OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

PALESTINIANISM GIVES ACTIVISTS SOMETHING FRESH TO BELIEVE IN. IN REALITY, IT IS AN ANCIENT CAUSE FANCIED UP FOR A NEW ERA.

Finally! Something to believe in!

“Those who stand for nothing, fall for anything” said Alexander Hamilton. What he meant, I guess, was that, if you don’t know your core values (or perhaps if you don’t have any), you will be swept up in whatever mob mentality you encounter.

And so, here we are.

The Palestinian movement, for whatever else it is, seems to have flawlessly captured the zeitgeist of young, Western progressives. A generation (or two) largely raised on video games, short-attention-span media consumption, and unmoored from any transcendent moral underpinnings finds themselves searching for meaning and — BAM! — along comes a movement that purports to be the master key to everything they think is wrong with the world.

You need to understand that I am an agnostic, so when I lament the fact that young people have mostly lost the transcendent values that defined previous generations, I attribute that not to the loss of organized religion across the last two or three generations but to the failure of our society (and their parents, educators and gawd knows popular culture) to replace that values vacuum with anything constructive or meaningful.

The vacuity of contemporary existence — for a generation whose idea of meaningful political engagement is often limited to posting on socials — has left a voracious hunger for meaning. The accompanying cynicism with which generations have been inculcated makes positive engagement more challenging and so activism is often negative — it is opposed to the status quo, rather than advancing a more positive future. Rather than the inspiring words of a Nelson Mandela, MLK or RFK, their guiding slogans are “Burn it all down” and “By any means necessary.”

The values of the past — a commitment to the collective good over the individualistic imperative, self-sacrifice, compromise and shared mission — are for chumps. For better or worse, the principles that guided our grandparents — faith, patriotism, a certain unity of purpose — have been rejected. And I get that. All of these things went too far, enforcing repressive conformity and dehumanizing people like me, who are gay, as well as half of the population that is female and those who do not fit into the normative majority (which was not a majority at all but rather a powerful minority that condescended to speak for all).

But we have gone the other direction with equal vigour. Now nothing is sacred. It is impossible to imagine, a generation or two ago, people celebrating rape, beheadings, immolations, kidnappings and mass murders of Jews and then seeing, in response, most of the rest of society shrug and say well, to each their own.

It is not a coincidence that the fight against antisemitism is one of the places where the values of our parents and grandparents have gone furthest off the rails. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, the world began to realize what had happened and committed itself to fighting antisemitism as a sort of ur-bigotry, a lynchpin affecting a small group but that signified a larger societal illness.

The fight against antisemitism, which was, to an extent, foundational to the entire movement for racial equality and other forms of social justice, is now poo-pooed as passé. Claims of antisemitism, a new generation of activists have been groomed to understand, are really just the bleatings of the ultra-privileged trying to steal the thunder of the truly oppressed.

Along came Francis Fukuyama, whose book The End of History and the Last Man contended that the fall of communism represented, essentially, the completion of the human capability for innovation. That, as your grandmother might have said, there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that can happen has already happened.

Then came, you know, Mad Vlad Putin, illiberal democracy, Islamist terror and so much more. History was not done unfolding.

And yet, the great causes of the past were seemingly done for. One thing that had, seemingly, died was the Western young person’s capacity for idealistic engagement. Everything was so blasé. They’re all the same. Nothing I do can change anything. Activism is for losers.

Then, in a world with nothing to believe in, along comes the Last Great Cause.

Of course, that phrase was used for the Spanish Civil War, and that kind of proves the point. Fukuyama’s idea that history was done unfolding was presaged by this term for a war that took place in the 1930s.

Into a climate where young people raised to believe in nothing much were unwittingly starved for a belief in anything, along came Palestinianism. And it caught on like wildfire.

The great irony is that, in a weird way, Palestinianism harkens back to our ancestors. It may look fresh to today’s screamy young activists, but it is really just old wine in new bottles.

It is exactly no coincidence that Palestinianism targets exactly the object generations who came before us aimed at. The Palestinian cause is about 50 years old, but the energy that drives it is ancient.

The thing is, Palestinianism isn’t really about Palestine or Palestinians at all. For these activists, “Palestine” is an empty vessel upon which they project all sorts of ideas around capitalism, racism, imperialism, privilege, and every other ism and issue that troubles them.

Of course, this is precisely the template upon which thousands of years of antisemitism have been constructed. Jews were always the scapegoat, the empty vessel upon which was projected the ideological, theological, social, economic and every other kind of issue troubling Christians, Muslims, communists, capitalists and almost anyone else with a beef.

Those issues that were once projected onto Jews are now, in their contemporary forms, projected onto the Jewish state. Neither of these phenomena — the old-time projection onto Jews or the 21st-century projection onto Israel — are rational. But trying to convince people rationally out of ideas that they came to irrationally is an almost impossible task. 

That’s why these activists carry placards declaring “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” They kind of have to say that, don’t they? Not just because to be overtly racist is one of the few red lines they acknowledge but because they need to differentiate themselves from the generations that came before them. As if there was, indeed, something new under the sun.

What Palestinianism does do, though, is offer people, especially the young things that they lacked — belonging, a community, a system of beliefs.

And “system” is the key word. This is not, if you scratch the surface, about Palestine or Palestinians, as I said. It is about a disordered approach to a vast range of issues that are, at best, peripherally related to Palestine and Palestinians.

Just as antisemitism has provided a magnificently perfect system of beliefs — an answer to every eternal question like “Who is in control?” “Why do bad things happen?” “Who can I blame?” — anti-Zionism provides an answer to these same questions. But now the answer is not Jews generally, but Israel specifically.

Same same.

Anti-Zionism gives us, as antisemitism gave our ancestors, a master key to unlock the mysteries, a host onto which we can project our guilt and sins.

In a world where people, especially the young, have nothing to believe in, they discover Palestinianism and they cling to it with such irrational, merciless ferocity that no amount of reason or facts will talk them out of.

Maybe it was irrational for our grandparents to believe that the wine and wafer literally embodied the blood and body of Jesus and by projecting their sins onto these symbols they and their world could be spiritually redeemed. But it is no less irrational for today’s atheistic kids to believe that Israel embodies all of the world’s sins and that, by consuming and crucifying it, they and our world can be politically redeemed.

Of course, if you know your ancient stories, the wine and wafer are the blood and body of a Jew. As I have written before — that’s not a coincidence. There is, as I said, nothing new under the sun.