u/atbing24

As a preface, there really is something about physically being someplace that makes a difference. I read a fair bit about Anglicanism (among other varieties of faith), but simply being inside the major churches of London did help teach me in some ways no book can. The vibes I got from the holy buildings surprised me a bit by how “via media” they were targeting to be compared to other churches. Not necessarily just between Lutheran and Reformed, or Catholic and Protestant, but I would even say Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. It was like they were trying for a generic Nicene high church formation. I now would describe Anglicanism, at least what it’s aiming to be, like this - an alternate evolution of Nicene Christianity post 500 AD.

Why do so many in the West, especially students, activists, and leftist intellectuals fixate so deeply on the Israel-Palestine conflict, far more than they do on bloodier wars like those in Yemen or Syria? Many Jews and Israelis will answer this question with one simple word, antisemitism. While this answer isn’t necessarily 100% false, I do think the true answer is much deeper than that.

I would argue Israel-Palestine is not just a geopolitical conflict, but an emotionally satisfying projection screen for a particular kind of Western narrative. This conflict seemingly offers (accurate or not) every trope that captures the imagination of the Western left:

-Light-skinned vs dark-skinned
-Right-wing vs left-wing
-“Judeo-Christian” vs Islam
-Colonizers vs indigenous
-Western culture vs Muslim Arabs
-Global North vs Global South 
-Exploiters vs exploited
-Tanks and jets vs stones and slingshots. 

In short, it presents a perfect stage for a morality play of "oppressor vs oppressed" especially seductive for those in the West who are deeply critical of the Western legacy.

To many in the West, Israel is projected as a living extension of Western colonialism: a modern settler state supported by the United States, built on top of a native population, using Western weapons, Western money, and Western values. In this narrative, supporting Palestine becomes a way to "stick it to the man", to fight the historical guilt of slavery, racism, or imperialism.

Do you view that global American intervention, when it happens, is ultimately good, and well meaning? Or overreaching, exploitative, and often destructive? You can probably guess which view tends to correlate to being more sympathetic to Palestine. If you’re angry about America’s past or Britain's imperial legacy, Israel offers a target that feels current, vulnerable, and actionable especially compared to faceless corporate systems or long-dead colonial empires. 

That’s why an American protester might look at an Israeli in the West Bank and think of them as a stand-in for white settlers on Native American land. A Black American will obviously paint the Palestinians as Blacks and the Israelis as Whites. An Irish activist might imagine echoes of despised British imperialism. It’s not necessarily about Palestinians themselves, but about what the conflict symbolizes to the outsider. Israel is Western enough to project Western themes onto it, yet foreign enough to stereotype and criticize comfortably.

Contrast this with the civil wars in Yemen or Syria. Both conflicts have claimed far, far more lives than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever did, in just a few years. But they don’t neatly fit the same emotional narrative. There’s no quasi Western entity to blame, no settler-colonial archetype, no good vs evil script. “Plain old Yemenis vs plain old Yemenis” just doesn’t have the same moral high. This doesn’t mean those wars aren’t tragic, only that, from the perspective of many Western observers, they’re not symbolically interesting.         

This dynamic attracts people especially attuned to leftist frameworks of injustice, where success is often explained through exploitation. In that mindset, if a group is materially better off, it must be because they exploited someone else. Why is the West richer than the rest of the world? Why are White Americans wealthier on average than Black Americans? Why does Israel dominate its Arab neighbors? The answer, in this worldview, is always the same: injustice, oppression, exploitation. 

