The Left’s Israel problem isn’t policy. It’s stupidity.

When "progressives" preach human rights but excuse terrorists, you know there's something fundamentally rotten with their calculus.

photo: Sophie Popplewell/Unsplash

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There’s a comforting myth that “progressives” are the intellectual elite — the people who read more books, have a more educated background, and possess a deeper state of enlightenment than the rest of us.

But watch them talk about Israel for five minutes and that façade crumbles faster than a poorly built Hamas tunnel.

The sad truth is that the loudest “progressive” voices on Israel and the Jewish People often don’t understand even the basic vocabulary of the debate. They don’t know what genocide means. They scream it at every Israeli counterterrorism operation, even though Gaza’s population has been growing, and the only people who openly call for extermination are the very “victims” they romanticize. In their world, “genocide” simply means “someone I don’t like is fighting back.”

They also can’t see the glaring contradictions in their own arguments. One minute, they’ll insist that all of Israel is “occupied Palestinian land” — and the next, they’ll demand that Israel go back to its pre-1967 borders, which means they admit there was once something not occupied. They chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” which — unless they failed geography (possible) — leaves no room for Israel at all, while insisting they’re “not against Jews.” This is like shouting “Ban all oxygen!” and claiming you’re not against breathing.

“Progressives” also project like it’s an Olympic sport. They attack their political foes for “misinformation,” “intolerance,” and “politicizing tragedy” while doing all three in the same sentence. They accuse the pro-Israel camp of “blind loyalty,” yet they defend Hamas and the Palestinian Authority with a level of devotion that makes a cult look like a casual book club. They mock conservatives for “religious fundamentalism” while excusing theocratic extremism in Gaza because it’s “culturally authentic.”

Then there’s their relationship with history — or rather, with whatever half-remembered Wikipedia summary they skimmed last week. They see the phrase “Mandatory Palestine” on an old map and assume it means Palestine was mandatory forever, rather than a League of Nations Mandate administered by the British between the two world wars.

They preach about “colonialism” without realizing that Jews are the indigenous people of the land, whose presence predates Islam by over a thousand years. They think the Balfour Declaration was some sinister imperialist land grab, not a legal recognition of Jewish rights already established by international law.

Other examples pile up.

They share fake casualty statistics from Hamas as if they are gospel truth, then scoff when you point out Hamas has every incentive to lie.

They insist that Israel “must negotiate” with Hamas, a terrorist group whose founding charter literally calls for killing Jews, and then express shock that Israel doesn’t take that as a starting point for peace talks.

They rail against “Israeli apartheid” while ignoring that Israel’s Arab citizens vote, serve in the government, sit on the Supreme Court, and run hospitals — rights that Jews wouldn’t have in any Palestinian-run state.

They demand a “two-state solution” while endorsing a movement that chants for one state (and it’s not the Jewish one).

They invoke “international law” as if it’s a magic spell, but they clearly haven’t read it. Under the Law of Armed Conflict, civilian casualties do not automatically equal war crimes. You can almost see the gears grinding in their heads when you explain that proportionality in war doesn’t mean “equal body counts”; it means whether the military advantage outweighs the expected civilian harm. By their logic, the Allies committed genocide against Germany because more Germans died than Americans in World War II.

They pontificate about the Middle East like it’s a student council election, imagining that if leaders just “sat down and talked,” the centuries of ethnic, religious, and geopolitical conflict would dissolve over Turkish coffee and homemade hummus. They don’t understand that politics, especially in this region, is about power, leverage, and incentives, not “just being nice.”

They treat diplomacy like a group therapy session, assuming that both sides come in wanting the same thing. But in reality, one side openly states it wants the other gone, and the other side is trying to survive. They confuse moral outrage for political strategy, and in doing so, they consistently back ideas that are dead on arrival the moment they leave their protest signs.

They claim to fight racism, but in practice they often just reverse its direction. They’ve decided that prejudice is fine — as long as the target is white, or Jewish, or both. In their worldview, entire groups can be stereotyped, blamed, and held collectively guilty for the sins of history, as long as those groups are labeled “privileged.”

They justify antisemitism by lumping Jews in with “white colonizers,” even though millions of Jews are Middle Eastern, North African, or Ethiopian — and even though “whiteness” in progressive rhetoric is just a moving target to suit the politics of the day. This isn’t anti-racism. It’s just racism with a fresh coat of moral smugness.

They are obsessed with indigenous rights — unless the indigenous people are Jews. They’ll tell you with a straight face that a Palestinian whose grandparents moved to Jaffa in 1920 is “native,” but a Jew whose ancestors lived in Jerusalem for 3,000 years and was exiled by the Romans is a “colonizer.” This is historical illiteracy wrapped in identity politics.

They march for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. Then they excuse, ignore, or outright defend Palestinian factions that jail or execute the very same people in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s a moral split personality: One half carries a rainbow flag, the other half cheers for people who burn that flag.

They act as if Israel controls every inch of Gaza, even though Israel pulled out every soldier and settler in 2005. When you point out that Hamas has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, they blink like you’ve just given them a math problem.

They romanticize “resistance” without ever defining it. To them, resistance means anything Palestinians do, including massacring civilians in their homes, burning families alive, and kidnapping children. In any other context — say, white supremacists doing the same — they’d call it terrorism. But if the perpetrators claim to be anti-Israel, the moral calculus gets tossed out the window.

They chant about a ceasefire as if that ends the war. They have no plan for the “day after,” no answer for what happens when Hamas inevitably rebuilds and restarts the jihadist forever war. Their entire strategy is “just stop,” as if geopolitical conflicts are Netflix series you can pause and resume later.

They advocate ad nauseum for “universal human rights,” but that universality mysteriously evaporates when the victims are Israeli Jews. They’ll march for prisoners’ rights, demand due process for terrorists, and condemn solitary confinement in U.S. prisons — yet when Hamas starves, tortures, and sexually abuses Israeli hostages, they shrug or change the subject. In some cases, they even frame the hostages as bargaining chips Israel should “trade” away, as if human beings are poker chips. It’s a grotesque double standard: human rights for everyone, except the people they’ve decided aren’t worthy of them.

They claim to fight all forms of hate, but they rationalize antisemitism as “criticism of Israel,” even when Jews are attacked in New York, London, and Melbourne over a war happening thousands of kilometers away. Their mental gymnastics would be impressive if they weren’t so dangerous.

In fact, recent hate crimes data from the FBI shows that anti-Jewish hate crime incidents rose to the highest number ever recorded since the FBI began tracking in 1991. Jews make up around 2 percent of the U.S. population, yet reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for 16 percent of all hate crimes — and nearly 70 percent of all religion-based hate crimes in 2024.

This is staggering. And yet, progressives treat antisemitism as a side note while endlessly harping about Islamophobia, even though anti-Muslim incidents make up a fraction of those numbers. They claim to “follow the data,” but apparently only the data that flatters their preferred narrative. When the facts contradict their worldview, the facts get quietly ignored.

Let me be clear: This isn’t about disagreeing on policy details. This is about a movement whose loudest voices fundamentally don’t understand what they’re talking about — and don’t care to. They prefer emotional slogans to coherent arguments, and moral posturing to moral consistency. They’re not interested in the truth because the truth would require nuance, humility, and admitting they’ve been wrong at times.

Maybe it’s time we stop pretending that “progressives” hold the monopoly on intellect. Maybe it’s time to admit that, at least when it comes to Israel and the Jewish People, much of what passes for “progressive thought” is just lazy ignorance with a moral superiority complex.

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