The Left is So Pro-Palestinian In Spite of Identitarian Social Justice Politics, Not Because of Them

And that's a good thing

In its ongoing mission to turn all my hair grey, the National Post, Canada’s newspaper of note for the red-faced jet-ski owner community, recently churned out yet another mesmerizingly stupid op-ed about the Palestine solidarity movement. I have to assume this one was accomplished by feeding the prompt ‘write an article comparing anti-war activism to the Hitler Youth, in the style of a hysterical conservative’ into ChatGPT, though I guess it's possible that a real live Boomer wrote it. The article made the groundbreaking claim that lefty pseudo-intellectuals have been brainwashing the nation’s vulnerable youth by feeding them a steady diet of Ibram X. Kendi and Kimberlé Crenshaw, so that now, terrifyingly, Canadian students’ “moral compasses are calibrated to side with whichever side of a conflict can be said to be suffering from oppression”. This radical stance will surely lead to social breakdown and mass bloodshed, the article notes; after all,

It’s all good fun to create a generation of zealous students enamored with the idea of progress, but the professors who led the change should be mindful that radical student movements tend to end poorly for educators — the Chinese Red Guards of 1966 and the Hitler Youth of the 1930s being prime examples.

Dark days indeed.

As usual, conservatives are succeeding in identifying half of what’s going on while wildly missing the mark on the other half. Because listen: I’m as fed up with social-justice posturing and the thoughtless uptake of American liberal identitarian authors as the next normal person. But what’s going on with the Palestine solidarity movement right now is actually much more interesting than a straight-forward case of liberal students mindlessly siding with whoever has the most oppression points.

In many ways the armed conflict in Palestine is an issue which actually blows open the facade of social justice politics. Within this mode of politics it is axiomatic that one must listen to ‘the voices’ of oppressed people; indigeneity is practically worshipped; gender-based violence is one of the worst sins imaginable; and it’s understood that holding regressive ideals like homophobia is enough to effectively disqualify your voice from ever mattering. And since October 7th, pro-Israeli media, which is to say practically all major media in the West, have been relentlessly asserting that Jewish voices, which is to say oppressed voices, support Israel; that Jewish people are indigenous to Israel; that Hamas committed indiscriminate gender-based violence against Israeli women; and that Hamas, Palestinians, and Arabs in general are hopelessly racist, sexist, homophobic and otherwise backward. And yet among left-leaning people under the age of 40, sympathy for Palestinians and the cause of Palestinian liberation continues to be very widespread.

What is going on here? It’s true that there has been plenty of ‘social-justice-ification’ of the issue, with people on social media sharing content naming Israel as the settlers rather than the indigenous people, conflating Zionism with whiteness, and so on, painting a picture of Palestinians as oppressed along identity lines that are easy for American liberals to understand and undercutting the narrative that Israel is the real victim here. But even with this going on, you would expect, I think, a much deeper divide among the left than what we currently see, if only because the wall-to-wall pro-Israeli coverage in conventional media, and the very common and deeply-held sympathy for Jews as the inheritors of the trauma of the Holocaust, would tend to push many social justice types to identify with the Israelis. Yet this isn’t what we see. Instead, practically everyone on the left, from the most saccharine social justice influencers to the grittiest of Dirtbag Left edgelords, is identifying what’s going on in Palestine as an atrocity of nauseating proportions.

The ranting conservatives at publications like the National Post can explain this only by way of deranged Jew-hatred. What other possible explanation could there be? They’ve explained at length that the Palestinians are murderous animals who can barely be trusted to breathe; they’ve let everyone know that Israel is merely defending their hot IDF girls and their gay beaches from demented religious fanatics; and they’ve clarified that it hurts the feelings of all Jewish people everywhere when you criticize Israeli war crimes. Pro-Zionist social media accounts have been churning out tearful accounts of the ways that Jews as an identity are being harmed by pro-Palestinian sentiment, and breaking out all the tired buzzwords of the social justice internet in a bid to turn the tide. Yet still the wayward youth will not listen. There must be, therefore, a simmering sea of antisemitism motivating all this sympathy for Palestine, probably stirred up by the flood of freedom-hating migrants flowing across our undefended borders.

