Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics

by Marc Lamont Hill

Trump still scored the support of more than 73 million Americans,

Palestine and Israel dropped all pretense of even-handedness. Many of the normal diplomatic niceties and policy charades deployed by previous presidents were simply abandoned.

Trump’s agenda was driven openly and unabashedly not just by pro-Israel forces, but by the most radical of those forces: the religious-nationalist settler movement.

For liberals, the idea that America could turn its back on people running from dictatorships, women escaping abuse, or racial and ethnic minorities fleeing persecution was morally outrageous. It not only contradicted core political values stemming from our notions of democracy, but our very conception of self.

Through his approach, Donald Trump removed the veneer of even-handedness that prior administrations worked hard to maintain. For example, cutting funds to UNRWA was an idea that had been floated in Washington for years, dating back at least to the George W. Bush administration. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem caused enormous controversy in the U.S. In so doing, he fulfilled a promise that one presidential candidate after another, Democrat and Republican, had campaigned on, only to backtrack once in office. By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, Trump altered the status quo on which the international community based its support for a two-state solution. To accomplish this, however, he did not need to fight for new legislation. Rather, he merely invoked a law that was created in 1995, with overwhelming bipartisan support, during the presidency of liberal Democrat Bill Clinton.

President Obama’s $38 billion aid package to Israel, finalized in 2016 as he was leaving office, marked the “largest military aid package from one country to another in the annals of human history.”

A United Nations report estimated that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020 and that 95 percent of the water there was already unfit for human consumption. Although these predictions have come to pass, two million Gazans continue to live under these conditions.

Palestinians cannot get permits to build necessary extensions on existing homes in areas under Israeli military control, forcing them to build without them in order to meet basic demographic needs. This results in a steady stream of demolitions of so-called “illegal” structures. Unemployment in the West Bank is generally around 18 percent, and Palestinian workers frequently suffer a loss of income because Israeli military closures make it impossible for them to get to their jobs.

“Nation-State Bill” that Israel passed into law in July 2018 epitomized this attack. The law states plainly that only Jews can exercise national self-determination in Israel, downgrades Arabic from an official language to one of “special status,” and explicitly states that Jewish settlement of the “Land of Israel” (a phrase that includes the West Bank) is to be encouraged.

The conditions mentioned here should be profoundly disturbing to American liberals and progressives, as they are clearly out of step with the values they claim to hold most dear. Yet year after year, Israel is by far the leading recipient of U.S. foreign aid, with little resistance from progressive voices. The United States repeatedly isolates itself on the world stage in order to shield Israel as much as possible from any consequences that it might face as a result of its policies and actions. Questioning this lockstep support in any but the mildest terms has long been seen as a political third rail and is often greeted by charges of bias against the world’s only Jewish state, or even allegations of outright anti-Semitism. Against the backdrop of these realities, the American political left has normalized a world in which it is acceptable, through words and policies, to embrace the ethical and political contradiction of being “progressive except for Palestine.”

When the topic turns to Palestine, the same people who consistently advocate for freedom and justice fail to live up to their professed ideals.

If we claim to care about producing freedom and justice around the world, which is often the expressed basis for American foreign policy, then we must remain morally consistent. Palestine cannot be an exception.

We challenge the notion that Jewish self-determination must necessarily mean Palestinian dispossession, or that Palestinian freedom must threaten Jewish safety or security.

In the current political moment, it has become a shibboleth of mainstream liberal political discourse to affirm Israel’s right to exist. Such an affirmation carries with it the presumption of a double standard, an implicit suggestion that all other nations of the world have had their right to exist affirmed, leaving Israel as the lone exception. The discourse surrounding Israel’s right to exist is also often presumed to be related not only to the abstract concept of the state, but to the physical status of the state’s citizens. In other words, the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is often understood to be a question of whether Israelis, or even Jews more broadly, have the right to exist. Of course, our answer to this latter question is clear and unambiguous: The right of Israelis (and Jews throughout the world) to live in peace, safety, dignity, and with self-determination is absolute and unquestionable.

