How the Progressive Left Adopted Oppressive 'Palestine' – A Guide
How the Progressive Left Adopted Oppressive 'Palestine' – A Guide
Progressives have made “Palestine” so central to their worldview and activism that they ignore every other issue on Earth.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
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, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The marriage of “pro-Palestinian” and progressive activists may be the moral blunder of our era.
As the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war rages, progressives, feminists, gay-rights campaigners, and human-rights activists have made common cause with the most violent, misogynistic, homophobic, regressive, intolerant forces on Earth. Not only that; they have made it their top international affairs priority.
In fact, progressives have made “Palestine” so central to their worldview and activism that they ignore every other issue on Earth. While they rant about a concocted “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in “Palestine,” actual genocides and ethnic cleansings go unnoticed.
How could this happen? How could the very people who claim to be the moral compass of our societies and political movements have so thoroughly sided with antisemitism, terror, hatred, and perpetual war over coexistence, peace, antiracism and human decency?
There are too many reasons to delineate.
Perhaps the most obvious one is that, given a choice between siding with a movement that betrays their commitments to women, queers, democracy, nonviolence, and peace, or siding with Jews, they have decided to go with the former.
That plays a role in the following theory. But it is a bit more complex.
In a little less than a month — on September 28th — we will mark the 24th anniversary of the era we are currently in: The post-Oslo Accords era. It was on that date in 2000 when the Palestinians overthrew the negotiating table that was leading to a two-state solution and launched the Second Intifada.
In that moment, the world — most of all, peace-seeking activists, anti-racists, and progressives who in every other instance endorse talk over violence — should have risen as one and demanded that the Palestinians reject violence and return to negotiations.
They didn’t, and the bottom line is this: In that instant, when the Palestinians chose violence over negotiated peace and coexistence, the global Left veered off a cliff. On this most fundamental value — violence versus dialogue — the global Left sowed the seeds of destruction for its moral legitimacy.
Then what?
In life, sometimes, we see friends make grievous life choices. We try to guide them back to sensible approaches. They dig in their heels. They double down. They refuse to acknowledge their error and they destroy their life by insisting that the worst decision they ever made was, in fact, the right one. They invent fantastical scenarios to justify their errors.
That is the path of destruction the global Left has been on for 24 years.
The short explanation is that the global Left never really thought the violence that exploded on September 28th, 2000 was a turning point. They did not know it would lead to a quarter-century of terror and war — including the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war they are now wringing their hands over but for which they, the global Left, are almost as much to blame as the Hamas terrorists who started it.
Thinking it was a last spasm of violent strategy before a resolution, they decided to condone the violence that began that day, thinking that the Palestinians would return to negotiations with a strengthened hand if the Israelis knew they were prepared to revert to violence if necessary.
This was a fundamental misunderstanding. Palestinian violence was not a diversion from the path. It is the path. Palestinian leaders know only violence and terror. They do not understand negotiation.
Indeed, despite the fact that progressives always esteem talk over violence, a core tenet of the “pro-Palestinian” narrative is that dialogue was never going to work in this instance. Why? Because no one stands a chance against those people in a negotiation.
Of course, this is a jagged pill to swallow for people whose self-identity is completely wrapped up in self-congratulatory visions of peace, coexistence, and anti-racism. So progressives needed to justify their crime by inventing a narrative of Israel that was so venal it excuses their betrayal of every value they claim to endorse.
The global Left, in cahoots with radical Islam and far-Right antisemites, set out to devise a perversion of the facts that would excuse their grievous moral transgressions. They had to invent a mythology of Israel so degenerate that it exempted us from culpability for their indefensible corruption on an issue as central as endorsing mass murder, rape, beheadings, immolations, and the assorted mayhem summed up by the popular chant: “By any means necessary!”
They started with “apartheid,” a smear so preposterous that it should have disqualified the Left from any serious engagement on this issue. And yet, because of the astonishing gullibility of the people they are talking about, this actually gained traction, leading activists to throw anything against the wall to see what stuck.
If you have read my precious gems in the past, you will know that one of my hobby horses is confronting the nonsense that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Here is a perfect example of where that assumed tautology falls down.
The relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not: “We hate Jews, therefore we hate Israel.” That is not how this works. No. The way antisemitism impacts on anti-Zionism is that we come from a civilization (humankind) that is predisposed to believe the most outlandish lies about Jews. So when we hear the most despicable mistruths about Israel, we think: “That seems about right.”
When haters saw how quickly the apartheid libel was swallowed by susceptible minds in the activist set, they started throwing everything including the kitchen sink.
They accused Israel of “settler colonialism” and “imperialism” — terms that a first-year political science student with any brains would recognize as completely inapplicable.
Again, though, the target audience for these fabrications are so ravenous for rationalizations to validate their endorsement of violence and hatred that they latched on to these idiocies with relish.
Finally, having engaged for years in the most hysterical hyperbole humankind can invent, progressives finally arrived at the summit: genocide.
