Palestine Solidarity in the Age of Reaction

The question in the subheading appears straightforward, but it presents semantic problems.  The notion of leftwing and rightwing is unstable and both words change spatially and temporally.  A “liberal” in the United States isn’t necessarily the same as a “liberal” in the Middle East.  For that matter, a “liberal” in the United States isn’t necessarily the same as another “liberal” in the United States, depending on who uses or hears the term. 

“Anti-Zionism” likewise is understood differently depending on speaker or audience.  Here is a rudimentary definition:  Zionism is a belief in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in any incarnation, on any part of historic Palestine.  Not everyone agrees with this definition, in large part because we’re apt to identify Zionism based on diction and sensibility.  A person can seem like a Zionist even if they profess to be anti-Zionist.  By what metric?  It can be tough to quantify.  All I’m certain of is that I’ve been listening to Zionists of all shapes and colors for more than forty years and therefore feel no need to over-intellectualize things for the sake of “nuance” or “civility”:  I know a Zionist when I hear one, self-identity be damned. 

Anyway, the main point is that terminological ambiguity adds a layer of difficulty to an already-difficult topic.  These layers of difficulty speak to the need for careful and systematic analysis.  Left to the sinkhole of internet punditry, the topic has potential to create negative outcomes for the Palestine solidarity movement.  We can learn a lot about the present and past of Palestine solidarity organizing by exploring the current debate.  Optimally, we can learn a lot about its future, as well. 

Given that ideological categories in Europe and North America don’t neatly adhere to similarly-named ideological categories in the Arab World, I will largely focus on North America, although where appropriate I make connections to the Arab World.  I don’t aim to prioritize North America, but acknowledge that the continent, beyond its material and moral sponsorship of Israel, is a terrain on which people hotly contest Zionism. 

The main question I want to address has seen significant debate since October 7, 2023:  should anti-Zionists—Palestinian anti-Zionists in particular—link up with rightwing elements opposed to the genocide either as a temporary convenience or a long-term alliance?  For many of us, the answer to this question is a simple yes or no, but the reasoning for either position can be convoluted.  

My notion of alliance is broad and covers both casual and formal interaction:  voting Republican, promoting rightwing influencers, appearing on rightwing media, spending money on rightwing products, platforming right-wingers, and participating in joint events like demonstrations and speaking tours. 

We’re not engaging a static or linear debate.  There are intellectual genealogies at stake, competing interests, discursive ambiguities, economic calculations, and moral intricacies with no universal answers.  Nor are we merely considering alliances.  There is the matter of how information is delivered and processed in this new era of artificial intelligence.  There are traumas and fears and insecurities.  And finally, there are the people actually suffering genocide, whose well-being ought to always be our foremost consideration.  We cannot so easily dismiss any tactic that might provide relief even if the tactic departs from normal procedure. 

In short, there’s a lot going on, which I suppose is my way of saying “it’s complex” without wanting to sound like an academic. 

So I will try to sort the conditions and possibilities of this debate with attention to various historical factors.  Before I proceed, a qualification:  my argument isn’t intended to shame or alienate anyone committed to Palestine’s liberation.  This is especially so of my Palestinian and Arab brethren.  However, I have firm opinions on the question of aligning anti-Zionism with rightwing movements in the West and won’t soft-sell those opinions to accommodate a superficial “unity.”  I hope that all camps remember:  we begin from a shared position that before anything else the Zionist genocide needs to end.  This shared position is a strong basis for productive rather than negative disagreement. 

*****

Among my earliest memories in southern Appalachia is my father in a shouting match with our next-door neighbor.  It must have been summer, because I remember a lot of sweat on both men’s faces.  My father’s normally stiff and spindly hair was unkempt and the neighbor’s bald dome glistened like a fortune-teller’s prop above its ruddy undercarriage.  They were arguing about us, of course—me and my brother, who had probably crossed the property line or committed some other transgression that Americans consider abominable. 

