Pro-Palestinians and Communists and Terrorists — Oh my!

The ancient Chinese taught us: “Know your enemy.” Too bad many of us have not been listening.

photo by Daniel Pelaez Duque

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This is a guest essay written by Masha Kleiner, a Canadian Zionist writer.

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

Share this essay using this link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/pro-palestinians-communists-and-terrorists-oh-my

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I have a confession: I did not know who Ben Freeman was until the day his photographs were plastered all over the University of British Columbia campus.

The captions under the photographs referred to him as a Zionist, a genocide supporter, and a baby murderer. Obviously, I could not miss an event with such a speaker.

The protesters’ screams were audible well before I reached the Hillel building where the event was to take place. About 20 people were pacing in circles on the sidewalk by the entrance, chanting, and shouting “Shame!” at anyone heading towards the door. As if in a parody, I saw a Palestinian flag waving right next to a rainbow one.

About eight years ago, in a photo of protests in Oxford, I saw the “Queers for Palestine” poster for the very first time. Back then I chuckled, thinking these are stupid idealists with an original initiative.

Prior to October 7th, like many others, I naively assumed that the Arab-Israeli conflict was between Arabs and Israelis or Muslims and Jews. In the aftermath of October 7th it became apparent however that this is not the case, and “Queers for Palestine” is not a coincidence, but rather a pattern.

The unending protests and demonstrations of the last months have clearly shown how deeply has the pro-Palestinian narrative embedded itself into the narratives of all minorities and activists.

Every character of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. Indigenous people. Black people. Feminists. Eco-activists. Worker unions, teachers, and doctors unions. Everyone and their dog have already explained this through the binary “oppressor versus oppressed” struggle paradigm that the pro-Palestinian movement has adopted.

“Are you oppressed? It means you are just like the Palestinians, come, join our fight for justice!”

Justice is a very powerful word, and once pronounced, it magically conveys to the listeners the significance and the greatness of the cause. Give someone a gun and tell them to shoot people, and they are likely to refuse. Quite the opposite, if they believe they are fighting injustice — they will pull the trigger ahead of the command.

But how has the story of some Middle Eastern Arabs come to symbolize the universal struggle for justice? Why did Western youth respond to this specific call? It has not and they did not.

The answer was right in front of my nose, blocking the entrance to Ben Freeman’s “Jewish Pride After October 7th” talk. In this truly caricature-like group of protesters, following the Palestinian and rainbow flags, two people marched with a banner reading “Intifada until victory” and decorated with a hammer and sickle symbols; several others carried red flags with a hammer and sickle.

They circled in a steady rhythm, chanting, “Israel, Canada, f*ck your flag, Gazans have to live in rag.” I give credit where credit is due; this chant rhymes and covers a lot of ground in a single line: specifically “anti-Zionism” (i.e. Israel) and generally anti-imperialism (i.e. Canada), but most importantly, it is about the worker class struggle!

I draped an Israeli flag over my shoulders and, amidst their furious “Shame!” screams, walked through their circle. Sometimes it takes looking evil straight in the face to recognize it.

The Socialists-Marxists club with about 300 members has existed at the University of British Columbia for decades. Their original “One Solution: Revolution” slogan has wholeheartedly absorbed the word “Intifada,” resulting in: “There is only one solution: Intifada Revolution.”

Unfortunately, the local communists are not packing and leaving for China; instead they aspire to build communism right here. Since October, the communist movement has been gaining momentum; two out of the three accounts that called for protests against Ben Freeman’s talk were created just shortly before the event itself. The memes on their pages claim that the system is beyond salvation and can only be destroyed, painfully resembling the infamous socialist Internationale:

“We will destroy the whole world to its foundations.”

Were these people transported here straight from the 1920s by a quirky creator of a time machine?

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It was in 1921 when the Communist Party of Canada was founded. It was banned during World War II, renamed to bypass the ban, then restored its original name. The Communist Party of Canada ran for government with enviable persistence, but little glory — only once throughout the entire history of the party, in 1945, a single communist Member of Parliament was elected, only to be removed from his position two years later and imprisoned for espionage.

Like many other communist movements, the Communist Party of Canada lost its zeal and spark following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It could have perished, but in 1993 the conservative Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney decided to deregister the party and seize its assets. For communists, their purpose lies in the struggle! They have been upholding the legal battle for 13 years, won, and continue to exist.

For several decades, many of us naively believed that socialism was defeated. Perhaps not as regimes worldwide, but as an idea. Weren’t its shortcomings evident to everyone?!

