Why Progressives Hate Israel

By Aaron Kliegman Anyone who really wants Arab-Israeli peace should be applauding the agreement to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The deal is historic: While Egypt and Jordan have had peace treaties with Israel for decades, the UAE is the first Arab country to go a step further and become friends with the Jewish state. Indeed, Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem are preparing to cooperate on scientific and economic projects, and the Israeli and Emirati peoples are preparing to develop intimate ties through trade and tourism. This is deeper than a strategic, practical peace, showing genuine warmth. It’s quite striking, therefore, to watch many left-wing progressives, who preach tolerance as a secular religion, oppose the deal so adamantly. Many are even expressing outrage. Sadly, the agreement seems to confirm that their calls for peace in the Middle East are just posturing — and that the progressive mantra of coexistence uniquely doesn’t apply to Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. Progressives joined the likes of Iran, Turkey, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority in denouncing the agreement. As usual, Ben Rhodes, who served as President Obama’s “foreign-policy guru,” led the effort. But he was hardly alone. Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss, demonized the deal and attacked pro-Israel groups for praising the UAE. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said she’ll refuse to celebrate the agreement, instead accusing Israel of “devastating apartheid.” Rather than praise an effort toward peace, Tlaib and the other three members of The Squad co-sponsored a bill that would block American assistance to fund areas of the West Bank where Israel may one day extend its sovereignty. The bill, which Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) introduced immediately after the deal was announced, would also prohibit the US from recognizing Israeli sovereignty over any parts of the West Bank. Naturally, the media has echoed the talking points of progressive Democrats, slamming the agreement as a “nightmare” for the Palestinians. Journalists even accused the UAE of “selling out” the Palestinian people. Progressive groups and like-minded think tanks and nonprofits did the same. The backlash was both fierce and immediate. But what explains it? How can progressives who advocate Arab-Israeli peace so passionately denigrate a landmark step toward that goal? One factor is Trump Derangement Syndrome. President Trump is the one who announced the deal last week, after his administration brokered it. So, of course, these progressive voices will oppose the deal reflexively, as they do with anything that involves the president. Another factor is antisemitism, whose core feature is the attribution of a cosmic, satanic evil to the Jews. Antisemitism is a virus that mutates with time to conform to what is socially, culturally, and intellectually acceptable. Since the mid-20th century, Jews have been hated and persecuted because of their nation-state, Israel, after it became taboo to hate and persecute them for their religion and race. This latest mutation also attacks Zionism, the millennia-long desire and resolve of Jews to reestablish, and then preserve, their national home in the land of Israel. Consider how American journalists, human rights groups, and even comedians immediately blamed George Floyd’s death on Israel, a foreign country the size of New Jersey, located more than 6,000 miles away. Or consider how the Democratic Socialists of America — whose membership includes one Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — recently asked candidates running for New York City Council to pledge not to travel to Israel. No other country, from Iran to North Korea, was included in the boycott. This strange obsession with Israel is inexplicable without factoring in some degree of antisemitism. The sad truth is that Western progressives are deeply hostile toward Israel. Many are even skeptical of Israel’s right to exist, if not outright supportive of the Jewish state’s destruction to make room for a single Palestinian state. But this hatred goes beyond the president and antisemitism. There are other factors to consider. One is ideology. Progressives put everyone into one of two groups: the oppressor or the oppressed. They see the world as black or white (often literally). Since Israel is generally considered powerful, the Jewish state is, according to this worldview, the oppressor, making the Palestinians the oppressed. The former is evil and must be stopped for the sake of social justice; the latter is an innocent victim that must be protected. Progressives also view Israel as a colonial outpost of Western imperialism, a creation of Europe, triggered by guilt for the Holocaust, that uprooted the indigenous colored peoples of Palestine. This narrative is egregiously false, but it fits an ideology, according to which a thriving pro-American democracy that has embraced free-market capitalism is, somehow, a destructive force in the Middle East. Another factor is history. I wrote last week about progressives’ long-standing and unholy alliance with Islamists. This collaboration has only further entrenched already visceral hostility toward Israel. But there’s another historical force at play here: The Soviet Union, which, along with the Arab world, waged a political, diplomatic, and ideological offensive against Israel that is identical to what exists today. The Soviets, for example, pushed the notion that Zionism is a form of racism. As with so many of the Soviet positions, the international left, especially in academia and other elite institutions, adopted them as the fashionable wave of the future. They have remerged in recent years with a new vigor as democratic socialism overtakes the West’s traditionally center-left political parties. There is one more factor to consider here that rarely, if ever gets mentioned — and it’s perhaps the most important. Few people seem to recognize that Israel’s existence is arguably the single greatest threat to progressivism. As the late Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1998, Israel is truly unique: “It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago.” Such a nation contradicts progressive ideology to its core. Indeed, progressives believe that history is making progress, heading toward a brighter future in which human beings are better and many ills of the past can be overcome. Or, as the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in the 19th century, “We rely on the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth, and on the natural tendency of society to improvement.” To the modern progressive, this means moving beyond religion, nation-states, nationalism, and all the trappings of the past that caused conflict and oppression. So long as Israel survives and prospers as the reestablishment of what existed 3,000 years ago, however, progressives can never rest easy, even if the uneasiness is largely subconscious. As the rest of Western civilization moves beyond history to a state of decadence, Israel remains right in it, recognizing that idealistic utopianism will never trump the harsh reality that we all must eventually face. 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