We come from a civilization where Jews have, for centuries, been accused of perpetrating the greatest crimes known to humankind. Across history and geography, Jews have been accused of being literally the embodiment of the devil on Earth. That extraordinary race-hatred is in our civilizational DNA. And we see it constantly today in images of Jews with horns, fangs, and other demonic characteristics. Israelis, do I mean? Sure, if we want to be specific, but that is precisely the conflation that proves my point.
Genocide is literally the greatest crime known to humankind. It is also a word that had to be invented to describe the 20th-century history of the Jewish People. And it is no coincidence that it is now debased and instrumentalized against the very people for whom it had to be created.
It is yet another example of our society’s mental disorder around anything Jew. We are unable to assimilate the societal lessons of the Holocaust, so we dodge that little moral conundrum by accusing the victims of perpetrating the crime. Hey Presto! Two-fer-one: We don’t have to think about that pesky Holocaust anymore and we get to win the “Palestine” contest by playing as dirty and low as a cheater can go.
The moral depravity is almost unimaginable.
Reasonable people have spent a great deal of time trying to understand how progressive people could align with the most regressive movement on the planet. Queers for Palestine. Feminists affiliating with the most women-hating oppressors on Earth. Peace activists endorsing rape, live burnings of human beings, and decapitations as “resistance.”
Trying to make order out of what is, at root, a psychosocial disorder is a losing battle. It is trying to make sense of the nonsensical. The Palestinian movement (at least the part made up of erstwhile progressive activists) is the embodiment of a social sickness. We cannot explain it or reason with it.
All we can do is acknowledge it — because we have not seemed to articulate this disorder.
You nailed it. The root antisemitism is the exclusive standard applied to Israel. No matter what Israel does, it’s wrong. It’s not humane enough. No other country is held to this standard.
It doesn’t help that the hostages and Oct 7 are barely a footnote for most and for many it’s something to applaud. When you see with your own eyes videos of Hamas behavior and the crowds around them and how proud they are, how could any rational person conclude that these are outliers? Or more incredibly yet, fakes. The Jews are also hiding videos by not posting everything even without the consent of the families involved. There’s no escape from criticism bc every standard applies even conflicting ones.
Then you spread out the antisemitism by alleging that any Jew who supports Israel or doesn’t dramatically denounce it is likewise depraved. The Jews who renounce Israel entirely may temporarily be useful or escape the tornado of a pitchfork mob but we’ve seen how exclusionary the forces of self proclaimed decency can be for anyone in the Star of David crowd. Having lgbt or socialist bona fides doesn’t even help.
Hamas butchered and mutilated and raped and tortured a group of dancing young people. They beheaded Thai workers. They shot Muslims. They took infants and grandparents as hostages. Other than drinking blood, not sure what was left to be done in this barbaric orgy which served no military purpose. And what a place to take revenge- the peacenik kibbutzniks on the border. The analogy would be Israel going into Gaza and targeting the dissidents.
Just being a native Israeli is an indictment. Sell your soul to the devil and he’ll renegotiate the terms. I have never met or encountered or read about an anti Zionist with anything close to a consistent standard. Israel is the big Satan always. The eternal other. Communist capitalist. Both and. A tiny country made to symbolize the blackness of history to swallow all the current problems in the world into its blob and to embody every angry resentful and conspiratorial sentiment.
I listen to well intentioned people read the land statement for the native Americans but don’t see anyone giving up that land or offering anything resembling real compensation. The offense of the Jews is Jewish nationalism. They’re surrounded by far more nationalistic Muslim entities. The rage at jewish nationalism makes no sense outside the scope of anti semitism.
Jews were sent into exile from Israel making them the opposite of settlers which makes one ask when native Americans will not be worthy of a land acknowledgement. When does a land claim expire? Palestinians have been used as pawns and have against the tide of history’s generally relocated or resettled refugees become multi generational long term refugees. Why not the Jews then? We also have expulsion from Europe and the Middle East on our belts. But we never prayed to return to those places. People are offended if you say there was never a Palestinian country or anything resembling it and that the term is Roman. But that is the truth. There’s an entire mythology created around Palestinians and it is a mythology. The truth is more like natives conquered/dominated by different groups over the course of history and some having relocated at the time of heavy jewish migration. Most Jews arrived with the expectation of coexistence. Frankly they were in no position not to.
The idea that a country should be there was floated multiple times rejected every time typically with war and it’s simply not true Palestinians have only been unhappy with the Jewish presence. They are treated horribly in Lebanon. Rebelled in Jordan. Obviously not referring to every Palestinian. Everyone knows that the ideal solution would be for the region to have a deep buffer for Israel and the rest controlled by Egypt and Jordan securely but that’s the rub. They don’t want the area and the people who’ve come with it. Egypt has shut its border (Israel checkpoints a border for good reason and this is never weighed against Egypt entirely closing it) but it’s an insecure border as far as weapons smuggling is concerned. Why would creating a Palestinian state end the warfare? If someone can’t answer that why advocate it? It’s no more ridiculous than advocating a separate country for ISIS so they stop planning attacks. The Palestinians aren’t supporting Hamas so they can get a state. They’re supporting Hamas to obliterate Israel. Did someone other than Hamas write their charter? Where was the yearning for a state before Jews came? The Middle East was carved up horribly by colonial powers. I have no problem seeing why Israel is linked to this past bc about half were of more recent European descent but assigning a small sliver of land to Jewish refugees including many middle eastern Jews who ultimately were forced to flee Arab lands was no more arbitrary than other population transfers like when India was partitioned or the horrible impractical lines the colonial powers cut through the Middle East to placate unelected royals.
