Palestine and the "Anti-Imperialism of Fools"

And why we should applaud Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) for his courageous No vote on unconditional supplemental military aid to the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu.

[Note to readers: Barring any surprises, the next issue of The Connector will be a deep dive into a topic I’ve neglected for a while since October 7: the state of progressive movement technology. Thank you for putting up with my detour into Israel/Palestine these months; we’ll keep popping back and forth as circumstances warrant.]

It’s likely that we’ll look back at last weekend’s series of votes in the US House of Representatives to approve tens of billions in military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, along with billions more in humanitarian relief funding for Gaza and other places, as a turning point in President Biden’s presidency. The money and weaponry that will flow undoubtedly will change the calculus of the emerging global conflict between Russia, Iran and their various proxies and the US, Europe and Saudi Arabia—though none of us know how Shadow World War III will end. It’s also possible we’ll look back ruefully at those House votes as one of the last times large numbers of Republicans and Democrats agreed about anything—or maybe, more positively, we’ll see them as a sign that Trumpist isolationism and know-nothingism has actual limits. To be honest, these days so much is happening it is tricky to tease any clear signal out of all the noise.

I’m starting today’s newsletter by highlighting one attempt to send a bold signal—the decision by a few mainstream liberal Democrats in the House, most notably two Jewish members—veteran Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and freshwoman Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), to vote against H.R. 8034, The Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. The bill appropriated $26.4 billion for Israel, including $5.2 billion for its missile defense systems, $8.9 billion for advanced weapons, artillery, and replenishment of other weaponry, and $2.4 billion for US military operations in the region. It passed easily, 366-58, with majorities from both sides of the aisle supporting it. Some of the Democrats who voted no, including my own representative Jamaal Bowman, are outspoken critics of Israel’s war in Gaza so their choice was not surprising. But I am not the only one who was struck by the choice of several Democrats who typically always vote for Israel aid to stick their necks out and vote no.

Raskin, who I got to know years ago when we were both young (me, working on a joint project between The Nation and the Institute for Policy Studies, which his father Marc helped run; him, a rising constitutional scholar, writing about campaign finance reform, an issue I worked on with him in the 1990s), put out a long statement explaining his vote. In it, he reminded his constituents that he has “been proud” to vote for tens of billions in past security aid to Israel and “fully” plans to do so in the future. But this time, he said, he couldn’t ignore how Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has shattered Gaza. “Yes, war is hell, as we are often told,” he said. “But that is why we have laws of war—precisely to confine the hellishness of war to actual military combatants. And, yes, Hamas terrorists neglect and endanger Palestinian civilians living in the theater of combat—that is what terrorists do. But that is why the democratic law-abiding world must make extra efforts to protect innocent civilians who are imperiled by terrorists, and never use their peril as a justification for neglecting or violating their safety ourselves.”

He also said that he wanted to include an amendment to the bill withholding the offensive military aid to Israel until the State Department affirmed that it wasn’t being used to violate American or international law but was blocked by the Republican majority from doing so. And he went on to explain that he saw himself in full solidarity with the thousands of Israelis protesting Netanyahu’s government demanding a hostage deal and that he hoped his vote would push Bibi to “elevate the lift and safety of civilians” in Gaza. It's worth noting that prior to this vote, Raskin was among the bloc of liberal Democratic House members who have largely stood by Israel throughout the last six months, highlighting issues like the hostages, calling for Hamas to be removed from control of Gaza, and avoiding charged language like “genocide.” (That said, he was among the first Jewish Democrats to call for a cease-fire last November.)

No good deed goes unpunished, and sure enough, Raskin is now getting heat from “pro-Israel” Jews complaining about his vote. Ron Halber, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, DC, which includes synagogues and institutions representing the bulk of his Jewish constituents in Maryland’s Montgomery County, put out a statement saying it was “profoundly disappointed” by his decision and arguing that “Israel is currently engaged in a multi-front war against terrorist enemies hellbent on its destruction and committed to wiping out the Jewish people.” The statement added, somewhat condescendingly, “There are any number of ways one can ‘send a message’ to the Israeli government that don’t involve attempts to withhold essential funding. It is our hope that Rep. Raskin’s opposition to this legislation represents a misguided exception to what has been his general rule of being a great friend to Israel and strong supporter of the American Jewish community.”

