1. Constantly promote people who are more influential, even (or especially) if their politics are to your right. These luminaries will preferably belong to your own socio-economic class; if not, with a proper effort, you’ll soon belong to theirs.
2. Occasionally say something decent about Palestine, a signal that you’re hip to the militant stuff, but save your most serious commentary for explaining why Bernie Sanders is the logical heir to George Habash.
3. Invoke “Palestinians” as an undifferentiated mass to boost your credibility, but decline to mention individual Palestinian writers, fighters, journalists, and revolutionaries.
3b. Treat Palestinians not as human beings in need of support and compassion, but as raw material to be instrumentalized for radical affectations.
3c. Cultivate an eminent Palestinian who will vouch for your legitimacy whenever you get overzealous about rule #2.
4. Palestine is useful insofar as it can confer social capital, but it’s volatile enough to threaten your career aspirations. Learn how to synchronize radicalism with opportunity.
5. Remember: blue checkmarks don’t operate in economies of rectitude, but extraction.
6. Treat Palestinians unimpressed by your heroic endeavors with contempt; important people love it when you discipline the natives.
7. Declare regularly that you’re under attack, repressed, a singular danger to the powers-that-be intent on silencing you. (Say “I will not be silenced!”) Exaggerate routine acts of rejection. Parlay lack of interest into blacklisting. Conceptualize criticism as persecution. Extol your fearlessness and tenacity. Start a hashtag urging the world to stand with you any time a few maladjusted Republicans turn up in your mentions. Repression isn’t a curse; it’s a commodity.
8. Claiming a vague socialist worldview can be profitable, but only if you attach it to electoral politics or a techno-utopian vision of communal excess in the post-industrial North. Scandinavia, not Palestine, is your Holy Land.
9. Arbitrarily change the language of Palestinian nationalism to make it more palatable to liberal Zionists (which will illustrate your suitability for morning talk shows). Replace scary words and phrases like “fight,” “resistance,” “liberation,” and “from the river to the sea” with the soothing patter of peace and reconciliation.
10. Say you support BDS, but don’t actually practice or promote it.
BONUS: Participate in, or generate, high-volume arguments about politicians, Zionist provocateurs, and social media influencers that invariably erase the Palestinian people.
You know better than to conflate the liberals idiot apologists for the fascists of Israel with the left. Please stop.
All these points are true for many ‘radicals’, particularly the blue-check radicals. Perhaps you’re a liberal yourself if you are unable to identify them. Or maybe point one applies to you.
Please rephrase No. 5; I don’t quite get it. Other than that, it certainly describes the behavior of far too many faux amis of the Palestinian cause, including too many lately in an organization (JVP) that had been much more active in the right ways (e.g., in the streets with BDS picketing H-P, Sodastream, etc.). Suddenly, too many have become, er, “spiritually awakened” and have busied themselves writing new rituals and celebrating obscure Jewish holidays formerly unknown to us seculars. Worse, they’ve gone into politics. They’ve formed a new organization to purr and scratch around the hems of politicians’ garments. This is largely motivated by their excessive fear of Trump and their misplaced confidence that packing Congress with Democrats is a good way of heading off incipient (what? I guess it may be called “left-wing autocracy”?) soft fascism for white folks and harder varieties for the “others.”
This electoral tilt is the good intention with which the road to hell has been paved for every damn organization lately. What can be done about it? When will we grab the bit in our teeth and pull out of the Democratic penumbra? Anything–labor party, women’s party, Black party, or, preferably, a strictly-no-Dems socialist formation. Please, folks, please. That mistake has been made two zillion times too often!
Numbers 9-11:
9. Ignore the fact that the Israelis arrested in New York on 9/11 blamed Palestinians for the attacks.
10. Ignore the fact that the media immediately circulated dubious video of Palestinians ‘celebrating the attack on America’.
11. Ignore the fact that the first claim of responsibility for 9/11 was widely reported as having been made by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Hi Steve;
I live in Champaign, am one of your supporters, and met you one time at a talk you gave. We have a local “Jewish progressive” group called Bend the Arc, a chapter of a national organization. I have written something about them and submitted it to Mondoweiss, although apparently they won’t publish it. But I would like at least to send it to you.
Best,
David Green davidgreen50@gmail.com
Is ther any real point to this intra-left bitching?
Other than insuring the Left will remain powerless, and alienating young people who want to change things?