Where should Progressive non-Semites stand on Israel/Palestine?

If you’re plugged into the culture wars, you are by now aware that you are obliged to take a stand on the matter of Israel/Palestine. Both right wing and left wing positions on Israel have been mapped out with some level of detail, and the true loyalists of each directional tribe are receiving increasingly more insistent commands to line up appropriately. The emergent right wing position on Israel is not generally a problem for non-Semitic conservatives. With the exception of unreconstructed Klansmen and neo-Nazis, conservatives embarrassed by the poor performance of right wingers during the Nazi period are thrilled with their opportunity to appear pro-Jewish about something. Conservatives may also secretly suspect that if they stand behind a nation where people smoke pot on topless beaches and grade schools teach the evidence for evolution accurately, rightist potential for cosmopolitanism and basic intellectual functioning will be less in doubt. The left wing position on Israel is more agonizing for progressives, however, who feel antsy if they miss an evening with Jon Stewart and owe Jews pretty much every good idea the Left has ever had. Further, because of the complexity of the history and the ample number of bloodthirsty genocidal people corrupting both sides, no equanimity-minded progressive non-Semite should want to touch the Israel/Palestine issue with a ten foot pole.

Indeed, Israel/Palestine sat pretty low on the progressive agenda from Israel’s foundation in 1948 right up through the eighties. It got a mention here and there among hard core Marxists and anticolonialists with regard to the international struggle against imperialism. But lefties more oriented towards free speech activism, women’s rights, labor solidarity, protecting the environment, preserving the welfare state, anti-war activism, etc. generally did not consider Israel/Palestine of much importance to progressive ideals and goals. That is no longer the case, and unconditional support for the Palestinians is gradually becoming central to the progressive identity. I will argue that this increasing criticism of Israel on the left has some justification, and there are more reasonable motivations for it than anti-Semitism. I will also argue, however, that there should be some attempt to keep criticism of Israel proportionate to its actions, and not to get too cozy with the enemies of Israel, many of whom exhibit a heinousness of character mitigated only by their relative powerlessness. Without vigilance on this matter, the Left may become a receptive space for people who not only hate Israel’s occupation, collective punishment, militarism and ethnic cleansing, but also hate Jews and everything Jews stand for—including a lot of the things the Left stands for. An essential part of this vigilance is to examine how the Left has recently become at least as beholden to an anti-Israel lobby as the American government is beholden to a pro-Israel lobby.

In the last few decades B.C.P. (Before Chomsky's Popularity), the creative energy, intellectual acumen and financial resources of liberal Jewish activists were considered indispensable to most bedrock progressive projects. In this political climate, progressive attention to the ways that Israel resembled a colonial power or apartheid state seemed to be not only low priority, but impolitic. Israel/Palestine was pretty much the only issue that most liberal Jewish activists were not so progressive about. Even left wingers who were disgusted by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians sensibly figured it wasn’t worth rocking the boat with important political allies, especially when faced with the specter of Nixon and Reagan landslides.

It is also possible, though unlikely, that clearer heads on the Left also understood on some level that it was hypocritical to fault liberal Jews for being stubbornly supportive of one little state whose only real foible was a duress-driven policy of oppressing and killing some members of the Wretched of the Earth. Israel was only oppressing about five million people after all, and it was killing these oppressed in numbers that generally did not exceed hundreds per year. In contrast, a good portion of the Left—including the most cute and colorful characters of the fifties, sixties and seventies—had been duped into whitewashing communism as practiced by communist parties in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. These communist parties had oppressed a couple of billion people, mostly poor agrarian people, over the course of their existence. They had also cheerfully murdered tens of millions of these in the name of proletarian revolution. Compared to whitewashing the gruesome horrors of communism, whitewashing a little occupation and ethnic cleansing by Israel is arguably a minor moral oversight.

If the Left ever needed to morally soothe itself for so strategically ignoring the oppression of Palestinians, they could always note that the Arab countries counted by Israel among its worst enemies tended to be no friends to progressives either. Arab states were at best egregious and at worst vile with regard to free speech, women’s rights, labor rights, gay rights, environmental protection, the welfare state, and commitment to peace. Israel, on the other hand, tended to do much better on many of these criteria for progressive adulation.

It wasn’t unreasonable to guess that Palestinians, as Arabs, would likely follow the Arab model with whatever self-determination they eventually exercised, even though Palestinians have arguably been as victimized by other Arab states as they have been by Israel (if not more so). Progressives were conscious that there were limited resources available for making the world a better place, so it was important to distribute them wisely. Arab models of government and culture--whether secular or religious--tended to have some pretty nightmarish aspects from a progressive's perspective. Against this political backdrop, supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation seemed like a relatively poor ideological investment, notwithstanding how wrong it might be for occupying soldiers to shoot children for throwing stones at them.

The nineties saw a little more movement on attention to Palestinian oppression thanks in part to the reputational rise of Noam Chomsky, son of Jewish radicals, superstar anarchist genius, linguistics revolutionizer, and harsh critic of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. When sensible academics began to start consuming en masse Chomsky's rather unflattering portrayal of Israel, a fierce anti-Chomsky smear campaign began. By this time, pro-Israel public relations organizations had successfully established themselves as legitimate, albeit non-elected, representatives of world Jewish opinion. These "Jewish" organizations and several other prominent individuals of various backgrounds started accusing Chomsky of being a self-hating Jew and, more bizarrely, an anti-Semite. The attacks were so vicious and irrational that lefties who had been holding their tongues on Israel began to loosen them as they smelled McCarthyism. Was “anti-Semite” going to become the new “communist”? Would a House Anti-Semitic Activities Committee be formed to pressure Americans on pain of black-balling to rat out anyone who thought Palestinians had human rights? Whether they considered Israel the worst human rights abuser among Western nations or not, increasing numbers of progressives began to scrutinize Israel out of a strong aversion to being bullied into ideological submission.

Anti-Semitism: a critical evaluation

This aversion to having our heads bludgeoned with echo-chamber propaganda about “anti-Semitism” is the most plausible explanation I can imagine for why the Left has gradually begun to look more carefully at the Palestinian side of things. The rise of left wing disgust with Israel was probably not related to greater concern about what “the Jews” do. Most people on the Left are not as religious as people on the Right, at least not in an identification-based way. What the descendents of the ancient Hebrews are doing should be no more intrinsically interesting to lefties than what the descendents of the ancient Hottentots are doing. Nor should the disgust have derived from an objective comparison of Israel’s crimes with the crimes of comparable nations. Israel looks like Iceland when compared with post-1948 Russia, Indonesia, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States, France, Britain, Chile, Colombia, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola, South Africa, Serbia, Turkey, Iraq, etc.

Some of the ire at Israel comes from a collectively self-critical perspective: Israel is culturally continuous with the West and is a particularly strong ally of the United States. Many Western progressives feel the West should assume some responsibility for what our cultural members and political allies do. While progressives certainly condemn the crimes and political criminals of the United States more enthusiastically than those of Israel, we have not shown nearly as much revulsion at the way, say, England has behaved in Northern Ireland, nor at France’s political and economic contributions to the Rwandan genocide. I believe, therefore, that left wing disgust with Israel has been exacerbated primarily by outraged confusion at the increasingly transparent speciousness of the arguments used to silence Israel’s critics or justify Israel’s crimes as both the critics and the crimes have accelerated over the last few decades.

The "anti-Semite" argument is often wielded indiscriminately against every criticism and critic of Israel. The merits of this argument rely largely on the plausibility of the correlation between those who criticize X and those who hate and want to commit genocide against X. It is a plausible hypothesis that in general, those who criticize the actions of a nation are more likely to hate the people of that nation than those who do not.

For instance, many who criticize China’s 1989 massacre of students and workers in Beijing—like North Carolina abomination Jesse Helms—would be perfectly happy if the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Beijing (assuming there was money to be made from doing so). China critics like Senator Helms do not consider Chinese life as important as the life of decent Christian church-going blond blue eyed white people like themselves. Such human life-indifferent bigots may in fact take the Beijing massacre as evidence for the essential depravity of the Chinese national/racial character. This evidence for Chinese depravity will justify the later slaughter of their teeming citizenry at the hands of their betters (us) when that slaughter becomes expedient to those who run our government (the Pentagon, oil companies, genitalia-deprived kleptocrats posing as “Christians”, etc).

Consider also opposition to the oppression of the Iranian people by Iran’s mullahs and clerics. Many of these who appear to care so fiercely for the life and dignity of the Iranian people would also like to test out some tactical nuclear weapons on them, and certainly enjoyed watching them expire in the hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war.

So let’s assume for the sake of argument that those who criticize X are indeed more likely to hate X and thus those who criticize the only Jewish nation in the world are also more likely to hate and want to kill all Jews than those who refrain from such criticism. Even if this correlation can be found empirically (and I have seen at least one empirical study that does NOT find it), it may still be the case that while mass murderous hatred of X is wrong, criticism of X is right. All that really would follow then is that sometimes people can take the right position for the wrong reasons. The fact that many anti-Semites can be found among the critics of Israel is no more meaningful than the fact that many people like Jesse Helms can be found among the critics of China or people like Donald Rumsfeld found among the critics of Iran.

A more obvious point that is often raised in response to charges of anti-Semitism levied at Israel critics is that Palestinians are also Semitic people, so the Israeli occupation can also be considered anti-Semitic. To the extent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a case of one set of Semites occupying, killing and oppressing another, then by defending the life and dignity of men, women and children on either side, you’re inevitably going to be either an anti-Semite type A, or an anti-Semite type B or both. If you’re stuck being an anti-Semite anyway, you might as well side with the Semite type Bs—the Semites driven from their homes, crowded into refugee camps and subjected to occupation, crushing poverty, attack helicopters, house demolitions, and a considerably higher casualty rate than the Semite type As.

At this point, the pro-Israel side tends to bring up the Holocaust, which was suffered by Semite type As, but not Semite type Bs. The argument then goes like this: since Semite type Bs never had 95% of their children murdered in Nazi death camps, Semite type Bs are not nearly as worthy of human rights concern as Semite type As. In fact, to call them Semites at all is to ignore the fact that they were never targets of anti-Semitism the way Semite type As were. It was in fact in the course of running from those trying to exterminate all Semites type As that Semite type As came into conflict with Semite type Bs in the first place. If the Semite type Bs hadn’t been so unaccommodating about leaving their land and giving it without resistance to their Semitic brothers, Semite type As wouldn’t have had to expel, occupy, oppress and kill Semite type Bs as they did. Moreover, many prominent Semite type Bs keep expressing an interest in utterly destroying Semite type As, which is what the anti-Semitic Nazis tried to do, so supporting the right to exist of Semite type Bs also means functionally appeasing their desire to exterminate all Semite type As. Semite type As, on the other hand, want nothing more than to occupy, oppress, minimally kill and perhaps run off their land Semite type Bs. Genocidally killing all Semite type Bs is not on the wish list of Semite type As. Between their genocide survivor status and their less genocidal ambitions, Semite As should get a special moral handicap vis a vis Semite type Bs.

I have turned this argument into a caricature, but actually it is reasonable on at least one point. It is reasonable to wish that Arabs living in Palestine could have shown more sympathy for refugees fleeing from extermination in Nazi Germany, the same way it is reasonable to wish that Western nations who were willing to put resources into killing Nazi soldiers could also have been even a little welcoming to the refugees fleeing from them. In fact, if the U.S. and Canada had taken on the hardship of welcoming all fleeing refugees instead of the hardship of fighting Hitler militarily, the Holocaust as we know it might never have happened (though Hitler might have come out of that war alive and militarily strong rather than vanquished and dead). Nations like the U.S. and Canada would also be considerably more liberal, interesting and intelligent countries.

