Call me naive: I don’t believe that all these keffiyeh-wearing, quad-occupying students are simply rabid antisemites. The real reason why progressives hate Israel is both simpler and more complex than that: Israel is a threat because of its success.
It is a threat because it shows what a battered, penniless people can accomplish in a single generation. It is a threat because it proves that the worst oppressions and atrocities do not have to determine a nation’s fate. It is a threat because it demonstrates that post-colonial countries do not have to devolve into despotic tyrannies.
In other words, Israel is a threat because it challenges the tenets of modern progressive dogma. It is easier for them to believe instead that Israel’s successes – its stellar human rights record, its diverse and vibrant democracy, its flourishing economy – are somehow due to thieving and immorality than it is to admit that triumph over adversity is possible on a personal, national and cultural scale.
And what group has faced greater adversity than the Jewish refugees who came to Palestine with the 19th- and 20th-century aliyahs? From Russia and the Pale of Settlement, they fled the constant threat of pogrom; from the Arab world, they fled dhimmitude and pogrom; from Europe they fled annihilation sandwiched between pogroms. To call these people colonists while insisting that Syrian migrants fleeing to Europe are refugees is simply incoherent.
Can you define colonist in such a way that it applies to aliyah Jews but not to Venezuelans arriving on the US border, or African migrants crossing the Mediterranean? It’s a difficult exercise, and most who attempt it end up making some mention of land being stolen, but suggest that aliyah Jews stole land is to defy not only history but also logic: does anybody really believe that a non-militaristic, non-unified, penniless group of immigrants was able to trickle in and oust a rooted indigenous population? What would be the mechanism of such an eviction?
Which is not to say that land swaps did not occur following the war of 1948, but to make the point that Jews had a strong presence by then, every right to the land they purchased from Ottoman landlords, and an internationally recognized right to sovereignty within their 1948 borders. If retreat to those borders and an end to settlement-building in return for hostage return and a credible offer of peace was the focus of student protests, they would not only be coherent, but also in line with much of Israeli public opinion.
Progressive opposition to Israel
Yet that is not for what students at elite universities were camped out. They were camped out to say that Israel has no right to exist, and to voice their support for the terrorist organizations that share in this conviction.
Is this alignment shocking? Sure. Baffling? No. Progressives and DEI proselytizers do not deny that badness exists in the world, and – if pressed – many of them would probably agree that it would be preferable if Hamas did not punish homosexuality with death, or appropriate aid funds to build underground terror networks, or oppress Palestinians in every facet of life. But these crimes, while heinous, are not unforgivable, because they do not challenge the foundations of progressive orthodoxy in the way that Israel does.
Progressives might disagree with despots and death cults, but they also can accept that they exist; on the other hand, if a country like Israel can shake off its colonizers and then rise up from a multicultural, multinational, multiethnic group of refugees that has suffered ubiquitous persecution on an unprecedented scale, then what implications does that have for the assertion that oppression, poverty and tragedy are insurmountable facts of life that must be pandered to rather than triumphed over?
It is Israel’s present successes, rather than their “settler colonial” foundation, that poses the threat to progressive worldview, and one does not need to look so far for proof. When the British Empire inherited Palestine from the Ottoman Empire after WWI, it was part of a single, merged territory called Transjordan, which comprised modern-day Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Eighty percent of that territory was lopped off and given to the non-Palestinian Hashemites from Mecca to rule over as a monarchy, while the remaining 20% was divided among Jews and Palestinians so that each group governed where they formed a majority. But Jordan escapes the ire of progressives, who don’t mind that Palestinians living there have no self rule, and far less rights than Israeli Arabs.
Can progressives really suggest that it aligns more with their values for a Palestinian-majority state to be given to a non-native Hashemite king than it does for a territory to be divided on the basis of democratic governance and self-determination? No, and most wouldn’t when pressed. But Jordan is a middle-income country with one of the smallest GDPs in the Middle East and a long list of human rights violations, and while progressives might disagree with torture or wrongful detention, Jordan’s state-of-being does not contest progressive worldview. Israel’s does.
As the Middle East’s most tolerant, most liberal, and most diverse country, Israel’s story seems to epitomize the goals of subjugated and oppressed group everywhere: an indigenous people who overcome centuries of global persecution and poverty in order to shake off their colonial overlords, revive their lost language and rebuild their nation into a thriving liberal democracy with a vibrant and tolerant culture, high standards of living, and a productive economy.
They should be the darling of progressives worldwide, but they aren’t, because their crime is their success. For if Jews in Israel have been able to triumph over adversity and oppression in order to build what they have built, it is proof that such triumph is possible, and such a proof is unforgivable to the bleak progressive worldview that screams otherwise.
The writer is the author of the novels The Family Morfawitz and Greetings from Asbury Park, and winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel. He graduated from Duke University with a degree in mathematics, received an MBA in Quantitative Finance from NYU Stern, and received an MFA in Fiction from the New School. He now lives in New York City.
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