Progressive Except for Palestine

The expected rallying-around-the-flag response from Jews in a time of perceived danger. As they say, progressive except for Palestine. From today’s New York Times:

“Progressive Jews who have spent years supporting racial equity, gay and transgender rights, abortion rights and other causes on the American left — including opposing Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank — are suddenly feeling abandoned by those who they long thought of as allies. This wartime shift represents a fundamental break within a liberal coalition that has long powered the Democratic Party….
They have long opposed the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supported a two-state solution and protested the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But in the Hamas attacks, many saw an existential threat, evoking memories of the Holocaust and generations of antisemitism, and provoking anxiety about whether they could face attacks in the United States. And they were taken aback to discover that many of their ideological allies not only failed to perceive the same threats but also saw them as oppressors deserving of blame. …
“The left doesn’t have a level of sophisticated understanding of antisemitism that we need if we are going to defeat white nationalism and fascism in this country,” said Joanna Ware, the executive director of the Jewish Liberation Fund, a philanthropic group created in 2020. “It has been painful to see some people I consider friends or comrades seeming to have a hard time empathizing with Israelis and, by extension, Jews in the United States.”

Reminds me of this quote, from Paul Gottfried, from Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique:

Paul Gottfried (1996, 9–10), a Jewish conservative, commenting on his graduate student days at Yale in the 1960s:

All my Jewish colleagues in graduate school, noisy anti-anti-Communists, opposed American capitalist imperialism, but then became enthusiastic warmongers during the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. One Jewish Marxist acquaintance went into a rage that the Israelis did not demand the entire Mideast at the end of that war. Another, though a feminist, lamented that the Israeli soldiers did not rape more Arab women. It would be no exaggeration to say that my graduate school days resounded with Jewish hysterics at an institution where WASPs seemed to count only for decoration.

6 replies
  1. A Viewer
    A Viewer says:

    The guileless naive goyish world wants to be deceived again and again, and should therefore always keep a very wide open ear for the loud feigned wailing of the Jews, and carry them once again on their backs over the Jordan. After all, we are all just the same exemplars of one single united species called “humans”! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

  2. Pierre de Craon
    Pierre de Craon says:

    Experienced readers of the Times are privy to the owners’ and editors’ bag of editorializing tricks, one of which is to signal the Preferred Opinion by prefacing it with the phrase “others say” or “many see” or the like. Kevin helpfully gives a representative sample above:

    But in the Hamas attacks, many saw an existential threat, evoking memories of the Holocaust and generations of antisemitism …

    Wasn’t it mere weeks ago that the Times, speaking for the millions of Jews whose interests it seconds, characterized a 1 or 2 percent drop in the size of the Jewish student body at a few Ivy League institutions as a similarly existential threat? Had the Jews accommodated themselves to that threat, I wonder, or were they still in maximal suffering mode when the Mossad-orchestrated Gaza breakout prompted new maximums of suffering, some of it stemming from the perceived betrayal of several of the Jews’ equally venal allies?

    Sarcasm aside, the parasitic nature of the Jewish presence would be bad enough were it not made even more repellent by the Jews’ evident pride in both their lachrymose cowardice and their spoiled-brat disdain for suggestions that they join the rest of the human race in putting life’s vicissitudes in rational perspective.

  3. Jonathan Portes
    Jonathan Portes says:

    I knew, sooner or later, ‘white nationalists’ would be the designated scapegoats the left would blame for his whole debacle.

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