Arabs who resisted early immigration of Jews to Palestine are guilty primarily of what these Western nations are guilty of: being xenophobic and selfish in the face of others’ suffering. The callous xenophobic selfishness of Arabs in Palestine differed from the callous xenophobic selfishness of the U.S., Canada, etc. primarily in the fact that Arabs in Palestine did not have enough control over their own territory to successfully enforce their xenophobia.

This puts mid-century Arabs in Palestine on a moral continuum with lower middle class U.S.A. Americans who are impotently unhappy about suffering Latin Americans pouring across the Mexican border into the U.S. to settle in it and change much about its cultural and political character. I strongly believe that U.S.A. Americans should be a lot more welcoming to Latin American immigrants fleeing political and economic suffering, even setting aside the fact that much of the land Latin Americans are now settling used to belong to Mexico, and also setting aside the contribution of American foreign and economic policy to Latin American suffering.

However, it would be somewhat problematic if, say, Mexicans specifically responded to the outrageous actions of a few xenophobic USA American minutemen types by orchestrating a violent political takeover of the South Western United States and the movement of all U.S.A. Americans into hideously awful refugee camps across the new border. Certainly Mexicans (as Latin Americans) have suffered and certainly they deserve humane treatment as they flee from their suffering. However, land-grabbing ethnic cleansing would be an excessive punishment for the callous, even violent xenophobia of a few U.S.A. Americans. Now if, say, Argentina, had just tried to exterminate all Mexicans for some reason and succeeded in killing 95% of their children, then I could have much more empathy for Mexicans even in the midst of their ethnically cleansing my compatriots. It would attenuate my outrage because having recently been the target of extermination creates duress that would cloud anyone’s moral judgment.

Nevertheless, understanding is not justification, and such actions would still be wrong. Reginald Denny was generous with his empathy when he was hospitalized by angry black teenagers in the wake of the Rodney King beating, and it would be nice if the Palestinians had shown similar empathy to the Jews as they fled Nazi extermination in Europe. This empathy might understandably have become strained as Israel began to use attacks from Arab leaders as an excuse for a nascent Israel to seize more land in war. The empathy might have become very strained when Israelis-to-be founded a state on that conquered land based around a single ethno-religious identity that the Arabs who had been living there for the past few centuries did not share. And it is especially hard for Palestinians to manifest that empathy today as they are oppressed and occupied, and killed in the hundreds every year.

Empathy may always be right (and wise, for that matter), but receiving empathy when you are in the midst of destroying someone’s sense of home is a privilege, not a right. No group of people is obliged to be empathetic when someone is killing them and throwing them out of their homes, no matter how much their aggressor/oppressor has previously suffered.

As for the greater genocidal intent of Palestinians, I will tentatively agree that there is some evidence for that. The pro-Israel side can argue that even if many Israel critics are not anti-Semitic themselves, they are at least contributing to the strengthening of political forces that are anti-Semitic, and fascistic in other ways. I agree that certain kinds of criticism of and political pressure on Israel may give aid and comfort to actually or potentially fascistic subgroups of Palestinians and other dubious anti-Israel forces in the Middle East. However, the need to avoid raising the morale of Arab or Islamic fascists should be balanced with the need to speak the truth and to stand up always and without exception for everyone’s human rights and human dignity. The successes of the civil rights movement in the United States raised the morale of totalitarian anti-American communists too—so what?

Moreover, progressives should take in its proper context the fact that many Palestinians, including the elected Hamas leadership, take the Protocols of the Elders of Zion seriously, deny the Holocaust, would be happy if all Jews were expelled from the Middle East, and appear to advocate killing their men, women and children until they go (or at least until the occupation of Judea and Samaria ends and the refugee crisis is settled). One of the more ill-advised objections that progressives can raise to this “some extremist Palestinians want to kill us all” argument is that just as it is understandable (but not excusable) for Israelis to run Palestinians out of their homes in order to found the state of Israel, so it is also understandable (but not excusable) that some Palestinians will pollute their response to Israeli oppression and aggression with genocidal ambitions. Empathy should show no partiality.

But actually, sometimes empathy does need to show partiality. All departures from basic human decency are not equal. Successfully pushing a people off their land into refugee camps and then killing hundreds of them a year thereafter is one thing; unsuccessfully wishing for the extermination a whole race of people is another. If a genocidal wish is unfulfilled simply because one side does not have the power to fulfill it, then it makes sense that decency-preferring people of the world would want to make sure that the genocidal fantasy side never got the upper hand. Israelis by and large do not ascribe dark supernatural powers to Palestinians by which they are believed to execute sinister world conspiracies, nor (for the most part) do Israelis deny the atrocities that have historically been visited upon Arabs, like the Crusades, nor those visited on other Muslims, like the Serbian mass murders of Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.

I imagine that only a handful of radical settlers would like to kill all Palestinians. Even setting aside moral qualms about doing so, there would still presumably be Arabs and Muslims left somewhere after a Palestinian genocide. You can’t kill all Arabs and Muslims efficiently without nuclear weapons, the radioactive fallout from which would likely adversely affect Israeli quality of life. Besides, if all the Palestinians were killed, Israel would have to import workers from Thailand and the Philippines to do the grunt work for Israel’s economy. The specter of the Palestinian refugees returning to demographically undermine Israel’s Jewishness would then be replaced by the specter of intermarriage with economically dependent Southeast Asians doing the same thing. T-shirts like “No Arabs no terrorism” are thus worn only by the lunatic fringe in Israel, because clearer heads know that the truth, in fact, is “No Arabs, no cheap labor”.

“No Jews no occupation” sentiment is considerably more widespread among Palestinians, however (though there are no t-shirts or bumper stickers selling with this slogan, as far as I know). Perhaps if more Israelis took jobs at Palestinian companies for 50 shekels a day, “no Jews no occupation” sentiment would eventually find itself confined to the lunatic fringe also.

So far, I’ve been tentatively buying into the claim that genocidal sentiment and the insane ideas that underlie it are more present on the Palestinian side than the Israeli side. Supposedly this genocidal sentiment can be seen on Palestinian TV at regular intervals during the day, and read on the websites of Hamas and other prominent resistance groups—at least according to some of the pro-Israel propaganda I’ve read. I’ve assumed this imbalance in genocidal sentiment for the sake of argument, but let us remember that much of what we read and hear about Israel—at least in the U.S.—is often thoroughly soaked in war propaganda. Whether less genocidally inclined or not, the fact remains that Israelis have much more power to actually cause suffering, misery and death to Palestinians than Palestinians do to Israelis, and this power imbalance can be seen in the kill ratios, with men, women and children being killed much more on the Palestinian side than the Israeli side.

The actual oppression and death borne by Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis they hate makes their hatred different from Nazi hatred, whose suffering at the hands of Jews was largely imagined, highly exaggerated or based on a very small sample of Jews not representative of most Jews in Germany or anywhere else. Nazis may have employed “Jew as oppressor” and “Jew as Christ-killer” propaganda to get the unwashed masses behind them, but one can argue that the anti-Semitic motivations of Nazi leaders themselves did not grow from such underdog concerns.

Hitler’s desire to exterminate the Jews was arguably based more on a paranoid and irrational racial identification of Jews with the threat of well-financed Bolshevism and moral-softening cultural degeneracy—something that many American conservatives still silently hold against Jews today (as we will discuss later). Even to the extent Hitler was accidentally right that Soviet style Bolshevism was bound to be a disaster of monstrous proportions, he was obviously wrong and morally insane to collectively murder all those who could be categorized as racially Jewish for the fact that many Jews were liberal and socialistic and a noticeable number of Jews advocated Bolshevik-like revolution to liberate mankind. Of course it is wrong to kill people en masse simply because of the dangerous ideas that some among them espouse. Today we all know that Bolshevism became a totalitarian nightmare as bad or worse than Nazism in many ways, but given the evidence at that time it wasn’t more unreasonable to believe in the potential liberating powers of Bolshevism than to believe that any kind of violent action was necessary to achieve long term justice and peace.

There are still plenty of people who believe that regular and ruthless doses of organized violence—even involving “collateral damage” to civilian men, women and children in the hundreds of thousands or even millions—is necessary for long term human flourishing and a bright, happy, peaceful prosperous future for humankind. To exterminate in concentration camps all those who would treat other people’s lives as a means to their utopian ends would be both silly and evil. The neocons in Washington should all be fired, not set on fire.

In the early days of the Third Reich, many otherwise sensible people, seeing how the bolshevist movement had a unique talent for mass murdering totalitarian horror, became supporters of Hitler or at least of less anti-Semitic variants on fascism, like those advocated by Mussolini or Franco. Today, many otherwise sensible people see how Islamist movements have a unique talent for medieval atrocity and apocalyptic fantasy (often an anti-Semitic apocalyptic fantasy). Those who see this have often become supporters of the fascistic War on Terror that is fought more against Islam and Muslims than against “terror” in general (terror is in fact essential to conducting the War on Terror).

There are some important parallels between the reasonable fear of Bolshevism in the mid-twentieth century and the reasonable fear of Islamism today. Reasonable people then as now gave the hawkish authoritarian defenders of “Western civilization” far too much moral credit. While many erudite and civilized supporters of mid-twentieth century fascism may have cared most about stopping bolshevist totalitarianism and body counts in the tens of millions, this desire to preserve human life and freedom from harm was not a strong motivation for Hitler himself, nor for the Nazi crew generally. Likewise, salt-of-the-earth supporters of decimating Iraq and of pre-emptively nuking Iran may envision a brighter and more humane future as a result, but the political and military leadership that conduct this mass killing might be motivated by considerably different concerns. And some of these concerns may be disturbingly venal. In the end, the people who conduct a war are more likely to achieve their aims than those duped into supporting it—though generally all wars fail to achieve anything more than a large pile of corpses and rubble that used to be the life and memory of a people.

Given his own impressive record of exterminating human beings in the millions, it is reasonable to conclude that what Hitler cared about most was restoring honor and strength to Germany as a specific nation, rather than an oppression and murder-free future for all humankind. In service of this goal, Hitler hoped to stem the tide of communist/socialist internationalism and degenerate sentimentality for society’s losers that he felt was standing in the way of Germany’s ubermensch future.

The Nazis’ ambitions were largely religious or at least utopian, driven by a desire to create a paradise on earth by having it run by Aryans and purged of the degenerate threats to Aryan rule. This brings to mind the famous Big Lebowski line, “say what you will about the tenets of national socialism—at least it’s an ethos”. As horrible as they were, authoritarian leaders had a guiding ethos in Hitler’s time; most of them probably actually believed that the world would be better off once all the communists, Jews, socialists, Poles, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. were made into lampshades. The Nazis, with a couple of exceptions, were arguably sincere in thinking that this would make the world a better place. While many prominent Nazis certainly profited materially from Hitler’s wars and mass murders, many Nazi actions do not seem to be adequately explained by the profit motive.

