In late 2019, I volunteered for two weeks in the West Bank city of Hebron. This was part of a month-long sojourn and reporting trip through Israel and the Palestinian territories. I hadn’t planned on volunteering, but upon showing up at a hostel in Hebron, the owner assumed I was there to help and essentially volunteered me. He was welcoming and enthusiastic, seeking a peaceful improvement of the tensions in the area, so I thought, “Why not?”
My new local friend ran a charity improving education, health care, and language services for local residents and showing Westerners the area. We became friends, smoking the hookah on a nightly basis and talking about life. Locals were also friendly, inviting me in for tea and offering hospitality.
Despite my friend blaming “the occupation” for all the problems of the region and talking about trauma during the Second Intifada when Israel clamped down on the uprising, I found him an honorable and well-intentioned guy, albeit with a view of history I later found to be inaccurate.
The people I did not find honorable or relatable were the Western volunteers. In fact, I found them to be victimhood parasites, feeding vicariously off the victim narrative under the guise of compassion. This has begun to grate on me more and more in the years since I was in Israel and Palestine and now makes the radical left’s reaction to the situation all the more explainable.
Much of what was told to me during my time in Palestine was patently false. But the most harmful and untrue narratives didn’t come from Palestinians: They came from the Western leftists pretending to adopt their cause.
I went on tours and volunteered with Westerners who blithely dismissed murders of Israeli “settlers” in the nearby neighborhood as mere attention-seeking. They glossed over Palestinians running at IDF soldiers in vicious knife attacks, implying it was understandable or at least not that notable.
Even the Israeli man planting flowers next to the new Jewish homes near Machpelah was clearly full of hate, couldn’t we see? The rest of Hebron where Palestinians resided was immaterial: That didn’t matter; any of their problems were clearly from this small central area they didn’t control! They were victims, they had to stay victims. That was their role.
The other leftist volunteers bought into a version of history that started in 1948 with “white settler colonialism.” They seemed to believe that random invaders had ruined the perfect tranquility of the prosperous and productive Arabs formerly living in Palestine.
Others showing up to Hebron didn’t care much either way, but were sure to tell me about their drug use and group sex experiences or how going to Palestine was just part of seeing places that were “different.” Sounds like a coherent narrative, guys! Perhaps Queers for Palestine would be interested in a group tour in the near future as long as they avoid the area where gay Palestinian man Ahmad Abu Marhia was beheaded last year after trying to seek asylum in Israel? I’m sure these leftists and their strong support of Palestine will lead to militants overlooking their rainbow flags and penchant for haram activities.
The Lies the Left Chooses to Believe
In the wake of Oct. 7, the left’s response makes much more sense when you consider the falsehoods they choose to believe about Israeli history. Unpacking those false narratives exposes the big lie at the heart of the left’s view of Israel and Jewish people more broadly.
The primary big lie is that Israel “stole” a country and randomly appeared out of nowhere to persecute innocent Arabs. It’s actually very simple: Israel is indigenous Jewish land. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah, and Rebecca aren’t buried in Hebron by accident. They’re buried there because it’s the heart of Jewish territory in the Middle East. The modern history of the Jewish people’s return to Israel also started long before the war of independence, including numerous legal land purchases and peaceful coexistence. It only became a “problem” for neighboring Arab leaders and some tribes once Jews became more powerful, unified, and determined to re-found their historical nation.
The recent video of two American wokesters being confronted by Shai Goldman for tearing down posters announcing a vigil for Israeli hostages by Hamas is especially instructive. The cowards refuse to state why they tore down the announcement for a peaceful vigil and repeatedly curse Goldman, acting like victims for being filmed in public and denying doing anything “disrespectful.”
A random leftist walking by tries to white knight for the despicable duo, accosting Goldman and saying that tearing down posters isn’t a big deal. Imagine his reaction if an LGBT poster had been torn down. One of the dysgenic duo becomes especially shrill before they wander off from enjoying their bagels, screaming, “There ain’t nothing more antisemitic than Zionism, f-ck off!”
In his 2015 piece “Why Zionism is antisemitism,” discredited leftist Sam Kriss claims that Israel was built on a hatred of the old idea of being Jewish and academic stereotypes and is a “European” rather than a truly “Jewish” ideology. Max Nordau’s muscular Judaism, in other words, isn’t “real,” because it doesn’t agree that Jews need to be bookish, analytical, and meek.
“The idea of a Jewish state is, once stated, already contradictory and meaningless,” Kriss writes in his fevered, nonsense piece. “In practice, it’s a monster.”
This is the leftist script on Israel. Kriss twists himself in pretzels to explain why Jews wanting their historical homeland is invalid and anti-Jewish. He uses a lot of fancy words to essentially claim that Jews wanting to be strong and safe is bad.
Insanity on the Left Leads to More Violence
Let’s be clear about the modern Western left: They tell us silence is violence when we don’t join the latest Soros-backed crusade but that actual terrorist violence needs to be “contextualized.”
For your refusal to vocally support an anti-family, racist organization like Black Lives Matter you are committing “violence,” but if you are horrified by actually innocent Israeli children butchered in their beds you are just not understanding “context”?
Incredibly, this is the insanity currently being peddled by current swaths of the modern left. It’s not only bizarre, it’s also incredibly dangerous and will lead to more anti-Jewish violence.
I still sympathize with the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians, especially considering their leadership and top advocates are largely war criminals and corrupt, genocidal racists. Gaza’s Hamas leaders have made it clear they take no responsibility for refugees in their own country and reserve their 500 miles of tunnels only for their militants without building shelters for their own people.
Hiding behind civilians and talking about the need to “sacrifice” potentially millions of innocent Palestinians to gain “liberation,” these heartless psychopaths are not rational actors and cannot be treated as such.
With leadership like that, who needs enemies?
With allies like the Western left, who needs opponents?
Paul Brian is a freelance journalist whose interests include politics, religion, and world news. His website is www.paulrbrian.com.
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