Within pro-Palestine spaces, there is a growing backlash to the problem of “anti-Zionists” who seek to protect perceived Jewish innocence. As I’ve talked about, the purveyors of this Judeophilic “pro-Palestine” politics will use any rhetorical trick to downplay Judaism’s role in Palestine’s colonization, with a recent tactic of theirs being to portray settler-colonialism as a purely “white” phenomenon. The question of whether it’s productive to try separating Judaism from Zionism has become a major point of contention within the left; Zionists have been so effective at creating fear of being labeled “antisemitic” that many anti-Zionists still act beholden to this fear, and seek to prove themselves as PC.
It’s this cowardice that a growing number of Palestine allies are fed up with, and in their drive to escape the Zionist hegemony, they’re embracing rhetoric that the hegemony would utterly demonize them for. Indeed those with our position will be demonized, when we become mainstream enough that the false “pro-Palestine” actors can no longer upstage us. Those who’ve embraced a genuine pro-Palestine politics have already accepted that we’ll be made pariahs; and this fuels our confidence in calling out the Jewish ethno-narcissism inside our movement.
The advice I have for my fellow participants in this backlash is to first and foremost take guidance from the actual resistance; this is what can give us the grounding we’ll need to most effectively combat these covert Jewish supremacists, who we certainly shouldn’t be afraid to challenge but who still hold a monopoly over the discourse. The Palestinian movement has been dealing with this narrative disadvantage from the start, so its participants know best how to outmaneuver the enemy’s manipulations.
One example of how we shouldn’t go ahead of the resistance is on the question of dealing with the colonizers. Many radical leftists have discussed simply getting them out of Palestine entirely; and it’s true that the indigenous population will remain an underclass as long as the demographics remain in favor of a deeply racial supremacist Jewish majority, even if Jews and Palestinians come to have equal voting rights. A point which others in the movement recently raised with me, though, is that these discussions about expelling the Jews from Palestine are counterproductive to the cause; aside from the practicality of the idea, this rhetoric can only confuse our intended audience about what we stand for.
We must learn from the strategic wisdom of the resistance, which knows that the bulk of the colonizers will leave anyhow when Palestine becomes strong enough. This is why Hamas supports a two-state solution, at least in the short term: when Palestine gets a real state, the indigenous people will become able to regain their demographic advantage, with the inevitable outcome being that no version of “Israel” can survive.
The Palestinian resistance factions have most certainly thought about the demographic question. That they’ve needed to think about it so much is why they don’t approach this question idealistically, like those with less experience in the struggle often do. We don’t need to engage in hypothetical argumentative battles, and the resistance has directly explained to us which battles we do need to fight. Among the most important ones being the effort at defeating pro-normalization institutions and political charlatans, as the PFLP described in its Nakba statement last year. This statement was speaking to Palestinians, but its instructions apply to everybody:
We renew our call for complete liberation from the Oslo Accords and its consequences, ending the PA's obligations resulting from them, halting security coordination and all forms of persecution of the resistance, reversing all dangerous and arbitrary decisions regarding allocations for the families of martyrs, prisoners, the wounded, and the freed, severing all forms of dependence on American-zionist projects, and moving towards building a unified arena of struggle that expresses the free will of the Palestinian people…
The masses of our nation, its intellectuals, and its vital forces must rise up to support our struggle and confront the genocide war against our people. They must reject all forms of normalization with the zionist enemy, and confront the project of neo-colonial hegemony and plans to fragment the region.
The way we can combat these problems as Palestine allies is by discrediting and isolating the opportunists who seek to co-opt the Palestinian cause. What we should take as a warning for the future tactics of “pro-Palestine” liberalism is this week’s stunt by the liberal Zionist Brad Lander. After Lander traveled to the West Bank with a group of volunteers to observe an olive harvest, and they were briefly detained, Lander made a statement condemning the latest action by the resistance. It’s clear that after he had carried out this effort to promote himself as one of the “good” Zionists, Lander felt he could more effectively paint the genocide’s perpetrators as victims.
One good sign is that the post he made condemning the resistance got absolutely ratioed, and this is indicative of a broader backlash to the Mamdani liberal Zionist tendency which backed Lander. The people who’ve been following the genocide of course will easily see through Jewish supremacy’s narrative manipulations, and these “progressive” supremacists are meeting a limit in how much they can narratively get away with. The question is whether we’ll manage to translate this growing anti-colonial consciousness into a mass working-class boycott against the Zionist entity, like Palestine’s union federation has instructed us to do.
Among the working masses, the anger is approaching a breaking point, with outrage towards the genocide being a critical aspect of this anger. When the riots in France come to America, a larger working-class offensive may begin, where we reverse the period of revolutionary retreat that we’ve been in for these last few years. Whether the next spontaneous uprisings turn into such a victory depends on how well we can organize the people; which in part depends on our effectiveness in getting people out of the DSA’s sphere. We need to make the connection between the obviously hypocritical Brad Lander figures, and the “progressive” movement that seeks to give legitimacy to their exploitation of Palestinians. We need to go into organized labor, and lead anti-Zionist boycotts that can sustain themselves. This is how we follow the leadership of the ones at the anti-Zionist fight’s center: by sabotaging the empire’s overt and covert efforts to maintain the occupation.
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