My father was generally stern and composed and so it was disorienting to see him having at the neighbor, whom we children disliked because he was surly and seemed almost featureless except for a missing arm (blown off during a hunting accident, according to lore).  Even at our young ages, we had some understanding of the irony that his most distinctive feature didn’t exist. 

I don’t remember the argument, per se, only phrases such as “go back to Arabia” and “those little Arabian bastards,” things of that nature.  In time, such language would come to signify a worldview so banal that I could probably transcribe the neighbor’s dialogue and summarize his entire life philosophy with a great degree of accuracy.  I would hear plenty of similar language on my way out of Appalachia; I would continue to hear it wherever I went afterward.  That language is the foundation of a powerful political movement in the United States. 

By that point of my life, I didn’t know that Zionists were my enemy, something I would recognize in later years, over and over again, in ways that would seriously alter my life, as it had altered the lives of my ancestors.  But when it came to the people adjacent to us, rendered alien and impassable by an imagined frontier, I knew it clearly and immediately…these people, despite the sense of idyll they liked to cultivate, were my enemy.  They wanted me to disappear; they wanted to cause me harm. 

They were my first enemy, these next-door reactionaries.  Then with the help of family conversations and an eagerness for books, I discovered Zionism as the main antagonist, a discovery that would be validated in thousands of negative interactions once I reached adulthood.  I used to wonder whether it was good or bad to have multiple enemies.  Was it a poor reflection on me or the byproduct of an unjust world?  It turns out that my confusion was a temporal glitch, not a contradiction, for it became clear as life went on that the reactionary in the United States and the Zionist in Palestine are in fact the same enemy. 

I therefore find it unnerving to see certain elements of the Palestine solidarity movement tolerate or fully embrace rightwing pundits, celebrities, and thought-leaders, usually but not always friendly to Trump.  This topic lends itself to a huge range of interpretation, so let me specify which tendencies and individuals I have in mind. 

I’m mostly thinking about the emergence of rightwing pro-Palestine sentiment directly after October 7:  movements like “MAGA communism” and the “anti-woke” left; pundits with large followings like Candace Owens, Jake Shields, Anastasia Loupis, and Nick Fuentes; and far-right politicians like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Steve Bannon.  The categories of left and right aren’t always so clear, nor are the ideological devotions of specific individuals, as in the case of Tucker Carlson, a white nationalist with populist tendencies; Glenn Greenwald, who vacillates between libertarian and progressive rhetoric; Norman Finkelstein, who likes to wear the persona of a cranky boomer; Jimmy Dore, a less charming version of Tucker Carlson; and a vociferous group of alt-media which regularly flirt with rightwing ideas.  An effort exists to reconceptualize Charlie Kirk as a truthteller who had run afoul of the Israel lobby. 

I don’t want to occupy our time critiquing these individuals and outlets.  I name them to help you better imagine specific examples in a broader analysis.  Instead we’ll stay focused on the relationship of anti-Zionism with discourses of cancel culture, wokeism, feminism, identity politics, and so forth.  Particularities of that discourse include transphobia, vaccine skepticism, nativism, and xenophobia, the issues through which modern variations of U.S. conservatism are heavily arbitrated.  

The alliances which emerged after October 7 aren’t novel or unprecedented.  The United States has always hosted a peculiar amalgamation of left- and rightwing elements, in part because discourse circulates through unacknowledged legacies of settler colonization.  That amalgamation has been apparent in pro-Palestine, or anti-Israel, thought for decades.  “Pro-Palestine” and “anti-Israel” are markedly different categories and those differences are essential to the ideological peculiarities at issue here.  “Anti-Israel” can suggest a lack of concern for the well-being of Palestinians or a lack of concern with Palestinians at all beyond perhaps as a rhetorical device.  “Pro-Palestine” implies prioritization of Palestinian national politics, not simply as a means of contextualizing opinions about Israel, but as an aspiration unto itself.  Both categories can have significant overlap; at times they might be coterminous.  At other times, however, they exist in opposition.  A useful way to parse the distinction is by asking:  do Israelis and Americans occupy the subject position?  Or are Palestinians the main constituency? 

