US AND THEM

Both sides in the global conflict around Israel and Palestine have found themselves in odd company. I sleep soundly.

Drag queens for Palestine.

Politics, as the cliché goes, makes strange bedfellows.

I have certainly learned that amply.

As a gay man, I spent years on the opposite side of the barricades from evangelical Christians and political conservatives. These were the people who opposed my right to marry. Some of them belong to movements that, in earlier times, demonized gay men because an always-fatal virus had begun sweeping through our communities. Some of them even celebrated the death of gay men as God’s punishment for our “lifestyle.”

But politics does not always sort people in the ways we expect. Sometimes the fault lines that matter most are not ideological at all. They are moral.

Years ago, when I first began my activism about Jews, Israel and antisemitism, I observed a fundamental difference between the people I met on both sides of this divide.

Without a single exception, I have been treated with respect, warmth and kindness by every evangelical and conservative Christian I have encountered in my many years as a pro-Israel person.

From my erstwhile “friends” in the progressive movement, I have received hostility, personal attacks, dismissiveness, harassment, abuse, intimidation, and death threats.

It revealed something deeply unsettling about a “progressive” movement that prides itself on compassion, tolerance, and respect for humanity.

Where does this hostility, which should seem antithetical to the values the perpetrators claim to champion, come from?

It comes from a place of weakness and vulnerability.

Many of the most vocal hate-Israel activists know almost nothing about the history of the conflict they have chosen as their cause.

So they cover their ignorance with confidence and aggression.

Their worldview is cartoonish in its simplicity. There are villains and victims, colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed.

The narrative cannot be revised or challenged because it was never constructed through evidence in the first place.

This is not a fact-driven movement. It is an authoritarian ideology founded on misinformation and disinformation. In a house of cards like this, intellectual curiosity must be suppressed for obvious reasons.

Like all political and theocratic ideas that cannot withstand rational analysis, Palestinianism demands absolute obedience. Questioning is apostasy.

And authoritarian certitude produces some very strange alliances.

History provides a revealing precedent. In the 1960s, the Nation of Islam attempted to form a political alliance with the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell. The two groups agreed on almost nothing except one idea: racial separation. They were opposite sides of a racist coin. The Nazis are a white supremacist group that hates Blacks and the Nation of Islam is a Black supremacist, separatist movement.

When movements define themselves primarily through opposition to a common enemy, ideological inconsistencies become irrelevant.

The “pro-Palestinian” movement operates in exactly this way. Groups that otherwise share no values whatsoever — Islamist extremists and atheists, radical leftists and far-right overt Jew-haters, feminists and genital mutilators, drag queens and those who drag queens behind motorcycles, white supremacists, “antiracists,” and conspiracy theorists — find themselves marching together under the same Palestinian flag.

What unites them is not a shared vision of justice.

It is a shared hostility toward Israel and Jews.

And yet the activists themselves insist they are the moral heroes of this story.

The tragedy in all of this is that actual Palestinians deserve so much better. But the people who claim to know what’s best for them — the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim elites who are their primary oppressors, the UN, the marching millions worldwide — use Palestinian people as pawns, as avatars in an ideological game that has nothing to do with the well-being of actual Palestinians.

If Zionists were truly the enemies of Palestinians, they could not possibly do a better job harming Palestinians than the movement that claims to champion them.

With friends like these, really, who needs enemies?

Which brings us to another uncomfortable reality.

If you spend enough time observing the “pro-Palestinian” movement, you will eventually encounter something that its defenders insist is rare: overt antisemitism.

I wrote this in my previous post. If any other political movement found itself repeatedly marching alongside people who expressed open hatred toward an identifiable group — Black people, Muslims, gay people, immigrants — its participants would not merely distance themselves rhetorically.

They would either purge these forces from their movements or they themselves would walk away.

They would recognize that the movement itself had become poisoned.

But when the hatred is directed at Jews, something different happens.

The activists close ranks.

They defend the movement and excuse the hatred as justifiable, if not entirely appreciated.

This undermines the activists’ claims to be antiracist advocates. But it’s bigger than that.

Palestinianism is the poison pill at the heart of today’s progressive movements, trade unions, liberal churches, middle-of-the-road and leftist political parties, the social services sector, and the entire complex we might call the left. (If you are on the right: Get off your high horse. You have poison in your own movements and you need to turn your attentions there. More on that soon!)

Here is what I’ve learned about strange bedfellows.

Strange though they may be, some make more sense than others.

The political conservatives and evangelical Christians with whom I find myself making common cause share my commitment to fighting antisemitism and advancing the right of Jewish people to national self-determination. We just come at it from different angles. They might argue based on biblical covenants. I argue based on historical facts. But we come to the same conclusion.

On the other side, the strange bedfellows are united by hatred of Israel and, as often as not, hatred of Jews. (They may or may not consciously acknowledge this hatred, because screaming “Antizionism is not antisemitism!” is a sure-fire way to prevent the sort of moral introspection genuine antiracism demands.)

They are united by intolerance, by violent impulses, and (at a minimum) justification for hate crimes and attempted genocide. They are driven by (or nonchalantly march alongside) a fanatical and toxic theological brew (even as the atheists in that weird coalition accuse my side of being driven by disordered theology and genocidal tendencies).

There are strange bedfellows on both sides.

There are also exceptions. There are genuinely good people in the “pro-Palestinian” movement and there are genuinely bad people in the pro-Israel movement.

Generally speaking, though, the “pro-Palestinian” side is made up overwhelmingly of people who think they are making the world a better place but are actually advancing hatred, racism, intolerance, and genocide.

My side is made up of people falsely accused of advancing hatred, racism, intolerance, and genocide. But with a few exceptions (so few that you can probably identify them by name) we are the ones who exemplify inclusion, coexistence, tolerance, and peace.

Once again, strange bedfellows they may be. But we have made our beds and now we have to lie in them.

I sleep soundly.

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