How Liberals Screwed Themselves
Liberals did not betray Jews by caring about Palestinians. They betrayed Jews by deciding they could not care about both.
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I grew up in a relatively liberal household in the suburbs of Los Angeles before I moved to Israel in 2013, at the age of 24.
Liberalism was not merely a political preference. It was presented as a moral framework that felt and sounded good.
That is what made the past several years so disorienting.
I watched people and institutions that had spent decades preaching universal principles discover exception after exception when Jews and Israel were involved.
The same people who insisted that minorities should define the hatred directed against them suddenly told Jews that antisemitism was not really antisemitism. The same movements that championed indigenous identity denied the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. The same activists who demanded moral clarity after violence against every other minority began offering context, qualifications, and excuses when Israelis were murdered.
I did not leave liberalism because I stopped believing in liberal values. I began losing faith in liberals because too many of them stopped applying those values to Jews.
That is the part they still do not understand. Their problem is not simply that Jews feel betrayed. Their problem is that, in betraying Jews, they exposed something much larger: Their principles were never as universal and wholesome as they claimed.
Liberalism did not lose its credibility because liberals criticized Israel. Israel is a country. Countries can be criticized. Governments can be condemned. Wars can be debated.
Rather, liberals lost their credibility because, when Jews and Israel became the test case, many of the principles they had spent decades presenting as universal suddenly became conditional.
Believe women — unless the women are Israeli. Protect minorities — unless the minority is Jewish. Respect indigenous peoples — unless the indigenous people are Jews returning to the land from which our civilization emerged. Oppose terrorism — unless the terrorists describe themselves as “resisting colonialism.” Defend national self-determination — unless the nation seeking it is the Jewish nation. Listen to marginalized communities when they describe the hatred directed against them — unless Jews call that hatred antisemitism.
The great liberal betrayal was not that liberals reached different conclusions about Israel. It was that they changed the rules.
For decades, liberal parties across the West built their moral authority around a simple promise: Principles apply to everyone.
Human rights are not reserved for people we like. Racism does not become acceptable when its target is politically unpopular. Sexual violence does not become less serious because acknowledging it complicates a preferred narrative. Civilians do not become legitimate targets because their government has done terrible things. Minority communities do not need to pass an ideological examination before society protects them.
Then came October 7th.
Jews did not merely watch Hamas invade Israel, murder civilians, take hostages, and attack entire communities. We watched much of the Western liberal ecosystem search almost immediately for a way to explain why this violence was different.
Before many of the victims had even been identified, the language of “human rights” was already being rearranged around the perpetrators. Murder became “resistance.” Kidnapping became “liberation.” The slaughter of families became the almost inevitable consequence of Israeli policy.
Context, liberals explained, was necessary.
Of course context is necessary. History matters. Palestinian suffering matters. Israeli policies matter. The conditions in Gaza matter. But context was not being used merely to understand the attack. It was frequently being used to reduce the moral responsibility of those who carried it out.
That was the first fracture in liberal credibility.
The same political culture that had spent years warning that explaining violence can become a way of excusing violence suddenly became remarkably interested in explanation when the victims were Jews. The same people who correctly insisted that discrimination against Muslims could not be justified by the actions of an Islamist organization began treating Jewish communities around the world as representatives of the Israeli government.
The liberal commitment to protecting minorities proved equally fragile.
Modern “progressive” politics developed an elaborate vocabulary for understanding prejudice. People were told to listen when minorities described their experiences. Intent mattered less than impact. Hatred could be systemic rather than explicit. Stereotypes could survive even when expressed in modern political language.
But Jews were often denied access to this framework. When Jews described antisemitism, we were told we were weaponizing it. When Jewish students said they felt unsafe, we were accused of trying to silence protest. When Jewish organizations explained that Zionism was deeply connected to the identity of much of the Jewish community, activists responded by searching for the small number of Jews who would tell them otherwise.
No other minority would be treated this way without liberals recognizing the tactic immediately: Find an approved member of the minority, elevate that person above the broader community, and use that person to invalidate everyone else.
Yet that became standard practice with Jews.
At Columbia University in New York, an official task force documented Jewish and Israeli students experiencing slurs, stereotypes, threats, assaults, exclusion from student organizations and double standards connected to their real or perceived relationship with Israel. At UCLA in Los Angeles, a federal court intervened after Jewish students were excluded from portions of campus when they would not renounce beliefs connected to Israel.
These were institutions that had spent years discussing inclusion, belonging, psychological safety and the obligation to protect vulnerable students. But when Jewish students needed those principles, administrators suddenly discovered nuance.
The contradiction became even more glaring in the response to sexual violence.
The slogan “believe women” was never supposed to mean that every allegation must be accepted without investigation. It meant that victims should be heard seriously rather than instinctively mocked, dismissed, or subjected to impossible standards of proof.
After October 7th, however, portions of the activist Left treated reports of sexual violence against Israeli women not merely with caution, but with hostility. Evidence was dismissed as propaganda. Testimony was treated as an Israeli public-relations strategy. People who would have considered such rhetoric grotesque in almost any other context repeated it confidently because the alleged perpetrators belonged to a group they had classified as oppressed.
That is not feminism. It is factionalism dressed as feminism.
The same collapse occurred with the liberal language of indigeneity and national self-determination.
Liberal parties routinely affirm that peoples possess collective identities. They defend the right of minorities to preserve their languages, traditions, historical memories, and connections to ancestral lands. They understand that displacement does not erase indigenous identity and that an exiled people does not become foreign simply because its exile lasted for generations.
Then they arrive at the Jews.
