Dear Progressives: You are hurting the Palestinians.

You are being manipulated and, as a result, you are consigning Palestinians to an eternal hell on Earth.

photo: mike litwack/X

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This is a guest essay written by Elissa Wald of Never Alone.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Dear Progressive “Anti-Zionists,”

Since you clearly do not care that you are hurting your Jewish friends and allies, and quite possibly you even find that deeply and secretly fun, I hope you will consider the fact that you are hurting Palestinians even more — truly, much more.

You recognize that MAGA members and Fox News junkies are indoctrinated and deluded. You recognize that they cannot see the truth when it is in front of their freaking eyes.

But you are confident that you are different. You are informed. You are a free thinker. You are far more discerning.

And yet you seem to me as programmed as a robot to spout patently false rhetoric and never question your own assumptions.

Every day I wake up and I am newly amazed by your insistence on erasing more than half of an intransigent and tragic conflict. You have decided that jihadist violence is a response to “occupation” and “oppression,” and apparently you have never once considered that the Palestinians’ restriction of movement might be a response to almost a century of relentless and lethal violence.

You decry Western centrism and yet you superimpose your own culture and experiences on a completely different situation in order to draw invented parallels to yourself.

The most frustrating part of your willfully blind self-righteousness is that you really are — in the truest and most literal sense — hurting the people whom you want to help most.

Let’s look at how you do that.

The other day, a Facebook friend left a comment beneath one of my posts. She wrote:

“Going by what happened in Ireland, I would say the only way to defeat terrorist organizations is to deprive them of the people, young men mainly, who are their cannon fodder, and that only happens when you give the said young men something to live for, in the shape of jobs, economic prospects, a decent future to look forward to. Because it is when they feel they have nothing to live for that they start looking for something to die for.”

Let’s put aside the fact that the conflict between the U.K. and Ireland does not resemble the one between Israel and Hamas from any conceivable angle. Let’s just look at the paternalistic Western conviction that economic prospects would solve the problems of violent jihadist ideology.

First, Israel provides those economic prospects as much as possible. Guess who shuts it down? Yes, maybe you guessed it: Western progressives who know exactly nothing about the conflict, but who never stop congratulating themselves on their moral superiority.

SodaStream was an enterprise beloved by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Located in the West Bank, it was owned by an Israeli but it employed hundreds of Palestinians who were paid very well — precisely the same as their Jewish coworkers. It was a tight-knit working family.

Relations between Jews and Palestinians within the manufacturing plant were very good. The Palestinians working there earned around three times as much as their family members who were working for the Palestinian Authority — and accordingly they highly valued this opportunity.

The anti-Israel (really, antisemitic) BDS movement managed to shut down these relations. Hundreds of Palestinians lost an excellent salary and very high job satisfaction as a result, and returned to hopelessness. Yay, BDS. Great job.

On the other hand, the BDS movement did not hurt SodaStream in the least. The company was acquired by PepsiCo for $3 billion, remains headquartered in Israel, and still has 13 production plants — just not in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank). Again: Nice job, BDS.

On a very literal level, the only people hurt by this BDS “victory” were Palestinians. This is what comes from screaming and whining relentlessly about something you do not understand.

Moreover, before October 7th, Israel had doubled the number of permits for Gazan residents who wanted to work in Israel. And many of those Gazans used this work opportunity to provide intel to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They made a study of the local kibbutzim: who lived there and how their communal operations were laid out. They gave those details, blueprints, and maps to Hamas for murderous purposes.

Now, let’s look at a much more significant way Western progressives cause harm to Palestinians within the context of this conflict. I never stop reeling from the fact that progressives look at these two governments side by side:

Israel’s government has invested mightily in protecting its own people by building the Iron Dome and bomb shelters throughout the country, and does its very best to protect Gazan citizens. In fact, according to John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, Israel has taken more care to prevent harm to the other side’s civilians than any other army in human history.¹

Then there is Gaza’s government, Hamas, which does everything in its power to maximize the death of both Israeli civilians — the most peace-seeking, Palestinian-serving ones at that — and their own civilians, while living as billionaires.

Yet somehow, after looking at both, progressives entirely ignore Hamas, demand nothing of them, condemn nothing about them, while relentlessly and furiously going after Israel and any Diaspora Jew who stands with her.

If you are such a progressive, here is a news flash for you:

1. There will be no ceasefire until Israel has destroyed the military capability of Hamas.

2. There can be no ceasefire until Israel has destroyed the military capability of Hamas.

3. There should be no ceasefire until Israel has destroyed the military capability of Hamas.

And there is not a damn thing that you can do about that. You do not get a vote. You cannot expiate your Western guilt by trying to force Jews to take it on for you, to atone for you and suffer for you and die for you.

Your history is not our history.

Your crimes are not our crimes.

Your illegitimacy is not our illegitimacy.

And we will not help you pretend it is as the price of preserving our friendships and relations with you.

These threats by the West to abandon Israel when it refuses to lie down and die are not new. When Joe Biden was a young senator in 1982, he threatened to withhold American aid from Israel, and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the latter had this to say:

Do not threaten us; it will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with a cultural history of 3,700 years. Nobody came to our aid when we died in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we struggled to establish our state. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And if necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your help.”

Israel is not going to sacrifice its children on the altar of Western progressive self-righteousness.

So if Western progressives succeed in getting the West to stop providing Israel with the high-precision weapons it needs to continue protecting the civilian population, it will proceed with more widely destructive, less precise weapons that will result in exponentially more civilian deaths.

Your “anti-Zionism” is Hamas’ entire game. It is killing its own children in the most savage and merciless ways, and it is betting that you will blame Israel for this instead of them, and send them more money to keep doing what is working so well.

You are being manipulated and, as a result, you are consigning Palestinians to an eternal hell on Earth.

To the rest of us, I know how frustrating all of the above is — and the best counsel I have is to hold fast to the truth, state it civilly, and then go on with your day.

Do not obsess over what progressives are thinking and saying. Do not engage with willful hypocrisy and antisemitism (disguised as “anti-Zionism”). Do not give these people emotional power over your heart and soul that they do not deserve.

Indeed, if these progressive “anti-Zionists” had any real heart and soul, they would quickly realize that they are increasingly hurting the Palestinians.

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1. “Israel Implemented More Measures to Prevent Civilian Casualties Than Any Other Nation in History | Opinion.” Newsweek.