Progressive except for Palestine, PEP (or PeP), is a familiar appellation. Palestine solidarity activists have been using it for a long time to describe the kind of leftist who professes support for racial and economic justice without extending that concern to Palestinians. In other words, the appellation describes standard-issue liberals in the metropole.
In recent months a cognate has emerged: feminist except for Palestine. This species, often indistinguishable from the PEP, locates in settler colonization a space for women’s liberation. In some cases, FEPs affirm Zionist civility by highlighting male barbarity among Israel’s enemies. They have a cozy relationship with US intervention in backward regions of the globe and imagine that gender equality can be realized through Zionism. Lately, they’ve been trying to rid the Women’s March of radical affectations.
Other variations of the pro-Israel leftist exist, but PEPs and FEPs are the most common. I’m less interested in their political characteristics—again, they simply do what US liberals have always done—than in how anti-Zionists choose to name them. I’m not sure it’s wise to concede that people who invoke racial and sexual justice in order to affirm Zionism are fundamentally decent.
Before we look at these naming conventions, let’s dispose of a few pretenses: any belief that equality and Zionism can coexist is laughable. Nobody understands the silliness of “egalitarian” settlers better than Israel’s most fanatical supporters. The godfather of Likud, Vladimir Jabotinsky, mocked the notion that an ethnocratic state can facilitate Enlightenment values. His crankier heir, Meir Kahane, declared that “a Western democracy and Zionism are not compatible. You can’t have both.”
Because it is embedded in global capitalism, Israel, the political manifestation of Zionism, will always work against liberation. Attaching a progressive agenda to the well-being of nation-states is a gift to the ruling class.
As for appending “except for Palestine” to a positive identity (progressive, feminist, and so forth), we ought to consider what happens to Palestine in these formulations. It unwittingly becomes background context to liberal self-absorption.
I argue in Uncivil Rites that PEP is too generous a descriptor for those who support Israel, but my appeal to change the phrase to something like RBI—regressive because of Israel—never caught on. I understand that persuading people to alter ingrained terminology is a difficult (and often foolish) task and that meaning changes according to speaker and audience, but I’m not ready to abandon the effort. Those who dispose of Palestine shouldn’t be allowed to claim a solid politics.
Why replace “progressive” with “regressive”? Humans, after all, have a right to describe their own identities. If somebody chooses to support Israel, a settler colony that steals land, destroys crops, bulldozes homes, imprisons children, and murders civilians, then regressiveness is a vital feature of that person’s outlook. Self-description doesn’t supersede material loyalty.
Furthermore, accepting a Zionist’s self-description as progressive or feminist (or socialist or anti-racist or whatever) renders Palestine subservient to arbitrary branding choices. Exposing hypocrisy is satisfying, but less so if it elides the import of Palestinian liberation. It’s better to scrutinize Israel as a source of moral privation rather than situating Palestine as a void that signifies an incomprehensible lapse of morality.
Or, put more simply, a progressive or feminist (or socialist or anti-racist or whatever) with shit politics on Palestine isn’t somebody with an inconsistency; it’s somebody with shit politics in general. Supporting Israel isn’t a respite from otherwise admirable ethics; it portends ethical flaws across a range of issues.
Palestine is a great irritant to liberal activists, pundits, and politicians. It either illuminates their duplicity or upsets their ruling class sponsors. In turn, those with inherently regressive politics approach the nation with a combination of avoidance, dishonesty, gutlessness, and dissimulation. Let Palestine fill such invertebrates with dread. In fact, facilitate that process. These people already extol our colonizer. Why allow them to also reduce our homeland to a state of exception?
I can’t tell if the “zioness” banner is meant to be ironic or sincere. Qué triste.
100 percent sincere.
Omg!!!!!! For real?!!
I have one word for this brigand “ repulsive”
This is incredibly resonant with me. I don’t like pat ways of categorizing and PEP always bugged me, like “I’m vegetarian, but I eat meat.” Thank you.
It is the vegetarian who eats eggs and drinks milk. He will not condone slaughter. The same is for the progressive who cannot abide the heinous Palestinian Arab tactics of resistance; murdering pregnant woman with their preteen daughters, murdering grandmothers with a grand child on her lap, using a knife to cut head off a baby.
The same with progressive woman who cannot abide the antisemitism and myopia of the leaders of the Women’s march.
Aww steve you’re just mad that you’re unemployable.
Stay salty bro
Thank you for a most lucid and coherent exposition. I for one will now use “RBI” instead of “PEP”. I think it neatly encompasses Israel’s oppression of and discrimination against Mizrahim, Ethiopian Jews, African asylum seekers, Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent as well as diaspora Jews who criticize the government of Israel.
Sorry Steve, but I have to raise a counter explanation. Zionism like much political nationalism, weaponizes self-serving victimhood.
I see it in other nationalist situations (especially in Quebec), where the ‘nation’ or people feel they are being victimized, and justify their racist acts against others in the mythic belief that they are defending their nation. Yes, they can be very progressive on many issues, even anti-racist — except when it includes those they feel are threatening them.
The key is their manufactured feeling that they are indeed victims or on the edge of being victims. And to best keep from being defeated, they must prioritize their own survival.
This is how Zionists have opportunistically abused the history of Ashkenazi pogroms and the Holocaust. They are skilled att brainwashing our Jewish community that Israel is our safety – threatened by Palestinians. This PEP Jews are suckered into believing these myths, despite the reality.
Which is why it is easier to get PEP Jews to take a critical look at Israel and make a break. Independent Jewish Voices – Canada yesterday released a survey of Jewish attitudes towards Israel and BDS. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israels-government-viewed-negatively-many-jewish-canadians-survey
Not surprising, those that were most conservative politically were most Zionist, and those that were most progressive were most critical of Israel or supportive of BDS. That’s were we can take the opportunity to change the PEP last backward’s position.
Thank you Scott Weinstein for this analysis. I was just on the verge of getting fed up with arguing with a Jewish Facebook friend of mine who is PEP. His fear of antisemitism is leading him to be regressive because of Israel. If only he could overcome this fear and this clinging to Israel as a “safe country for the Jews” where he never lived and probably doesn’t wish to live. I wonder how he would feel if his two adult children would have had to do mandatory military service in Israel and were ordered to raid Palestinian’s homes, and arrest Palestinian children.
He said repeatedly that I can only argue with him about Israel occupation policy being wrong if I demand that Sudetendeutschland and Kaliningrad go back to Germany. (I am German.)
What a weird outlandish thing to say.
Being against Islamist terrorism espoused by Palestinian nationalists does not mean you are not 100% progressive.
Being pro-Palestine/anti-Israel does not make you progressive.
Thank you Scott Weinstein for this analysis. I was just on the verge of getting fed up with arguing with a Jewish Facebook friend of mine who is PEP. His fear of antisemitism is leading him to be regressive because of Israel. If only he could overcome this fear and this clinging to Israel as a “safe country for the Jews” where he never lived and probably doesn’t wish to live. I wonder how he would feel if his two adult children would have had to do mandatory military service in Israel and were ordered to raid Palestinian’s homes, and arrest Palestinian children.
He said repeatedly that I can only argue with him about Israel occupation policy being wrong if I demand that Sudetendeutschland and Kaliningrad go back to Germany. (I am German.)
What a weird outlandish thing to say.
What I’ve always said is that PeP isn’t a thing because there’s no progressive form of racism because progressives reject divisive ideologies. Simple as that.
However, despite what some “Progressives” think, the Palestinian issue has nothing to do with Racism.