Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics

by Marc Lamont Hill

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 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.

Despite launching Hamas and other groups employing violence into the spotlight, the Intifada was largely a nonviolent effort composed of labor strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts.

The effective physical ghetto-ization of Gaza would, in later years, also provide a mechanism for its isolation and the siege of the Strip that continues to this day.29 As a result of its encirclement, Gaza became dramatically more reliant on Israel in fundamental ways. All its infrastructure—electricity, water, and trade—was now inextricably dependent on Israel, and there was no way for the people of Gaza to develop any alternative. The conditions inside Gaza continued to decline steadily, as overcrowding, unemployment, restricted access to the rest of the world, and the lack of resources progressively took their toll.30 The effects of measures that were taken in the 1990s to improve economic conditions for the people of Gaza—such as the construction of an airport, and the opening of a safe passage route between Gaza and the West Bank—were blunted by the tight Israeli controls that were exercised over them. Moreover, these measures would, in the course of conflict, eventually be reversed by Israel.

Although Hamas showed some flexibility, U.S. policy remained rigid. Even some centrist policy thinkers in Washington recognized that the argument that “the funding suspension is a deliberate, cold-hearted external veto upon the Palestinians’ free exercise of their democratic rights, revealing the insincerity of U.S. democracy promotion,” was gaining traction.63 Abbas was unwilling to yield to U.S. demands that he nullify Hamas’s victory on the basis of it being a terrorist group. This was a wise decision, as nullifying the victory would have unleashed a tsunami of fury from the Palestinian public, a natural reaction to their expressed will being vetoed. Yet Abbas’s efforts to maintain some sort of working relationship with the United States, which included attempts to create mechanisms to deliver aid to the Palestinian people without going through the official PA channels that the U.S. now refused, caused great tension within the Palestinian territories, especially Gaza.

One need not defend Hamas to recognize that the people of Gaza are living in unacceptable squalor. Yet as we have demonstrated, the United States has not merely been indifferent to the crisis in Gaza, but played an active, significant, and thoroughly bipartisan role in degrading the conditions. The Strip is still that millstone that Edward Said warned Yitzhak Rabin wanted to drop from his neck, a place that no one wants—except the Palestinian people. Yet, as many have noted, the blockade of Gaza, now in its fourteenth year, has turned the Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison.

The people of Gaza live in a situation much too precarious to be ignored. The end of the Gaza siege cannot be delayed until the broader question of Israeli occupation is answered. The universal values of compassion, justice, and human rights demand that the siege be ended. Decimating the Gazan economy and starving the people living there have devastated an already depressed and overcrowded area. Moreover, these actions have not improved the situation for Israelis. Americans share significantly in the blame for this situation. Our overwhelming silence is a betrayal of the noble, definitive ideals that liberals and progressives profess to hold dear.

With the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, Jewish people everywhere need and deserve solidarity with liberals to survive. But if that solidarity comes at the expense of another people, it is ultimately self-defeating.