These days, in contrast, it appears that only a handful of those leading the hawkish authoritarian movement to “defend the West” actually believe in that movement’s (considerably more humane) utopian ideals—democracy, open markets, civil and political liberty for all. The large numbers of people who politically support the contemporary “defend the West” movement probably do believe in these ideals and naively trust that those who would fight wars for these ideals care at least an iota or two about them. These believers in the uncorruptibility of right wing authority refuse to contemplate the possibility that neoliberals and neocons would start bloodthirsty new wars in the Middle East unless happy, friendly “Defend the West” ideals were likely to be served. It will come as a rude awakening to the trusting fans of neoliberals and neocons that in fact most of the Bohemian Grove set just want to make as much money as possible off of murderously stealing the national resources from swarthy superstitious people of no consequence so they can afford to buy themselves and their offspring space in a fiercely guarded “green zone” somewhere once the rest of the earth is made unlivable by nuclear and environmental catastrophe. The more ruthlessly cynical among them may even intend to actively precipitate such catastrophes so they aren’t caught by surprise. Well, okay, my paranoia is getting a bit hyperbolic here. But my somewhat tongue-in-cheek hyperbolic conspiracy-minded paranoia may be closer to the truth than the widespread belief that Cheney, etc. really give a damn about saving the best liberal ideals of the West, preserving the life and dignity of most human beings on the earth, or even stopping terrorism. Many of their actions strongly suggest otherwise.

But even if my paranoid black cloud vision is correct, perhaps there’s a silver lining to it. When considering the monumental evils that have been done in pursuit of Nazi and communist utopian idealism, the banal cynical greed of contemporary Western war-makers is probably good news. Their Mafioso-like rational self-interest should, in principle, make it easier to carrot-and-stick them into realizing that their Machievellian mass murders are not only ethically indefensible but also insane even from a purely venal selfish perspective. It might be considerably harder to carrot-and-stick those who want to destroy the West and replace it with a utopian Caliphate Muslim paradise. On the other hand, people with ideals at least have ideals to appeal to. When the abandonment of ideals crosses over from self-serving amoral cynicism into wholesale nihilism, greedheads may be as resistant to moral truth as totalitarians.

To the extent Islamist movements are fascistic and would be glad to commit genocide if they could pull together enough effective firepower, it is reasonable to give some consideration to supporting the West a little longer, as morally bankrupt as it is fast becoming (and, if examined honestly, has always been). However, support for the West, even when it is menaced by more fascistic and totalitarian cultures and ideologies, does not necessarily mean military support, and certainly not fawning obsequious uncritical praise for Western institutions, history and culture. I personally choose to support the West not with guns, war propaganda, torture and mass murder, but with inquiry. I think inquiry is central to what is best about the West, and what distinguishes it in a good way from many other long standing cultural traditions and new emergent ideologies. However, I do not think that inquiry is worth invading countries and mass murdering children for, so whenever I hear of a group being demonized by my missile-toting compatriots, I am always keen to look at the other side of the story.

I will freely acknowledge that in many cases, Western war propaganda has actually soft-peddled the potential for evil in its opponents. It is often not until after a war is over that we discover just how monumentally vile our enemies truly were. It takes even longer to face how monumentally vile we really were. There is something about the urgency of war that makes us disinclined to examine anti-human atrocities from our side or the other that would lead us to the paralysis of existential horror. Few among the allied nations could have coped with the thought that Hitler was exterminating children by the millions in concentration camps—at the time such a revelation might have done more to perilously destroy faith in God and in humanity than to mobilize fighting spirit outrage. Likewise, during World War I, we did not have to tell our soldiers that the Young Turks were the type of anti-human political movement who would slaughter 80% of their Armenian population in order to secularize and modernize their nation. It was sufficient to remind our soldiers of those who died on the Lusitania on (supposedly) German orders.

Moreover, when we need to suddenly re-unite with old enemies in order to murder the children of new ones, it is not only existentially traumatizing but politically inconvenient to pay too much attention to the recent atrocities of these ex-enemies on the battlefield. This was the case shortly after World War II, when we needed the anti-communist passion and know-how of Holocaust Germany and Rape of Nanking Japan in order to take on Stalin and Mao. Admittedly, we pressed Germany pretty hard to face up to its wartime evil, but that was not strategic—it was only because Jews, more than Chinese and Koreans, etc., were much less willing to endure a tepid apology and Jews who were politically influential used all the influence they could to exercise that unwillingness. These days, we need the allegiance and airspace of Armenian genocide Turkey (to say nothing of Darfur genocide Sudan) in order for certain interests to continue profiting from the War on Terror. As with Young Turk atrocities, Hitler’s atrocities, Hirohito’s atrocities, Stalin’s atrocities, Mao’s atrocities, etc. it is quite possible that much of what is being said about America’s enemy-du-jour may actually underpredict how much evil they will have done by the time the smoke clears and we need them onside to take on some new enemy. Maybe that enemy will be Israel half a century from now and those whom we now call Islamofascists will be redubbed as Islamo-freedom fighters (as they were once known in the days of the Cold War, when the CIA trained Islamofascists to fight Communofascists in Afghanistan).

In the event that the state of Israel is recast as an enemy of the West one day, it is a good idea to start gearing up a minority of the population—especially progressives—to hate Israelis right now. When it becomes expedient to murder Israeli children and steal Israeli resources, the tireless work of these progressives to demonize our client-state-for-now Israel will come in very handy. Certainly the tireless work of progressives who demonized our old client dictator Saddam Hussein during the Reagan years has been tremendously useful in justifying the human and cultural destruction we have recently unleashed in Iraq. Saddam committed genocide once by gassing 7,000 Kurds during those Reagan years—and that was reason enough to set in motion the killings of hundreds of thousands of the people under his thumb. It was regrettable to have to kill so many people, perhaps, but unfortunately their lives stood in the way of Freedom.

My point, if it has not yet been sufficiently bludgeoned home with that last touch of sarcasm, is that even to the extent the war propaganda of today reflects (or understates) the truth, we still need to inquire into any demonization of foreign peoples very carefully. We do not want to be seduced into mass murdering backwards ignorant medieval anti-Semitic foreigner children by our reaction to their congenital moral inferiority. Likewise, we do not want to set the stage for a later seduction, where conservatives will usurp liberal progressive complaints to call for the mass murder of pushy, arrogant, ethno-chauvinist, anti-Muslim Jewish children who are sitting on resources that our beloved nation—or the cabal that rules it—desperately wants.

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More thoughts on this issue, for those who have not been glutted

Let us then consider the contours of the genocidal imagination as it supposedly exists among many Muslims today. When the most genocidal Hamasniks entertain fantasies about exterminating the Jews, it is doubtful that they imagine them expiring with the poor, sick and downtrodden, but instead see them vanquished with the Goliaths of our age: the military and corporate giants of the United States and the new Roman Empire it governs. This completely fails to mitigate the horror of their genocidal fantasies of course (to the extent these are not overstated), but there is a subtle and important difference between anti-conqueror genocidal fantasies and anti-oppressed people genocidal fantasies.

To understand the difference between Palestinian anti-Semitism and, say, Nazi anti-Semitism, imagine a blond blue eyed middle class churchgoing neo-Nazi named Claus, who hates Jews because he fantasizes that they killed Christ, drink the blood of Christian babies at Lent, and possess some kind of mutant gene that makes them support Bolshevism and moral degeneracy. Claus's hatred inclines him to buy into callous erasures of the history of human suffering as well as nonsensical racist conspiracy theories, and makes him want to kill Jewish men women and children until they leave Germany. Now imagine a swarthy hand-to-mouth Palestinian refugee named Mahmud who hates Jews because there really are some Jews out there who are really and actually occupying and killing his people. Mahmud's hatred inclines him to buy into callous erasures of the history of human suffering as well as nonsensical racist conspiracy theories, and makes him want to kill Jewish men, women and children until they leave Palestine. Mahmud the refugee is arguably an unreasonable and dangerous individual, but unlike Claus the Nazi, his hatred grows out of something real, something that would inspire most not-so-saintly human beings to hatred. Mahmud the refugee is in a bad moral ballpark, but he’s far from the moral ballpark of Claus the Nazi.

The Palestinian children who throw stones at tanks are probably more likely to be shouting in Arabic, “Get out you murdering occupier” rather than, “Get out you Christ-crucifying Bolshevist baby eater!” It is true that it can be easy to cajole some Palestinians, and certainly some Arabs and Muslims, into saying nice things about Hitler. Under normal circumstances, this should be cause for some alarm, because Hitler was a mass-murdering dictator. Hitler was not the only mass-murdering dictator in history however. Stalin, his ideological opposite, also did some mass-murdering, and more of it by the counts of many historians. Many of those exterminated in Hitler’s concentration camps, including a fair portion of the Jews, could have been cajoled into saying nice things about Stalin at that time. Certainly they would have had some nice things to say about Stalin when Stalin’s red army helped to liberate those concentration camps. It might have been reasonable to disagree strongly with the vile political views of these concentration camp victims and to encourage them to appreciate the evils of Stalin’s regime. Nevertheless, it really would have been absurd for a reasonable person to be more alarmed by the pro-Stalin views of concentration camp victims than by the fact that people were being murdered in the millions in concentration camps in the first place. Admiring someone who commits oppression and genocide is morally different from actually committing real oppression and genocide.

Genocidal fantasies and Hitler-adulation among Palestinians likely reflect the impotent anguish Palestinians feel at the oppression they suffer, and it is plausible to believe these fantasies would attenuate if the oppression attenuated. There is less of an excuse for the Hitler-adulation and genocidal fantasies of others in the Arab and Muslim world, however. If you’re not having your houses bulldozed, family killed, and dignity destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces, you really ought to have the presence of mind not to entertain dictator-worship and genocidal fantasies.

Here is an important Israeli view to consider: even to the extent Palestinians believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, deny the Holocaust and rejoice in the taking of Jewish life out of a quasi-legitimate outrage at real oppression, they are still a dangerous volatile people in need of control—precisely the type of control that is filling them with such genocidal rage in the first place. Moreover, the fact that Palestinians (or other Arabs and Muslims) are too weak to actually commit the genocide they want is not a compelling reason for Israel to take its foot off their neck. More liberal Zionists who enthusiastically offer military service to Israel often make the point that they really don’t like oppressing and killing the Palestinians, but if the Palestinians were ever given the chance to move from humiliation to national strength the way Hitler’s Germans did, they would likely execute their new heady powers the way Hitler’s Germans did as well. It is regrettable that Israelis bear the moral weight of oppressing, killing and stealing land from a downtrodden people, but they exercise their power over the Palestinians with more restraint and humanity than the Palestinians could be expected to show if the shoe were on the other foot.

I think this argument is bogus for several reasons. First, the vast majority of Palestinians—even those who admire Hamas for other things—would be quite satisfied to have Israel’s foot off of their neck, even if their frequent ventings of spleen (and of explosives) paint a much more apocalyptic set of desires. It would be better if we all had the equanimity of mind not to hate whole groups of people for what individuals or even representatives of those groups are doing to us, but this is a moral error easily made when you are being occupied, oppressed and killed. Moreover, it is quite possible that this is a moral error that fewer Palestinians make than Israeli propagandists would claim. The non-recognition of Israel in the charters of organizations like Hamas is wrong given that Israelis have been making their home in Israel for more than half a century, but the non-recognition is unlikely to represent an inclination to seek to genocidally or otherwise expunge Israel/Palestine of Jews should other key demands be met, like an end to the occupation of the West Bank, and some amicable settlement for the Palestinian refugees. It is considered (perhaps wrongly) good negotiation strategy to look crazier and more extreme than you are and to ask more than what you will settle for. Even chummy pacifists like the Dalai Lama are prone to this tactic—the Tibetan exile government currently asks for Lhasa-governed autonomy not only for the land within the current borders of Tibet, but also for neighboring majority Chinese provinces (Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai) that have a majority Tibetan population in some regions.

