The most insidious kind of pro-Israel propaganda is not the one where reactionary demagogues share AI-generated pictures of Jewish children who’ve supposedly been beheaded by Hamas; that trick is too easy to counteract. The most insidious manipulation used to ensure public support for aid to Israel stays sufficiently high is the one which discourages the better-informed minority, who know about the reality of Palestinian oppression, from trying to bring the majority to the pro-Palestine stance. Because what better way to ensure the pro-Palestine movement fails, than by making this movement relegated to an insular niche?
This is a hidden reason behind why opposition to Zionism has been so ineffective in the USA: the country’s authentic communist and anti-imperialist movement was virtually destroyed decades ago, so the only mainstream political formations that support Palestine are ones which don’t seek to get out of the movement and into the masses. These left opportunist formations may be denouncing Israel’s crimes, but they’re committing a self-defeating error: being concerned with building influence inside that niche, rather than with reaching the broader population.
As long as the anti-Zionist movement is monopolized by political actors who are satisfied with staying powerless, our government’s project to aid the genocide of Palestinians will remain viable. What can truly end this project is a scenario where tens of millions of more Americans undergo the revelatory experience on Israel which Scott Ritter did; the experience where, as he explains, he went from being complicit in Zionism’s atrocities to an ally of national liberation:
I arrived late to the Palestinian cause. I was too wrapped up in the Israeli saga, too invested in the Israeli fantasy, to see the forest for the trees. I was too busy hating Hamas to realize that I should instead be hating that which enabled Hamas to carry out the crimes it has committed for the past four decades. Simply put, I was blind to the tragedy of the Palestinian people. Today I know that the only true victims in the Israeli saga (outside the children from every walk of life who are caught up in the tragic events foisted upon them by adults who claim to be working for a bright and shiny tomorrow, but only deliver death and destruction) are the Palestinian people. At least Israel’s founding fathers were honest enough to acknowledge this. The Zionists of today lack the moral character to admit that Israel can only be built and sustained at the cost of a viable, free, and independent Palestine, that Israel will never allow such a Palestine to exist, and that if there is a Zionist Israel, there will never be an independent Palestine.
I must clarify that as much as Ritter deserves respect for his contributions to the anti-imperialist cause, I’m not treating his statements throughout this essay uncritically; I dislike his use of terms like “terrorism” to describe the present Palestinian resistance, as this doesn’t take into full account the context in which Hamas and its partnered groups are operating. Is it fair or productive to to call a group that’s fighting to free its people from a massive open-air concentration camp “terroristic?” Definitely not. Another important piece of context regarding Hamas is that even though Israel nurtured Hamas to try to create divisions between Palestinian groups like it and the groups to its left, these groups have since mended their disputes, and formed into a united front. To ignore this is to adopt the same mindset as the imperialism-compatible U.S. leftists who are “anti-imperialist” only in theory, while repeating their government’s lies about every country which challenges Washington’s hegemony. Our response to the Zionists should be “yes, we refuse to condemn Hamas—and?”
Therefore, Ritter’s framing of Hamas as deserving of scorn is based in an understanding which lacks crucial context; but Ritter has shown to be someone who’s open to learning, and I myself didn’t learn what I just said until someone closer to the situation recently confronted me about the problems with reiterating Ritter’s perspective on Hamas without talking about that context. I’m holding up Ritter as a positive example not because I think he gets everything right about the situation, but because he shows even a professional Israel supporter can change.
There are enough Americans like the one who Ritter used to be; those being the kinds who only still support Israel because they haven’t yet seen the truth about the “country”; for a majority of the people to be brought towards anti-Zionism. Most Americans have already been brought halfway to supporting the cause of the Russians who are fighting to demilitarize and denazify fascist Ukraine, with more than half of Americans now being opposed to further Ukraine aid. And many of these Americans are the same conservative-leaning people who are at present supporting Israel. We can interpret their lack of willingness to apply the same critical thinking to Israel which they’ve applied to Ukraine as reason for being discouraged about the antiwar movement’s future; or we can interpret it as a reason to believe the antiwar movement’s recent gains can be built upon.
Are the majority of the USA’s people (who’ve said they sympathize with Israel) truly unable to ever come to the right side of history on this issue, even though they’ve been able to do so on Ukraine? Ritter was able to undergo this transformation because his support for Israel was based within a genuine belief that Israel represented humanitarian values; though Ritter is a Republican, he’s of a different nature than the right-wing agents of Zionist hate, who are fully aware that Israel is deliberately murdering Gazan civilians and are cheering Israel on for doing so. He could only be “pro-Israel” for as long as he didn’t know what he was supporting; and what helped him recognize the reality of Israel’s genocide against Palestine were the pieces of evidence that “Israel” is fundamentally fake.
Netanyahu’s bragging about how easy it is for Israel to influence U.S. officials; the efforts by Netanyahu and others to bring Hamas into power; Israel’s working to divide Palestinians by supporting one faction over another; these weren’t the actions of the kind of state Ritter thought Israel was. In the Israeli fantasy, whatever harms Israel may be responsible for happen in spite of the state’s nature, not because of it. And to maintain this myth, Israel has to perpetually cover up its war crimes and corrupt political tricks. Minds like Netanyahu’s can rationalize these evils due to their single-minded desire for anti-Palestinian violence; as one of Ritter’s Israeli guides once said about Netanyahu, “he only knows hate.” Minds like that of the younger Ritter, though, need to be unaware of Israel’s criminal nature in order to keep being pro-Israel.
This concealment of reality, combined with the efforts to suppress anti-Zionist speech and assembly, is why the U.S. empire is (for now) able to maintain the narrative that supporting Israel’s supposed right to exist is essential for supporting Jewish people against antisemitism. The imperialist media has an incentive to avoid platforming the Jews who oppose Zionism; and these kinds of Jews are subjected to unhinged Zionist intimidation tactics both on and offline, while their community and the the rest of society get targeted with intensive pro-Israel psyops. The imperial state is going to continue providing endless resources for the projects to dox, harass, censor, and excommunicate pro-Palestine individuals, because the hegemon needs Israel to exist in order to remain the hegemon. As Joe Biden once said, if an Israel weren’t here, we would need to invent one.
When I accuse American leftists of failing the Palestinian cause, I’m not primarily thinking of the “leftists” whose failure is so complete that they’ve condemned both sides in the present conflict. Those kinds are easily recognizable as opportunists. I’m mainly thinking of the leftists who understand everything I just wrote about why Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, yet insist on staying in a ditch when it comes to movement-building; who act according to the belief that we can defeat the capitalist state while seeking to appeal only to liberals, and to those already within the activist niche. We can’t defeat Zionism; or the imperial state that’s behind it; while denouncing every anti-imperialist rally, political actor, and organization which threatens the efforts of the major “left” orgs to monopolize activism spaces.
We can’t afford such pettiness, we need to focus on the next tasks in our mission as anti-imperialists: bringing the majority of Americans to the pro-Palestine stance, preemptively combating the pro-war psyops about Mexico, exposing the hegemon’s crimes in its emerging hybrid war on BRICS, raising awareness about Uhuru’s persecution, and creating the same mass opposition towards war with China and Iran which has come to exist in regard to Russia. Americans have more revolutionary potential than the ineffectual left believes they do, and most of them can be made into allies in these efforts.
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