White Savior Complex: How Activism Is Killing Palestinians
Perpetuating this conflict, rather than solving it, is in the self-interest of "White Saviors." Without dead Palestinians, their entire purpose in life would disappear.
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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.
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You do not hear much about White Savior Complex these days.
That’s weird, because it is rampant right now.
The reason we may not be hearing much about it is because it is precisely the people who would normally be condemning this unprogressive behavior who are feverishly practicing it.
White Savior Complex (or the White Savior Industrial Complex) is a retrogressive tactic in which ostensible allies usurp the voices of the people they presume to be helping, talk over them and on their behalf, and basically do exactly what progressives were supposed to have unlearned years ago.
Nova Reid, author of “The Good Ally: A Guided Anti-Racism Journey from Bystander to Changemaker,” wrote a while back on this subject:
“There’s an impulsive desire to fix, to be the hero of the story, to swoop in and rescue and, for some, it also comes from a place of superiority and/or a desire to be forgiven. It feeds into something called the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’ — a term first coined by Harvard professor and novelist Teju Cole in 2012.”1
And here is how Cole described it: “White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice, it’s about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege … There is much more to doing good work than ‘making a difference.’ There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.”
White Savior Complex is rampant in activists’ approaches to Palestinians, as we will discuss more below. But the question is: Why is this trend so prevalent in this one instance?
There is the rhetoric, for one thing. If our fight is against “colonialism” and “imperialism” — things we thought we had largely overcome in the last century — then we are turning back the hands of time. (Never mind that Israel is not an empire nor a colonial enterprise. A middling first-year political science student should know this.)
If we are returning our activism to an earlier time — the time of postwar decolonization — our tactics might also regress. This is why the mania for donning Palestinian keffiyehs, a form of cultural appropriation that should be as wildly inappropriate as blackface in our political discourse, is experiencing a wildly successful zenith.
Again, though: Why?
Because: Jews.
We treat Jews differently than we treat everyone else. The fact that the Palestinians are up against Israelis (Jews) is why we treat Palestinians differently, too.
Probably the most prevalent trope of antisemitism is the idea of “Jewish power.” If you subscribe to this “Jewish power” concept (even unconsciously — and almost anyone who is a product of Western civilization, to some extent, does) then, certainly, some extraordinary means would be necessary to defeat them, right?
“By any means necessary” is the mantra of Palestinian activists. It means no rules apply. Mass murder? Rape? Immolation? Decapitation? Kidnapping? “Hell yeah. Any means necessary baby!”
The very essence of humanity that is ostensibly the heart of our progressive movements is obliterated when it comes to this issue.
What rational explanation could there be for this?
Wrong question. Do not expect rationality to get you out of a problem irrationality got you into.
It is racism. Anti-Jewish racism.
The flipside of the Jewish power motif is Palestinian powerlessness. Springing from the motif of Palestinian powerlessness and the antisemitic supposition of Jewish power is a phenomenon in which overseas “allies” infantilize Palestinians in ways we do with no other people on earth.
This idea of total powerlessness means that Palestinians, like crying infants, are never blamed for their predicaments, never expected to take any responsibility for their situation. By extension, overseas activists are freed to treat Palestinians like hopeless, helpless, feeble invalids.
Listen to the rhetoric and you will notice that Western activists view and treat Palestinians as some sort of single cell organism incapable of agency, able only to respond to external stimuli. This dehumanizing imagery, which is at the absolute core of the Palestinian narrative worldwide, is in evidence every time grisly acts of violence, like October 7th, are justified based on Palestinian “frustration.”
Palestinians and Israelis are, for many of these activists, symbols, not actual humans.
Jews and Israelis are the embodiment of developed world privilege. Palestinians are the quintessence of downtrodden developing world people (despite decades of drowning in billions of foreign aid that their terrorist leaders have pissed away fabulously).
If we do not see these people as human, but as metaphors or avatars, obviously our humanity (and theirs) will suffer accordingly.
This is why so many overseas activists seem prepared to continue this conflict to the last dead Palestinian — because when you see people as a cause, rather than as fully formed humans, being right trumps life itself.
This is especially evident in the Palestinian Martyrdom World Cup, where self-proclaimed humanitarians score the number of dead on both sides and declare Palestinians the landslide winners (and moral victors) because they have more dead. (They would, presumably, like to see more dead Jews, but dead Palestinians serve their purpose, too.)
The activists of the “pro-Palestinian” movement, like the campus campers, are mostly in it for the thrills. Many or most of them have no idea what the issues are. And yet they are driven to unprecedented levels of hysteria based on little more than ignorance and hyperbole. (You know: “Genocide!” “Apartheid!” “Stolen land!”)
The irony of all this is that the very people who (consciously or not) believe they are “saving” Palestinians are perpetuating their statelessness, dispossession, and death.
This is surprisingly obvious to anyone viewing the “pro-Palestinian” movement with a dispassionate eye. So why cannot the activists see the problem they are so emphatically propagating?
Because it is all about them. White Savior Complex is not about helping others, it is about feeling good about yourself. In this upended worldview, dead Palestinians paradoxically give these saviors a sense of meaning.
As a result, you can see why perpetuating this conflict, rather than solving it, is in the self-interest of White Saviors. Without dead Palestinians, their entire purpose in life would disappear.
Which is why I always use scoff quotation marks around the term “pro-Palestinian.”
“No more white saviours, thanks: how to be a true anti-racist ally.” The Guardian.
A perspective I hadn't considered, and very thought-provoking.
Bingo! Nailed it! Same with White Supremacist", o "White Inferiorists" -as I call them, since they believe that the act of thinking, or reasoning is a criminal offense, punishable by death!