Why are they Marching for Hamas?
The Financial Times released a poll today conducted by YouGov that showed — as the headline reads — "The US is far more pro-Israel than other western countries.
While I object to the question, as it should have read, "Which side in the Hamas-Israeli conflict do you sympathize with more," — as Israel has not attacked the West Bank and has stated repeatedly that its goal is the eradication of Hamas, I do see the findings to be both expected and explicable, but not for the reasons the FT offers.
I'm a political scientist who has lived in Europe for over twenty-five years. I worked at the UN for a decade on peace and security matters, and as it happens I'm American, studied in the UK, now live in Spain, was married in Italy and know it well, and spent ten years in Scandinavia. So I not only read the data, I've lived it.
Why do we see this, and why would we expect to see this?
The answer, as it happens, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinians, history, or even anti-semitism (which is nevertheless on the rise everywhere). It has do to with the moral philosophies taught by socialist theory.
Let's start from the bottom of the FT graph that lists the UK as the most supportive of the Palestinians.
Before WWII, the UK was hesitant about engaging Germany and wanted "peace in our time." Most history books will talk about the UK and Europe generally being war wary; of recognizing Germany's seemingly-legitimate desires to unify the German-speaking peoples; and the unfairness or excessiveness of the Treaty of Versailles. Few scholars of WWII would disagree on any of these individual points. The problem with the list is what it leaves out. One of the unspoken (and less heroic) concerns of the British aristocracy in the inter-war years was the encroaching threat of socialism (theory, moral philosophy that focused on workers' rights and value), and the more geo-strategic concern with Soviet power. The British had an aristocracy to defend, a class system extraordinaire, and a colonial empire. Socialism was threat to all that and Germany was not.
After WWII, the colonies were lost and the standing joke was that "Britain leads the world in decline." Today it is far less funny because a weakened Britain is bad for world peace. Nevertheless, ever since WWII, socialism in the UK has radically increased even considering the times the Tories were in power. Academia (I studied at both St. Catherine's and Linacre at the University of Oxford) is smitten by any theory that can undermine British historical pride or confidence in itself, and that is most often post-modern, French, African (e.g. Fanon, the Negritude movement) philosophy, and post-colonial theory.
Britain has swallowed — hook line and sinker — the theory that the Palestinians were colonized. They have no interest whatsoever in the idea that the Jews are indigenous to Judea; that no Arab state has ever existed there called Palestine or anything else for that matter; and that when Jews started returning to the region it was under Ottoman control and only British after WWI. To the British, colonization is bad and — though is not accurate — Israel is a colonizer. That is enough to explain sympathy for the Palestinians.
Italy was fascist from 1922 until 1945 (though the '45 is debatable as Germany effectively occupied it after Italy withdrew itself from the war). It was at war with the democracies and only became one after democracy was imposed on it after WWII. Italy today is a mind-bogglingly complex political landscape and much of it is anchored in the complexities of sympathies about the past. While the UK is pro-socialist because of their industrial past, Italy was pro-socialist because the Communists did, in fact, support their cause against the fascists. Socialists ran the philosophical gambit from moral, thoughtful, just, Enlightenment-inspired thinkers angry at the excesses of capitalism or the unfairness of colonialism, or the arbitrariness of racism, genocidal psychopaths who would go on — in camaraderie at least — to kill millions under Stalin, a million or more under the Khmer Rouge, millions more in the gulag and the list goes on. Italy is pro-Palestinian because they are pro-Communist, and being pro-Communist, to them, means standing up for the little guy. They have swallowed the idea that because Israel is technologically advanced, educated, Western, and many in the population at least look European in style and fashion and complexion, the Palestinians are the "subaltern" as theory theorist Gramsci would have said.