Suddenly Jewish history begins “in Europe.” Jewish connection to Jerusalem becomes mythology. Hebrew, the Bible, Jewish holidays, archaeological evidence, centuries of continuous Jewish presence, and the direction in which Jews prayed throughout exile are brushed aside.
Jews are transformed into generic Europeans who woke up one morning, selected a random piece of the Middle East, and decided to colonize it.
Indeed, much of the liberal Left could not tolerate that complexity. Its ideology required a settler and a native, a powerful group and a powerless group, an oppressor and an oppressed. Jews had to be placed in the first category. Once there, almost anything done to them could be reframed as resistance.
This is where liberalism began turning into its opposite.
Liberalism is supposed to protect individuals from collective guilt. Yet Jews around the world were expected to answer for an Israeli government they did not elect.
Liberalism is supposed to reject ethnic essentialism. Yet Jewish schools, restaurants, synagogues, and cultural events were treated as extensions of the Israeli state.
Liberalism is supposed to oppose the demand that minorities renounce part of their identity to gain acceptance. Yet Jews were increasingly told that we could remain welcome in “progressive” spaces only if they denounced Zionism, severed themselves from Israel, and proved that they were one of the “good Jews.”
Even the definition of Zionism was taken away from Jews.
For most Jews, Zionism means that the Jewish People possess the same right to collective self-determination claimed by other peoples. Liberals could have opposed particular forms of Zionism. They could have challenged borders, settlements, governments, and policies. Instead, many declared the entire idea uniquely illegitimate.
The message received by Jews was unmistakable: Everyone may define their own liberation except us.
This did not begin after October 7th. Britain’s Labour Party had already provided a warning. In 2020, Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission found the party responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination related to antisemitism. A movement founded to fight racism had created a culture in which many Jews felt they had to defend their own experiences against people who claimed superior expertise in oppression.
October 7th revealed that the problem was much larger than one British political party.
Across Europe, a major survey published by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 96 percent of Jewish respondents had encountered antisemitism during the year before the survey, while 80 percent believed antisemitism had worsened in their country over the previous five years. The survey data was collected before October 7th, and supplementary information from Jewish organizations indicated that the situation deteriorated afterward.
Yet too many liberals responded to Jewish fear by debating whether Jews had interpreted their own persecution correctly.
That is how the liberals screwed themselves: They spent decades constructing moral standards that allowed them to claim not merely that their policies were preferable, but that their movement represented decency itself.
Then they demonstrated that their decency had exceptions.
They taught the public that hate speech could cause violence, then defended eliminationist slogans as harmless rhetoric. They demanded that society believe minorities, then interrogated Jews about whether antisemitism was really antisemitism. They insisted that silence was violence, then became silent when acknowledging Jewish victims threatened their political coalition.
They opposed collective punishment, then treated random Jews as morally responsible for everything Israel did. They warned that Right-wing populists divided society into innocent insiders and dangerous outsiders, then created their own system in which some minorities were worthy of protection and others were presumed powerful enough to deserve hostility.
The political consequences were inevitable.
Jews, myself included, began losing faith in movements they had supported for generations. Moderates began recognizing that the language of universal justice concealed a deeply selective moral system. And the political right was handed an enormous opportunity to present itself as the only force willing to defend Jewish citizens and Western democratic values.
Some Right-wing politicians have exploited Jewish fear cynically. Some embrace Israel while tolerating antisemites within their own movements. Some defend Jews merely as a weapon against Muslims, immigrants or the left.
But liberals made that strategy possible. They vacated the moral ground and then complained when their opponents occupied it.
A serious liberal movement should be capable of opposing Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their chief patron: the Islamic Republic of Iran. A serious liberal movement should unequivocally defend Jewish communities. A serious liberal movement should celebrate Zionism, the most successful decolonial project on this planet.
That is what liberalism requires, but liberalism is precisely what too many liberals abandoned.
They replaced principles with a hierarchy. The lower a group was placed on that hierarchy, the more innocence it possessed. The higher it was placed, the less protection it deserved. Jews — viewed as “white,” successful, Western, and connected to a powerful state — were assigned the role of oppressor. Once that assignment was made, Jewish vulnerability became almost impossible for the ideology to process.
A synagogue could be threatened, but Israel existed. A Jewish student could be excluded, but Jews were privileged. An Israeli woman could be attacked, but Palestinians were “oppressed.” A Jewish child could be murdered, but there was context. This is not morality. It is an accounting system in which human worth rises and falls according to political usefulness.
Liberals believed they could apply their principles selectively without destroying those principles. They believed they could exclude Jews from universalism while continuing to call themselves universalists. They believed Jewish voters, writers, students, and institutions would tolerate being abandoned because the alternatives appeared worse.
They miscalculated — and the damage is not simply that Jews feel betrayed. The damage is that everyone can now see the betrayal.
Once a principle is revealed to have an ethnic exception, it is no longer a principle. Once human rights depend on the identity of the victim, they are no longer human rights. Once a movement decides that some forms of hatred are acceptable because the target has been classified as powerful, it can no longer credibly present itself as an opponent of hatred.
Liberals did not lose their credibility by caring about Palestinians. They lost it by acting as though caring about Palestinians required them to stop caring about Jews. They did not screw themselves by criticizing Israel. They screwed themselves by showing the world that, when the victims were Jewish, all their supposedly liberal ideals came with an asterisk.
No wonder so many people can no longer take liberals seriously.
Haven't you figured it out? The people you are describing aren't liberals. They are illiberal radicals. They have coopted the term. We mustn't let them. Leftists are inherently illiberal.
The hypocrisy is damning. I will never forget Columbia's former president, during the government hearings about justifying antisemitic campus actions, saying "It depends on the context." There is no context to anti-Semitism or racism. Traditional progressives knew that, but today's "progressives" are actually regressives.