As pertains to rightwing thought-leaders, the perspective is overwhelmingly anti-Israel (and even here the “anti” is weak or conditional). 

*****

Despite the usual discrepancies, exceptions, and outliers, we can observe a through-line for conservative anti-Israel sentiment that emerges in the early 20^th century and assumes a clearer shape in the 1950s. 

Dwight Eisenhower’s sharp rebuke of the 1956 tripartite aggression against Egypt helped to cement a coterie in the State Department and the foreign policy establishment inclined to sympathize with Arabs.  While always a distinct minority, these State Department Arabists expressed varying levels of opposition to Israel based less on pro-Palestine sentiment than on realist or isolationist worldviews. 

This strand of anti-Israel realism or isolationism foregrounded the emergence of a paleoconservative tendency in the seventies and eighties, defined by its focus on the Israel lobby as a scourge of U.S. democracy and an America-first mentality with little emphasis on imperialism or domestic ills such as racism and economic inequality.  In keeping with the idea that Israel is an albatross or an unreliable ally, the Israeli sinking of the USS Liberty in 1967 was a major rallying cry.  U.S. interests took center stage.  Palestinians were at best an afterthought.  Leading figures of this tendency included Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, John B. Anderson, and Richard Curtiss (all of whom were involved with the Council for the National Interest).  The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs was a major organ of the tendency and one could argue that it survives in the work of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. 

The libertarian Pat Buchanan headed a distinct but related tendency, one that would influence the presidential candidacies of fellow libertarian Ron Paul.  Buchanan argued that Israel is a drain on the federal budget and a warlike entity always strong-arming a reluctant United States into bad decisions.  His criticisms of Israel sometimes contained an undertone of disdain for Judaism.  He conjoined this criticism of Israel with a social conservativism hostile to Black and LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, communism, and emerging economic powers such as China and Brazil.  One can trace a connection from Buchanan’s nativism to Tulsi Gabbard’s strange mixture of progressive branding and hidebound cultishness.  Gabbard captivated a portion of the leftist pundit class in her early days as a national politician, despite warnings from more skeptical contemporaries that Gabbard was a highly dubious character.  (Warnings that ended up being too generous.)  Even today, after her Trumpian pivot, Gabbard continues to occasionally captivate the same group of pundits despite her adamant Zionism, which spans both the progressive and MAGA periods of her career. 

On the whole, though, Palestine has been a leftist cause, internally and externally, for reasons that still predominate:  Palestinians comprise an oppressed national community; the great capitalist and imperialist powers support Israel; Palestine has received material or rhetorical support from states hostile to U.S. influence; from its outset, notable intellectuals in both the East and West recognized Zionism as an expansionist colonial movement appended to Europe; the Palestinian intellectual tradition is varied, but has consistently focused on revolutionary thinking in both its religious and secular incarnations; the central values of socialism—wealth redistribution, national liberation, economic sovereignty, strong public institutions—align with the core tenets of Palestinian nationalism. 

Conversely, people of the left (and often the right, approvingly) associate Israel with militarism, imperialism, and ethnonationalism.  It has long enjoyed the support of Western liberals, but many conservatives treat it with a religious zeal.  One of the first modern neo-Nazi influencers, Richard Spencer, conceptualized Israel as an aspirational model for white people in the United States.  He even came up with a term for it:  “white Zionism.”  During South Africa’s Apartheid era, Boers and Israelis enjoyed personal affinity in addition to close diplomatic ties.  Israel has long advertised itself as an indispensable barrier between Western civilization and the hordes of the East. 

