For many activists, Palestinians are not even actual people.

This is why cultural appropriation is a progressive mega-sin, except when it comes to junior jihadists playing "Palestine" Barbie.

Palestinians are mere representations of perverted politics, archetypes of developed versus developing world peoples, stand-ins for Whites versus peoples of color, avatars of the advantaged versus disadvantaged.

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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.

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

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/for-activists-palestinians-not-actual-people

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No decent parent these days dresses their kids up in feather headdresses for Halloween. Dehumanizing sports team names like “Indians” or “Eskimos” have rightly been discarded. Other examples of cultural appropriation and dehumanization are challenged at every turn.

So why is it that even the most politically engaged activists these days feel absolutely no reluctance in donning Palestinian keffiyehs which, by any standard or measure, represent a cultural appropriation that would be acceptable in no other circumstance?

Allegations of appropriation fly especially frequently when talk turns to “Palestine” and Israel. In one example, Israelis are accused of “stealing” Palestinian foods, like hummus and falafel.

We do not, in almost any other instance, include foods as examples of cultural appropriation. If so, we would condemn Brits for “stealing” from Jews the idea of fish and chips and condemn anyone who goes through a Taco Time drive-thru as appropriating Latino culture.

Only in this case do we condemn Israelis (that is, Jews) for culturally appropriating food. Why? Because it dovetails neatly with a core antisemitic trope:

Jews take stuff that does not belong to them.

To accuse any other people of culturally appropriating food would get you laughed out of the buffet. To accuse Jews of this “crime” justifies serious handwringing.

This is the nut of the entire Palestinian narrative:

Jews came in and took Palestinian stuff, from their land all the way down to their deep-friend fritters.

This is another example of antisemitism’s malleability in projecting onto Jews the “sins” for which all humans are guilty. We all eat foods that do not “belong” to us. Only Jews are accused of culinary cultural appropriation.

If you want an example of real cultural appropriation, consider Christianity and Islam. If you want cultural appropriation on a cosmic, civilizational scale, imagine building your entire religion and identity on someone else’s sacred texts.

Early Christians, and then early Muslims, took Jewish ideas (ethical monotheism) and scriptures, then audaciously declared these texts and traditions to be (a) foundational, (b) now theirs, but also (c) superseded and defunct.

Imagine people  —  now about half the world’s population  —  subscribing as their central life’s philosophy to a theology that is stolen from Jews and retrofitted for their own purposes. And then imagine the stupendous hypocrisy of a chunk of those same people taking self-righteous umbrage because Jews have the audacity to eat mashed chickpeas.

But anyway.

Everywhere you go these days, certainly at every Palestinian protest on North American campuses, we see (often White) individuals wearing Palestinian keffiyehs.

How is this different than a 21st-century version of minstrel-show blackface?

Right now, a member of the Ontario, Canada legislature is at loggerheads with the speaker of the house over whether she can appear in the house wearing a keffiyeh, which the speaker has declared a “political” symbol.

I am going to acknowledge that suggesting a Somali-Canadian politician is engaging in blackface is a bit of a stretch, and problematic in its own way. But my point is this: We would not think it was okay for someone to appear in a parliament wearing Somali dress as a sign of their concern for the conflict there.

How come LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) Palestinians by parading around in a keffiyeh is not a problem?

Are there any other examples where progressive activists adopt any corresponding garb or accoutrements of a Developing World people or other equity-seeking group?

In all the well-intentioned activism around truth and reconciliation in Canada, nobody, to my knowledge, took the obviously inappropriate step of donning the headdresses or face paints of the Indigenous peoples with whom we are allying.

While Ukrainian people do not have the experience some other groups do with appropriation, I am sure that we would look disapprovingly at someone without roots in that country showing up at a solidarity rally in Chicago or Toronto in a traditional embroidered shirt or flower crown. It may not be as offensive as some other examples, but it would be weird.

Likewise, dressing up as a sexy geisha is not really something a progressive person would think appropriate for a lark.

I will not even dare to go down the path of imagining a parallel example of White allies to the Black Lives Matter movement and what that might look like if they had the lack of sensitivity that Palestinian overseas “allies” do in flaunting keffiyehs all over the place.

So why is this appropriation of Palestinian culture okay?

There is an explanation.

First, everything about overseas “pro-Palestinian” activism betrays every other value progressives claim to support. Palestinianism is fundamentally misogynistic, homophobic, violent, and anti-democratic. Progressives who align with that movement betray everything that they claim to believe.

Why would cultural appropriation (obviously a minor “crime” compared to the other values progressives betray to stand with Palestinians) be too jagged a pill for activists to swallow when they have no qualms allying with the ayatollahs?

What, though, does all this have to do with keffiyeh kitsch, with the fashy fashion statements of the junior jihadists at Columbia and McGill universities?

For many of these activists, Palestinians (and Israelis) are not actual people, but creations of their own disordered worldviews. Palestinians (and Israelis) are mere representations of perverted politics, archetypes of developed versus developing world peoples, stand-ins for Whites versus peoples of color, avatars of the advantaged versus disadvantaged.

These are silly simplifications but they fuel, as we see in the extremist campers on campus, an inferno of outraged activism.

As a result, stealing the symbol of Palestinians, the keffiyeh, is not real cultural appropriation since, to many of these activists, Palestinians are not people so much as, like the keffiyeh, mere symbols themselves.

Keffiyeh kitsch dehumanizes Palestinians. Yet White suburban college activists playing “Palestine” Barbie  —  and those who march alongside them  —  do not seem to see the problem.

Why is that?

Because this is not really about freeing “Palestine.” It is about almost everything else.

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