TOXIC PALESTINIANISM™

HOW ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISM RUINS EVERYTHING.

Not clear on several concepts.

After Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, the case became a catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement. Then along came “pro-Palestinian” activists waving signs with slogans like “From Ferguson to Palestine.” Because where African-Americans are bleeding out in the streets, you can always depend on the humanitarians of the Palestinian movement to swoop in and exploit the situation for their own objectives.

When Donald Trump, the once and future US president, was threatening to build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it, those same “pro-Palestinian” activists showed up with signs demanding “No wall — Mexico to Palestine!” While people from Mexico and further south are striving for a better life, escaping from oppression or murderous drug cartels and so trying to enter the United States, the parallel these activists are making with Israel’s security barrier is specious. Palestinians aren’t trying to infiltrate Israel for a better life. The barrier exists to prevent the sorts of mass murder of Jews that were routine before the barrier was constructed.

When the people of Flint, Michigan, and when Native Americans, have tried to get their fellow Americans to know and care about the fact that they lack access to potable water, along come “pro-Palestinian” activists to remind people that Palestinians, too, sometimes lack access to adequate water. Because when any minority community in the West has an issue, it is a core tenet of the Palestinian movement to talk over them, coopt their cause, divert attention and interject the Palestinians into the discussion.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Antisemitism Culture™, which is an overlooked phenomenon in a world where rape culture is a recognized problem and things like cancel culture and toxic masculinity are social occurrences that we understand. The inherent but often invisible presence of antisemitism permeates a great deal of our society. It’s time we recognize it and give that phenomenon a term. (My use of ™ was an attempt at humor. One reader asked where and how I trademarked the term. I didn’t. It’s a joke.)

Here is another phenom that deserves a term of its own: Toxic Palestinianism™.

The appropriation, usurping, theft and abuse of other people’s experiences to do duty in the cause of Palestinianism is a toxic development in world culture.

Ostensibly, it’s a sort of international intersectionality. The perpetrators will argue that they are empowering the issues they coopt by linking them with a major global conflagration.

In reality, it is a theft of victimhood, a usurping and coopting every other cause on the planet and changing the subject to Palestine.

Do you have a friend who sidetracks every conversation into their pet topic? That’s what Palestinian activists do on a global scale.

Consider the small cluster of buzzkills who disrupted and shut down Pride parades last summer. Thousands of people may have come to celebrate advances in LGBTQ+ rights and continue the struggle for equality, but damned if there weren’t a dozen who were having none of it until we paid obeisance to the prevailing political cause in the world today: Palestine.

Queer people advocating for Palestinian self-determination are arguably more masochistic than the leather-clad parade entries the activists stopped in their tracks. One opinion poll of Palestinians indicated that 5% of Palestinians think it is morally appropriate to kill a homosexual while 3% think that homosexuality is morally acceptable. In other words, more Palestinians think it is morally acceptable to kill a gay person than to be a gay person. But we’re not marching about that. No, we’re interrupting the march to support the people who are arguably our worst enemies. Can you imagine what would have happened if a dozen protestors from Westboro Baptist Church had done the same thing?

But the Queers for Palestine disorder is just the most ridiculous example of irrational cooptation by Palestinian activists.

Environmental justice groups jump on the Palestinian bandwagon, alongside boycotters of Israel, the country with many of the world’s most advanced solutions to our existential climate and environmental challenges.

Indigenous rights movements, which struggle hard enough for attention, have their efforts exploited and eclipsed by “pro-Palestinians” who make the preposterous case that people who arrived in the Holy Land long after the Jews built the civilization there are somehow its indigenous people.

Likewise, people who are suffering from actual settler-colonialism, such as the people of Western Sahara, Tibet or the Uighur communities of Xinjiang, have their causes debased, ignored or exploited by people who hate Israel and accuse a successful movement for national self-determination (Zionism) of being its opposite (settler-colonialism).

The greatest example of cooptation is the “apartheid” libel. Wouldn’t it seem that an injustice worthy of the term wouldn’t need to exaggerate and invent false parallels with one of history’s worst forms of racial injustice? If a cause were honestly so prima facie racist and unfair, surely we wouldn’t need to plumb history to manipulate another people’s experience with racism to rationalize the Palestinian case.

The list just goes on and on. Anti-war movements align with the side that has started and perpetuated every war in Israel and Palestine. Human rights campaigners side with the most oppressive regimes in the world against Israel, the oasis of freedom in the Middle East. Anitfa activists side with Palestinian causes that are among the contemporary world’s closest thing to fa. Feminist movements, like queer movements, make common cause with the most misogynistic forces on earth. Women in Afghanistan are literally forbidden from speaking in public but, sure, let’s talk even more about Palestine.

Prisoner advocacy movements express solidarity with convicts who have indisputably mass murdered Jewish civilians, which kind of debases their legitimacy when they turn around and advocate for wrongfully imprisoned people in the United States or elsewhere in the West.

Academic boycott movements condemn Israel, where genuine academic freedom exists, and make common cause with a society where intellectual liberty isn’t even on the radar. It’s been said before, but if these activists would boycott any or all of the lifesaving research done in Israel, their movement might be a great deal diminished.

Artists and other cultural figures are among the loudest voices for Palestine, a place where they would have the sorts of freedom that propaganda artists enjoyed under Stalin.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t be advocating for Palestinian rights. On the contrary. We should be advocating for Palestinians to have the sorts of rights we take for granted in Canada and elsewhere in the West. But that’s not what the “pro-Palestinian” movement does. They do not express any concern about indigenous oppression of Palestinians. A “free Palestine” tomorrow would be anything but free. But the activists don’t care, because a “free Palestine” isn’t really their goal. Terrorizing Israel and Jews is their goal.

If you haven’t figured this part out yet, you really aren’t paying attention. The “pro-Palestinian” movement isn’t about our attitudes toward Palestinians. It’s about our attitude toward Jews.

The bigger issue is that, while doing nothing to advance the well-being of Palestinians, the movement aggressively undermines every other cause on the planet. In a world with historically short attention spans, Palestinianism attempts to suck all the oxygen out of every other movement for social justice. And Palestinianism is not even, for all intents, a movement for social justice.

That’s toxic.