Voices of the American Jewish establishment, like the JCRC of DC, are continuing to show terrible political judgment. Instead of continuing to line up slavishly behind the Netanyahu government and its disastrous policies of endless war, settlement expansion and humiliation of Palestinians, they should be searching for ways to de-escalate the conflict. We shouldn’t applaud arsonists; we should applaud fire-fighters. And friends don’t let friends drive drunk. For the last several years, Raskin has been one of most effective and important leaders we have in Congress working to defend the rule of law and democracy in America. I’m not surprised to see him extend that concern to insisting that American and international law be followed by American allies, as these concerns are all threads in the same weave. Instead of chastising him, the JCRC should have backed him. For if signals like Raskin’s aren’t followed, the fragile coalition behind Biden’s current presidency may not be strong enough to prevent a second Trump term. Which will make the current carnage look like a picnic.

Meanwhile, About the ‘Anti-Imperialism of Fools’

“Liberation is our mission; No more war with our tuition!” – chant heard at the NYU student encampment in solidarity with the Columbia University protestors.

“Anti-Zionism is part of a larger intellectual crack-up on the left with distant roots. There is now a kind of meeting point between simplistic post-modernism and simplistic anti-imperialism. This conjuncture can be called ‘the anti-imperialism of fools,’ a phrase that echoes the famous criticism of antisemitism on the left in the late 19th century by socialist August Bebel. When some on the left tried to blame ‘Jewish capitalists’ for Europe’s woes, he called it ‘the socialism of fools.’ Formulations of both the antisemitism of fools and anti-imperialism of fools depend on intellectual twisting and turning until somehow, no matter what, blame is ascribed to, respectively, Jews and Zionists. Ominously, that ascription is often there before the twisting and turning.” – Mitchell Cohen, co-editor emeritus of Dissent, interview in Fathom Journal, April 2024.

Two Sundays ago, I attended a workshop on “Building Support for Palestinian Liberation” that was held at the nearby Andalusia School in Yonkers, NY, as part of the Wespac Foundation’s 2024 Social Forum. The workshop was advertised as being facilitated by three groups—National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Westchester, and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) NYC. As each of these three groups has been very much in the forefront of the current wave of pro-Palestinian organizing (the latter in the lead of major traffic disruptions, for example), I figured attending the session would be a great way to hear direct and unfiltered from spokespeople for these organizations, as opposed to trying to understand them from the snippets that get highlighted in the media. The conversation was moderated by a leader of a fourth group, a relatively new one called “Westchester for Palestine.” So this was my first exposure to that organization as well.

Four people spoke—two from PYM, one from SJP and one from JVP—to an audience of perhaps 40 people.  I’m not interested in giving any of the individual speakers publicity (or notoriety), so I’m simply going to identify them by their first initials and organizations. As it is, three of them only gave out their first names. It is not an easy time to be publicly identified around the Israel/Palestine issue if it ever was, and anyway I’m more concerned with what was said (and not said) as opposed to who said it. (I should add that it gives me no pleasure to report what follows; the people I know in Westchester doing this work all seem like good and decent folks, they’re just off on a different planet.)

Not to bury the lede, what I heard both appalled me and gave me a powerful feeling of negative nostalgia. I was appalled because these people, as they made clear in their own words, are not seeking peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians. They say, instead, that they are fighting for the liberation of Palestine from Israeli Jews, who they prefer to call Zionists, as a form of moral distancing from the implications of their words. They have as much chance of achieving this as they would demanding that the 8.3 million people of New York City move out and let the descendants of the Lenape tribe and other indigenous inhabitants of the tristate area take over. But that thought never seemed to cross their minds, so sure were they of the righteousness of their cause.

