Call me naive. I do not believe that all these students wearing keffiyehs and occupying limbs are simply fanatical anti-Semites. The real reason progressives hate Israel is both simpler and more complex than that. Israel is a threat because of its success.
This is threatening because it shows what a group of battered and penniless people can accomplish in one generation. This is a threat because it proves that the worst forms of oppression and brutality do not have to determine the fate of a country. This is a threat because it proves that postcolonial countries need not descend into despotic tyranny.
In other words, Israel is a threat because it challenges the tenets of modern progressive doctrine. For them, successes such as Israel’s stellar human rights record, diverse and vibrant democracy, and thriving economy are somehow more important than acknowledging that individuals can overcome adversity. It is easier to believe that it is due to theft and immorality. National and cultural scale.
And is there any group that faced greater adversity than the Jewish refugees who came to Palestine with aliyah in the 19th and 20th centuries? They fled Russia and the Pale of Settlements from the constant threat of pogroms. They fled the Arab world from stupor and pogroms. They escaped annihilation from Europe during pogroms. It is completely incoherent to call Syrian immigrants who have fled to Europe settlers while claiming they are refugees.
Aliyah Can we define a settler in a way that applies to Jews, but not to Venezuelans arriving at the U.S. border or African immigrants crossing the Mediterranean? This is a difficult exercise, and Most who try end up making some reference to the land being stolen, but they suggest that Aliyah Jews stealing the land is contrary not only to history but also to logic. , could a group of penniless immigrants trickle in and displace an established indigenous population? What is the mechanism for such evictions?
This is not to say that land exchanges did not occur after the 1948 war, but that Jews by then had a strong presence and had all rights to the land they had purchased from Ottoman landowners, as well as internationally recognized This is to emphasize that they had the right to domestic sovereignty. Borders in 1948. If a withdrawal to these borders and a halt to settlement construction in exchange for the return of the hostages and a credible peace offer were the focus of the student movement, they would not only be consistent, but would also be in line with Israeli public opinion. Most would agree.
progressive opposition to israel
Anti-Israel queer protesters in Marifeld, The Hague, Netherlands (October 28, 2023) (Credit: Ethan Bergman)
But that’s not why students at elite universities camp out. They argued that Israel has no right to exist and camped out to express support for terrorist organizations that share this belief.
Is this arrangement shocking? of course. Is it incomprehensible? no. Progressives and their DEI converts do not deny that evil exists in the world. And if pressed, many of them would probably agree that it would be preferable for Hamas not to punish homosexuality with the death penalty or give it adequate aid funding to build an underground terrorist network. Or oppressing Palestinians in every aspect of life. But while these crimes are heinous, they do not challenge the foundations of progressive orthodoxy in the same way that Israel does, so they are not unforgivable.
Progressives may not agree with tyrants and death cults, but they can also accept their existence. On the other hand, what if a country like Israel could shake off its colonial masters and rise up from a multicultural, multinational, multiethnic refugee population persecuted everywhere on an unprecedented scale? , what meaning does this bring to the claim of oppression? , are poverty and tragedy an insurmountable fact of life that must be pandered to rather than overcome?
One need not look far for evidence that it is Israel’s current success, not its “settler colony” infrastructure, that poses a threat to a progressive worldview. When the British Empire inherited Palestine from the Ottoman Empire after World War I, it was part of a single combined territory called Transjordan, consisting of modern-day Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
80 percent of its territory was carved out and given to the non-Palestinian Hashemites from Mecca to rule as a monarchy, and the remaining 20 percent was divided between Jews and Palestinians, with areas in which each group forms a majority. ruled. But Jordan escapes the wrath of progressives who don’t care that the Palestinians who live there have no self-government and have far fewer rights than Israeli Arabs.
Progressives really believe that it is more consistent with their values to give a Palestinian-majority state to a non-indigenous Hashemite king than to divide the territory on the basis of democratic governance and self-determination. Can I make a suggestion? No, most people don’t do that when pressed. But Jordan is a middle-income country, with one of the smallest GDPs in the Middle East, has a long list of human rights violations, and while progressives may disagree with torture and illegal detention, the current situation in Jordan is It does not challenge a progressive worldview. Israel does.
The story of Israel, the most tolerant, most liberal, and most diverse country in the Middle East, seems to symbolize the goals of subjugated and oppressed groups everywhere. It is the indigenous peoples who have overcome centuries of global persecution and poverty to shake off their colonial masters and come back to life. Recover their lost languages and rebuild the country into a prosperous liberal democracy with a vibrant, tolerant culture, high standards of living, and a productive economy.
They should be the darlings of progressives around the world, but they aren’t. Because their crime is their success. Because if the Jews of Israel were able to overcome adversity and oppression to build what they have built, that is proof that such victories are possible, and such proof is is unacceptable to a dark progressive worldview that screams otherwise.
She is the author of the novels The Family Morfawitz and Greetings from Asbury Park, which won the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel. He graduated from Duke University with a degree in Mathematics, earned his MBA in Quantitative Finance from New York University Stern College, and earned a Master’s degree in Fiction from The New School. He currently lives in New York City.