Antisemitism persists and, in the form of vague stereotypes and hazy half-belief in stale conspiracy theories, can even be widespread. I’ve certainly heard clients at work calmly say things about The Jews that made me want to put them in one of those Clockwork Orange eyeball-caliper things and force them to read like 80 hours’ worth of Wikipedia articles about history and political science. There are also more vicious antisemites on the far right and among some religious extremists. But let’s be clear that among the quivering social justice nerd demographic, the targeted race-based hatred of historically marginalized groups is not encouraged. The idea that university students are being taught by their woke professors to hate Jews is, obviously, completely insane.

So what is going on then? If it’s not Ibram X. Kendi and it’s not virulent antisemitism, what is it? Why is basically the entire left turning up at huge pro-Palestinian demonstrations and why aren’t they ‘listening to Jewish voices’? Conservatives have pointed mockingly at banners reading things like ‘Queers For Palestine’ and informed queer people that Arabs would riddle them with bullets and throw them off a rooftop if they got their hands on them. The vitriolic hyperbole of these kinds of statements aside, most queer people are aware that attitudes toward homosexuality tend to range from suspicious to extremely hostile in the Muslim world, and they’ve seen the images of Israeli soldiers planting ‘the first pride flag in Gaza’. Yet overwhelmingly politically engaged queer people continue to support the Palestinian cause. Or take the issue of indigeneity. Lots of people have a muddy understanding of the history, but most understand on some level that the ancestors of most of today’s Jewish people did indeed live in Palestine in the distant past, and that the diaspora has always maintained a connection to the area, and that Arabs are originally from Arabia. Of course, it’s also easy to see that some Ashkenazi guy from Brooklyn whose ancestors last lived in Palestine a millennium ago can’t have much more of a ‘claim’ on the area than a Palestinian whose family has lived there for centuries and who is almost certainly partly descended from Arabized populations native to the area. But the point is that it’s not obviously clear that Jewish people aren’t at least in some way sort of indigenous to the area; yet claims of Jewish indigeneity to the Holy Land, which are the entire basis of Zionist ideology, have largely failed to convince many people in social justice world of the validity of the Israel cause.

I think what’s actually happening is that the horror of what is being done to the Palestinians has smashed through the ideological shell of the social justice crowd. I don’t think their sympathy for Palestine is really because of their identitarianism and essentialism; in many ways I think it’s in spite of it. I think that the sheer stomach-churning madness of watching a state our governments unconditionally support using high-tech bombers to carry out the indiscriminate mass slaughter of helpless civilians completely unable to flee was too much. I think watching half of Gaza be turned into uninhabitable rubble practically overnight, with a million people displaced and living in makeshift tents, was too much. I think watching Israeli troops ‘conquer’ a hospital full of dead-eyed, traumatized orphans was too much. And I think when people started looking into the history to understand what was going on, and discovered that the territory Hamas ‘ruled’ was effectively an Israeli concentration camp, that realistically almost none of the Hamas fighters who crossed into Israel on October 7th had ever left that concentration camp before in their lives, indeed had lived their entire lives under the shadow of Israeli machine gun turrets, crowded into a nightmarish cage with millions of other refugees within spitting distance from their former homes — it was too much.

Because in the end no quantity of identity-points can make that kind of thing alright. No historical trauma is sufficient to cover up the blood. And I want my fellow leftists to go further. We actually don’t even need to calque our ideas about indigeneity onto Palestine in order to recognize what is happening. The Jews who lived in the former Pale of Settlement in today’s Poland were not ‘really’ indigenous to the shtetls, but it was self-evidently wrong to displace and murder them to make room for German settlers. It’s wrong for exactly the same reasons to displace and murder Palestinians to make room for Israeli settlers, regardless of anyone’s claim to indigeneity. And we don’t need to do a complicated summing-up of identity points and ideological sins either: a simple power analysis suffices. On the one side is the major military power in the Middle East, nuclear-armed, NATO-aligned, technologically sophisticated, backed and financed by the US, wealthy and tightly integrated into global capitalism. On the other side is a stateless refugee population made up largely of children, subsisting on international aid and Egyptian goods smuggled in through illegal tunnels, trapped inside the Detroit-sized strip of land that Israel has kept behind a comprehensive blockade for twenty years.