Even setting aside fantasies, the actual violence done by Hamas and other Palestinian groups needs to be addressed. The suicide bombings supported by a majority of the Palestinian population (at some times anyway) are wrong, but they are wrong in a rather common and banal way, a wrong that is shared among many nations and peoples. Supporting the killing of Israeli civilians to advance Palestinian national interests is morally continuous with supporting the bombing of non-military cities like Dresden and Nagasaki in order to advance allied interests in World War II, or more topically to support the inevitable killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq to advance coalition interests there (though of course, Halliburton’s interests have been notably better served in this particular case). If Palestinians should be branded a terrorist people for their callousness towards Israeli civilian casualties, then most people of the world—including Israelis and Americans—should be branded terrorist people also. Perhaps it would be a first step to peace to admit that we are all terrorists, and that the blood of the innocent stains the hands of all nations. Then the next step would be to try together to keep that blood from our hands in the future, building a future that protects the innocent by showing mercy to the guilty.

I also suspect that many Palestinians, even the ones who express the fiercest hatred of “the Zionist entity” have a secret liking for Israelis as people and in fact would like them much more if Israelis weren’t oppressing and killing them all the time. It is instructive to watch a documentary called Promises, about Israeli and Palestinian children, some of whom actually meet up for a day in the occupied territories. One of the children is a young Palestinian boy who threw stones during the first Intifada, whose brother was killed by Israeli soldiers, and who at first shows resistance to meeting Israeli children. Yet when he talks to them on the phone, he becomes excited, and even primps in front of the mirror in preparation. He slicks back his hair and puts on cologne; it’s as if he’s going on a date. When he and other Palestinian children (all supporters of Hamas) play with the two Israeli boys, it is as if they are playing with family they have known all their lives. They roll and tumble on the floor, and show each other affection that many children of families that know nothing of war or oppression will never see. At the end of the day the boy who primped in front of the mirror weeps uncontrollably when he realizes that the two Israeli boys will simply go back to their life and all will be forgotten and gradually everything will become as it was, as if no contact had been made, as if the natural human bond between them had never been revealed.

In fact, both of the two Israeli boys end up going into the army when they come of age. One of them notes that it is an occupying army and that they are jeopardizing the friendships they made across the fence—they might accidentally kill one of them in an exchange of fire one day—but nevertheless he is committed to protecting his country from “terrorism.” The primping Palestinian boy moves to New Jersey, adopts an American accent and attitude and starts working for Wal-Mart. It saddened me to watch this, actually: it somehow cheapened the grace of the opening of his heart to peace. Perhaps a similar temptation to banal, soulless exploitative globoculture afflicts all who would leave the world of hateful nationalism and jingoism behind: cultureless materialistic banality and identification-based hatred are the Scylla and Charibdis of the modern age.

Whether peace necessarily invites banality or not, Israelis who fear that allowing Palestinians human rights, dignity and self-determination will set the stage for the next Holocaust can take some heart from this story. Its comforting lesson for the conqueror is that many conquered people often secretly love and admire their conquerors, and would gladly shed their identity to be like them if they could. I am not sure it is the case that Hitler’s Germans felt this secret love towards the Jews, but then again they were never truly oppressed by Jews: they only fantasized that they had been oppressed when the reality was that Jews were the victims of oppression in Germany and the rest of Europe and had been for centuries. Although Nazi hatred of Jews was portrayed as if it sprang from oppressed resentment, actually the hatred was more pregnant with oppressor’s contempt. Jews were slaughtered alongside the weak and unconventional—the mentally ill, the handicapped, the homosexual—and the proclaimed friends of the weak—communists, socialists, trade unionists, pacifists.

Palestinians, on the other hand, do not have the luxury of Nazi contempt. Like all hatred that comes from below, the hatred of Palestinians towards Jews likely wants to be love for the great and the accomplished, but the poison of their oppression makes it otherwise. Whatever genocidal fantasies there are among Palestinians (who kill Israelis by the dozens each year), they have a fundamentally different, and I believe much more contingent, character than genocidal fantasies among the Nazis who actually carried out a genocide that killed six million Jews half a century ago.

In sum, there is no question that denying the moral worth of a whole race, nation or culture of people is evil, and thus anti-Arabism, anti-Africanism, anti-Asianism, anti-Americanism, anti-liberalism, anti-conservatism, anti-atheism, anti-Christianism, anti-Islamism and anti-Semitism all have the potential to spawn great evil. Jew-hating among Palestinians is evil too, as is the widespread (though by no means universal) Palestinian indifference to or even hostility to Jewish life. This evil among some Palestinians, however, is something that is best healed with justice and honestly-expressed contrition for what Israel has done to them. The hatred of Palestinians is stoked by legitimate grievances born of real death, suffering and oppression experienced at the hands of the objects of their hatred. That doesn't make the stupidest beliefs among Palestinians less wrong or their all-encompassing hatred less pointlessly destructive, but to call attention to the "anti-Semitism" of Palestinians as an excuse for oppressing and killing them is stomach-turningly Orwellian.

“Israel has a right to defend herself”

In addition to rage at the fatuously indiscriminate use of “anti-Semitic” to destroy the reputations and careers of Israel’s critics, progressives have also felt themselves trapped in an Orwellian echo chamber whenever they hear the phrase “Israel has a right to defend herself”. This phrase is used by both Democrats and Republicans to pummel opposition to Israeli acts of collective punishment that would be considered major floutings of international law and basic humanity if performed by nations other than the U.K., the U.S., Australia or Israel. “Israel has a right to defend herself” was a frequent refrain in 2006 with regard to Israel’s reinterpretation of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” to mean “hundreds of civilians (dead) for 2 soldiers (captured).” Of course Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but only by virtue of the fact that all people have a right to defend themselves. However, if there is a meaningful difference between the word “defense” and the word “attack”, then bombing cities full of people is attack, not defense. And if we must call it defense, then we must call terrorists who kill children on school buses “defense” also, since such killing is carried out with the same spirit of morally bankrupt Machievellian pragmatism: “to defend the righteous from attack by the wicked, it is sometimes necessary to murder the innocent”.

Why is it that of the G8 leaders, only the most dictatorial and vile—Russia’s Vlad “The Impaler” Putin—was willing to publicly point out the flaw in this refrain by noting, understatedly, that Israel’s defense of herself was “disproportionate” to the attack she suffered?

“The Middle East’s only democracy”

A less Orwellian but equally frustrating refrain is that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” and thus lovers of freedom should support whatever Israelis do to the Palestinians, since Palestinians, as Arabs, are atavistic premodern savages hell-bent on destroying liberal pluralist civilization. Actually, Israel is not technically the only country in the Middle East that gives the vote to people it is not occupying and killing. Lebanon, under siege by Israel when I wrote the first draft of this article, has also been having relatively free elections when not in a state of occupation or civil war, and these elections have become even more legitimate as Lebanon has gained real independence from Syria. The Palestinian authority also holds elections that are internationally judged free and fair. Admittedly the Palestinians have elected governments willing to murder women and children to secure Palestinian national interests, but the governments of the world most morally outraged at this are also quite sanguine about murdering women and children to secure their national interests: of which military activities in Iraq and Lebanon are two illustrations.

There is a broader truth to the premise of this "Israel = democracy" argument, however: those under Israeli purview who are not being occupied, invaded or brutalized actually do enjoy some of the greatest personal and democratic freedoms of any Middle Eastern country. In addition, Israel legally enshrines political and religious tolerance among its non-occupied people better than any of its geographic peers. However, many progressives believe that greater moral responsibility is implied by "free and democratic" status, because such status implies some level of nobility. Relative to the morally impoverished, the noble should be able to constrain their urges to bulldoze people's homes, invade neighboring nations, massacre families in refugee camps, etc. Progressives reasonably expect shared democratic values to translate into more basic humanity, and expect more basic humanity of those who exhibit a capacity for democratic values than those who do not. By the same principle, we expect boys raised in nice middle class families to more effectively restrain their urges to invite attractive female passers-by to "chow down on my pork pole baby, aw yeah". It's still bad when road construction workers do that, of course, but it's worse when Harvard graduates do it.

Essentially, lefties find it preposterous to argue that Israel should be cheered as it wontonly and violently betrays its own democratic values, because "at least they're more democratic than the Arabs". Why is Israel even comparing its values to those of the Arab despots? Have their expectations of themselves sunk that low? Some concerned Jews with a strong Jewish identity, including many committed Zionists, have begun to make exactly this point as a prophetic critique. These prophetic critics claim that the Israeli occupation undermines what moral foundation there is to the state of Israel (see, e.g. the Head Heeb) and even to Judaism itself (www.semitism.net). Sadly these prophetic arguments are generally hidden from view in American discourse, found, like my own underedited rant, primarily in the blogosphere. Israeli newspapers make a little more room than American ones for discourse on this matter (e.g. Haaretz), but American media outlets consider newspapers like Haaretz self-hating Caliphate-wishing ex-Jew propaganda.

Are good pro-Israel arguments even possible?

Perhaps one of the reasons that unreconstructed pro-Israel arguments tend to be so bludgeoningly bad is because even the fairest and most reasonable pro-Israel arguments still fail to make Israel look morally above reproach. For instance, in response to the offensively exaggerated charge by some Israel opponents that Israel is committing “genocide” against the Palestinians and that Israel is as bad as Nazi Germany, a pro-Israel slide show circulated by e-mail in 2001 argued matter-of-factly that since Israel is killing Palestinians at a rate that does not exceed their birthrate, the word “genocide” does not apply. Though put forward as a reasoned and accurate rebuttal to an extreme claim, it came across as if Israel deserved a Compassionate Restraint award for not exterminating all the brutes: “Congratulations, Israel! You’re NOT committing genocide. Thank you for being a moral standout among oppressing occupiers. Keep up the good work!”

The more salient reliance of pro-Israel arguments on obviously thick reasoning makes me wonder, in fact, whether pro-Israel loyalists are really trying to make a case, or whether the arguments are rather calculated stupidity. This is an important consideration because neither Israelis nor Jews generally are stereotyped as stupid but if anything the opposite. Certainly smart people sometimes do stupid things out of egghead cluelessness or some other powerful psychological process that their intelligence can't overcome, but occasionally the stupidity is calculated. Calculated stupidity is used most famously by dictatorships with no interest in rational inquiry or dialogue. Calculatedly stupid arguments are meant not to persuade you but to illustrate to you the official line so you know that you deviate from it at your peril.

The communist party of China, for instance, is manned by people carefully selected by a surprisingly meritocratic school system to be the smartest out of 1.3 billion people (and thus presumably better at running things than those that the foolish masses might be inclined to democratically elect). The communist party weilds the epithet "anti-China" in much the same way that pro-Israel organizations weild "anti-Semite." If China were Israel, the entire Chinese population would be the Palestinians. Human rights groups who criticize Israel with regard to the Palestinians tend to criticize China with regard to Tibet, Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, Falun Gong, Taiwan, Hong Kong, gulag labor, the Three Gorges Dam, financing genocide in the Sudan, etc. When the highly intelligent writers of China Daily editorials excoriate these human rights scoundrels as “anti-China”, the purpose is not to persuade, but to intimidate. The implication is that anyone who opposes the Chinese government’s right to murder students, workers, monks, etc. is morally continuous with the Imperial Japanese soldiers who dropped Chinese babies on bayonets during World War II’s Rape of Nanjing. If you do not unconditionally support the communist government that emerged in the wake of Japan's loss, then you must secretly wish that Japan had successfully torture-murdered half of the Chinese population and turned the rest into comfort women for Japanese rape playgrounds.

This line of "reasoning" is too absurd, however, to change the true opinion of anyone with an IQ greater than 80. But the argument is directed instead towards changing outward behavior, not true opinion. Essentially the party is saying: “We know you know that this ‘anti-China’ smear is a smokescreen. But we don’t consider you worthy enough of our respect to make more convincing arguments. You have more of a reason to be frightened of us than we have to be frightened of you. So tremble, and obey.”