Zionism is the nationalist ideology of the Jewish people, which constructs Judaism as not only a religion but a nationality. Zionism advances the idea that Jews of all sorts—irrespective of race, ethnicity, cultural identity, or geographic location; regardless of whether they are secular, religious, or atheist—constitute a singular modern nation.

for states to come about through the dispossession of another people. This is particularly true when the incoming nation employs a strategy of settler-colonialism—as in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States—whereby an imperial power creates colonies of its own people in other territories.

Had Jews merely wanted to live in Palestine, this would not have been a problem. In fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians had coexisted for centuries throughout the Middle East. But Zionists sought sovereignty over a land where other people lived. Their ambitions required not only the dispossession and removal of Palestinians in 1948 but also their forced exile, juridical erasure and denial that they ever existed. So, during Israel’s establishment, some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes to make way for a Jewish majority state…. This is why Palestinians have been resisting for more than seven decades: They are fighting to remain on their lands with dignity. They have valiantly resisted their colonial erasure…. This resistance is not about returning to the 1947 borders or some notion of the past, but about laying claim to a better future in which Palestinians and their children can live in freedom and equality, rather than being subjugated as second-class citizens or worse.5

The relevant political question is: Is the dispossession and ongoing denial of rights at various levels to Palestinians justified?

Begin brings the ancient homeland claim into the internal Jewish-Israeli sphere and removes it from matters of international politics.

When someone asks if one supports “Israel’s right to exist,” they are tacitly asking if one agrees that Israel’s elevation of Jewish rights above those of Palestinians in the land they all inhabit is acceptable. The question, in fact, is whether it was legitimate—after many centuries of Palestinians of numerous faiths, including Jews, living in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—for Jews from Europe (and later Jews from around the world) to emigrate there with the express purpose of creating a state in which Jewish people would be privileged above others, especially the indigenous inhabitants.

This does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people.

In other words, the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present.

Today, this is what is still being demanded when defenders of Israel’s actions and policies call for affirmation of its right to exist. The issue is not Jews’ right to constitute a nation or even to pursue a homeland. Rather, the issue is whether their national identity and historical and cultural connection to the land that has been called Israel, Palestine, Canaan, Judea, etc. justified the dispossession of the Palestinians. Demanding that not only supporters of Palestinian rights, but also Palestinians themselves, affirm this point is not reasonable.

“Judea and Samaria” [the biblical name for the West Bank],

While Jews’ right to decide the definition of their own collective existence is axiomatic, their right to displace another people to lay claim to an historic homeland from many centuries past is not.

Palestinians are not merely another nation, but a nation dispossessed by Israel’s creation.

Why, then, are the Palestinians—the one group who would be supporting their own oppression with such recognition—expected to offer this unique gift to Israel?

While recognition of a Jewish state does not necessarily dictate the exact manner in which individual Palestinian refugee claims will be resolved, such recognition does seek to allay a central Israeli concern that the claim for refugee return is in reality an attempt to undermine Jewish self-determination. Those seeking recognition argue that Palestinians cannot, on the one hand, demand the establishment of an independent state as part of a two-state solution while, on the other, pursuing the return of refugees not only to Palestine but to Israel as well.

Becker next examines the objection that recognizing Israel as a Jewish state would justify a secondary status for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, most of whom are Palestinian.

The Nation-State Law, formally known as Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, stirred a great deal of controversy in Israel and around the world when it was finally approved by the Knesset in July 2018. For staunch supporters of Jewish nationalism, the Nation-State Law codified with sweeping principles what they saw as Israel’s long-standing self-definition: (A.) The Land of Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established. (B.) The State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it exercises its natural, cultural, religious and historic right to self-determination. (C.) The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people.56

it transforms discrimination into a constitutional, systematic, and institutional principle, and into a basic element of the foundations of Israeli law.

The issues around the Nation-State Law, which became a Basic Law (roughly tantamount to a constitutional law in the United States), were declarative. But, as Adalah’s summary pointed out, the bill serves as a legal basis for current and future discriminatory laws and official policies.