Israel wasn’t always rejected by the Western left.  In its earlier days, many European and North American thinkers considered the nascent state an experiment in socialism.  This viewpoint hasn’t been prominent for at least three decades and, beyond some anachronistic tendrils of the Democratic Party, most Zionists seem content to have relinquished Israel’s socialist reputation.  There are still some holdouts, particularly in academe, but these days hardly anyone tries to conceptualize Israel as socialist; rather, liberal Zionists choose to self-brand as anti-Zionist in order to claim socialism for themselves. 

This trajectory exemplifies a common phenomenon:  the Western left finally catching up to long-established knowledge in the Global South. 

In the end, it’s difficult to map anti-Zionism and Palestinian nationalism onto seemingly endless ideological cartographies.  Thus I limit myself to broad strokes which I hope can sufficiently clarify that while Palestinian liberation has been a central feature of leftist politics for many decades, particularly in the Global South, a tradition of rightwing anti-Israel sentiment also exists and foregrounds the emergence of today’s conservative anti-Israel commentariat. 

*****

Having sketched an outline of the political communities in question, let’s now evaluate the appropriateness of trying to align Palestine solidarity with rightwing individuals or factions.  Here are the main arguments in favor of such an alliance: 

1. Any kind of alliance is appropriate to stop a genocide. 

2. Even if they have unsavory politics, rightwing pundits are bringing the message of Palestine to large new audiences. 

3. All support is welcome. 

4. Conservatives have power; therefore, changing their minds can lead to changes in U.S. policy. 

5. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim cultures are inherently conservative and don’t align with the social permissiveness of the Western left. 

The most persuasive argument is that amid mass slaughter, observers are in no position to reject anything that might stop the killing.  Cessation of genocide is always the first priority.  In this situation, alliances of convenience are perfectly reasonable.  My concern is less with the idea of strange bedfellows than with its effectiveness as a tactic.  The fact of the matter is that online reactionaries did nothing to stop the genocide—and the degree to which they altered public opinion, if at all, is also in doubt.  (Credit belongs to the Palestine solidarity activists who struggled and suffered over many decades.)  Nor did the reactionaries affect policy or corporate media coverage.  What are we left with, then? 

While it is compelling to suggest that allying with hostile elements in order to stop a genocide would be justifiable, what happens when the alliance doesn’t actually stop the genocide, or have any visible effect on it at all?  If the moral and tactical rationale for an unsavory alliance depends on an outcome that never comes into existence, an outcome easy to see in advance, then we will have betrayed core sensibilities of a national liberation movement for nothing more than the status quo. 

If rightwing influencers or leftwing intellectuals can’t stop the genocide, then who can?  Here we run into the problems of imperialism and capitalism, where the rationale for a so-called red-brown alliance falls apart. 

Nobody can stop the genocide but those powerful enough to enact it.  Think about what we’ve learned, or should have learned, during the past two years:  what the West calls democracy is a sham; the rule of law concords to the exercise of force; public opinion is irrelevant to the ruling class; knowledge doesn’t in fact lead to change (“if only people knew”).  Having learned these things, or having had these things reaffirmed, it should follow that gassing up rightwing grifters is a dead end. 

If somebody came to me and said, “Join up with the rightwing pundit circuit and the Zionist genocide will stop tomorrow,” then I’d take the deal before the “I”s were dotted.  But this isn’t the deal being offered.  Instead, we’re being asked to join up with historical antagonists to their benefit on a blind faith assumption that it will help end the genocide.  The genocide, needless to say, is ongoing. 

Am I suggesting that we must submit to the reality of genocide?  Absolutely not.  I’m suggesting that bourgeois logic gives us easy answers (vote, lobby, start a podcast, make friends with fascists), but we need to consider difficult answers, instead.  Those answers are found precisely where centers of power occlude structural insight with common sense.  The answers, therefore, are to be found where inquiry is verboten.  

At the risk of being too abstract, we begin by existing as anti-Zionists rather than merely wearing it as a label.  This means we always know damn well what needs to be done even (or especially) when we are unable to say it. 

