PALESTINE: THE NEXT LAST GREAT CAUSE?

ACTIVISTS IMAGINE THEMSELVES IN THE MOLD OF SPANISH CIVIL WAR PARTISANS. THEY GET IT EXACTLY WRONG.

If they understood history, “pro-Palestinian” activists would realize this is the side they’re on.

I’ve been reading about the Spanish Civil War again, in anticipation of a visit to Barcelona next month.

The Spanish Civil War has been called the Last Great Cause. This is a somewhat dispiriting term from the perspective of the last century of activists — not to mention a little high-fallutin’, like Fukuyama’s audacious (and inexorably premature) declaration of The End of History.

The term suggests that there would never again be a cause so righteous as this.

Then came Palestine.

If the Spanish Civil War was the Last Great Cause, in the minds of its (eventually defeated) partisans, the activists of the overseas Palestinian movement beg to differ. Theirs, they are convinced, is the actual LGC.

I have massive respect for the volunteers who signed on to fight the fascists in Spain, like members of Canada’s Mackenzie-Papineau Batallion, the American Abraham Lincoln Batallion and Poland’s Dąbrowski Battalion. Defying their own governments, these individuals joined up and made their way to the frontlines to take the battle to Franco, Hitler, Mussolini and their allies while Western governments stood mute.

The phrase the Last Great Cause is premised on the apparent moral clarity of the conflict. This was not only fascists versus anti-fascists (actual anti-fascists, not like the ones who use the term today while often employing brownshirt tactics). It was also a fight taken up by individual volunteers, not conscripted soldiers, who demonstrated almost unimaginable devotion. They smuggled themselves across Spanish borders and then fought with massively inadequate weapons and supplies against unimaginable odds.

Put mildly, these were people with skin in the game. Not like today’s college activists who pitch a pup tent on the quad and imagine themselves saviors on par with Dr. Norman Bethune or frontline eyewitnesses like Orwell or Hemingway. (As if they know who these people were.)

Of course, I’m the one who made the parallel between Palestine and Spain. I’m not trying to set up a straw man here, but rather aiming to get to a root issue. For one thing, most of the activists who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” today (or antifa, for that matter) are so lacking in knowledge of history and current events that they are ignorant of the basics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which they have made the centre of their existence. Ask them about something as antediluvian as the Spanish Civil War and expect eye-glazing. If they have not literally declared themselves protagonists in the Last Great Cause, it is probably only because they are not familiar with the term.

Whether they use the term or not, these activists almost certainly see themselves in this heroic light. Every great issue of our generation (they imagine) is bundled up neatly in the cause of Palestine. Oppressor/oppressed. Economic injustice. Settler-colonialism. Imperialism. Indigenous peoples oppressed by whites. Global capitalism versus traditional societies.

And, if this were true, it would be true. But the truth is something very different.

If the conflict between Israel and Palestinian terrorists actually reflected the proxies I just outlined, then it might justify the term Last Great Cause. Or at a minimum, a Somewhat Great Cause. It doesn’t.

For overseas activists, the Palestinian cause is an empty canvas onto which they project whatever they want to take a stand for (or against).

An intelligent observer recognizes that the template doesn’t fit. Not even close. Without wasting all day dismissing these canards, the most obvious one is this: By no archeological, historical or other measure are the Palestinian Arabs (who are descended, obviously, from peoples who migrated originally from Arabia) the indigenous people in a place where Jews lived first. That’s not how indigeneity works. And if you need this lesson in the definition of “indigenous,” you probably shouldn’t be engaged in this discussion. The other canards are likewise easily dismissed by critical thinking or even the most basic facts — like the demographic reality that Israel is a majority-nonwhite country. But that’s the point: the overseas Palestinian movement lacks that critical component.

“Palestine” is an idea, for these activists. Not an actual place.

Spain was an idea, as well. But the fighters of the last century knew very well that it was also a real place — they staked their blood and their lives on it.

“Palestine,” for many or most of these North American activists, is an imaginary place. A place where right meets wrong in a Manichean battle in which they directly invert the morality and the players.

Unlike the volunteers who fought fascism, today’s activists invest nothing. No blood and certainly no life. Yet they have an extraordinarily aggrandized self-conception. In a time when usurping the voices and agency of members of other groups is a secular sin, “Palestine” activists have no compunction declaring themselves the sainted saviors of the subjugated.

It’s a game to them, but these are real lives. And what is worse is that they claim to be concerned about lives of Palestinians. Yet it seems to me, so often, that the only thing they care about in terms of Palestinian lives is racking up fatality numbers to support their position that Israel is evil.

The more dead Palestinians, the more justified their political outrage and the more they envision themselves heroic fighters like the Spanish Civil War soldiers. Well pass me a bucket.

The volunteers of that earlier era may have been the best of their generation. Today’s activists embody a cartoonish worldview that makes them more performance artists than political activists. Because they lack any transcendent ideals or understanding, they go to Palestine protests like other people go to AA meetings — to address some personal demons. Except AA, from what I know, is a constructive, helpful movement. Palestinianism is the opposite.

They wrap themselves in keffiyehs, a somehow politically correct blackface, that are made-in-China (possibly by enslaved workers) — cultural appropriation be damned! — and revel in terrorist chic, enjoying the frisson of transgression without the pesky danger of actual warzone injury.

At the same time, while literally wrapping themselves in the appropriated imagery of “resistance” (read: “terrorism,” “attempted genocide of Jews,” “immolation of Jewish babies”) they also absurdly appropriate the language and imagery of peace, even though they are aligned with the side that is now, and always has been, the only side in the conflict that is making war.

Unable to make their cases based on facts on the ground, history or empiricism, they rely on emotion. Their lack of knowledge is compensated for by overconfidence and overheated rhetoric. They imagine themselves the sainted advocates of All Things Good. What they actually advocate, wittingly or not, is something very different.

How do activists who embody the worst in human nature manage to convince themselves that they embody the best?

One guess.

It is not a coincidence — not by a longshot — that today’s imagined Last Great Cause is a fight against the Jewish state.

In Western civilization, Jews have always been the empty vessel upon which we project our messy socio-psychological crap. Today, the Jewish state is that empty vessel.

Israel has replaced Jews as the scapegoat of choice for the current generation. This differentiation, of course, is a paper-thin disguise. The only people convinced are those committed to self-deception. Our great-grandparents may have falsely accused Jews of every sin under the sun, but when we accuse the Jewish state of being the modern incarnation of comprehensive sins, there’s not a doubt in our activist minds we are not making a mistake. As if our ancestors questioned their judgment.

For people who lack core values or an understanding of the real world, but who feel a gaping spiritual hole that needs filling with a misguided sense of meaning, Palestine fill that hole the way Jews answered existential questions for our forebears.

The irony, of course, is that these activists are not on the side of the backers of the Last Great Cause. They are firmly on the other side — whether they know it or not.