Meanwhile, socialists were regrouping and preparing for a new battle. The revival of Marxist movements in the West, including in Canada, dates back to the early 2000s. The concurrent rise of numerous anti-Israel movements, including the infamous antisemitic BDS movement, is not a mere coincidence.

A brief disclaimer: Mainstream media chooses to call these movements “pro-Palestinian.” They themselves use the words “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel” interchangeably. The leaders of the struggle for Palestinian rights view Palestinian rights as synonymous with the destruction of Israel. The cause itself was invented as a facade for Israel’s destruction.

In 1947, the decisive voice at the United Nations supporting the creation of the State of Israel belonged to the Soviet Union. Comrade Stalin believed that the Jews would build true communism in Israel.

He was mistaken. The Jews settled for kibbutz and accessible healthcare but steered clear of a one-party dictatorship and the Gulag.

Stalin took great offense at this and initiated persecutions against the Soviet Jews in the early 1950s. Stalin, fortunately, died in 1953, but the animosity towards Israel outlived him.

“Zionist aggression” and “Zionist occupiers” libels were widespread in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, and the anti-Israel caricatures from Soviet times could rival those of the Nazi Germans and the contemporary pro-Palestinians. There is nothing novel in today’s anti-Israel rhetoric.

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Socialists of the past century hoped that the oppressed working class would rebel and fight the darn capitalists, but the working class, in its majority, wanted eight-hour shifts, paid sick leave, and annual vacation. The working class did not want to burn down the factories, so the global revolution, envisioned by the Soviet Bolsheviks, never materialized.

During the decline of the Soviet Union, socialists came up with the idea of generalizing the revolutionary cause to include more than the working class struggle. Socialists have been teaming up with the Arabs in their struggle to annihilate Israel long before the 2000s.

The ignorant students of today wrap themselves in keffiyehs and praise Islam, not realizing that the keffiyeh gained recognition as a symbol of Yasser Arafat, a notably non-religious leader of the terrorist organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO was founded in 1964, and the Soviet Union was one to provide it with military and financial support. Not once the members of the PLO were exposed as KGB agents.

Shortly after, following the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel, another secular organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), emerged. Its founding principle is pan-Arabism and resistance to Western imperialism.

In its early days, the PFLP adopted Marxist-Leninist ideology and garnered support from the Soviet Union and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, the PFLP became notorious for airplane hijackings and suicide bombings.

The PFLP went from being a PLO faction to drifting apart and finally diverging during the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace accords, due to disagreements over the necessary degree of hostility towards Israel. It did not, however, prevent both organizations from jointly participating in the Second Intifada and claiming numerous innocent lives, both Israeli and Palestinian.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the PFLP (without abandoning its secular Marxist ideals) aligned itself with the radical Islamic regime of Iran and its proxies. Truly, hatred towards Jews can reconcile even the most irreconcilable.

The designation of the PFLP as a terrorist organization in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Japan in 2012 resulted in PFLP leaders establishing another organization, Samidoun. Its official objective is the release from prison of all Palestinian terrorists, including the bloodiest murderers serving life sentences. Its true mission is the liberation of “Palestine” from the river to the sea, by all means necessary. “The end justifies the means,” where “end” stands for the end of Israel.

It is hard to imagine a more evident demonstration of the alliance between anti-Israeli Arabs and Western Marxist-Socialists than Samidoun. Its leaders are Khaled Barakat, a PFLP leader and Palestinian Arab, and his wife Charlotte Kates, a socialist from New Jersey.

The alliance also manifests in funding: Far-Left funds, closely linked with the Cuban and North Korean communist regimes and socialists in Central America, sponsor Samidoun and a dozen other anti-Israeli organizations. The same funds also sponsor projects of racial, environmental, and LGBTQ+ activism.

The rhetoric of uprising, resistance, and revolution has been endowed upon all causes by the resurgence of socialism. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” and so socialists need many allies. This is precisely why the enthusiastic young folks with purple hair, who initially mean no harm and whose main fault is a complete lack of critical thinking, will be the first to be thrown overboard by the revolution, like unnecessary ballast.

“Pro-Palestinian” Arabs, on the other hand, are much more useful comrades in the revolutionary struggle of the socialists. Neither have the capability or the desire to create or build anything. The essence of revolution is the opposite — demolition and destruction.

I hope to live long enough to see the day when they start demolishing each other.

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