WHERE ARE THE “PRO-PALESTINIAN” MODERATES?

WHEN IT COMES TO ISRAEL AND PALESTINE, ANTIFA HAS PRETTY MUCH GONE FA.

Here’s what’s up in my town. How are things down your way?

Have you noticed the obsessive outrage about Israeli extremists? Every time Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich thinks out loud, a global chorus of unhinged indignation erupts.

What does it tell us that this focus on the minority of Israeli weirdos is almost inversely proportional to the concerns about Palestinian extremism?

Let’s back up. What does the term “Palestinian extremism” even mean? There is, effectively, no Palestinian moderate movement. So the extreme is the mainstream.

Let’s leave aside Hamas and the other forces that anyone with brains and human decency (hold this thought — we’ll come back to it) recognizes as among the most inhumane entities on the planet. Let me illustrate my point by giving you a quick intro to the Palestinian leader the world considers the “moderate” partner for peace.

Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and successor to Nobel Peace Prize laureate (bahahaha) Yasser Arafat is in the 20th year of his five-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority.

He is the face of “moderate” Palestinianism.

His doctoral dissertation at a Soviet university argued that the Holocaust was exaggerated and that Jews perpetrated their own genocide to screw the Palestinians.

In Berlin (!) in August 2022, Abbas accused Israel of committing “50 holocausts” against Palestinians. (And some people accuse me of hyperbole!) But then, if you deflate the numbers of the Holocaust in the first place, I guess accusing Israel of perpetrating “50 holocausts” isn’t the crime it sounds like on first hearing.

In a 2023 speech, Abbas claimed that Hitler targeted Jews not out of antisemitism but because they were “moneylenders.”

Abbas’s entire career has been an exercize in maximizing the number of dead Palestinians. “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every shahid will reach paradise,” is just one of a million examples of his murderous incitement.

My point is that the world accepts Palestinian extremism because, presumably, they have been given no other choice. But Israelis are supposed to respond to 76 years of incessant genocidal incitement, wars and terrorism with equanimity, cool-headedness and relentless moderation.

But my main concern is not about moderation or extremism in the Middle East. There is precious little people like me can do about that. What I might be able to have a small impact on is extremism here at home. And this is the point …

There is effectively no “moderate” pro-Palestinian movement anymore.

Despite decades of apologies and excuses for Palestinian terrorism, “pro-Palestinian” activists in Canada and elsewhere in the West used to at least pretend to believe in a peaceful resolution. Nobody bothers with that anymore.

After October 7, the idea of a peaceful, independent Palestine living next to Israel ceased to be even a fantasy of “pro-Palestinian” activists.

The people marching in the streets, agitating in political parties, trade unions and churches, or commenting on opinion pages are rallying around the slogan “From the river to the sea.” This has become the primary driver of the movement (even if most of these brainiacs can’t name the river or the sea).

In Vancouver, shortly after October 7, a college instructor called those kidnappings, mass rapes, beheadings, live immolations and murders an “amazing, brilliant offensive.” “Activists” worldwide chant “Long live October 7!”

You might say that this is just an extremist minority. But then where is the moderate majority? Where, even, is a moderate minority? Where, for God’s sake, is even the lonely voice in the wilderness on the “pro-Palestinian” side calling for coexistence? Nowhere. (Disagree? Please leave links to evidence in the comments. Thanks!)

The Horseshoe Theory — the idea that the far-left and the far-right have more in common than they would like to think — is nowhere more evident than when looking at the world’s approach toward the conflict in the Middle East.

The Palestinian cause is completely antithetical to the values that Western progressives claim to support. The Palestinian movement (that is, in Palestine) is among the most regressive, violent, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic and racist ideologies on the planet. The only way that left-wing Western politicians like “The Squad” in the US Congress or Canadian Members of Parliament like those in the New Democratic Party can make common cause with this movement is on the assumption that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the enemy, of course, is … well, you know.

The term Horseshoe Theory is fairly new, but the template for it goes back to the very early days of the Jewish and Muslim conflict in the Levant. The Arab nationalist movement in Palestine sided with the Ottoman imperialists during the First World War and with the Nazis and the other Axis powers in the Second World War. Talk about picking the wrong sides.

The Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was the spiritual and political leader of the Palestinian people. He was also a Nazi.

Some people try to justify his alliance with Hitler as an unpleasant but useful alliance for political gain. But al-Husseini was a fascist not by convenience but by ideology.

OK, some might respond, but that’s history.

Well, Mein Kampf in Arabic translation remains popular bedside reading in Palestine, hitting the bestseller list as recently as the 1990s (in the middle of, remember, the Oslo Peace Process).

It is interesting how the left in North America accepts the idea that one Nazi in a group poisons the entirety of the movement. This certainly — and correctly — has been the position of many around Donald Trump’s footsying with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. That was certainly the case when a swastika flag showed up as part of the “trucker convoy” protests in Canada in 2022.

But when the North American and European left makes common cause with a movement that is fascistic root and branch, it is remarkable the intellectual contortions that we go to in order to justify that alliance.

You don’t get to hang around with Nazis and pretend you’re not a Nazi. In the same way that there is no such thing as “nonracist” — there is only “racist” and “antiracist” — there is no “non-Nazi.” You are either a Nazi or an anti-Nazi.

And yet, if we use the same standard the left applies to those on the political right and apply it to the very people making that case, they fail by their own measure.

The left has made common cause with the Palestinian movement, centering that fundamentally racist, fascist-founded, religiously fundamentalist movement at the heart of our own movement. You don’t get to get away with that. That is not being anti-Nazi. And since there is no such thing as “not Nazi,” that suggests to me that, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, antifa has pretty much gone fa.

And if I have presented in any way an unrepresentative survey of the “pro-Palestinian” movement — if there is any substantial strain of the movement anymore in Europe or North America that is not, basically, a genocidal, antisemitic movement — do feel free to present your evidence in the comments.