Whether able to explicitly draw analogies to communist Chinese intimidation tactics or not, I think the growing preponderance of Orwellian news coverage and editorializing on Israel has gradually set progressives to wondering: is the dark side of Israel darker than we thought? Is it time to pull our heads out of our rectums and take a closer look at this issue?

“9-11 changed everything”

Though outraged reaction to all of these bad arguments fuelled the small scale taboo-breaking that got underway among a minority of lefties in the nineties, the real acceleration of progressive attention to Israel has been in these first years of the new millennium. The co-occurrence of 9-11 with the more violent, “martyrdom”-driven second intefada has had a lot to do with this. This co-occurrence produced changes in attitudes towards Israel on both right and left.

On the right, Christian fundamentalists had long hated Jews for being Christ-killers, abortion supporters, feminists, labor union organizers, liberal democrats, environmentalists, etc. These fundamentalists did not change their mind so much about Jews generally after 9-11, but 9-11 accelerated a process begun mostly after 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza and Christian fundamentalists began to see the state of Israel in a different light.

The co-occurrence of 9-11 and the second intefada reminded fundamentalists that Israel—the Holy Land—was suffering the same kind of Islamosatanist threat as Holy America. Moreover its Jewish leadership was showing with muscular bravado exactly how that threat needed to be dealt with: ruthlessly. In the eyes of these fundamentalists, Jews who supported a woman’s legal right to terminate her embryo might be going to hell, but there was some hope for Jews who recognized the expediency of terminating full grown Arabs and Muslims. Right wing fundamentalists increasingly began to look up to Israel, who had been fighting with the demonic atavars of Islam for decades already. Perhaps Israel could show the way to most effectively cleanse the earth of this evil that had struck at the heart of God’s most beloved nation on September 11. Thus these fundamentalists solidified their view that Israel was an important ally in disposing of the Arab/Muslim problem.

Subtler minds among right wing fundamentalists began to realize that Israel might also offer a very effective solution to the Jewish problem, thus stoning two heretics with one boulder. When Israel went from being an annexer to an occupier in 1967, the character of Israel began to change noticably under the stress of it. Before, Israelis didn't have to deal so often with hostile Palestinians, because the ones who didn't flee to refugee camps after having their land violently annexed were given citizenship--a fact that stands as a counterexample to accusations that Israel is a commitedly racist apartheid state. Indeed, Israel's racism—which is more a kind of ethno-religious bigotry than racism per se—is considerably more measured than South Africa's: most Israelis were and are fine with having a few Palestinian citizens--as long as they never became the majority. After a couple of unpleasant purges of ethno-religious undesirables, Israelis could imagine themselves living in a happy liberal progressive fantasy land, where Zionism and friendly humane non-racist socialism sat cuddled up topless with a bottle of wine and a doobie by the beach. Once the occupation began, however, this self-image became harder to maintain, and Israelis found themselves thinking and behaving more like the kind of people that nutty American fundamentalists could get along with.

Indeed, nutty American fundamentalists did start to get along with Jews, but with some considerable ambivalence on their part. For instance, 1960’s evangelical superstar Billy Graham once made the revealing remark to Nixon that when the greasy Jews came up and slobbered gratefully on him for being so supportive of Israel, he couldn't bear to tell them how much he hated them for what they were doing to America (or some variation on that theme). Nixon, not surprisingly, agreed and added that while not all possessed by Satan, most Jews were left-wing scum who wanted "peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews." These remarks pretty much sum up the distinction that fundamentalists and conservatives generally began to draw secretly between Jews and Israel. After 1967, The "Jewish problem" had begun to look ripe for redefinition as a diaspora Jewish problem—a problem fostered by Jews like Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Goodman & Schwerner, etc. In contrast, there didn't seem to be as much of a Jews-with-a-homeland problem. In fact, it looked more like a Jews-with-a-homeland opportunity.

Redefining the “Jewish” problem

To understand the original understanding of the "Jewish problem" and how the rise of Israel changed it, it is important to revisit mid century anti-Semitic literature like auto maker Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Ford's tract had faulted Jews for being soft, left wing moral degenerates, prone to misdirecting their otherwise Protestant-like acumen for generating and accumulating wealth into supporting a wicked conflagration of individual libertinism and state socialism. Henry Ford essentially accused Jews of being biologically incapable of supporting the only good system of culture and government: a system with the fortitude to utterly crush all those unwilling to be happy obedient assembly line workers for Christian capitalist bosses in service of the Fatherland. Many Jews considered anti-Semitic garbage like The International Jew a tremendous compliment, even if unintentionally bestowed. There are worse things than being told that you are congenitally incapable of fascism. Actually, I haven’t really read the International Jew, so I don’t know if it really said all this. It probably had some real accusations thrown in together with its backhanded compliments, but still it is generally pleasing to be slandered by a moral imbecile.

As Billy Graham's remark to Nixon illustrates, religious fundamentalists were at one time rather sympathetic to Henry Ford-like anti-Semitism. After 1967 and especially after 9-11, however, they increasingly began to see that the state of Israel was a potential counterexample to Ford’s pessimism about the Jewish ethno-religious character. Whereas most diaspora Jews were sentimental about human rights and opposed to militarism and racism, those more identified with Israel-as-occupier saw that human rights sentimentality must be attenuated and militarism and racism deftly employed if Israel’s national interests were to be best served. If the burden of defending the state of Israel could convince so many Jews of the value of militarism, racism and crushing human rights, then encouraging total Jewish identification with Israel seemed a brilliant way to ensure that all Jews might eventually adopt other bedrock Christian values as well.

Once the dominoes of human rights sentimentality, anti-racism and peacenik idealism fell within Jewish culture, then the next step was obvious. It would require only gentle pressure from their fundamentalist allies to convince Israel-identified Jews that life begins at conception, that enjoying sex is evil, that feminism, gay rights, labor unions and environmentalism are demonic pestilences, and that laissez-faire capitalism must be completely unfettered. If only all Jews could be molded in the image of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, it would no longer be necessary to count them among the greatest enemies of Jesus Christ and his true followers on earth.

Of course it was not expedient to be too explicit about this plot to turn Jews into right wing authoritarian fundamentalist Christians, however. Instead fundamentalists began searching for Biblical prophecies suggesting that Jews must regain control of Israel, as well as the Palestinian-squatted lands of Judea and Samaria (i.e. the West Bank). According to these prophecies, Israel would rebuild the temple in this area, and pave the way for the second coming of Christ, who would politely not send the Jews to hell if they confessed His divinity at the last minute. And if this fulfillment of Biblical prophecy required something genocidal or sub-genocidal, then so be it; the Bible was never shy about genocide after all, and what better way to redeem Jews of their Satanic liberal proclivities?

Fundamentalist Christian “supporters” of Israel are often impatient, in fact, with how reluctant real Israelis are about committing wholesale genocide. This was demonstrated by Pat Robertson’s curse of coma-bound Ariel Sharon for withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip. Though Palestinians complain incessantly about being occupied by Jews whom the world lets get away with everything because of the Holocaust, it is likely good fortune for the Palestinians that their oppressors and occupiers have a strong historical consciousness of the Holocaust and the horrors of genocide. This consciousness may set firm limits on the scope of Israeli oppression, even if Holocaust-related fears are regularly stoked by public relations executives to bolster popular support for Israeli occupation policy and to silence opponents. Although Holocaust consciousness gets misused, Palestinians should tremble to think what it might be like for them if Israel were run instead by Pat Robertson and his ilk, for whom all relevant world history ended with the Book of Revelations.

In addition, Palestinians should appreciate rather than condemn the fact that the Holocaust has wrought such a strong taboo against killing Jews, even while it’s pretty much okay to kill all other non-Europeans. While this taboo makes Palestinians look like Nazis when they fight back against their oppression, the taboo also makes Israelis very careful about never killing other Jews; memories of Jewish kapos manipulated into assisting the slaughter of Jews in Nazi death camps make this prospect particularly anathema. During the evacuation of Gaza led by Sharon, great care was taken to prevent the confrontation between IDF soldiers and intransigent settlers from becoming violent, and Israeli soldiers tolerated a lot more abuse and potential threat to their life than they ever would have tolerated from Palestinians. In joint Israeli-Palestinian protests against Israel’s “security fence”, Israeli soldiers generally take great care not to harm the Israeli protestors and these Israelis effectively serve as a human shield for peaceful Palestinian protestors who might otherwise be shot as “terrorists pretending to be peaceful protestors”.

I believe it is very unlikely that Israel will ever commit genocide because in order to commit genocide it would have to decimate its own people. This is because many Israelis would try, at risk to their own life, to shelter and evacuate Palestinians if Israel ever went entirely the way of Pat Robertson. If the Hutu genocidiares of Rwanda had been as squeamish about killing other Hutus as the Jews are squeamish about killing other Jews, the Rwandan genocide would never have happened, at least not on the same scale. To have a genocide, you must propagate the sentiment, “those who shelter cockroaches are as bad as the cockroaches themselves”, which is how Hutus who sheltered Tutsis were characterized.

Palestinians, instead of condemning this unwavering respect of Jews for Jewish life, should mirror it by fostering an unwavering Palestinian respect for Palestinian life. Palestinians are all too sanguine about taking Palestinian life—including the lives of accused collaborators and the lives of suicide bombers. The last testaments of both of these Palestinian victims of the Palestinian people are the most popular sellers at Palestinian video stores. The murderous hatred that is directed at Israel consumes primarily Palestinian lives, lives that could have been transformed either by forgiveness in the case of collaborators, or by a less bloody vision of liberation for the suicide bombers. It is not even necessary to stop killing Israelis to assuage Israel’s fears that free and unoccupied Palestinians will oversee a second Holocaust. It would be sufficient to stop killing Palestinians.

“The puzzle of the neocons”

With regard to changing progressive opinion on Israel, knee-jerk opposition to American Christian fundamentalists may have certainly played a part in the greater attention to Palestinian oppression. Generally, however, progressives only mention these Jew-hating Israel-lovers to make the rhetorical point that anti-Semitism can cohere as well with support for Israeli policy as with opposition to it. Perhaps a more important motivation is that progressives have been uniformly horrified at the drastic acceleration of American violent interference in the Middle East. They have also been unhappy with the burgeoning anti-Arabism and Islamophobia that has been used as an excuse not only to kill and torture people abroad but to curtail bedrock American freedom and egalitarian protections at home. In this context Israel, notwithstanding its free press, feminism, gay rights, workers rights, etc., has begun to be seen as a partner in America’s apparent downward spiral into fascism.

Progressives took note when, in the wake of Israel’s brutal crackdown on Palestinians as apparent punishment for the second Intefada, George Bush said without a trace of irony that Arafat was fully to blame and that Ariel Sharon was a man of peace. George Bush had been very deft at securing his reputation for homespun clueless stupidity, but could his handlers be that stupid also? Who were the brains behind Bush’s grotesquely mindless indifference to peace in the Middle East?

Bush’s motivations may not in fact have been entirely dishonorable. It is plausible that Bush simply has limits on his capacity for flagrant hypocrisy. After all, he had just recently punished the 19 dead terrorists who carried out 9-11 by creating a humanitarian crisis in the entire nation of Afghanistan, where it was claimed that the mastermind of these attacks was hiding. If Bush’s collective punishment of Afghani children for the supposed crimes of Osama Bin Laden was okay, what moral ground did he have to stand on to criticize Sharon’s collective punishment of Palestinian children for the crimes of those engineering the second intifada?