The problem is that most of the original villains of that mindset, the envisioned white fascist colonial who thinks himself as superior, intervenes in the globe and exploits it, are either dead or disempowered. The days of a just and glorious Haitian style revolution they romanticize, are over. But the emotional rage hasn’t disappeared; it demands a new villain, a stand in for the evil past. This obsession leads them to find a new contemporary enemy who supposedly encompasses everything they so passionately hate: “Zionists”, a term that for them has morphed into a catch-all slur, sometimes used not just for Israeli policy, but anyone complicit in Western power structures. As an example, when the President of the United States seized the authoritarian head of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the acting Venezuelan president Delcy Rodríguez condemned the incident as an attack with a “Zionist” tint. Show up to a pro Palestinian protest in London with a Union Jack and I don't think you'll be very welcomed. But ask yourself, Why? Because a “Zionist” is one who would have fought aboriginal Australians, one who would have banished native Americans to Oklahoma, one who would have enslaved populations and remained wealthy oppressing them. The slave owner, the imperialist, the nationalist, the colonialist, the capitalist; the eternal exploiter.

Whether it's historical imperialism and colonialism or contemporary capitalism, they are equalized, despised for supposed exploitation, and are seen as the reason for many inequalities and suffering seen today. The conflict becomes a symbol of the whole world’s supposed suffering under the manipulative West. And therefore the perfect place to begin the revolution, or at least to symbolize one.

When activists chant “Globalize the intifada,” critics interpret it as an antisemitic call for global violence. This is a reasonable interpretation, but the underlying emotional meaning, more often than not by those chanting themselves, is different: "Globalize the fight to free the entire world from Western colonialism, capitalism, and oppression.” And ultimately it is this freedom from the West that is meant here. Free Palestine, not specifically from Israel, but from the West. Many White Americans feel very guilty about America’s early history, while others are less prone to those feelings. One sentiment from the latter camp is that ultimately in a utilitarian sense, 21st century and beyond black or native Americans living in the US are usually much better off thanks to European colonialism. I think this is where the projection is so powerful. Many Israelis argue that ultimately Palestinians themselves often have better lives living in Israel, than living under Palestinian rule. That a Palestinian would be better off under Israeli rule than the reverse is also very often implied. In my eyes it does often boil to this projected emotion of whether the world would benefit from the West, and whether it should trust it. Coming back to the thought about global American intervention mentioned in the beginning as well. One who sees it as manipulative imperialism is more likely to be an “anti Zionist.” One who sees it as well meaning involvement is more prone to be an “anti anti Zionist.”

Internal anti Western sentiments portray the West as religious, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. Israel therefore champions these traits, while Palestine is seen as the antithesis of them. The reality of course is that the West is often less religious, racist, homophobic, or misogynistic when compared to the rest of the world, and likewise Israel when compared to Palestine.

This piece isn’t about silencing legitimate and respectful criticism of Israeli policy, or denying the suffering of many Palestinians. It’s about why this particular conflict provokes such obsession in Western circles, far more than other ongoing tragic conflicts. It's about why North American universities are much more likely to be so passionate about this topic compared to universities from China or Eastern Europe. It may also shed some light on why self proclaimed “comrades” are more likely than others to sympathize more with Gaza than Nova. 

Perhaps, at its core, the enthusiasm is not really about Palestine, but about the West itself, a mirror of unresolved guilt, moral exhaustion, and ideological fervor, outgrowthed onto a real and tragic conflict. An imagined frontline between the West and the rest. Perhaps this passion for the conflict is a lot more of an attempt at a projection, a metaphor, of the West's unresolved moral issues than it seems.
“Israel is an extension of America” - Hasan Piker
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P.S. A sophisticated reply by the activist is that the reason for the passion regarding Palestine specifically is because that in that specific conflict the destruction is also perpetrated by their own government. There are multiple angles to show how this post hoc argument is quite weak. Firstly, this phenomenon isn’t restricted to Harvard or Columbia, but Western Europe as well, for reasons that should be obvious from this piece. Leftists in Spain (Spanish colonization of America) or Ireland (British Imperialism) often despise Israel just as much, if not more than American leftists, and these countries don’t give a penny to Israel, just trade. Second, it is simply not true that the United States only assists Israel. In the 2010s during the intense phase of the Yemeni civil war where hundreds of thousands of people died (85,000 children starved to death in three years), the United States assisted with dozens of billions of dollars. And yet, there is comparatively no symbolism when it’s Arabs bombing Arabs, even if many of the bombs came just as directly from America as with the war in Gaza. It is ironic how the proudest anticolonialists colonized a foreign geopolitical conflict (a Palestinian can and ought to be angry about this as well. You are not black, you don’t care about queers, and you want Palestine to be Muslim, not secular).

