With Pro-Pals Like These, Who Needs Enemies?
How the pro-Palestine movement harms its own cause
This piece is by contributor Johan Pregmo.
The incendiary political climate surrounding Israel/Palestine since October 7th, 2023 needs no introduction. For the better part of a year, the war in Gaza has dominated the discourse and maintained a fever pitch of emotional intensity like few issues in recent memory. Amid the blistering outrage of the war’s most vocal critics, one of the world’s most intractable and longstanding conflicts gets reduced to a bumper sticker. The Western, pro-Palestinian left takes a complex history spanning over 75 years and more than a dozen wars and armed conflicts and collapses it into a simplistic moral binary in which Israel is the evil, oppressive empire and Palestine is the helpless, oppressed victim. Indeed, the loudest voices on the front lines of the pro-Palestine movement see themselves as kindred spirits of the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars, the resistance fighters from The Hunger Games, and the Fremen from Dune. This is the level of sophistication they bring to the issue.
None of this should be especially surprising given that the core of the Western Palestine movement is driven by young people. They believe a fictional version of history in which Israel is a white European colonial project, never mind the fact that half of Israeli Jews are Middle Eastern Mizrahis or that 18 percent of Israelis are Muslim. They don’t know which “river” or “sea” they’re chanting about. They don’t know that the Palestinians rejected a chance at a state of their own on no less than five occasions, each time preferring war to peace. But The Hunger Games — that they know. And so they engage in the most loathsome behaviors, trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, harassing random Jews, and rolling their eyes at rape victims without regard for principles or decency. The worst part is, none of this is even about Palestine.
You can tell a lot about what people actually believe by looking not at what they say, but at what they do. And just like pro-life “family values” congressmen who secretly get abortions for their mistresses, we can see by the actions of pro-Palestine protesters that they don’t really care about the cause to which they profess. They may think they do, but their actions do not reflect a sincere desire for lasting peace. The movement is not just immature and profoundly unserious — its atrocious behavior and lack of clear goals actively works against the interests of the Palestinian people.
I used to think that anti-Zionism was separate from anti-Semitism, but October 7th changed that. After seeing the naked anti-Semitism of the pro-Palestine movement spring to life on October 8th, before Israel had even responded to Hamas’s attacks, I began to question my priors. I saw actual swastikas on display. I saw demonstrators justifying the slaughter at the Nova Music Festival. I saw protesters throwing Hitler salutes. I saw Holocaust memorials defaced, holocaust ceremonies picketed, and Jewish businesses attacked despite no apparent ties to Israel. At a certain point, it became impossible to deny: a virulent hatred of both Israel and Jews is rampant in the pro-Palestine movement.
Whenever these blatantly anti-Semitic actions are called out, we hear the familiar chorus of “anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism.” But with every heil Hitler shouted at a protest, it becomes less and less credible. If this overwhelmingly leftist movement was consistent with its own purported anti-fascist values, such anti-Semitism would be swiftly shut down and forcefully kicked out of the movement, not downplayed or denied. Years ago, there seemed to have been some daylight between anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. Right now, the Venn diagram between the two is fast approaching a perfect circle. For all the valid criticisms that could be levied at the Israeli government, it has sadly become rational for Israelis and American Jews (91 percent of whom are Zionists) to feel that anti-Zionists are simply anti-Semites.
The fact that the pro-Palestine movement is fine harboring racists isn’t just a moral problem — it works against their own stated goals. When the most vocal and visible advocates are the worst people imaginable — tearing down hostage posters, blocking traffic, telling Jews to “go back to Germany”, and protesting an exhibit for massacred partygoers — any sane observer will be turned off. Viewed from the perspective of wanting Palestinians to have a real shot at peace and an independent state of their own, the movement’s repellent antics and lack of realistic and achievable goals make no sense.
If, however, we view the Western pro-Palestine movement not as a serious campaign for justice, but rather as a masturbatory exercise in virtue exhibitionism, the pieces begin to click into place. Evaluated by their behavior, the real goal of the protesters is not to affect change, but to be seen among their peers as a Good Person™ who is opposed to all the Bad Things™ — colonialism, fascism, capitalism, you name it. The war in Gaza is just the latest convenient excuse to take to the streets and call for revolution — or in this case, intifada.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. The activist left has always been a haven for the rudderless children of the upper-middle class with a penchant for role-playing. Whether it’s burning cities and decapitating pigs to defund the police, or defacing the Mona Lisa and Stonehenge to stop fossil fuels, the point isn’t to find a realistic path to change. The point is to gorge on what Aldous Huxley once described as “the most delicious of moral treats”:
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. [...] To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
What makes Israel/Palestine unique is the combination of issues it weaves together in the minds of young leftists. Pro-Palestine activism ties the war in Gaza to Western imperialism, Islamophobia, US-style racial identity politics, and anti-Americanism. Israel, in this view, is an apartheid state, a settler colonial regime as bad as the Nazis, genocide and all. That European colonialism never once involved a land where the colonists had cultural and religious ties dating back thousands of years, not to mention a continuous presence, or that imperialism is in no way specific to white European countries, is lost in the shuffle. As is the fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict is more geopolitical than religious (Israel has normalized relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, both deeply religious Muslim nations).