Spain: Spain is a nation that has never healed from its own civil war of 1936-1939 and Franco's murderous rampage for about ten years after. The bodies were never recovered. Families never grieved. The white terror did eclipse the red terror, but both were read. The nation was torn, and separatist ambitions in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galacia were quashed but never forgotten. To be from one of those three areas today means holding that socialist past close to one's heart: One can even see how the population of Barcelona "dresses down" compared to more formal, well-tailored Madrid as part of their legacy of being "working class" or at least having elitist working class sympathies (many academics are left-leaning and their administrations even more so). People can try and argue the fashion difference is because of the water and weather but I don't think so. I think it's history. Spain is pro-Palestinian or uncertain because A) Jews played as rich and complex and positive roll in Spanish society before their expulsion in 1492; B) were left-leaning when they came back but C) Catholic propaganda against the Jews runs deep. So if we combine the ambivalence of their socialism with their ambivalence towards the Jews, we see why they're in the middle.
France. Ah, dear, dear France. As it happens I love France despite being American. A decade in Geneva had me almost surrounded by France, I learned French, and their history, culture and regionally diverse culture and ideas and experiences has never stopped being dear to me. However, they do have one problem which is an uncritical affection for rebellion. That is, anyone or anything that seems to "fight the power" is considered rebellious. It was, after all, a nation of rebellion and the Republic remains defined by it. But that rebellion was also a moral one. They aspire to a moral position at all times but — like many of us — often fail abysmally. They also have a large Muslim population that is either not well integrated, or not integrating well depending on one's analysis. Writers such as Michel Houellebecq have made a career out of poking that problem with a stick. The country is torn: They know their anti-semitic past and are shameful of it (though it persists); they know their colonial past and are shameful of it; they try and be pro-Arab because that's the liberal elite default situation, which aligns to their post-modern theories and self-hatred over Algeria and colonialism; but they are also burning with rage over Islamism and the Jihadists who have murdered French civilians and decapitated teachers. France used to be pro-Israel.
Today it is not. But it is conflicted.
The Scandinavians are more conservative than you might think. While being social democrats on the outside, and emitting a sort of aura of coziness, warmth, welcoming, and tolerance, the Danes and Swedes have strong aristocratic, conservative, and extremely homogenous societies that are now facing the headaches of pluralism. They want to be liberal. They try and be liberal. But reality keeps getting in the way. As the old saying goes, "Scandinavians can tolerate anything except difference." It is currently the Muslim immigrants into Sweden that are causing the greatest social tensions and while very few are Palestinian, they are less inclined to adopt abstract social ideas about the minority always being right due to their daily confrontation with conservative and often anti-Western Islam.
Germany: Lord Ismay, the first Secretary-General of NATO allegedly said (off the record, but it was heard) that the purpose of NATO was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Germany, even in 2023, has still not entirely rejoined the family of nations on equal footing, just as Japan as not. Germany almost never takes offensive military action or even positions; debates furiously about whether its ammunition should be used in Ukraine in its war of self-defense against the clear aggressor that is Russia; and intellectually it is pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. Usually.
Germany, a bit like Italy, is a very complicated place. It was only unified into a single state in the mid-1800s and it has now been blamed for two world wars – the first was debatable and second was not. It is also responsible for the Holocaust, for genocide, and for a virulent strain of anti-semitism; the consequences and effects of which, in my view, haven't even begun to be understood, just as the impact of Marxism still remains deeply unappreciated though it now marching down the center of our cities. German public opinion on the Jews is going to be notoriously difficult to measure because whatever people are really thinking — about Jews, about Israel, about the conflicts in the Middle East — they are not likely to be as forthcoming about those ideas as pollsters might hope. Like much of Europe, they too have a "Muslim problem" but their fear of being called racist, and therefore eliciting a Nazi comparison, is palpable. They want it all to go away.
America: America — land of the free and home of the brave — was never a colonizing power; not in the way the Europeans were. While some might call its westward expansion "colonialist", even such theorists see how quickly the analogy and theories break down. American went west and stayed there, "from sea to shining sea." They didn't establish colonies, they built a civilization. America has also never been colonized, and has never been occupied by a foreign power. The wars it lost were all far away. Jewish contributions to American life are vast, monumental in importance, and on-going. Jewish comedy, philosophy, political experience and culture are embedded in American pluralism. And while only 2% of the U.S. population, they have a big impact. It is not the Jews, though, who make America pro-Israel: It is the evangelicals.
As The Washington Post reported in 2018, "Half of evangelicals support Israel because they believe it is important for fulfilling end-times prophecy," and that number seems very low to me. Their power in state politics and national politics is very high, and those who don't explicitly support Israel are rarely against it, and when they are, they are not exactly pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, or pro-Palestinian.
