Post-Palestine Policy
If a policy hasn't worked for 100 years, try something new -- or stop trying
This is the first of a two part essay. Here I talk about how the left has failed to develop an effective foreign policy for Palestinians. In a follow up essay I’ll discuss what comes next.
I want to delve into why the idea of Palestinian sovereignty has shown itself, after over 100 years, to be impossible and must be abandoned if you value peace and stability in the region. I also feel compelled to analyze the global and American political movements that have so closely aligned themselves with the idea of a Free Palestine.
Let's set the table: the idea of a safe, peaceful Palestinian sovereign state (never mind a classically-liberal democracy with rights for women, children and minorities like gay people) that’s good for its citizens and good for its neighbors, including the neighbor with a minority population, is impossible. This is the reality I ask you to consider and embrace, despite how disappointing and depressing it is. As an optimist, I humbly think that acknowledging and accepting reality has to happen before rectifying wrongs to make the world a more humane place.
Palestine is over. It’s time to move to new ideas. And possibly, to new lands.
How do I know it's over? Let's see how we got here. You can date the formal movement for what would be eventually be called Palestinian statehood to 1937 with the Peel Commission, which said both an Arab and a Jewish state should replace British suzerainty. The overall movement can be dated even earlier, to before the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, which controlled most of the Middle East for over 400 years. Without getting too mired in the complexities of history, many scholars say the idea for independent Arab sovereignty began in Egypt where Napoleon’s colonialism had spread values from the French Revolution. Egyptian sovereignty from Mamluks and Ottomans was the first bid in the Arab world for what would become modern statehood. The Greek War of Independence from the Ottomans was also inspiration. Eventually, with the end of World War I, Arab nationalism spread to the entire region.
In one of the great ironies lost to leftist ideologues on today’s Ivy League campuses, European Jews joined Arab independence movements, but they were the only ones to successfully implement a post-imperial, classically-liberal state the French would recognize.
It’s been a very long time to observe Arab nationalism. We can see, as of now, what’s worked or failed.
For example, Egyptian secular military dictatorships dependent on the US since the Cold War seem to last longer and cause less friction than a democracy that quickly devolves into Sunni Islamic theocracy (with tacit support of the Obama administration for some reason) or to dictatorships supported by the Soviets.
What happens next in Syria will be an interesting test for how a Shia/Alawite dictatorship evolves into something new. Perhaps it’ll become a Sunni theocratic vassal to Turkey, where the wheels of history turn on themselves with an Ottoman imperial redux. But no one is predicting a liberal state to emerge, not even the most ardent leftist will go that far.
Why liberals can’t observe that Palestinians live near Syrians and share a similar culture, language, religion, economics, agriculture, ethnicity, and yes, politics, is a mystery.
For now, Syria has a weak central government alongside a loose and violent affiliation of provinces dominated by armed men. While a new Syria is emerging, the current state of affairs is very similar to Iraq, Afghanistan and many other Muslim countries with weak governments and strong provincial warlords.
Israel, as a democratic nation, has likewise shown itself to be durable despite unimaginably brutal and constant attacks by its neighbors, diplomatic sanctions at the UN and commensurate antagonism from much of the world — except from the one country that counts.
Sure, a regional, undeclared nuclear monopoly helps explain Israel’s physical survival, but democratic state institutions — no matter how imperfect and corrupted under various administrations — have been intact since the pre-state entities that coalesced in 1948. These pre-state institutions date from the mid 1880s in the form of agricultural, defensive and administrative organizations. It’s been a long time. Israel works.
If you’re with me so far, you’ll also see that Palestine doesn’t work. As far as their pre-state entities and governmental organizations, Palestinians have built the PLO, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They built a tunnel infrastructure and siphoned money and goods from aid organizations while creating arsenals with weapons that rarely have time to cool. Yes, there are a handful of peace activists and filmmakers celebrated by Hollywood and progressives on Instagram. Remind me how much power they wield? Or if there were elections, how many votes they’d garner? Or how they rank in polls?
A Palestinian peace activist and a Biden re-elect staffer walk into a bar…
Why is anyone talking about Palestine when Palestine has never happened, isn’t happening, and, it seems to many observers, that it’s not going to happen anytime soon — and that’s from the Arab Gulf perspective, let alone from Israel’s?
The better question to ask isn't why people are clinging to an obsolete and easily refuted idea, it's who clings to it.
Only the left — globally and here in the USA — retains this belief. It’s a relic at best. Like sacralization, it’s pretty clear that the adherents of Free Palestine have moved from rational political theory once shared by ambitious, even-handed diplomats in Whitehall and the State Department, into the realm of mysticism — which is as unimpeachable as it is impossible to manifest. Palestine can’t be taken seriously because religion transcends logic.