The accusation of apartheid likewise falls flat upon considering that Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Israeli Jews. As for the absurd charge of genocide, much has been made of the case brought against Israel by South Africa in the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ), as though the mere accusation of genocide was ironclad evidence. But far from proving these serious allegations, the president of the ICJ who presided over the case clarified that it “didn't decide the claim of genocide was plausible.”
What illustrates the anti-Israel fetish on the Western left is the near total apathy for the world’s many other — and often far worse — humanitarian crises. Where is the outcry over the Yemeni Civil War, a war involving slave-owning terrorists that has seen 377,000 dead? Where are the protests over the Syrian Civil War, which saw a staggering 617,000 dead? Or the ongoing oppression of the Uyghur Muslims in China? Or the Sudanese Civil War? Not a peep. None of this is meant as a whataboutism. 600,000 dead in some other war doesn’t give Israel carte blanche to kill civilians. But to have activists so passionate about one conflict that they’re literally setting themselves on fire while completely ignoring all others is eye opening. It’s hard to see the Palestine movement as a principled opposition to oppression and civilian casualties rather than an unhealthy fixation on the world’s only Jewish state.
For all that the pro-Palestine movement calls for “peace” and “ceasefire”, they have little to say about Hamas’s role in the violence. Imagine if Hamas laid down its arms in surrender instead of trading Palestinian civilian lives for anti-Israeli PR. Imagine a Gandhi-like peaceful Palestinian resistance. The international pressure behind them would be overwhelming. Israel would lose all justification and have no choice but to back down. But Hamas would rather continue seeing their own people butchered in the crossfire of urban warfare, because Hamas doesn’t want peace or coexistence — they want the complete eradication of Israel and the Jewish people. And the Western leftists who support them don’t want a negotiated peace — they want Israel abolished, with no thought for what would happen to the Jews living there now. The pro-Palestine movement does not want a Mandela-like figure building reconciliation. They want a Robespierre-style revolutionary to burn the entire system to the ground.
Consider, by contrast, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. Although fiercely controversial at the time, King’s activism and the broader protest movement of which he was a part ultimately paved the way for reforms that ended Jim Crow. How? Because King had a brilliant strategy with a clearly defined, achievable vision. With a principled commitment to non-violence, protesters forced the authorities to make the first aggressive move and thus traded their own suffering to change hearts and minds and create political pressure. It was brave, intelligent, and most importantly, effective, because the movement had concrete goals and a realistic method for getting there. None of this ethos is present in the pro-Palestine protests. They would much rather chant “there is only one solution” or pointlessly occupy a university building and then demand the administrators feed them. There’s a reason why the protesting intensified the moment the weather got warm and finals were around the corner. It’s all so endlessly sophomoric.
In a saner world, I would be a moderate on Israel. I oppose the settlements in the West Bank and think that Israel’s far-right Likud party and its obstinate leader Benjamin Netanyahu have been obstacles to peace. I believe in a two-state solution, and acknowledge that in this long and bloody conflict, neither side’s hands are clean. But because the far left would rather engage in apologia for terrorists than learn the most basic nuances of the conflict, I come across as a pro-Israel hawk, which is a sign of how unhealthy the discourse has become. Israel is stuck in an impossible situation, surrounded by hostile actors and under constant bombardment by terrorists. That doesn’t justify the loss of civilian life in Gaza, but I have yet to see a single pragmatic solution to the war coming from the left that doesn’t amount to Israel willingly exposing its throat to those who would gladly cut it.
If I thought that Hamas would honor a ceasefire, I would call for one too. But as the world saw on October 7th when Hamas broke the previous ceasefire, they are not a party that can be reasoned with — they must be defeated. And their Western supporters, who couldn’t discredit the Palestinian cause more if they were Mossad agent provocateurs, are only making that fate more likely.
Every principled supporter of Palestine should look to the comrades at their side and ask, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
See also: Hamas’s Useful Idiots
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The Western Pro-Palestine movement is led by the ideas of older historians, many of them Jewish and Israeli, such as Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pape. Pape's book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" uses sources from Israeli archives to prove that the Nakba was pre planned by the Zionist militias well before 1948. Arab Israelis have different IDs from Jewish Israelis, are are intimidated at polling stations. Only recently was one of their political parties allowed to join a coalition government, and that didn't last long. https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2024/02/the-many-civil-and-human-rights-challenges-facing-israels-palestinian-citizens?lang=en
As a US Army veteran, I see no reason we are giving Israel 2,000 lbs bombs, which they are using in situations we wouldn't use in, to cause huge collateral damage. Every day I wake up to see IDF soldiers with social media posts of them holding war loot, which would be a crime in the American military, but seems to be fine in the IDF. An IDF spokesman said to Piers Morgan that they don't know how many civilians they have killed. That makes me think that with the huge amount of ordinance they have used, that Ralph Nader's estimate of 200,000 dead in Gaza is not far off.