Americans also hate terrorists. They seem to hate them more than Europe does, if our pop culture, political speeches, and general outrage can be measured.
I've long believed that the big difference between murderous liberals and murderous conservatives is that liberals can talk themselves out of anything whereas conservatives don't find the need to. Communist philosophy is overflowing the bookshelves. Fascist? Not so much. Body counts? As Tim Snyder suggests in Bloodlands, it is probably beyond reason to even compare or sometimes even distinguish because dead is dead.
What is striking about all of this, is that motive support for the Palestinians has almost nothing to do with Palestinians. That is, it is not the worthiness of their cause; the charm of their comedians; the depth of their literature; the warmth of their political tolerance and opinions; or their sharing of common values that orients som countries towards the pro-Palestinian (if not necessarily pro-Hamas) cause (recounting my earlier objection to the phrasing of the FT question). It has to do with us. We project our own philosophical conclusions onto the world, and find causes to support that help us define ourselves and our worldviews.
History, facts, and even reality — the falsifiable kind, anyway — doesn't even come into play.
Socialist philosophy once positioned the worker has "moral" and the bourgeoisie and industrialist as "immoral" because the worker created the value but reaped no rewards. Later, anyone who seemed lower — or "subaltern" — in a power dynamic was elevated to morally superior status and in this way, "victim culture" was born.
But of course, morality is not a trope, a mechanical process, or an algorithm; just ask everyone slaughtered by the Communists and their ideas. In fact, the ones to ask might be the Jews because they decided — more than two thousand years ago during the Babylonian exile — that "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" cannot be taken literally and we must never adopt ease or ideology in place of moral reasoning.
Why?
Because — said the Rabbis — "no two eyes are the same."
— Dr. Derek B. Miller
Most recently the author of the forthcoming novel, THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI.
While I object to the question, as it should have read, "Which side in the Hamas-Israeli conflict do you sympathize with more," — as Israel has not attacked the West Bank and has stated repeatedly that its goal is the eradication of Hamas, I do see the findings to be both expected and explicable, but not for the reasons the FT offers.
I'm a political scientist who has lived in Europe for over twenty-five years. I worked at the UN for a decade on peace and security matters, and as it happens I'm American, studied in the UK, now live in Spain, was married in Italy and know it well, and spent ten years in Scandinavia. So I not only read the data, I've lived it.
Why do we see this, and why would we expect to see this?
The answer, as it happens, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinians, history, or even anti-semitism (which is nevertheless on the rise everywhere). It has do to with the moral philosophies taught by socialist theory.
Let's start from the bottom of the FT graph that lists the UK as the most supportive of the Palestinians.
Before WWII, the UK was hesitant about engaging Germany and wanted "peace in our time." Most history books will talk about the UK and Europe generally being war wary; of recognizing Germany's seemingly-legitimate desires to unify the German-speaking peoples; and the unfairness or excessiveness of the Treaty of Versailles. Few scholars of WWII would disagree on any of these individual points. The problem with the list is what it leaves out. One of the unspoken (and less heroic) concerns of the British aristocracy in the inter-war years was the encroaching threat of socialism (theory, moral philosophy that focused on workers' rights and value), and the more geo-strategic concern with Soviet power. The British had an aristocracy to defend, a class system extraordinaire, and a colonial empire. Socialism was threat to all that and Germany was not.
After WWII, the colonies were lost and the standing joke was that "Britain leads the world in decline." Today it is far less funny because a weakened Britain is bad for world peace. Nevertheless, ever since WWII, socialism in the UK has radically increased even considering the times the Tories were in power. Academia (I studied at both St. Catherine's and Linacre at the University of Oxford) is smitten by any theory that can undermine British historical pride or confidence in itself, and that is most often post-modern, French, African (e.g. Fanon, the Negritude movement) philosophy, and post-colonial theory.
Britain has swallowed — hook line and sinker — the theory that the Palestinians were colonized. They have no interest whatsoever in the idea that the Jews are indigenous to Judea; that no Arab state has ever existed there called Palestine or anything else for that matter; and that when Jews started returning to the region it was under Ottoman control and only British after WWI. To the British, colonization is bad and — though is not accurate — Israel is a colonizer. That is enough to explain sympathy for the Palestinians.
