This is part of the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why the pro-Palestine movement failed to stop a holocaust, & how it can still win.”
In August 2026, the DSA-aligned streamer Hasan Piker did an interview with the “Israeli” outlet Haaretz, which reported he said that “I’ve condemned October 7, I’ve talked about the crimes that took place. I’ve talked about the heinous violence we saw unfold, as did everyone else…I see it as an unfortunate and tragic consequence of 75 years of apartheid and occupation, where desperate people are leaning into unfathomable acts of violence as a final way to try to remind people that they’re there and to make the occupation as costly as possible.”
It was this moment that marked a critical turning point in Piker’s role as a political actor, because it confirmed that he didn’t just intend to lead leftists back into the Democratic Party; he also sought to de-radicalize them away from a principled anti-imperialist position. To prevent this project’s success, we must show the pro-resistance Gen Z crowd just how right they are. We must advance a politics whose basis is in the actual, historical anti-colonial struggle, which recognizes the necessity of the occupied to defend themselves.
Piker’s Hamas condemnation was such a major betrayal because over the last half-decade, Piker’s views on foreign policy had made him represent a real anti-imperialist mutation within the DSA’s camp. That he had gone as far as he did in defending anti-imperialist countries and resistance movements was causing both ruling class wings to become increasingly upset with him. When the recriminations against him became intense enough, though, and he received a subpoena in May 2026 for his Cuba solidarity activities, he soon would start doubling down on his past liberal Zionist stances. Given how much he’d broken from U.S. foreign policy narratives, it seemed like he might no longer stand by the past times he’d condemned Al-Aqsa Flood; but he affirmed this opposition to the resistance, giving him a better chance of being protected by the Democratic establishment.
That this was the first time Piker had talked to Israeli media shows how important normalization is in the eyes of this establishment. When you treat the occupier as legitimate, and bow to its false moral framework, this shows the ruling class that you’re more of an asset than anything else; which is exactly what Piker has an incentive to show. The answer to this normalization game is to disengage from the occupier and its spokespeople, like George Galloway does. As The Guardian described in 2013, Galloway drew a line on dialogue with “Israelis” that he would not walk back, no matter how loudly “Israelis” claimed they were being discriminated against:
Galloway interrupted the third-year philosophy, politics and economics student at Brasenose college when Aslan-Levy used the word "we" in reference to Israel.
"You said 'we'," said Galloway. "Are you an Israeli?"
"I am, yes," Aslan-Levy replied.
"I don't debate with Israelis. I have been misled, sorry," Galloway said, standing and putting on his coat, then reiterating as he walked out: "I don't recognise Israel and I don't debate with Israelis."
The Oxford student newspaper Cherwell…quoted Aslan-Levy as saying afterwards: "I am appalled that an MP would storm out of a debate with me for no reason other than my heritage. To refuse to talk to someone just because of their nationality is pure racism, and totally unacceptable for a member of parliament."
By taking this stance, Galloway was applying the logic of Frantz Fanon, who clarified why you cannot debate a political force whose entire basis is the dehumanization of a subjugated people:
The natives' challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute. The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. *Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces.
From the Palestine “ally” Hasan Piker, we see this same reasoning: the native’s acts of revolt must have been immoral by definition, even if the native’s cause was theoretically righteous. In order to become open to debating the Zionists, Piker had to concede on this point, because they won’t accept any dialogue that treats the native as right for rebelling. When we internalize this lesson, when we recognize that Zionists will never treat the Palestinians as equals, we can understand the true line of demarcation which has been placed before us.
Right now, the faction within Zionism that Piker has aligned himself with is trying to rehabilitate the settler entity’s image. The liberal and “labor” Zionists are challenging Netanyahu’s coalition at the polls, and spinning a story about how they’ll return “Israel” to its grand past as a “democracy.” Prepare for this to become another narrative that Piker or those within his “progressive” sphere begin pushing. Their role is to put a friendly face on Jewish supremacy, building up the neo-comprador forces that provide a critical buffer for the colonial project.
These are the Jewish supremacist forces that claim to want equality, but twist this idea into a way of forcing through the occupier’s fraudulent “peace” deals. This is the policy they want Palestine supporters to embrace: a “reconciliation” where the neo-compradors sell out the Palestinian people, and the normalizers use this as proof that debating Zionists is worthwhile. The problem which this psyop’s facilitators are facing is that the logic of “dialogue” will never be accepted by the bulk of their target audiences, whether they’re the Palestinian people or the generation of Americans who Gaza has radicalized. The disconnect is too great between what the normalizers promise and what they deliver.
The only way their politics can appear to offer hope is when they’re out of power, and people can become caught up in a story about a coming moment of salvation. As soon as the “progressives” get power, the illusion shatters, because they’re the ones continuing the holocaust.
This is the whiplash that will guarantee a major disillusionment with the “progressives,” and it’s easy to anticipate when one has noticed the historical pattern of breakdown for reformist politics. But being right is not good enough. If it were, we would have gotten a major revolutionary movement in America by now. To prove our position to be the correct one in the people’s eyes, we’ll have to demonstrate what fighting back against a genocidal project actually means. We’ll have to build an independent working-class force, capable of cutting off the occupier’s commercial sources. And to do this, we’ll first have to give up any illusions about becoming “friends” with the occupier or its representatives.
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