And that’s what gave me the flashback to my days in college when handfuls of us, eyes bright with secret knowledge that we alone had unlocked, would talk about overthrowing the military-industrial complex or ending American imperialism. I was never a sectarian leftist myself, but I knew plenty of people who were. A few years later, as a young staffer at the leftist Nation magazine, I would go to local events like the annual Socialist Scholars Conference, and there too I’d see lots of shiny young people along with some much older and grayer folk, their necks wrapped in keffiyeh, parading their superior knowledge of what it means to be a true anti-imperialist radical. Sunday’s session felt like a throwback to those times, complete with the dingy cafeteria meeting space and old white radicals citing Pacifica radio shows at me, but minus the musty-sweet scent of patchouli, which apparently no longer graces the grooming habits of the young or old Left.

The conversation about “building support for Palestinian liberation” among the four panelists covered a variety of topics, including how they measured effectiveness--J. from PYM told a story of shaming a “Zionist” on the subway for defending Israel as an example of successful consciousness-raising; M., his colleague, mentioned a recent Land Day rally in NYC of 30,000 people (which would be a lot anywhere but NYC); S., the gent from SJP, mentioned the “material damage to the empire” being caused by a few dozen colleges passing Israel divestment resolutions. Asked about the challenges they wrestle with, M. said the problems of “how do we maintain momentum” concerned her. J., her colleague, mentioned how having so many “brilliant minds” in the same room trying to agree on tactics or opinions often led to headaches, but he said his way through that was to ask everyone, “Okay guys, who is our enemy?” Lovely. And of course, they all mentioned the ways that federal investigators, politicians, local police and Jewish defense organizations were targeting their ranks as a serious challenge, though of course that comes with the territory, given their goals. The need to maintain discursive space for strong criticism of Israel against the effort to impose a definition of antisemitism that ignores such distinctions was also a challenge they cited, one that I was tempted to sympathize with.

That is, until the last fifteen minutes of the session, when the moderator opened the floor to questions. I had been thinking to ask the group if Hamas’ violent attack on Israel on October 7 and its continued holding of civilian hostages had made their work easier or harder (since none of them had even mentioned the day, other than to note how their ranks had grown since then), but decided instead to lob a softball, which was to describe what they mean by "liberation." Their answers were illuminating.

Below is my transcription of what was said. My recording is a little blurry at points and I've also taken out most of the "you knows" and "likes" and other kinds of verbal repetition, though one of the speakers liked to say "right?" at the end or beginning of his sentences, a verbal tic that I left in.

I asked: “I know we’re almost done. So I thought I’d ask a question, sort of to give you a chance to talk about your vision of liberation. A lot the talk today has been about tactics and politics and fighting against things, but I'd love to hear if you could describe what when you say liberation, what do you envision?”

M., the woman from the Palestinian Youth Movement, answered first:

“That's a very good question. You know, I think often say we're against things, like we’re against Zionism. We're also for other things like liberation and so what does that actually mean in practice? … At PYM, one of the main things that we do believe in is the right of return. So obviously, many of you know, but much of Palestinian society is fragmented and dispersed throughout the Arab region and the diaspora, so this as an essential component of liberation, meaning all refugees get to return. People might know that there's a huge Palestinian population that was displaced in 48 and in 67, in Jordan and Lebanon and the surrounding the region.

“So right of return is really critical and we can’t understand liberation without that. …our vision for liberation is one that rests upon the removal of imperialism from our region. Not just the end of Zionism in our region, which means the end of the colonial project completely, from the river to the sea, also the end of imperialist influence and imperialist domination in the region. And the reason I say this…I think it's important for us to understand that the fact of Israel as this actual entity in Palestine is predicated on the support from imperialist powers from its very beginning. From 1917, when the British occupied Palestine to 1948, Israel would not have been able to become a state…it would not be able to continue carrying on the genocide it is carrying on in Gaza without the billions of dollars from the US, without the ideological cover for the US, and the military.”

“So really, I think it's important for us when we talk about liberation to understand that, you know, at the center of it is the liberation of the land and the liberation of the control and the right of the people to go back to the land from which they've been dispossessed, the end of colonialism, and the end of imperialist power, which means the end of the biggest imperialist power, the United States.”