Italy was fascist from 1922 until 1945 (though the '45 is debatable as Germany effectively occupied it after Italy withdrew itself from the war). It was at war with the democracies and only became one after democracy was imposed on it after WWII. Italy today is a mind-bogglingly complex political landscape and much of it is anchored in the complexities of sympathies about the past. While the UK is pro-socialist because of their industrial past, Italy was pro-socialist because the Communists did, in fact, support their cause against the fascists. Socialists ran the philosophical gambit from moral, thoughtful, just, Enlightenment-inspired thinkers angry at the excesses of capitalism or the unfairness of colonialism, or the arbitrariness of racism, genocidal psychopaths who would go on — in camaraderie at least — to kill millions under Stalin, a million or more under the Khmer Rouge, millions more in the gulag and the list goes on. Italy is pro-Palestinian because they are pro-Communist, and being pro-Communist, to them, means standing up for the little guy. They have swallowed the idea that because Israel is technologically advanced, educated, Western, and many in the population at least look European in style and fashion and complexion, the Palestinians are the "subaltern" as theory theorist Gramsci would have said.
Spain: Spain is a nation that has never healed from its own civil war of 1936-1939 and Franco's murderous rampage for about ten years after. The bodies were never recovered. Families never grieved. The white terror did eclipse the red terror, but both were read. The nation was torn, and separatist ambitions in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galacia were quashed but never forgotten. To be from one of those three areas today means holding that socialist past close to one's heart: One can even see how the population of Barcelona "dresses down" compared to more formal, well-tailored Madrid as part of their legacy of being "working class" or at least having elitist working class sympathies (many academics are left-leaning and their administrations even more so). People can try and argue the fashion difference is because of the water and weather but I don't think so. I think it's history. Spain is pro-Palestinian or uncertain because A) Jews played as rich and complex and positive roll in Spanish society before their expulsion in 1492; B) were left-leaning when they came back but C) Catholic propaganda against the Jews runs deep. So if we combine the ambivalence of their socialism with their ambivalence towards the Jews, we see why they're in the middle.
France. Ah, dear, dear France. As it happens I love France despite being American. A decade in Geneva had me almost surrounded by France, I learned French, and their history, culture and regionally diverse culture and ideas and experiences has never stopped being dear to me. However, they do have one problem which is an uncritical affection for rebellion. That is, anyone or anything that seems to "fight the power" is considered rebellious. It was, after all, a nation of rebellion and the Republic remains defined by it. But that rebellion was also a moral one. They aspire to a moral position at all times but — like many of us — often fail abysmally. They also have a large Muslim population that is either not well integrated, or not integrating well depending on one's analysis. Writers such as Michel Houellebecq have made a career out of poking that problem with a stick. The country is torn: They know their anti-semitic past and are shameful of it (though it persists); they know their colonial past and are shameful of it; they try and be pro-Arab because that's the liberal elite default situation, which aligns to their post-modern theories and self-hatred over Algeria and colonialism; but they are also burning with rage over Islamism and the Jihadists who have murdered French civilians and decapitated teachers. France used to be pro-Israel.
Today it is not. But it is conflicted.
The Scandinavians are more conservative than you might think. While being social democrats on the outside, and emitting a sort of aura of coziness, warmth, welcoming, and tolerance, the Danes and Swedes have strong aristocratic, conservative, and extremely homogenous societies that are now facing the headaches of pluralism. They want to be liberal. They try and be liberal. But reality keeps getting in the way. As the old saying goes, "Scandinavians can tolerate anything except difference." It is currently the Muslim immigrants into Sweden that are causing the greatest social tensions and while very few are Palestinian, they are less inclined to adopt abstract social ideas about the minority always being right due to their daily confrontation with conservative and often anti-Western Islam.
Germany: Lord Ismay, the first Secretary-General of NATO allegedly said (off the record, but it was heard) that the purpose of NATO was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Germany, even in 2023, has still not entirely rejoined the family of nations on equal footing, just as Japan as not. Germany almost never takes offensive military action or even positions; debates furiously about whether its ammunition should be used in Ukraine in its war of self-defense against the clear aggressor that is Russia; and intellectually it is pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. Usually.