The severity of the violence and destruction have made clear some things that I wish were more obvious more of the time to more leftists. First of all, we can act in solidarity with people who might not particularly like us. We can act in solidarity with people who believe regressive things. We can act in solidarity with people who are deeply religious. We can put these kinds of things aside in the name of solidarity. In the case of Palestine, we have no problem understanding that these people shouldn’t have to pass our purity checks in order for us to oppose the dismemberment of their children by the missiles of the occupation. If we want to really scare the conservatives, we need to push this further.

Second of all, it makes clear that we cannot just rely on emotional claims of victimhood made by people holding historically marginalized identities in order to determine the truth about what is going on. Pro-Israeli media and individuals have been issuing a steady stream of such emotional identitarian claims; one that the National Post seems particularly fond of is the notion that Palestinian solidarity organizing in and of itself is profoundly harmful to Jewish people in general. Across the West these identity-based claims of harm are being taken up to intimidate, coerce, and censor Palestinian solidarity. In Montreal, a student union at McGill voted in favour of a resolution called the ‘Policy Against Genocide in Palestine’, calling for boycotts and sanctions against entities involved in Israel’s war machine. A Jewish (not even Israeli) student sued on the basis that this made her feel unsafe; a judge ordered the union not to adopt the resolution, and it may have to pay her $125,000 in ‘emotional damages’. Leftists have had to look at these identity-based claims of ‘harm’ and determine that they may not be the unadulterated truth; we’ve also had to look at these claims and understand that Jewish people are not monolithic and have significant internal disagreement.

Because the stakes are so high and the violence is so extreme, we are more easily able to practice discernment so often lacking in social justice world: people don’t need to be nonbinary saints for us to support them; just because someone is upset and from a marginalized group doesn’t mean they are automatically infallible nor does it mean they are speaking on behalf of everyone from that group. What would it be like if we were able to take this breakthrough and start applying it more broadly? At the beginning of October Clementine wrote an article noting that a lot of the people in Canada marching in, as well as organizing, recent demonstrations critical of things like gender transition for children have been Muslims and immigrants. The left mostly responded to these marches with fury at the idea of people daring to disagree with whatever our orthodoxy around gender is supposed to be at the moment, and the thrust of Clementine’s article was to ask: do we really want to be showing up at these demonstrations to shout ‘transphobes go home’ at a bunch of immigrant moms? What would it look like if we put aside some of these differences, took some of the wind out their sails, accepted that it’s extremely unlikely that everyone is going agree on gender anytime soon, acted with a bit more humility? What if we tried to be in real solidarity with neighbours and fellow workers who might be, for example, religious Muslims? A brief but incandescent internet meltdown followed, with people calling Clementine a depraved and diabolical trans-exterminationist and so on, and emphasizing that real leftists cannot under any circumstances be in solidarity with transphobes. A week later, with the Israeli offensive, it became politically inexpedient to say that, and the criticism of Clementine’s article essentially disappeared overnight. It would be tempting to gloat about the self-serving hypocrisy of the social justice kids, but truly I’m just happy that people snapped out of it. Leftists can and frequently must be in solidarity with all types of people who believe all types of shit we don’t like. It’s part of the whole deal.

The sweaty minions of capital over at the National Post are apparently afraid that an army of social justice warriors has been radicalized by White Fragility and diversity workshops into becoming a bloodthirsty revolutionary vanguard ready to begin the work of executing white Protestants or whatever. Of course anyone who’s been paying attention (and frankly I suspect that this must include at least some of the sweaty minions of capital) can tell that the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and the DEI Industrial Complex have been incredibly effective at defanging, declawing and debackboning the left in North America and turning it into a miserable, ineffective exercise in nagging and navel-gazing. But I think what’s really going on here is, from the point of view of the right, actually significantly more terrifying. I think the left may have finally rediscovered solidarity. And I’m here for it.