More devastatingly to the left is the idea that a Free Palestine isn’t actually what they want at all. Free Palestine are syllables, not policies. They say they want it, they take over campus buildings or vote for politicians who hate Jews, but words sometimes lack meaning. Perhaps the left’s idea of Free Palestine is just a complicated version of land acknowledgements — which never intended to cede territory to Native Americans.
Land acknowledgements were about saying you wish you could cede territory but won’t or you feel bad about the past but oh well, not that you will lift a finger to help anyone now. In the end, these acknowledgments collapsed into satire because their sincerity was fueled by performance and ignorance, not action. No one asks whom the valorized Natives killed, raped and brutalized to be remembered as the last man standing.
Unfortunately for Mohawks and Palestinians, they have the same champions.
If this sounds kind of high level and too broad, let's zoom into last few weeks of late February and early March. The American left has only moved deeper into the sacred spaces of Palestinian redemption and, for the left, this requires a Satanic counter to reinforce their religious certainty.
Holy warriors needs victims to save and demons to blame.
It’s now official according to a Gallup poll. Not that polls are the best barometer of sentiment in the modern era as we’ve seen with Trump’s “surprise” victories, but they send signals worth noting if they match social media trends, voting patterns, university curricula, faculty hires, student activism, cultural positions and actual government policies. If Palestine is the fabled land of what Jews call geula, the redemption, then Israel is the Evil One who must be bravely defied. Sounds like the worst Marvel movie yet, but this passes as conventional wisdom for millions.
According to a recent high quality poll, only 30% of Democrats have a favorable view of Israel with 60% unfavorable. That’s a huge drop in support over the past several years while Republican numbers — 83% currently support Israel — have remained stable for decades. Independents score better than Democrats. They have a 44% unfavorable rating so not yet in the majority. Not great if you care about Jewish security, but better than 60% negative for a tiny state filled with what the left would call refugees.
Please humor me for two digressive questions:
1 - How is a Palestinian in Gaza, Lebanon or Jordan still considered a refugee if his family came from Jaffa (basically south Tel Aviv) 75 years ago, but a Jew in Israel or America is not a refugee if his family came from Baghdad that same time? While most Palestinians voluntarily fled what would become Israel in hopes to return on the ashes of their dead Jewish neighbors, others were forced out or killed by Israeli soldiers. It was a mix of voluntary exit and violent expulsion.
A few hundred miles to the east a few year later, all Iraqi Jews were forced out of their ancestral homes. All of them. Threats of violence, property confiscation, humiliation and more pushed them out. You get it. These are bad ways to treat an ancient minority, I mean a “marginalized” and “underserved” group. The coercive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews happened across all Muslim countries. In a twist of history, roughly the same amount of Palestinians and Jews were willfully or forcibly displaced from their homes, with the Jews suffering a slightly higher number. This population swap is never mentioned by the left, but it was the norm in the 20th century with the end of imperialism and the rise of new nations, like in India/Pakistan, in Africa, across Europe and in East Asia.
The left excels at innovating identities, but for some reason not for Jews. Why aren’t Mizrahim (literally “Easterners”) in Israel considered “formerly-marginalized post-refugees” and treated with the same sympathy as Palestinians whose great grandparents were forced out of their villages? What about the descendants of Palestinians who voluntarily fled their homes? Should they be considered regular folk or as eternal and immutable victims because of their skin color? Which is the same color as Mizrahim. You see where this ouroboros gets you.
2 - Why have Democrats shifted their perceptions of Israel while Republicans have stayed the same?
I’m sure it’s complicated and also involves the fact that religious Christians of all backgrounds feel alienated by secular Democrats, but I think what’s mostly to blame is the left’s evolution in the early 21st century. Doubling-down on skin color and niche gender identities, and the concept of rectifying marginalization via unaccountable, expensive bureaucracies with little to show for their efforts, has led to misguided thinking that manifests in leftist support for Islamic terrorists, alienates sporty girls and ultimately loses elections.
If you think I’m being strident, I invite you to Barnard any day of the week, a union meeting, a public school, any progressive candidacy in America or to the entire country of Australia. Or just come with to me to my synagogue tonight and ask why there are so many layers of security?
The left is toast. Palestine is one of many examples of their intellectual, administrative and ethical illiteracy. Left and right seating assignments from the 1789 French Assembly endured for a remarkably long time, but by 2025, dividing people into wings doesn’t work when one of them willfully ceases to exist.
Leftists now flap a stump of a limb they cut off themselves and cry about ableism while the right soars.