We cannot salvage Palestine from among the oppressed nations of the world while leaving the conditions of oppression intact, unless the goal is for Palestine to emerge as a disaggregated neo-colony beholden to the Zionist entity or yet another vassal state governed at the behest of Western capital.  At best we can manage temporary relief, but if Zionism continues to exist then genocide is ever on the horizon.  It is therefore critical to balance notions of temporary relief with a vision of long-term survival. 

*****

People sometimes defend the godawful politics of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Jackson Hinkle, Jake Shields, and fellow travelers by saying, “Well, at least they’re good on Palestine.”  It is a curious defense.  The implication is that being good on Palestine absolves other shortcomings, which is at best questionable.  The real problem, though, is that their views on Palestine aren’t very good, either. 

There’s no “at least” with reactionaries.  Reaction will always be their predilection. 

Even if we conceptualize their criticism of Israel as sincere, the nature of that criticism only partially aligns with the anti-Zionism developed over decades in Palestine and more or less accepted as valid in the Palestine solidarity movement.  In keeping with their isolationist and libertarian forebears, rightwing critics of Israel focus on the well-being of the United States.  They have scarcely anything to say about Palestinians (or scarcely anything interesting to say, in any case).  One gets the sense that they would be content if Israel could be brought to heel without liberating a single Palestinian. 

There is virtually no engagement of settler colonization, which would also implicate the United States, and little discussion of issues such as the right of return, BDS, electoralism, or anti-Arab and -Muslim racism.  And certainly no beef with capitalism and imperialism, each critical to a proper understanding of Zionism.  Instead, we get complaints about how Israel makes the United States look bad, impedes American policy in the region, or leads a hapless White House into foolish conflagrations. 

This approach elides nearly all the perceptive analysis that Palestinians have committed to the page throughout decades of courageous and creative intellectual work.  

*****

As to the question of values, arguments claiming to identify some type of cultural uniformity in Palestine tend to be simplistic.  Palestinian cultures and values are vast and complex to the degree that it is untenable to treat them as monotonous.  National communities are neither homogeneous nor static.  You cannot say “Palestinians oppose homosexuality.”  The statement would be demonstrably false.  You cannot say Palestinians do or do not anything in the singular. 

One might amend the statement to say that “most” or “the great majority” of Palestinians oppose homosexuality, an apparently self-evident observation.  We have no cause to accept the statement as self-evident, though.  It ignores a lot of the historical archive, first of all.  Moreover, it imposes on Palestine a Western lexicon discordant to traditional Palestinian notions of exile and belonging.  The approach displaces Palestine from its own moorings onto a cultural terrain inherently hostile to it.  What do the luminaries from the evangelical Christian right who created moral panics for political gain have to do with Palestine?  Nothing, except they also created traditions of Christian Zionism that facilitate military occupation. 

Even if we grant that Palestinian society is hostile to homosexuality or nonbinary gender (and to do so we would have to take apart some loaded terminologies), the hostility has little to do with American homophobia and transphobia.  Those attitudes grew up in a climate of juridical and religious fundamentalism in the West, so it won’t do for Arab proponents of social conservatism to dismiss alternate sexualities as a foreign conspiracy.  The conservativism that’s supposed to be atavistic to the Arab World is just as foreign.  Likewise, this brand of social conservatism traditionally has gone hand-in-hand with Zionism.  It is as much a form of cultural imperialism as Pizza Hut, unless one is prepared to argue that JK Rowling is Indigenous to Palestine. 

There is no good reason for Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims to join up with U.S. conservatives based on some apocryphal notion of traditional values.  Consider that you’re not actually making the world safer for our children, but instead falling victim to a classic bourgeois manipulation.  Various anxieties—racial, economic, sexual, educational—are subsumed by supposedly straightforward solutions that tap into nostalgia and a desire for personal security.  If only we could go back to how it was!  Why can’t we just live as God intended!  Unfortunately, effortless answers to social ills only benefit the ruling class.  Personal disgust doesn’t make for a coherent politics.  It turns smart people into nonthinkers. 