J., also from PYM, answered next:

“The core of liberation, obviously, is for a free Palestine in the Palestinian context. But like we had a brother downstairs earlier, I forgot what his name was, was talking about the Congo. And he didn’t end his speech by just saying Free Congo. He also said free Congo Free, Free Haiti, Free Sudan, Free Palestine and we can continue on and on and on. Because the reality is, if you deal a blow to Zionism, you deal a blow to imperialism and capitalism worldwide. Right? Because when you say globalize the intifada, that's exactly what it means. Right? Because when you work towards the complete freedom of Palestine, and the Palestinians, and complete sovereignty of the Palestinians or themselves, that's what it truly means to be liberated.

….PYM takes the stance of one free Palestinian state. …[and] PYM and the Shut it Down for Palestine Coalition has a five-step very clear process as to how liberation is achieved. Right, the first step is a very urgent immediate and permanent ceasefire. The second step is to lift the siege on Gaza permanently. The third step is the release of all Palestinian prisoners and obviously to allow the right of return. The fourth step is to end the occupation in Palestine. And the fifth step and this is very crucial to everyone in this room, including myself, is to end all US complicity in Zionism. And that's such a crucial step. Palestinian liberation cannot be achieved without these five concrete steps. So in a concrete way, that's also what liberation is.”

The person acting as moderator, from Westchester for Palestine, interjected: “Actually we did adapt these five steps as well as, you know, demands for liberation for the Palestinian liberation movement here as well.”

[Someone across the room then asked if they were talking about right of return to a free Palestinian state or to Israel. M’s answer is blurry so I can’t quote her precisely, but she said we don’t believe in the return to Israel, the idea is a return to a free Palestinian state and the end of the Zionist entity.]

J., her colleague, jumped in:

“To continue off of that as well, but the idea of returning, like we asked like return to what, right, you cannot return to Israel because they were removed from their lands when Israel was created as a result of their removal. So it’s a return to a free Palestine.

[Another questioner then made a long rambling statement that ended with him saying something about how the right of return is confusing and asking if that meant the end of the Israeli states.]

M. responded: “We want the end of Israel. We want a free Palestine from the river to the sea. The whole land doesn’t belong to these European settlers. It is about ending the Zionist entity.”

Another person seated closer to me then asked: “Are you talking about one secular democratic state? Or are you talking about a two-state solution where there is an Israel and a Palestinian state?”

S., from National Students for Justice in Palestine, jumped in with a smile:

“I'm gonna get a little bit Marxist for a second, I'm sorry, but only kind of …As it is the Israeli state survives off of exploited labor from the Palestinian nonstate, right? Millions of people from Gaza, work in southern Israel on essentially like permits. [Actually, about 200,000 Palestinians from the occupied territories worked in Israel before October 7, including about 10,000-20,000 from Gaza.] And so all of the agricultural work that's done inside of Israel is done by Palestinian labor, because there is no Palestinian state. …So hypothetically, if you just took all of the Palestinian territories that are not occupied currently, and made them a state, Israel would have no labor force, right?”

“The entire process that Israel has built through apartheid, through settler colonization, through the settlements that keep expanding through their seizure and reappropriation of agricultural land--all of this is based on the labor relations between Israelis as the privileged class over Palestinian laborers. So there is no reality in which Israel and Palestine are two states together and Israel is not actively exploiting the labor of Palestinians. It simply can't happen. It just couldn't. So when we talk about one state, and what that would mean, it's actually also a class revolution, a class change, a change in the class dynamics between the Israeli settler society and the Palestinian indigenous society. So I think that that's also important to mention, because it's not like you know, seeing the two, the two regions as two distinct, like, blocs with their own perfect class hierarchies. That's not really the case. Palestine is subordinate to Israel in class as well.”

At this point, the older person from Jewish Voice for Peace-Westchester got in a few words:

“I just want to say that I agree with everything my young brothers and sisters, or should I say cousins, have said. For me, Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea. This is just my personal take. That means that everybody within historic Palestine has equal rights, equal justice and the right to live in dignity, to live their lives like all human beings should, in equality. How that works out, and it’s a long way to go to get there, that to me is the work.”