I don’t see a deep spiritual connection to most of Israel on the part of Palestinians but no doubt some were native to the region and were there before Jewish people arrived making much of the land more arable and malaria free. The attachment to all of Israel is an invention and the Arabs could’ve settled every Palestinian decades ago. They want the wound of Palestinian limbo open and theres a phoniness- they don’t want to absorb this population they call brothers. I honestly don’t get it.
People have a very mistaken idea of the relatively small size of the population even then and how much it’s grown thanks to the foreign aid that helps allow for it (even with the Hamas theft to build tunnels and weapons)
The entire ottoman and Muslim conquests are erased from history. The same way we’ve had people dangerously try to erase the idea that biological sex exists (not to advance science but to compel a social political agenda to decree under threat of real punishment that if someone feels a certain gender and have had surgery then they are that biological sex. But there’s a difference between entirely or selectively accepting someone’s life choice or tolerating it in all or most domains(most Americans are really live and let live)and having to say something you don’t believe at all or to endanger someone medically because you can’t acknowledge there are biological sex based differences. Right now we simply cannot change most of our dna barring some small advances in genetic engineering. Maybe one day in the far future that will change.
How society deals with this issue shouldn’t be based on the idea that biological sexual dimorphism doesn’t exist for almost all humans. The more demonstrably false ideas come into the fore with a guarding ax against those who disagree the more contorted the debate becomes the more humans are divided into rigid cliques. Definitions matter.
Likewise, genocide can’t be redefined to mean literally any aspect of war decontextualizing allowed or it’s an entirely useless term and it’s nothing short of evil to accuse Jews of this and reeks of holocaust whitewashing especially because Hamas has made its genocidal intentions clear in word and deed and has unfortunately garnered a large amount of support among Palestinians who’ve been educated in this mindset since birth. There is no aha because no matter how genocide is defined the anti semitic crowd will just say that’s Israel’s goal and no amount of reality will change that.
It’s vague and nebulous in the logic world but crystal and rigid in the world of feeling. If Hamas throws people off buildings, if they steal aid from their people, if they use their own as human shields, if they deliberately put others in harm’s way, this is all part of the Oct 7 non genocidal resistance. Bc by this definition resistance means everything one does literally everything is justified and never read as part of a sequence but rather as the reaction to pinpoints (including highly exaggerated distorted or false calamities) on a timeline. To adapt to that sinister mindset you really have to demonize the other to a point of impossibility. The fantasy of the resistance is you’ll vanquish the demon. What then? What society would Hamas build? A fascist terror kleptocracy where Palestinians suffer on the whole. I’m all ears to hear otherwise.
I don’t sympathize with Palestinians generically. Having Palestinian civilians cheer Hamas brutalizing women and children and even holding them
Hostage themselves means something is grievously wrong in the society as a whole and won’t change except through resistance.
I sympathize with Palestinians who are innocent and stuck in this hell. But it’s not a majority and that needs to be said. Of course no one applauds or should applaud the death of civilians just bc they support an evil cause. Hamas aims to maximize civilian casualties. It’s human sacrifice of your own on a wide scale. The west won’t look this in the eye. For shame.
I just have a very different idea of how it needs to work. The west should want absolute defeat of Hamas and predicate any aid on the total denazification of Palestinian schools. They can still receive aid from places like Qatar which sadly support nazification.
It’s not difficult to see a Middle East with Israeli Palestinian collaboration to some extent but it absolutely cannot happen without major change. The west is floating mindlessly in fantasies and status quo conformity. Embedded in this is a total disregard for human life Israeli and Palestinian for useless expediency. Anti semitism will continue to grow in this moral fog.
The Palestinian cause was invented by the Arab world which enlisted the help of Marxists to "sell" it to Western audiences. A famous Palestinian activist, Edward Said, who was a self-admitted Marxist educated at Harvard, made the case in his book "Representations of the Intellectual". It was a huge success amongst left-leaning media and so-called intellectuals who already had far too much influence in Western society. This book was the subject of a term paper I wrote 24 years ago for a propaganda course in university. In it, I specified the tactics Said used to influence his Western readers. Those tactics have since become the playbook for Palestinian propaganda. Unfortunately, this false playbook is now so entrenched in the public psyche that nothing short of a miracle will change it. Which is why I believe Israel should just do whatever it takes to survive and rid our land of the Pallies through termination of Iran's proxies, policing, Jewish settlement of Gaza/Judea/Samaria and gradual deportation or termination of Pally civilians who practice Jew-hatred and violence in whatever form. If Israel is smart and tough, I don't think anyone will attack her to "save" any Palestinians because in the end, they were never a true "cause". They were (and still are) just a propaganda tool of the Islamo/Leftist alliance.