One can understand why the rank-and-file are impressionable to these narratives, but there is no excuse for those who fancy themselves activists or organizers.  No doubt there are issues to be worked out within Palestinian culture and society, but the process can properly develop only in the environs of a liberated nation.  It certainly won’t happen in the company of strangers.  All national communities deserve an opportunity to stumble, to evolve, to exist in productive and debilitating tension.  It does a great disservice to colonized people to conceptualize them as fixed in their ways of thinking.  Again, even if the totalizing suppositions were true, the ensuing logic is nonsensical:  “Most Palestinians are super-conservative.  Therefore, I should pal around with Western Nazis.” 

It is worth pointing out that Zionists have long used perceptions of Palestinian backwardness to rationalize their violence and racism.  “They hate gay people, so yay Israel!”  That any advocate of Palestine’s liberation, or champion of the Palestinian people, would legitimize pinkwashing is a startling failure of perception.  I would argue that it is also a betrayal of the significant number of Palestinians who don’t adhere to heteronormative conventions.  They have the same right to participate in national life as any other compatriot.  Lest we forget, Palestinians have been fighting for the better part of a century against an entity predicated on bigoted standards of belonging.  

I want to return to the alliances that inevitably emerge when people prioritize abstruse “values” over a liberatory politics.  One of the objections to anti-trans activism, quite beyond any biological or theoretical question, is that whatever the intent it ends up in service of regressive legislation and retrenchment of state power.  Self-described leftists who take up an anti-trans position—again, not as a neutral expression of cultural values, but as a deliberate ideological choice—therefore make common cause with the right, to the detriment of a community that already exists in great danger. 

Note that in all the cases we’ve examined, the default assumption is that the leftist is obliged to move right and not the other way around.  This tells us, among other things, that the right occupies a normative position—its mores produce common sense—and therefore the right operates in service of the same system we aim to subvert.  The alliance between Palestine solidarity and the right is entirely advantageous to the right with nothing but empty fantasies or ideological betrayals for Palestine solidarity.  What’s worse is that the alliance forces Palestine solidarity activists to dispose of groups who have shown a capacity for meaningful and enduring friendship, for it is clear to anyone who pays attention that the trans community has been largely and often vocally supportive of Palestine.  It is a bad look—and, I would argue, dishonorable—to mistreat people who have taken on significant risk in supporting our cause. 

*****

In case it’s not already clear, I want to state explicitly that my argument is mostly directed at the Palestine solidarity movement in North America.  I make no demands of those in Palestine, nor should anyone who lives in other parts of the world. 

Palestinians are obliged to do nothing but survive genocide, using any means at their disposal.  If they want to focus on Palestine without a care for other issues, then that is their prerogative.  The same is not true of the diaspora or the Palestinian solidarity movement in North America. 

Those of us in diaspora have obligations to the communities we inhabit.  It may sound obvious to proclaim, “I don’t care if [insert reactionary] has said or done awful things, as long as [said reactionary] supports Palestine,” but this viewpoint is at best shortsighted.  To begin with, chances are that the reactionary doesn’t support Palestine, but simply dislikes Israel (or, in some cases, Jewish people).  More important, the reactionary is no doubt hostile to groups for whom we ought to feel an affinity. 

Feeling an affinity might not be enough.  One could argue that we owe these groups loyalty.  It is after all on land they cultivated with blood and sweat that Arab Americans earn money, buy property, and raise families.  Arab immigrants were able to move into neighborhoods from which Black people were excluded.  They could more easily attain loans for homes and businesses.  They brought to the country their own negative attitudes about dark-skinned people.  Despite a long history of anti-Arab racism, they largely identified with whiteness and thus enjoyed the rewards of assimilation.  It is shameful for Arab Americans to invoke Palestine, an oppressed nation, as a reason for promoting public figures with a well-known history of anti-Black racism.  Doing so highlights the most ignominious aspects of Arab American history.  (Black people too have been great supporters of Palestine, from the United States to South Africa, to the point that we cannot speak of a Palestine solidarity movement without their presence.) 

