People with hope cannot raise their own children to kill and be killed. People with hope teach their children to advance a future of coexistence and peace.

There is effectively no hopeful idealism in the Palestinian movement. There is no vision for an independent Palestine. There is the chant “Free Palestine” but no answer to the question “Then what?” There is the threat “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” but no vision whatsoever for what happens the day after the rivers of Jewish blood are washed away.

Zionism — the movement for Jewish national self-determination — was and is a movement of intensive hope. The movement’s anthem, now the national anthem of the country, is Hatikvah, “the hope.” Utopian, visionary and hopeful books, songs, essays and movements were created to usher in the great national redemption that is Zionism. When the Jewish people had nothing left but hope, Zionism sustained them.

Not only is the Palestinian movement not a movement for Palestinian self-determination. It is a nihilistic movement for whom Palestinians themselves are not the beneficiaries but instead the very devices of warfare. It would be hard to operate a terrorist military in which suicide bombing is a core tactic if your people have an optimistic view of the future. It would be challenging to convince families to store weapon stockpiles in their attics and basements, making them targets for the opposing military, if these people were convinced that life is better than death.

Unlike every successful social movement in history for which hope has been the driving force, hopelessness is the fuel that drives the Palestinian movement. Because Palestinianism does not have a successful social end-goal. It does not seek Palestinian liberation. It seeks Israeli elimination. Its hope is destructive one, which is not really hope at all, but hate.

The mask is off. Until September 28, 2000, the Palestinian leadership sort of pretended they sought mutual coexistence. Even activists worldwide today don’t make believe that is on the agenda any longer. “From the river to the sea” sort of takes care of that innocent idea.

Among everything that Palestinian leaders have stolen from the people they claim to represent, perhaps the theft of their hope is the most cruel. Once you take that away from people, what is left? And this is the key: Nothing.

From there, you can convince parents that, with nothing to look forward to and nothing left to lose, the sacrifice of your child to the cause — sending them to be killed in a fruitless assault on Jewish civilians that will do nothing to advance humanity or your own well-being — is the rational thing to do.

Palestinianism is kind of the opposite of Harvey Milk’s vision: You have to take away their hope.

Of course, if Harvey Milk were alive and in Palestine, he would be thrown off a roof. Since Dan White took care of that 46 years ago, Palestinian leaders are left to defile Milk’s vision by inspiring yet another generation of young people bereft of hope, agency and a future.

And worldwide, activists, including the maniacal Queers for Palestine, cheer them on.