Bush’s avoidance of hypocrisy on this matter is arguably limited to Israel. Admittedly, his criticism of Russia or China over how they fight “terrorism” in Chechnya or Xinjiang has been somewhere between muted and non-existent. Nevertheless, he has never said, “Russia and China have a right to defend themselves” or blamed everything squarely on their targeted minority populations. Bush has more saliently proclaimed Israel’s right to murder Palestinians with impunity.

With a little further examination, it gradually became clear to progressives that “neoconservative” Likudniks of both the Jewish and fundamentalist Christian variety were also prominent candidates to explain Bush’s policy behavior. These neoconservatives have been the driving intellectual force behind white house policy since Bush was elected in 2000. Their rather odd conglomeration of Trotskyite internationalist idealism with Machievellian realpolitik dominated media discourse in the wake of 9-11 and in the lead up to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The disproportionately Jewish influence in this neoconservative movement was particularly baffling to progressives. Most American Jews—including staunch defenders of Israel—were and are liberal and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Al Gore’s running mate could have been the first Jewish vice-president, and a remarkably Likud-friendly vice president as well. To secure Gore’s loss it was necessary to disenfranchise Jewish voters in Palm Beach, Florida by setting them up to vote for Pat Buchanan of all people—notorious for his criticism of Israel and his defense of odd Muslim behavior like the price put on the head of Salman Rushdie by Ayatolla Khomeni. Regardless of whether the neoconservatives had any role in rigging the election of 2000, it was bizarre that even a handful of highly intelligent Jews--right wing Likudnik loyalists or not--would be willing to work with a Bush presidency that had usurped power against the express will of most American Jews. Was the state of Israel so far gone that its loyalists in the U.S. saw more promise in George Bush and the fundamentalist-beholden Republican party than in the Jewish-supported Democrats? What was going on?

“Rigidifying left wing anti-Israel sentiment”

The apparent overlap between hawkish Israeli interests and America’s frightening foreign and domestic policy accelerated hostile progressive attention towards Israel. Today, anyone logging on to Indymedia will repeatedly be directed to stories about Israeli soldiers dispatching five year old kids with a gunshot to the head and about how the New York Times won’t cover it. Radio shows like Democracy Now broadcast a parade of discussions about what a threat to peace the Israeli Apartheid Wall is and why everyone ought to boycott Israel as we once boycotted South Africa. Anyone with cable can flip to the local progressive station and watch some disillusioned journalist talk about how she once believed the American corporate media story that Palestinians were all terrorists and anyone who calls for Palestinians human rights must be an anti-Semite, but then she visited the occupied territories and learned the truth about what a menace the Zionists really are. Any patron of independent film must watch, at least twice a month, a new documentary about Israeli tanks mowing down Palestinians who violate curfews and Apache helicopters launching cruise missiles at Palestinian shantytowns and refugee camps.

Left wing discussions on Israel are generally conducted without a broad frame of reference (i.e. to the crimes of comparable nations), and nuance in left wing criticism of Israel is rare. The other side is always painted as the settler Zionist side, propagated by American Big Media and thus not worth discussing since it is pounded into our heads every day already. Progressives consider themselves courageous to brave accusations of anti-Semitism by taking, as much as possible, the unreconstructed pro-Palestinian position.

“The Pro-Israel lobby?”

For the last few years, I have been mulling over the rise of anti-Israel enthusiasm (and some degree of concurrent anti-Semitism) on the Left, but I was moved to write all this primarily after the attention given to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s provocative thesis on the pro-Israel lobby. Mearsheimer & Walt assert that the United States supports Israel on so many of its most murderous land-theiving policies primarily because of a very well organized and effective group of lobbyists (e.g. AIPAC) who push the U.S. government and media to be pro-Israel with a deft combination of carrots and sticks. With some noble exceptions, progressive media ate up Mearsheimer & Walt’s thesis like a dog eats its own vomit.

Perhaps their claim was so resonant on the Left because it confirmed the suspicions of many that something terribly unusual must have happened to America from the year 2000 on. It is certainly unusual to imagine that some improbable group of politically mutant Jews is to blame for America’s disastrous empowerment of Bush and the Republicans, the disastrous war in Iraq, the disastrous Patriot Act, etc. I also suspect that some progressives secretly (and ignobly) liked the potential appeal to mainstream Americans of M & W’s ‘national interest’ oriented argument. Perhaps they thought that the politically manipulable mainstream American majority might be persuaded to join the progressive movement out of fear of ‘dual loyalty’ from people like Jews: Jews, after all, aren’t ‘real’ Americans. By exploiting xenophobia and anti-Semitism, this segment of the Left perhaps hoped to convince mainstream Americans that the power of conservatism, fundamentalism, big corporations, etc. is not simply an embodiment of America’s will to power. Rather it is the result of perfidious Jews persuading our government to act against our ‘national interests’.

I found this uncritical celebration of the pro-Israel lobby theory to be a potentially sinister turn in the progressive agenda. We progressives are altogether too quick to congratulate people like Mearsheimer & Walt for being “courageous”, i.e. courageous enough to overcome their fear of smear to examine Israel’s powerful and persistent influence on American policy.

But it is not actually very courageous to state opinions that you know your tribe already agrees with. The courage we should be cultivating now is the courage to examine what is making American progressives so receptive to the equally persistent (if not equally powerful) anti-Israel lobby. The arguments of this anti-Israel lobby are often as specious as those of the pro-Israel lobby. I would say that these arguments often skirt the edge of anti-Semitism, but I don't want to be preposterously accused of succumbing to the bullying tactics of Israeli propagandists. But even if anti-Israel arguments are never Hitler-level anti-Semitic, they are at least somewhat discriminatory. The arguments often hold Israel to a higher moral standard than that to which they hold other Western nations and powerful nations generally. That is, Israel is more resoundingly condemned for less extensive atrocities than other comparable nations.

Progressives need to consider whether unconditional progressive support for the pro-Palestinian position is a departure from progressive self-interest. Perhaps it is true that unconditional Pentagon and Big Media support for whatever Israel does is also a departure from the self-interest of the Pentagon and Big Media. I think, however, that for institutions as far gone as the Pentagon and Big Media, unconditional support for the Israeli occupation is an easy sell. In fact, I think the case that progressives are being manipulated into betraying our true interests is stronger than the case that the already dubious rulers of the U.S. government are being so manipulated.

I have not read Mearsheimer and Walt’s argument in detail (honestly I do not trust anyone with a suspiciously un-American last name like “Mearsheimer”). Let us assume, however, that Mearsheimer and Walt are correct: the pro-Israel lobby is remarkably effective at persuading the American government to act against America’s national interests to support a narrowly right wing settler Zionist agenda. Indeed, the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful and effective as to persuade American lawmakers to put the good of right wing settler Zionists over the good of the right wing American corporations and fundamentalist kleptocrats that they usually bend over for. If right wing settler Zionists are competing with fundamentalists and robber barons for the loyalty of American lawmakers, then this is something that fundamentalists and robber barons should indeed be outraged at. Surely homegrown special interests should be given more power to undermine democracy than foreign special interests.

I, however, do not identify as a fundamentalist or robber baron. If my government is beholden to wealthy powerful right wing special interest groups anyway, I do not have a preference with regard to which particular right wing special interest group my government sells its loyalty to. If I am to believe Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud, my government also gets onto knee pads for the Saudi royal family. Now admittedly the Saudis observe more decorum in the way they wield their influence in the American government. If some Americans call attention to how brutal it is to stone a woman to death because her husband catches her masturbating, no Saudi lobby outlets will create a climate of McCarthyite terror by accusing these whistle blowers of anti-Saudism. Nor does the Saudi lobby interfere with the free speech rights of talk radio hosts to call for the nuclear annihilation of the entire Middle East, nor indeed with right of the United States to torture Muslims in a Cuban prison indefinitely without trial or charge.

Imagine that the United States constructed poison showers and ovens in which to begin the wholesale extermination of all Arabs and Muslims. Imagine even that America-residing Saudis were not flown out in time the way Osama Bin Laden’s relatives were flown out after 9-11. I would guess that the Saudi lobby would still offer us no hinderance in this expression of our freedom. They generally don’t care what we say or do, just as long as we continue to prop up their regime, buy their oil and fight a war or two in their interests. The same kind words cannot be said of the pro-Israel lobby, however. Notwithstanding this reputation for pushy indiscretion in the pro-Israel lobby, if my government is selling itself to the highest bidder, that already consumes an enormous amount of my outrage. I don’t have much residual anger left to fume over the fact that one of the highest bidders is the Likudnik brigade (now perhaps the Kadima brigade?).

“Let progressive Jews take the lead”

The cozy relationship between American fascists and Israeli fascists is something that Israelis or Jews who crave better moral status for Israel should be at least as concerned about as progressive Americans are. Progressive Israelis and potential Israelis should indeed have some moral interest in keeping Likudniks from strong-arming American lawmakers into throwing them shanks of kosher pork at Washington feeding frenzies. I personally doubt that this is a fair description of what happens, however. It is ordinary Israelis who are universally obliged to devote years of their lives to wearing khakis and fatigues and killing people for a strip of desert that they got moved to after the other concentration camps were shut down. Militarism consumes the youth of Israelis—they spend a good part of their youth in direct service to militarism and the rest of their youth backpacking stoned through places like India and Thailand to recover from it. In contrast to the harsh lives of Israelis, ordinary Americans live in a big gigantic country with lots of different topography and natural resources and are only obliged to work 80 hour weeks for low wages and spend the rest of their time playing murderous video games designed by the military and masturbating to Baywatch reruns (the males are encouraged to do this in their spare hours at least; the females are encouraged to shop for sweatshop-made products and struggle with anorexia, bulimia and leaky implants). Given the easier lives of Americans, the question of the hour is who is manipulating whom for what?

Even with the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, it is a plausible hypothesis that oil companies who wanted higher gas prices and Pentagon officials who wanted to expand the Iraq war into Iran put the Israeli leadership up to their “disproportionate” response. Thus Israel’s sowing of chaos in Lebanon was more arguably in the interests of Saudi Arabia and the Pentagon than it was in the interests of Israeli citizens (notwithstanding the overwhelming popular support for this operation in Israel at the time, popular support that has now given way to democratic rage against those who sent Israel to a war it ended up losing). The war may even have been in the interests of highly-placed apocalyptic Christian anti-Semites who would like either to kill all the Jews or, more dramatically, to kill everyone and bring back Jesus. Part of this apocalyptic plan may involve provoking soon-to-be nuclear Iran into dropping a few payloads on Israel, taking care of the plurality of the world’s Jews once and for all, and giving America the excuse to wipe out the entire Arab world with them—the Jewish problem and the Arab-Muslim problem both solved in one fell swoop (and at last Christians can recapture the Holy Land!). Ah, but then I am being hyperbolically paranoid again. Let us nevertheless watch where the wind blows.

It might be worthwhile for irony-minded Israelis to reverse the insight of Mearsheimer & Walt’s thesis and begin to consider whether Israel has more to fear from her “friends” than her friends have to fear from her, and whether indeed she has more to fear from her professed friends than from her professed enemies. Yet even if we see things through the looking glass and imagine that it is Washington robber baron fundamentalists who are manipulating Jerusalem to act against Israeli national interests, this does not change the fact that progressive Jews and Israelis should have the strongest interest in scrutinizing the U.S.-Israel relationship. For American progressive non-Semites on the other hand, condemning the U.S. for supporting Israel is like Russian democracy activists condemning the Soviet Union for supporting Cuba. Yes, on occasion the tail wags the dog; but more often, the dog wags the tail. Cubans lost more from their ideological and economic dependence on the Soviet Union than the Soviet Union lost from this dependence. The same is true of Israeli dependence on the United States.