Israeli hasbara (technically translated as “propaganda” but used to represent all of Israel’s public relations tactics to promote its political positions and its self-identification as a Jewish and democratic state, the “only democracy in the Middle East”). “Israel has a serious racism problem,” Pfeffer writes. “There is a legal and social framework that discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens. For the last 52 years it has been occupying millions of stateless Palestinians who still have no prospect of receiving their basic rights.” He continues, “Acknowledging these fundamental issues has nothing to do with the argument of whether Zionism was a practical and just solution for the historical and genocidal persecution of Jews before 1948. That’s why hasbara is a waste of time. All it does is undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Because real countries don’t have to argue they are legitimate. Hasbara’s one function is to deny Israel is a real country with real problems that need dealing with.” 62

BDS is a modern, grassroots nonviolent movement inspired by a 2005 call from a long and diverse list of Palestinian civil society organizations. Despite being ignored by world leaders and global media, BDS has been an integral feature of the Palestinian national movement.

Israel’s construction of the wall in the West Bank, in areas well beyond its internationally recognized border • Continued expansion of Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank • Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and the deep concern over potential annexation of large parts or even all of the West Bank16 • The growing global Palestinian refugee population • Israel’s discrimination against its own Arab, largely Palestinian citizens.

ruling by the International Court of Justice that the wall Israel had constructed inside the West Bank was illegal under international law. The court also ruled that the UN Security Council should consider how “to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and the associated régime, taking due account of the present Advisory Opinion.”

From the six-month general strike in April 1936 during the British Mandate that initiated the three-year Great Revolt, to the long tradition of boycotts, Palestinians have long deployed nonviolence as a vital means of achieving their political goals.

Reut Group), a strategic think tank founded in 2004, in part to combat what it calls the “delegitimization” of Israel.

A zero-sum approach dictates that any gains for Palestinians must mean a loss for Israelis, and vice versa.

When the rights of Palestinians are defined only in terms of how they affect Israel, the implicit corollary is that Israeli rights are always of superior importance.

When journalist Christiane Amanpour asked him if the United States still supported a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Friedman stated matter-of-factly: “We believe in Palestinian autonomy, we believe in Palestinian self-governance. We believe that autonomy should be extended up until the point where it interferes with Israeli security.” 45 This hierarchy of rights is both the result and a perpetuator of the framing that the struggle for Palestinian rights is an attack on Israel. It also leads to a view of all supporters of Palestinian rights as being essentially of the same stripe.

As of January 2020, twenty-eight states had laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations, or individuals for engaging in or calling for boycotts against Israel.66 The laws usually penalize businesses or individuals for refusing to sign a document that commits them not to participate in any way in boycotts against Israel. Some of the laws have real penalties, while others are merely declarations that the state opposes BDS.

BDS is a useful boogeyman for the Israeli and American right wings, allowing them to expand their assault on democracy while advancing the narrative that “the whole world is against Israel.”

If BDS has not yet succeeded in bringing economic pressure on Israel, it has succeeded in changing the debate on the entire question of Israel and Palestine.

unequal representation of Palestinian violence as terrorism and Israeli violence as self-defense).

The U.S. has also imposed legal and diplomatic penalties on the Palestinians for going to the International Criminal Court (ICC), or any other international body, for relief, and even imposed penalties for the Palestinians having joined the United Nations General Assembly.73 The only route available, then, for Palestinians to seek redress for their situation is the bilateral talks with Israel under U.S. auspices that have failed so dramatically for more than a quarter century.

fundamental international law, which, as stated in the charter of the United Nations, forbids the acquisition of territory by force.

this is far from the first time that the United States has directly undermined international law for Israel’s benefit. Since 1972, the U.S. has used its veto power at the UN Security Council to shield Israel from forty-four resolutions criticizing its behavior or calling on it to comply with international law and UN resolutions.3 That is by far the highest total of vetoes of any country over that time span, and it doesn’t account for resolutions that countries abandoned or withdrew because of the threat of a U.S. veto. That would be a far greater number.

The Republican Party invested an open effort in winning a considerable slice of the Jewish vote (beyond the 18 percent it won in 1992) and the aspiring presidential candidate, Bob Dole, was also courting Jewish backers and voters.

Trump was heavily influenced by the views of his closest advisers, all of whom were closely aligned with the far right in Israel and were part of the related segment of the American Jewish community.