At no time during this workshop did any of the speakers address what the seven million Israeli Jews or two million Israeli Palestinians might want. Nor did the panelists explain how their maximalist demands would be imposed on Israel, though the implication was clearly by violence, not by persuasion. It’s more of the “collect underpants” theory of social change; somehow shrill ideological assertions that ignore the realities on the ground in Israel/Palestine will make things change. No one talked called for peace talks or brought up President Biden’s attempts to cobble together a regional peace deal that would include the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state. (And indeed, National Students for Justice in Palestine is very much on record supporting October 7 as “armed struggle”—I’m appalled that Wespac supports them.)

I don't think people who are attracted to groups like PYM or SJP understand very well what it would actually mean to get seven million Israeli Jews to acquiesce in the radical transformation of their lives. It’s not very realistic to think they will do so voluntarily—especially when they are told they have no legitimate claim to be living where they live. (But hey, some of them want New York Jews to move back to Poland, so at least we seeing consistency here!) Far better, in my mind, to try for a two-state compromise than to expect that this generation of Israeli Jews will accept the elimination of their society. After listening to the panel, I found myself agreeing with Noah Smith, the economist who recently dissected the Palestine protest movement as “not a peace movement in any meaningful sense of the term [but rather] a movement in support of violent, armed struggle against Israel and any country in support of Israel.” As Smith wrote:

 “A movement in favor of the armed destruction of an internationally recognized nation-state is at an inherent moral disadvantage. That destruction would doubtless involve the slaughter of a great many Israelis and the ethnic cleansing of most of the remainder — an even greater atrocity than Israel is now wreaking upon Gaza. And it would also overturn the international norm of territorial integrity that has largely prevailed since World War 2 — the idea that countries shouldn’t be invaded and destroyed Israel has undoubtedly violated that norm, with its land grabs in the West Bank. But the destruction of Israel in the name of an irredentist Palestinian land claim would violate that norm to an even greater degree. Palestine protesters are thus using one atrocity as an excuse to call for an even greater atrocity. That’s not just inhumane; it’s an invitation to global chaos. It’s a call for a return to the law of the jungle, where nations press ancient land claims with invasion, ethnic cleansing and genocide. That’s not a future most people in the world want, and insisting on it will ensure that Palestine protesters are widely regarded as extremists.”

Smith adds: “There are still some Jewish people in the protests, of course. And many of the protesters probably find antisemitic displays distasteful and unhelpful. But the degree to which antisemitism has found a safe space and a platform at these events shows that the protests have essentially no ability to police their tone or stay on message. Which suggests that the Palestine movement in the U.S. is the kind of chaotic, disorganized movement that can never be appeased or negotiated with. In other words, the Palestine protest movement is so utterly unreasonable that it will probably not be able to win much, and it will probably not be remembered as being one of the good movements 50 years from now. All it will do is create a sad spectacle, cause minor inconvenience, make a lot of people mad, and discredit the American leftist movement of the early 20th century.”

One final note from this revealing event: I was startled to hear H., the speaker from Jewish Voice for Peace-Westchester, say, in describing his group, which he said had grown from about 15 activists before October 7 to 70 now, that “about half of our members are Jewish, about a quarter are from Palestinian communities, and the rest from other communities interested in doing this work together.” As far as I am concerned, if you are going to use the word Jewish in your group’s name and claim to speak for Jews, then you are telling the world you are a group of Jews, not something more general. They are entitled to keep speaking out, but on the basis of everything I have seen and learned about them, they ought to call themselves something like Activist Voice for Palestine, as they’re not really all that Jewish or all that for peace.

Additional Reading

—Yuval Noah Harari, “From Gaza to Iran, the Netanyahu Government is Endangering Israel’s Survival,” Ha’aretz, April 18, 2024 (gift link).

—Nicholas Kristof, “What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew?” The New York Times, April 19, 2024.

—Hillel Schenker, “Where is the Leftist Critique of Hamas?” The Nation, April 17, 2024.