Germany, a bit like Italy, is a very complicated place. It was only unified into a single state in the mid-1800s and it has now been blamed for two world wars – the first was debatable and second was not. It is also responsible for the Holocaust, for genocide, and for a virulent strain of anti-semitism; the consequences and effects of which, in my view, haven't even begun to be understood, just as the impact of Marxism still remains deeply unappreciated though it now marching down the center of our cities. German public opinion on the Jews is going to be notoriously difficult to measure because whatever people are really thinking — about Jews, about Israel, about the conflicts in the Middle East — they are not likely to be as forthcoming about those ideas as pollsters might hope. Like much of Europe, they too have a "Muslim problem" but their fear of being called racist, and therefore eliciting a Nazi comparison, is palpable. They want it all to go away.
America: America — land of the free and home of the brave — was never a colonizing power; not in the way the Europeans were. While some might call its westward expansion "colonialist", even such theorists see how quickly the analogy and theories break down. American went west and stayed there, "from sea to shining sea." They didn't establish colonies, they built a civilization. America has also never been colonized, and has never been occupied by a foreign power. The wars it lost were all far away. Jewish contributions to American life are vast, monumental in importance, and on-going. Jewish comedy, philosophy, political experience and culture are embedded in American pluralism. And while only 2% of the U.S. population, they have a big impact. It is not the Jews, though, who make America pro-Israel: It is the evangelicals.
As The Washington Post reported in 2018, "Half of evangelicals support Israel because they believe it is important for fulfilling end-times prophecy," and that number seems very low to me. Their power in state politics and national politics is very high, and those who don't explicitly support Israel are rarely against it, and when they are, they are not exactly pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, or pro-Palestinian.
Americans also hate terrorists. They seem to hate them more than Europe does, if our pop culture, political speeches, and general outrage can be measured.
I've long believed that the big difference between murderous liberals and murderous conservatives is that liberals can talk themselves out of anything whereas conservatives don't find the need to. Communist philosophy is overflowing the bookshelves. Fascist? Not so much. Body counts? As Tim Snyder suggests in Bloodlands, it is probably beyond reason to even compare or sometimes even distinguish because dead is dead.
What is striking about all of this, is that motive support for the Palestinians has almost nothing to do with Palestinians. That is, it is not the worthiness of their cause; the charm of their comedians; the depth of their literature; the warmth of their political tolerance and opinions; or their sharing of common values that orients som countries towards the pro-Palestinian (if not necessarily pro-Hamas) cause (recounting my earlier objection to the phrasing of the FT question). It has to do with us. We project our own philosophical conclusions onto the world, and find causes to support that help us define ourselves and our worldviews.
History, facts, and even reality — the falsifiable kind, anyway — doesn't even come into play.
Socialist philosophy once positioned the worker has "moral" and the bourgeoisie and industrialist as "immoral" because the worker created the value but reaped no rewards. Later, anyone who seemed lower — or "subaltern" — in a power dynamic was elevated to morally superior status and in this way, "victim culture" was born.
But of course, morality is not a trope, a mechanical process, or an algorithm; just ask everyone slaughtered by the Communists and their ideas. In fact, the ones to ask might be the Jews because they decided — more than two thousand years ago during the Babylonian exile — that "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" cannot be taken literally and we must never adopt ease or ideology in place of moral reasoning.
Why?
Because — said the Rabbis — "no two eyes are the same."
— Dr. Derek B. Miller
Most recently the author of the forthcoming novel, THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI.
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If the IDF had attacked the West Bank, we'd know it. They didn't. The Settler violence is an outrage and should be dealt with far better by Israel but comparing it to a full military assault is preposterous and simply wrong.
You can read what you like.
Human Rights watch state: "Settlers have killed 15 Palestinians as of November 17. During the first eight months of 2023, settler violence soared to its highest level since the UN began recording this data in 2006; three incidents per day on average, up from two in 2022 and one in 2021. That rate has almost doubled since October 7."
So forgive me for not reading the rest of what you have to say.