This is gruesome, but now imagine the left wielding power once again and I think you’ll prefer a grisly metaphor than bloated, expensive governance based on skin color or gender that doesn’t build anything. Don’t take it from me, just ask a 16-year-old girl in a blue state trying for a sports scholarship. Or talk to a working class person. Or someone who doesn’t live in a city. Or a religious congregant. Or a recent legal immigrant.
It’s a long list.
That said, I don’t thinkRepublicans offer much of an alternative.
In a war between two parties that kicked off on 10/7/2023 where one party invaded the other, with a mix of militants and civilian volunteers who later murdered children with their hands, the left thought it best to choose the aggressors. This is despite their historical track record of ethnic violence, a century of negating peace treaties and more recently, the popular election of a violent totalitarian government in 2006.
Why the left chose Palestinians over Israeli Jews is a longer discussion, but that’s how it went down. Witness the recent Academy Awards for examples of privileging Palestinian narratives over Jewish ones — except when it comes to the Holocaust ala the Brutalist, which like the Civil Rights Movement, remains for liberals as sacred and entombed as a fossilized arm of a saint. Look at it. Feel deep sentiments. Go on with your day.
Yes, some establishment Dems were horrified by the 10/7 invasion, but their response when they held power was to condition support of Israel based on progressive anti-Jewish antipathies, as witnessed by Leader Schumer’s criticism of the popularly elected democratic Netanyahu administration instead of arming Israel to the teeth and launching missile attacks on Iran. Israel did indeed receive meaningful military support from the Biden administration which was vital, but Democratic equivocating buttressed Hamas and prolonged the war.
Now here we are, 16 months later with bloodshed on the horizon. See Ukraine for an analogue.
This is the policy I’m supposed to vote for?
The poll confirms what many of us on the ground have observed. The Democratic base doesn't support Jewish security. Sadly, it’s never been about “just” Israel, Jews in Democratic-majority geographies feel it here at home.
New York City holds the largest concentration of Jews in the world. There are continuous, violent anti-Jewish attacks at Barnard and in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods. This doesn’t seem to conflict with liberals bemoaning the rollback of ineffective DEI bureaucracies. Failed ethnic ranking policies are their hill and they’re going to die on it, no matter whom it hurts.
This is the policy I’m supposed to vote for?
The left made their decision. It’s binary. Good guys vs bad guys. They chose an illiberal, violent, totalitarian, fundamentalist government instead of a thriving liberal democracy that is as flawed and problematic as all thriving liberal democracies. Since this is the only place in the world the left makes this Faustian bargain of choosing an illiberal aggressor over a democratic defender, it’s hard not to note that Jewish lives are at stake.
In China, Taiwan, Tibet, Russia, Ukraine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela et al the left makes a very different calculation. Just not when it comes to Jews, who now conveniently fit into the identity-based ideology of “post colonialism” — which I’ve argued before is the eugenics of the modern era. All you have to do is swap out the word “science” for “justice” and voila, welcome to 21st century bigotry.
Bigots are always positive they’re not only scientifically or ethically right, but that they’re also on right side of history. Fortunately, soldiers in World War II and voters in America took a better path.
If the left is discredited as a movement and certainly has no claims for enacting effective policies, be it for improving skin color diversity in universities or corporations, building housing for anyone but the wealthy or managing foreign affairs to expand democracy, then what about their ardor for Palestine?
I ask because things are suddenly very different after the return of the murdered Bibas boys and their mother the other week. And because, for now, we have an American president who seems to understand that Hamas is made up of Palestinian people, and these people have agency like all other humans have agency, and its Palestinian agency that has caused so much violence and brutality.
Let’s look at language for a moment. Mainstream media calls this the “Gaza War” or the “Israel-Hamas” war despite both terms being inaccurate or lopsided. Shouldn’t it be the Israel-Gaza war or the Likud-Hamas war? Despite liberal press distortions, the conflict is in fact the latest chapter of the Palestinian-Israeli wars that Palestinians have waged for over a century against Jews. (Most date the first violence to the 1929 Hebron Massacre.) By now, with the Bibas bodies laid to rest in Israel, everyone everywhere can see this, except for the left.
Their blinkers are their own.
No matter what the left postulates, there is no going back now for Israel and those who feel compelled to defend themselves from Islamic terror, like, say the Egyptian or Jordanian dictatorships. Palestinians did the killing. We — world leaders, average Israeli citizen, anyone who’s paying attention — can see clearly what Palestinians are capable of doing. With their bare hands. To women, children and the elderly. Their actions are as horrific as they are clarifying. They’re also totally unnecessary because they’ve already waged countless massacres, a civil war, ground wars, intifadas, thousands of one-off terror attacks and missile attacks, but there you have it. The lesson has been relearned. By some.
If you like to study, you’ll agree we need to try something new for Palestinians. That’s what we’ll talk about next.