We should also remember that, contrary to popular belief, Indigenous nations still exist throughout the Americas and still fight for liberation.  It is essential to learn more about those nations, to reach out where possible and offer solidarity, and to oppose the corporate and bureaucratic machinery that maintains their dispossession.  Being in Canada or the United States confers to us this obligation.  As do the significant convergences between colonization in North America and Palestine.  Indeed, the convergences are strong enough for us to conclude that it is the very same colonization.  It is incongruous to oppose Zionism while also promoting the most adamant exponents of the American colonial project. 

Not to mention the other positions articulated by the likes of Carlton, Fuentes, Owens, Taylor-Greene, and so forth.  Carlton, for example, is an out-and-out white supremacist who once referred to Iraqis as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and continues to bemoan the decline of Euro-American culture.  This brand of pundit opposes relief for migrants and immigrants, among whom we count many from our own community.  Such pundits celebrate ICE thuggery and police brutality more generally.  They are also apt to co-sign foreign aggression if they believe it to be advantageous to the United States.  Even if you’re under the impression that these people have changed their beliefs, questions of repair and redress remain.  What do those who have caused material harm to a community owe to that community in order to be forgiven?  Surely it requires something more than a podcast invitation. 

These matters aren’t a distraction from Palestine; they are fundamental to Zionism’s persistence in the United States.  But we don’t need to connect everything to Palestine in order to voice opposition.  ICE raids are one of the great moral issues of our day.  Masked men are terrorizing neighborhoods, kidnapping individuals in broad daylight, and spiriting them to various black sites where they will die in significant numbers.  ICE is essentially comprised of paramilitary groups of the sort that sanctimonious politicians normally invoke as a pretext for invading other countries.  These groups are completely unaccountable to civilians.  Their cheerleaders don’t need our support. 

For the majority of my life, I have stubbornly focused on Palestine.  This stubborn focus is precisely what leads me to care about Indigenous nations in North and South America, about white supremacy and anti-Black racism, about ICE terrorism, about persecution of queer and trans people, about economic inequality, about the rise of opportunists who summon Palestine as a recruiting tool for retrogressive politics. 

*****

If you’ll be kind enough to humor a bit of self-indulgence, I’ll speak for a moment about my experience with these questions of alignment. 

Basically, I don’t mess around with people whose politics I dislike.  It’s mostly pride, I suppose, mixed with a bit of moralism and increasing grumpiness as I age, although there’s a principle somewhere in there, too.  I try my best to exist as an anti-Zionist.  I’m not always successful, which can lead to overcorrection, but I just don’t want to give any life to forces in the world that are hostile to vulnerable communities.  It would feel to me like a betrayal—not simply of whatever values I attempt to practice, but of the vulnerable communities themselves.  I don’t need to like or identify with those communities.  I need only recognize that they are worthy of life and dignity as against the malevolent forces now ruining our world. 

I’m also hesitant about being used as a resource for somebody’s profitable media venture.  I once experienced a moment of infamy and could have done quite well by inching to the right, as so many of today’s media figures chose to do.  But fame or financial gratification isn’t my purpose in this world.  Becoming an online provocateur on behalf of some wealthy funding source or for subscription money always struck me as taking the easy way out of my misfortune, a path unavailable to the people I most care about.  I am certainly open to any tactic that might benefit the downtrodden, but I have seen nothing to suggest that becoming a thought-leader who panders to reactionaries for engagement will facilitate this kind of outcome. 

So, yeah, I’m a bit of a prick about these things.  I stay away from spaces adjacent to the right and also keep a distance from the socdem media ecosystem, which is filled with voices contemptuous of Palestinians.  I grant that my attitude could be completely irrational, but ultimately, for reasons of both politics and personal peace, I prefer to avoid negative associations.  (Nobody’s gonna catch me going out like Noam Chomsky.) 

