In high school in the early 2000s I assumed the role of Palestine in our semester-long Model UN class. It was, in part, a feeble act of rebellion against spending weekends at a Conservative synagogue during my angstiest years.
Although my comprehension of the Middle East conflict was in its infancy, an innate sense of justice drove me to defend the Palestinian cause. To characterise my choice as merely rebellion, then, doesn’t capture the full picture.
My mother, a New Yorker with fierce feminist beliefs, raised me with quintessentially progressive Jewish values. I was taught that we, as Jews, stand with the oppressed – because we were the oppressed. This sentiment was often reinforced by my grandparents who arrived in America penniless, the Nazis hounding at their heels.
I took my role seriously, making it my mission to call for an immediate halt to the bulldozing of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza. I plunged into extensive research and armed myself with the knowledge to effectively champion a two-state solution – a belief I passionately held in high school and continue to endorse today.
Later, as a man in my 20s, it was only natural that I found myself firmly situated within the progressive left. I never once questioned my political home.
Guided by my Jewish values, during the George Floyd tragedy and the racial reckoning that followed, I wholeheartedly embraced anti-racism initiatives. I read Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and I even took on the role of facilitating international dialogues on collective sense-making and healing. I strove to be a good “white ally”. Truly, I did.
Then came a flexion point: During 2021 in a San Francisco Bay Area psychotherapy training course, in a “processing session” around race, a woman vulnerably shared her first-hand experience with a horrific act of anti-Semitic hatred. To my astonishment, the two facilitators, both white women, chastised her – yes, chastised – stressing the session’s emphasis on anti-black racism.
This episode unveiled a disconcerting bias in this community that routinely minimised anti-Semitism to the point it was no longer considered legitimate racism. The young Jewish woman who’d shared was cowed into silence. From within my depths, I could hear my grandfather’s groan from eternity: This, still, here?
At that moment, it became clear to me that “wokeness”, or whatever term we may use to describe the new progressive social justice ideology, didn’t seem fully compatible with the perspective I had developed in a family that was very liberal because of our lineage of Holocaust survivors.
Since then, I’ve struggled to find my political footing while maintaining a commitment to the pursuit of truth and justice.
I started noticing the sinister shadow of postmodern progressivism everywhere: a seeming insistence on “pluralism” that, in practice, often lacks genuine embodiment and quickly devolves into its own form of dogmatic and reductive tribalism.
I began to feel as though I had been baited into an a priori virtuous world view that, in a twisted way, sows more division than it does healing; more concerned, as it is, with retribution than reconciliation. That my Judaism was utterly swept away (even shadow-demonised) in the context of this conversation left me only more disillusioned.
Yet my affiliation with progressivism persisted. Say what one will about the oversimplifications and occasional insincerities of the progressive left, I told myself, their hearts were in the right place. Then, four weeks ago, Hamas grotesquely murdered 1400 Israeli citizens, including 270 at a pro-peace music festival, a gathering my friends and I would have joyously attended if we were in the Holy Land.
While these events were deeply disturbing to me, and all fellow members of the diaspora, what was even more shocking was the response from segments of the online left back home. These are progressive groups that, ostensibly, should cherish all human life and abhor all wanton violence.
Instead, many celebrated – yes, celebrated – these attacks as a form of “anti-colonialist resistance”. Memes circulated, such as the now infamous Chicago #BLM paratrooper, that quite literally glorified an unimaginable slaughtering. Student groups at Harvard decried Israel as “entirely responsible” for Hamas’s attack; groups at the University of Virginia went a step further in saying that “colonised people can resist occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary”; and groups at Tufts University in Boston took the cake by praising Hamas’s ingenious creativity.
The straw that broke my proverbial progressive back occurred when students at a high school in the Bay Area, my home for the past 15 years, were seen chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. They marched in the hallways of a public school chanting the jihadist rallying cry that implicitly calls for the erasure of the State of Israel. And all those who live within it.
Do these high schoolers, who are the same age I was when I debated on behalf of Palestine in Model UN, grasp the underlying anti-Semitic implications of their words? Or might they simply be aligning with a far-left mindset that unreservedly and reductively supports the “oppressed”?
Zooming out, it has become clear to me, and devoid of the Israeli-Palestinian context, there’s a dark reality: Our Western culture is riddled with ambient anti-Semitism. Screeds by celebrities such as Kanye West testify to the fact. As Israel is pulled into a conflict governed by jihadist game theory – where civilians are intentionally used as shields so that dead children can be broadcast as propaganda puppets on social media – anti-Semitism has and surely will continue to intensify around the world. In London, anti-Semitic hate crimes have already risen by 1350 per cent. Watch it grow, worldwide.
Yet it’s the latter question – how so many hypereducated students have steadfastly embraced far-left ideology – that raises my greatest concern for our future. This should not have to be said, but if you find yourself mourning some civilian deaths while celebrating any others, there’s an objective problem with your world view. And you.
The notion that one can distil our world’s most complex, historically dynamic and challenging conflict into simplistic binaries is so utterly absurd that it clearly exposes the shortcomings of “woke” ideology. Or any dogmatism, for that matter.
Outside of lacking vital historical context, I’ve been aghast to learn that this branch of the progressive left does not seem to understand why such horrors were committed against Israeli citizens. Unfortunately, there is an explanation beyond “colonial resistance” – radical jihadism.
Granted, not all forms of jihadism are based on terrorism, and all Muslims are not, of course, jihadists. But make no mistake: The ones who are responsible for these brutal acts of murder, rape and mutilation are radical jihadists.
Groups such as Hamas are, quite literally, death cults that are not consequentially distinct from Nazism – the death cult that systematically annihilated my grandparents’ entire extended family. The cult that the Allied West had no confusion about needing to destroy. Hamas’s stated intention is the eradication, first, of Israeli Jews – then all Jews everywhere. That is a genocidal agenda.
The Israel Defence Forces, with all their flaws, which are numerous and sometimes deadly, avoid civilian Palestinian deaths whenever and however possible. That is the opposite of a genocidal agenda.
I truly wish it were as simple as reducing this conflict to an oppressor-oppressed dynamic. I watch, with horror, as Israel’s ground invasion continues to claim thoroughly innocent lives. I do not want any Gazan children to be collateral damage.
My Jewish values, along with what I’ve learned advocating for Palestinian statehood, continue to affirm my belief in the importance of upholding the rights of Palestinian civilians.
Any ideology that justifies or minimises the tragedy of civilian casualties is broken and perverse. That is not to say that all such casualties are avoidable. Reform Jews of my generation are unified in a desire for a two-state solution that provides Palestinians with safety, dignity and rights. During the past few weeks I have heard no American Jew wish violence upon Gazans; I’ve witnessed many American so-called progressives who wish violence upon Jews. In response to raped teenagers and headless babies, a common leftist online refrain has been: “What did you think decolonisation looked like?”
That’s not progressivism. That’s bloodthirst.
This story originally appeared in Tablet magazine, at tabletmag.com, and is reprinted with permission.
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