If patriotic, morally concerned Jews and Israelis are compelled to examine and, if appropriate, condemn the U.S.-Israel relationship, it is not clear what role non-Semitic progressives should be encouraged to play in this condemnation. Instead of putting so much effort into mobilizing (mostly) progressive goyim to support their anti-Israel campaigns, perhaps progressive Jews should consider taking on Israel more from within the Jewish community. Some Jews at least should try to keep criticism of Israel and the Israel-U.S. relationship on the intra-Jewish debate pipeline. Progressive Jews might want to be more sparing about taking this internal struggle into the national or international spotlight, where it is more likely to create perceptions of “us Jews” versus “them anti-Semites”. Progressive Jews may build more trust among their co-ethnic/co-religionist opponents by refusing to air dirty laundry and may ultimately have a much better impact on Israeli policy and the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship. They may also gradually overtake the leadership of self-anointed “Jewish” organizations who currently demand uncritical obedience to Israeli policy among diaspora Jews in the United States and elsewhere, forcing Jews around the world into a position where they can either support Israeli militarism and have a supportive community, or oppose Israeli militarism and be without one.

The downside of this “internal” approach, however, is that it functionally gives non-progressive Jews too much unchallenged control over what the rest of America and the world perceives to be consensus Jewish opinion. Likewise, Christians who do not want Christianity identified with the Christian right would be unwise to keep the internal ideological struggles among Christians too low on the down low. Sometimes Christians must speak out against high profile Christian-seeming institutions when they are setting what is ultimately a non-Christian or anti-Christian agenda. Likewise, to the extent “Jewish” organizations betray every religious and cultural value that is worthy of being called Jewish, Jews who really are Jews should speak out against these organizations publicly to combat their monolithic distortion of Jewish pluralism.

Even in the short term, some progressive Jews can and should form large, coordinated and publicity-minded national groups that stand in contrast to the other pro-militarist “Jewish” organizations. Forming new organizations could be a strategic supplement both to slowly overtaking existing Jewish organizations on the one hand and to appearing before the media as ragtag individuals on the other (individuals who are now often dismissed as anti-Semites, self-hating Jews or maverick freaks). If some progressive national and international Jewish organizations are formed and stir up some publicity, this will present the question of legitimacy that is not asked enough: what makes a self-anointed “Jewish” organization a legitimate as opposed to illegitimate representative of Jewish interest and opinion?

“What Palestinians should expect from non-Semitic progressives”

Palestinians and other Arabs in the Middle East, the U.S. and other nations also have obvious interests in changing Israeli policy. I could see why they would want to seek support and attention to Israel’s crimes wherever they could get it. I can also understand why they would not want to simply wait in the hope that self-contained Jewish critiques or a publicly-discussed progressive Jewish organization would liberate Palestinians. However, as reasonable as it is to seek support from everyone progressive, regardless of ethnic or religious identity, Palestinians and Arabs should understand why progressive non-Semites might not be so receptive to their overtures. They should not be surprised, in fact, if non-Semitic progressives might one day go back to asking Palestinians to take a number.

There are a lot of pressing issues for progressives other than the oppression of Palestinians. These issues include the potential of global warming to cause worldwide catastrophe, cultural genocide in Tibet and Xinjiang, real genocide in the Sudan, the proliferation of AIDS; torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, mass murderous war crimes in Iraq; the specter of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran, peak oil, the undermining of democratic accountability in the U.S. and the West generally. All of these issues have some degree of interconnection and might in some oblique way relate to Israel and U.S. policy towards Israel.

However, pro-Palestinians should not be disappointed if they fail to persuade the Left to make all these other issues subordinate to unconditional support for Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, especially given how stomach-turningly murderous and inhumane this resistance can sometimes be. If Palestinians want progressive support, they should do more to earn it: perhaps put more effort (I recognize some is already being extended) into intra-Palestinian intra-Arab intra-Muslim ideological and behavioral housecleaning. Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims—whether fairly or not—do not have an uncheckered reputation for tolerance, compassion, respect for open inquiry or other championed virtues of contemporary progressivism. Without some major changes in values and practices, it is a lot to expect progressive non-Semites to jump whole-heartedly on board with a nuance-free pro-Palestinian agenda. It wasn’t the best investment for progressives thirty years ago, and I for one cannot see how the real value of the investment has risen.

The Palestinian cause has been relatively lucky however, because most hard core progressives don’t agree with me, and the perceived value of progressive investment in the anti-Israel position has indeed gone up dramatically. A warning, though: progressives can quickly lose their stomach for civilian-targeting violence and gross stupidity, no matter how oppressed are those who propagate this violence and stupidity.

“Towards a sane progressive stance on Israel/Palestine”

I certainly do not advocate that non-Semitic progressives should collectively shut up again about the crimes committed by Israel. Nor do I advocate reviving the taboo against supporting Palestinian rights and self-determination. What I do advocate is that criticism of Israel should be measured in its scope, intensity and frequency. Decisions about when, how and how much to criticize Israel should flow from meaningful comparisons with other peer nations (Western-style democracies, nations above a certain GDP/capita, nations with comparable political/economic power, geographical neighbors). The importance of devoting progressive time and attention to criticizing and politically pressuring Israel should also be weighed against the importance and priority of other more pressing progressive concerns.

Also, let us agree that there is no excuse for whitewashing the wrongs done by Israelis and their institutions and advocates against Palestinians. However, we should not whitewash the wrongs done by Palestinians and their institutions and advocates against Israelis either, or indeed against the Palestinian people themselves. It is reasonable, and consistent with left wing values, to weigh Israel’s crimes more heavily because Israel is more powerful. In addition, Israel is arguably the greater aggressor both historically and at present. Finally, insofar as Israel understands and promotes democracy and freedom, it really ought to know better than to occupy, oppress and kill people. Its greater knowledge and power implies greater responsibility. The Palestinians are not without responsibility, however, and if progressive non-Semites are going to presume to call Israelis to account, they should not be shy about calling Palestinians to account also. The oppression suffered by Palestinians does not exonerate all their acts of “resistance”. We should have learned enough from the horrors of communism-in-practice to know that there are limits to what present or prior oppression is an excuse for. There is no excuse for blowing up school children on buses, summary executions of suspected collaborators, and violating the rights of children by raising them on an almost exclusive political diet of militarism and anti-Jewish hatred. The Left should not be shy about roundly condemning these atrocities and cultural failures among Palestinians.

“Boycotts and other political pressure”

As for political pressure on Israel, I am ambivalent about the movements for boycotts and even targeted divestment. I understand that many of these initiatives have their inception in progressive Israeli or Jewish organizations who want Israel to be a nation they can be proud of instead of one that makes them feel like America-in-Iraq, Russia-in-Chechnya or China-in-Xinjiang. I also understand that these boycott and divestment campaigns may exert effective peaceful (as opposed to violent) pressure on Israel comparable to the peaceful pressure exerted on South Africa that helped to bring down apartheid.

However, when North Americans feel righteous about boycotting Israel for the atrocities of its occupation, I have to ask if they would also encourage progressive Israelis to boycott the United States and Canada for their roles in the occupation, cultural destruction and decimation of the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan. These invasions and occupations have been considerably more disastrous and unconscionable than Israeli occupations of the West Bank and Gaza. As a North American progressive, I would support this North American boycott as Israeli progressives support Israel boycotts, and I wish that Israeli progressives had the chutzpah to start this kind of boycott. Of course Israeli boycotts of North American goods might be strategically sillier than the reverse: a boycott against Israel involves a limited enough number of goods and it is directed at a fragile enough economy that it could actually have an effect, while an Israeli boycott against the U.S. and Canada would likely fail on both counts (unless they got the word out a little). However, at least an Israeli boycott against North America would be more justified than the reverse.

When Israel started the war that allowed them to occupy the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, they did so in response to a credible threat of immanent attack. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were justified respectively by 9-11 (Afghanistan) and the threat of weapons of mass destruction (Iraq). Little convincing evidence has yet emerged that the 9-11 attacks were engineered by any of the Taliban leadership of Afghanistan, however heinous they might otherwise have been. The perceived problem with Afghanistan was that “people who shelter cockroaches (terrorists) are as bad as the cockroaches themselves”. And we all know that weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq. The Arab states from which the occupied territories were seized, on the other hand, genuinely HAD mobilized to attack the state of Israel in 1967. That planned attack may have been understandable given the other things Israelis had been up to prior to 1967, but it was still a real threat to Israel, rather than a made up one.

Moreover, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have probably killed more people in the last 5 years than Israel has killed in Palestine over the last 50—the excess deaths in Iraq alone were 655,000 as of 2005—in all likelihood the toll exceeds 1 million now. And with Iraq having the worst rate of child mortality of any country in the world, a credible case can be made that the U.S. and its “coalition forces” have been genocidally reckless. Of course the U.S. isn’t actually committing anything that can be condemned as real actual genocide, even if the body count is solidly in that ballpark. After all, we don’t INTEND to exterminate all the Iraqi people—it is just that the sizeable proportion of the population upon whom we have unleashed lethal chaos were regrettably expedient to set up for violent death. More specifically, this enormous number of deaths just happens to result from a war that has brought hefty profits to a handful of corporations with some reliable friends in both political parties of the United States.

The massive grave that would have to be dug to contain all the Iraqi men women and children who are now dead and would not have died had we not invaded is, even only in our imagination, a testament to at least one great thing we have achieved in Iraq. We have already exceeded the kill count of the Sudan genocide, and may be well on the way to exceeding that of the Rwandan genocide. Give us a few more years and a new target of mass murder (say Iran) and we can outdo the Holocaust. Perhaps we can identify some Jeeeeews who have had (and continue to have) some influence in convincing us to unleash the massive carnage we are still unleashing. Perhaps a number of these Jeeeews have ties to Is-rayel. However, we must also admit that there are a number of other Jeeeeews who have been loud and effective voices against this carnage, turned our attention to the evil of it, and cried out relentlessly for us to stop it. Jeeeeews, like people of all other ethnic groups, will disagree with each other on this kind of thing. And Jeeeews, like all smart people, will fill positions of influence where intelligence is required—positions that by their nature call for good or for evil. There have been prominent Jeeeewish voices on both sides of the Iraq issue, as there have been prominent intelligent voices in general on both sides of this issue.

This means that we non-Jews, who make up the majority of both the American nation and its accountability-shielded de facto leadership, have not been blind sheep manipulated by a monolithically uniform and dissent-free Jewish conspiracy into invading and destroying Iraq. Rather we faced a choice of whether to support an invasion or to oppose it. And our media—both disproportionately Jewish (e.g. the New York Times) and disproportionately Goyish (e.g. Fox News)—had blitzed us with administration propaganda. Most of us believed this propaganda long enough to either support or not sufficiently oppose a war that has begun a new nightmare to replace the nightmare of the Cold War that we so recently escaped. Clearly, the masters of war have many obsequious servants in high places in the contemporary American media—both Jewish and goyish. But we have been deceived by the media before, and we should know better. We made the wrong choice, and we should own that choice. If we are going to blame the disproportionately Jewish neocons and their media servants for sending us into Iraq, we should also credit the voices against the war that have been interesting, entertaining and intelligent enough to compel our attention—these voices have been disproportionately Jewish also.

