The „progressive” term is deployed to undo decades of Mideast peace efforts
Listening to the discourse around the Middle East can feel like a journey in time back to the 1960s, when the Arabs rejected the very existence of Israel. But in the new iteration, Arab maximalism is being supported by Western progressives who see the world through a haze of “decolonization” and “oppressed-oppressor” narratives.
One might call it a red-green alliance, and it is a problem for the West. It fuses together the burgeoning illiberalism among Western youth with the misogyny and nihilism of Iranian-backed jihadism. Improbable and incongruous though it may seem, this alliance is already undermining academia and the media, where it makes a mockery of intellectual inquiry and objective reportage. The issue was laid bare in Congress this week, when the heads of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania (my undergraduate alma mater!) refused to state that calls for genocide against Jews constituted harassment or violated their code of conduct.
Unless stopped, this madness will spread as the youth become adults, and will devastate the economy and make a monkey house of politics. Thus do empires crumble — slowly at first, as we know, and then with stunning speed.
How could all this possibly relate to a bunch of terrorists in Gaza? Read on.
In the bad old days, the basic fact was that the Arab world rejected Israel’s existence as a Western implant and an affront to its very dignity. This was summed up with uncharacteristic efficiency in the so-called “Three Nos” declared by the Arab League in Khartoum in Sept. 1967: no peace with, no recognition of and no negotiations with the “Zionist entity” (that had embarrassed them months earlier in the Six Day War).
Over the years, that position eased. Egypt made peace in 1979 and Jordan did so in 1994, a year after the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel launched talks that created the Palestinian autonomy government, and in 2020 the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – the venue for the Three Nos – made peace as well. As late as September, it looked like the Saudi Arabia would join in as part of a pro-Western strategic alliance of the supposedly moderate (if dictatorial) Sunni nations against Iran, a non-Arab Shiite theocracy whose stock in trade is oppressing its population and making trouble around the world.
This was all the more remarkable given that the current Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu (which fluked into power a year ago) is easily the country’s nastiest ever, a nightmarish assemblage of ultranationalist fanatics and religious zealots that has allowed radical Jewish settlers to run riot in the West Bank, leading to growing tensions and an uptick of fatalities there. There are few good guys here.
The Palestinian Authority, set up by those 1990s talks with the PLO, still controlled its West Bank islands of autonomy, helping Israel on security (even as Netanyahu shunned peace talks with it on a permanent settlement). In what emerged as a catastrophic miscalculation, Netanyahu believed Hamas, the Iran-backed terrorist group that seized control of Gaza in 2007, was “contained” and sought only to plunder Gaza and oppress its population.
In this environment, many Israelis started to assume their troubles with the Arabs – which dated back to a massive invasion as their state was declared in 1948, and bouts of deadly rioting even before – were almost over. It made them reckless and complacent.
Oct. 7 put a massive dent in all that overconfidence. It is unbelievable that Israel’s military and government ignored the ample intelligence and warnings and left the Gaza border almost unprotected before a savage brutality that involved not just the murder of 1,200 Israelis but a campaign of rapes and torture, filmed for posterity.
There was briefly some clarity around the world, for a few days, that this pogrom crossed every line and that Hamas had to be removed from power in Gaza. But the effort to achieve that has become messy and catastrophic, exactly per the plan of Hamas and the Iranians (which I had warned about here). Hamas is entrenched among civilians and hides – along with the scores of Israeli hostages it holds – in tunnels underneath. Israel is not strenuously denying claims that its counter-assault killed 15,000 people, saying only that a third were Hamas “fighters.”
It’s a good bet that Hamas is happy about the carnage. The high death toll in Gaza opens the door to a devil’s workshop of jihadist false equivalence. When everything is reduced to “narratives” Hamas can present everyone as savages. In the eyes of many who get their news from TikTok, Hamas is the preferable savage since Palestinians are the “oppressed.” Many a Palestinian despairs of Western nitwits who think Hamas represents them, in vain.
Also in vain will one point out that Western progressives seemed to care little for the probably greater loss of innocent life in the US-led campaign to similarly uproot Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria. Or about the far deadlier wars in Sudan and central Africa. Or the shocking, systematic oppression of Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria (where Arab governments still refuse to grant citizenship and services to the descendants of refugees from a stone’s throw away, across the border in what is now Israel). Even Russia’s criminally vicious aggression in Ukraine seemed not to discernibly animate the “progressive” bleeding hearts.
Perhaps that’s because the West is supporting Ukraine.
For it is one of the oddities of the progressive left, and of the youth that flock to it, that it has little appreciation for the advantages and freedoms – liberalism, free markets, democracy and secular humanism — that enable its own experimentations and agitations. Their opposition to Israel is a proxy for their opposition to their own societies.
It’s complicated, of course. The obsession with identity politics, so vexing for a liberal, stems from understandable shame at the fact that much of the West – the whole system in the Americas and Oceania, and Europe’s plunder of much of the planet – was built on white colonization. The resulting push for “decolonization” has amounted to imposition of diversity from boardrooms to newsrooms across the former patriarchy, which one can support as justice or oppose as anti-meritocratic.
Either way, now they pounce on Israel because they view it as a colonial project that can still be stopped – a whole country that can be cancelled, if you will. That is the meaning of the now-familiar slogan “from the river to the sea”: the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of its Jews.
There are plenty of arguments about why this is wrong. Ever since Homo erectus walked out of Africa into Europe, pretty much every country is the product of conquest and injustice. Not knowing this is infantile; picking on Israel only is unfair.
Moreover, even though Israel was created by a large Jewish migration, it was to an ancestral homeland in which Jews had lived throughout, which cannot be said of the Anglo arrival in Australia and New Zealand, or of the Iberian invasion of central and south America. It is also not something that can be said of the 7th century Arabian invasion of the Levant – which includes the Holy Land – as part of the Islamic expansion in the Arab-Byzantine wars.
None of this is any interest to the ignoramuses – in the West and in the Middle East – now advising Israelis to “just go back to their home countries.”
The vast majority of Israel’s 7 million Jews were born there. The countries from which their ancestors in some cases came to Israel include Arab ones that remain inhospitable to Jews, like Iran, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. In many cases these ancestors were kicked out of those countries and their property stolen. Now the population is so mixed that few Israeli Jews have a “home country” anyway.
Regardless, the Palestinians have observed the global zeitgeist, and it is hardening their attitudes. A shocking recent poll showed three-quarters of them supported the Oct. 7 massacre and similar proportions reject any accommodation with Israel and seek a Palestinian state instead of Israel, not beside it.
That way lies madness. But this is not a problem that can be ignored. Hamas must be removed from power in Gaza – there is no other way. But after that, Israel needs to figure out a way to divorce from the Palestinians. The world should push for this and should invest time, energy and treasure into pacifying the Palestinians.
Because the debacle in Palestine is feeding a beast that could grow into a major global problem.