If you’re serious about liberation, then you sacrifice career, you sacrifice upward mobility, you sacrifice access, you sacrifice awards, you sacrifice prestige, you sacrifice adulation.  In short, you sacrifice the convenience of easy solutions.  

I don’t want to be anybody’s goddamn mayor.  That’s my contribution to the cause. 

Surely there will be remonstration along these lines:  “But you need to get the message out to people!”  I don’t find it to be a convincing argument mainly because while it’s true that audiences need different voices to educate them, in the examples I witness it is the messenger who is impressionable to the audience.  In many cases, the purpose isn’t to spread messages, but to capitalize on the value of a following. 

For example, a significant left (broadly defined) emerged from the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015-16.  A decade on, what became of this “big tent” united around a desire to see Sanders as president?  A lot has happened, for sure, but generally speaking the majority of his devotees are now Democrats with a fetish for Scandinavia and a minority are paleoconservatives banking subscription income as boutique radicals.  These formations have nothing to do with the Palestinian intellectual tradition; they are the detritus of liberal Zionist electoralism, as indicated by the failure in subsequent years to maintain a coherent pro-Palestine position. 

The main difference between actual rebellion and rebellious aesthetics is that actual rebellion isn’t rewarded with media access and corporate sponsorships.  The most effective rebels in the world exist in places we’re encouraged to ignore because common sense tells us it is more productive to beg fascists for a sliver of informational real estate. 

David Lloyd, as is his custom, beautifully sums up the charge before us, in all its vastness and simplicity.  We have, he explains, “a continuing obligation to be anti-Zionist.”  To be anti-Zionist “is to be anti-fascist and anti-colonial.  It is to be against genocide and ethnic cleansing.  It is to abhor war crimes and crimes against humanity.”  It is not, Lloyd pointedly argues, to validate the legacies of racial and colonial violence from which Zionism drew inspiration and on whose continuum Israel performs its genocide.  In short, we aspire to anti-Zionism in the richest iteration of the term, one that leads us into the company of other human beings burdened by dreams of freedom. 

Lloyd, incidentally, was a stalwart of the anti-Apartheid movement early in his career.  He then moved on to anti-Zionist activism, playing a critical role in academic boycott efforts.  This trajectory should be our model.  If Palestine were freed tomorrow, then we wouldn’t quit caring about the world; we would increase focus on other injustices that demand our attention. 

*****

In the end we have to address the matter of love.  It has been addressed before by some of history’s most successful revolutionaries.  Doing so can nevertheless feel difficult.  We risk being tacky or saccharine, sentimental or overbearing.  I think you can see when it’s being addressed without being named, in choice of words, perhaps, or in style of analysis.  We struggle and we fight and every now and again—or with great frequency—we’re assholes in service of our cause.  Hostility to power is simultaneously an expression of love, and should certainly be one of its consequences.  Love sometimes demands unpleasantness.  It can be interpolated through deliberate, enduring anger.  We needn’t sanitize the emotion.  Love can be no more complicated than hating the right people.  It is important to remain antagonistic to ostentation, to push our intellect beyond the prosaic, to maintain enemies as a vow of loyalty to friends.  I have no desire to be among those aiming to harm individuals with whom I’ve shared moments of joy and pain, of whom I am devotee and beloved, from whom I’ve received and to whom I’ve provided sanctuary in times of stress.  Because I am committed to love, hatred is often the most useful strategy I possess.  It has to be this way until the entrails of Nazism are finally erased.  We foreground the aftermath of liberation by what we are now willing to embrace or tolerate.  The upshot:  a vision of Palestine not premised on the ideologies that led to its dispossession, but a nation modeled on the courage and compassion that has preceded its freedom.  Is this kind of nation possible?  Almost certainly not.  But that doesn’t mean we fight for anything less because we have seen, a thousand times over, the bad that happens when loving voices drown in the incessant noise of convention.