There are certainly some Jews out there, many of them Israeli, who hope to convince the democracy-indifferent leadership of the U.S. to genocidally murder tens of millions of Iranian children with pre-emptive nuclear strikes in order to save Israel from the “existential threat” that crazy-irrational-suicide-loving-Muslim Iran would pose should it ever attain the nuclear weapons that crazy-irrational-suicide-loving-Muslim Pakistan has (and that dropped-them-twice-on-real-cities-full-of-real-people-but-in-a-rational-sensible-kind-of-way America has). However, if we choose to mass murder Iranian children out of this bone-headedly prejudiced fear of Iranians’ incomprehensibly atavistic willingness to die for causes they consider patriotic or otherwise righteous, we cannot blame “the Jews” for our choice. Plenty of other Jewish voices are crying just as loudly that this unprovoked mass murder of Iranian women and children would be unconscionably evil, would be a disaster for the U.S., Israel and the world; and would be based on a hypocritical and transparently bigoted understanding of “the Iranian mindset”.

Just as the majority-goyim U.S. leadership receives a lot of contradictory pressure and influence from the prominent Jews of the world, so Israel receives a lot of contradictory pressure and influence from the prominent goyim of the world. And, like the Americans, the Israelis finally have to make their choices with the power they have, and they have to own those choices. I ask progressive non-Semites susceptible to the anti-Israel lobby to calmly consider this fact: the Palestinians are poor, oppressed, occupied, and subjected to regular culling by Israel, but they are considerably better off than Iraqis or Afghanis at this point. The Israelis show considerably more de facto concern and compassion for the Palestinian people than the Americans show for the Iraqi and Afghani people, though perhaps only in the sense that professional contract killers generally show more concern and compassion for their victims than do deranged serial killers. Let there be boycotts if these boycotts might save lives or free people from occupation and oppression, but I wish the boycotts were not hypocritically limited to targeting Israel.

I hesitate to support many of the existing boycotts against Israel because left-wing Christian churches, university campuses, and (in Canada at least) labor unions too often target only Israel for economic pressure. Some of these organizations may even downplay the crimes of more egregious regimes when asked why they are not boycotting these regimes as well. Christians of all people should be focusing primarily on the crimes of other Christians and their nations and organizations. The link between the fundamentalist Christian lobby and the appointment of Bush by the Supreme Court, the war in Iraq, the freedoms eviscerated by the Patriot Act, etc. is much cleaner cut, for instance, than any link to the pro-Israel lobby. Excessive Christian attention to the crimes the one Jewish nation in the world can make it seem like the Christian left is blaming Jews more than their fellow pretenders to Christianity for the world’s evils. Some Christian churches have been able to finesse their divestment from Israel by divesting also from atrocity giants like Sudan and from companies believed to be involved in the manufacture of suicide bomber vests, but too many others call for a boycott of Israel and then call it a day. Of course, I would have these churches divest from North Amerca as well, though this would be an odd thing for a North American church to do.

Again, it is true that Christian churches are often firmly persuaded into their anti-Israel position by extremely persistent left wing Israelis and potential Israelis who are prophetically horrified by what their nation is doing. Still, these churches should consider telling these admirable conscience-driven Jews to consider taking their prophetic struggle for the Jewish soul to the synagogues first, and let the Christian churches confront Israel’s fundamentalist allies instead. The last thing liberal Christians should want is for rogue elements on the Christian left to be inspired by their institutional opposition to the Israeli occupation and revive theological interest in sickening New Testament passages like “let his blood be on us and on our children”. This is the kind of thing for Mel Gibsonite fascist Christians to cut their teeth on, not progressive Christians.

Labor unions who take a dogmatically pro-Palestinian stand are similarly out of their depth. It is bad enough that labor density has been declining steadily over the last few decades (with voter turnout and thus government accountability to democracy declining in tandem). If unions appear highly concerned about securing self-determination for the people who elected Hamas, union members and potential union members may begin to wonder if their unions have grown less concerned about other things that unions are supposed to be concerned about. Unions should have enough to do organizing new shops, securing worker security against layoffs, stemming the decline of real wages, protecting worker safety, etc. Even with regard to political advocacy, unions can be more effective in trying to preserve what’s left of the welfare state and seeking more pro-union legislation. It’s not clear how much positive effect unions can have on Israeli politics by joining an anti-Israel boycott, though such a boycott can certainly have an ominous effect on domestic political support for unions. And it is still the case that Israel treats its workers—even its Palestinian workers—better than many Arab countries treat theirs, and of course monumentally better than the United States treats its workers.

“On strategic influence”

I would generally argue that singling out Israel for disproportionately harsh left-wing excoriation is difficult to defend on principle and also strategically reckless in practice. Nevertheless, there are potentially good things that can arise from it. Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are often inclined to see Israel as the worst eddy of pure evil on the planet. Perhaps the best way to implant and nurture progressive tendencies in Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims is to temporarily cajole this idiotic hyperbole. This pandering to prejudice may help to gain the trust of paranoid and genocidally-minded Arabs and Muslims and thus increase their receptivity to social influence by what is best in the Western liberal tradition. As the Left goes on a rhetorical rampage against Israel, “naturally” Israel-hating Arabs and Muslims, some of whom may have learned some rather right wing Republican-like values in their societies of origin, are becoming culturally cozier with the Left. Thus many Arabs and Muslims are beginning to hang out with, go clubbing with, date, lose their virginity to, become addicted to drugs with and otherwise come under the influence of groovy, easy-going, feminist, gay-loving, logic-and-reason-employing, Holocaust-believing-in progressive people.

Sure, some of these progressive people are receptive to influence too. Weaker minded progressives may start to believe weird things like that gay marriage is a Jewish plot to destroy Islam, but for the most part, the direction of influence should go primarily from host to guest.

The flip side of this, sadly, is that as progressive non-Semites gain more influence with Palestinians and their ethno-religious pretenders of allegiance, they appear to be losing it with less progressive Jews. Those Jews most relentlessly exposed to pro-Israel public relations may begin to feel safest locked up in right wing Jewish madrassas, fearfully preparing to combat the second Holocaust that third millennium human rights hippies will soon unleash upon them.

“Conclusion”

My silly caricatures of paranoid Jews and backwards Palestinians notwithstanding, I don’t finally think influence bought or lost should be a big consideration with regard to the stand non-Semites should take on Israel/Palestine. What I would encourage progressive non-Semites to do instead is to give Israel/Palestine no more than proportionate attention relative to other progressive concerns. In addition, we should make a place for a variety of potentially different perspectives on Israel/Palestine that have the following characteristics in common: (a) they refuse to whitewash atrocity, (b) they refuse to treat oppression either as morally equivalent to resistance or as an excuse for atrocity, (c) they grow from understanding and compassion applied to both sides and (d) they care what the truth is.

By working through perspectives that meet these criteria, the Left may arrive at a measured and nuanced but firm stand on Israel/Palestine. None of the more extreme camps will be very happy with that stand, but most people on both sides should be compelled to respect it. If taking this stand gains us enemies or loses us influence, it will be worth it. But we’re still a long way from that, and congratulating ourselves for being “courageously” anti-Israel is taking us even further away.

At one time, it was expedient to fund Jihadists as “freedom fighters” because they fought against the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was a threat to our economic interests. Now it is expedient to call Jihadists “Islamofascists”, and to unconditionally support Israel as an outpost of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Many Muslim nations are sitting on resources that we want and we are running out of oil quickly. Once the world is out of oil and all sectors of our economy collapse except for the military (which will be buoyed by taxes on mostly poor and middle class Americans) we will have to find someone to kill to get the economy working again. The Jews might make a convenient target at that time, since many Jewish individuals and plurality-Jewish companies control other resources that the most politically influential corporations might one day want as much as they currently want oil. In all likelihood, there will be some Jewish kapos involved in this operation—Jews from some sectors of the economy supporting genocide against Jews in general so they can reap the benefits of killing and robbing their own people. Perhaps at this time it will finally become politically expedient to refer to Israel as an “Apartheid State” in the money-controlled media and to start capturing suspected “Zionofascists” and torturing them at Guantanamo Bay. In fact, once Castro is dead, we might be able to turn all of Cuba into our own personal torture colony, spun by our media as necessary for winning the new War on Zionism.

If you think this idea is far-fetched, it probably is. However, there is no debating that there is some fierce anti-Israel bias on the left right now, and there is much money available for erudite accusations against Israel for manipulating American policy against America’s interests. Is the Left also being used in order to build up a potential groundswell of hatred against Israel and Jews for a time when those in power might profit from that hatred? In the event that “Zionofascists” become the new enemy to hate and fear as much as Hitler, the Left who would usually oppose such preposterous scapegoating of enemies-du-jour in service of “American interests” will be caught with their pants down. The Left in this scenario would be effectively neutralized from acting against genocidal fascism by their own habits of condemning Israel as the worst state in the world.

As discussed earlier, the U.S. has a tendency to turn in Orwellian fashion against its former allies and client states when it is expedient to do so. When it does, the harsh rhetoric of yesterday’s left finds its way into the echo chamber of today’s right—sometimes a former lefty is actually deployed by the media as a fattened lauded pundit to convince progressives to support contemporary wars by spinning these wars as natural outgrowths of progressive values. Christopher Hitchens is a case in point. Today’s countercultural protest may be setting the stage for tomorrow’s war propaganda, so the Left should watch its rhetoric. Keep your eye on the editorial staff of Adbusters, the most mainstream of Israel-baiting leftist publications, to see which of them eventually go on the NSA payroll to support the profitable anti-Zionist mass murders of the mid 21^st century.

The Jews will probably not become targets of genocidal aggression again before a couple of other more politically acceptable targets have paved the way. I suspect religious Christians—particularly African and Latin American Christians who lack the political connections of Pat Robertson—are likely to be smeared as either fundamentalists or fundamentalist-enablers and militarily targeted after Muslims as “the next great problem religion.” Hugo Chavez aside, the resurgence of leftist government in Latin American has the participation of some openly religious Christian leadership. African Christians are also becoming troublesome for neocolonial profit as they spearhead anti-death penalty, anti-War, and anti-poverty movements on the continent that threaten to result in humane, prosperous stable government in Africa. These subversive activities could undermine the state of disorganized sovereignty-free chaos that Western companies currently exploit in order to extract diamonds and other important resources from the region. If bloody wars are to be fought in the Dark Continent to secure resources that the West is addicted to, then the African Christians (as well as Muslims) who have the potential to stand in the way of these wars will need to be either brought on side or neutralized.

I suspect a long term agenda is unfolding in which monotheists in general are being eyed as targets of plunder (a kind of generationally misplaced cosmic justice, I suppose, given the atrocities that monotheists have historically perpetrated against each other and on the rest of the world over the last few millenia). This broad anti-montheist agenda may explain the flurry of atheist publications targeted at the educated middle classes of Western society, precisely the demographic that needs to be mobilized when a genocide is in the works. Monotheists will not be targeted all at once, however. In order to make good use of the principle of divide and conquer, the plunder will have to take place one monotheism at a time. Muslims, of course, will be first (with anti-Muslim culling assisted by duped Christians and Jews), perhaps Southern Christians the next (with the help of duped Jews and Muslims), and the Jews the last (with the help of what remain of Muslims and Christians—and there will be enough propaganda-brainwashed atheists by that time that propaganda-brainwashed Muslims and Christians will not be necessary).

While my hyperbolic paranoid soothsaying does not convince even me at this point, there is still some reason to avoid letting our leftish outrage set us up to be the right wing dupes of the future. As progressives, let’s find a way to confront the contemporary atrocities of the West against Arabs and Mulsims without setting the stage for next year’s model of expedient lucrative atrocity. If there is any religious insight that has been borne out over the course of human history, it is that when you call for hatred and violence against another, you are deeply, if unintentionally, calling for hatred and violence against yourself.