I think the term “Zionist” should have died in 1948; that is the year the ideology achieved its goal. Abolitionism was largely achieved in the 19th century yet no one calls themselves an abolitionist today. In 1947 the British decided to split India in two, largely based on religion, a majority Hindu state named India, and a majority Muslim state named Pakistan. Many Indians even today may think the creation of Pakistan was flawed, unjust, or unnecessary in some way. Yet there is no term equivalent to “anti Zionism”, as Pakistan simply exists and isn’t going anywhere.
Zion is a certain hill in Jerusalem, but the name eventually became another term for the entire land of Israel. Originally Zionism was essentially the name for Jewish nationalism, consequentially desiring a state and more specifically in the original Jewish Homeland. The persistence of the term continued in Israel as Israelis loved the term, and were uncertain of Israel’s fate. Today to the typical Israeli, “Zionism” largely signals Israeli patriotism. 
However this persistence of the term allowed critics of Israel to label themselves as anti Zionists. Zionism today is simply one of those words that can be a great example of contemporary semantic drift as it means different things to different people. To anti Zionists, Zionism is effectively not much less than a slur. Sometimes it is even used not just for Israeli policy, but anyone complicit in Western power structures. As an example, when the President of the United States seized the authoritarian head of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the acting Venezuelan president Delcy Rodríguez condemned the incident as an attack with a “Zionist” tint. Show up to a pro Palestinian protest in London with a Union Jack and I don't think you'll be very welcomed. But ask yourself, Why? Because a “Zionist” is one who would have fought aboriginal Australians, one who would have banished native Americans to Oklahoma, one who would have enslaved populations and remained wealthy oppressing them. The slave owner, the imperialist, the nationalist, the colonialist, the capitalist; the eternal exploiter.
Anti Zionism is often defined as the belief that the creation of Israel was unjust or flawed in some way. Yet to many of course, based on their interpretation of what “Zionism” is, it can easily encompass opposition to racism, imperialism, settler colonialism, genocide, and alike. And because the typical Israeli sees themselves as a proud Zionist today, one can easily face unjust discrimination. Sure, it’s technically not antisemitism, but a default “anti Israelism” is bad for the same reasons antisemitism is bad in the first place.

People who want Palestine to be freed, from the river to the sea, often get confronted. “From the river to the sea? Oh you mean all of it? You want to just delete Israel and its population of 10 million people?”

The response is usually honestly well meaning, they don’t desire to genocide the Israelis of course. They want one secular democratic Palestinian state. A free Palestine where Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Samaritans, and atheists live together in peace. A state where Jews and Palestinians live together in prosperity. This of course is a utopia, yet not that far off from a state that as it turns out, already exists. A state where Jews and Palestinians are both equal citizens; both are doctors, politicians, lawyers, or judges, with complete equal rights. This state is largely secular and democratic, not in a utopia level way, but largely, yes. We both know the name of the state I'm talking about, and you may genuinely believe propaganda that Palestinians citizens aren't really treated equally. It’s propaganda, period.

One of the biggest things I wish the typical Western pro Palestinian will realize is that Palestinians aren’t Norwegians. Western leftists paint Palestinians as those fighting the right wing Zionists out of a desire for utopian progressive freedom. A free Palestine from the river to the sea controlled by Arabs won’t benefit atheists, Jews or queers as much as Israel hypothetically annexing the entire region regarding ethnic Palestinians. I do believe a large contributor to this delusion is an internal hatred of the West.

If you genuinely envision and strive towards a free democratic and secular state in Palestine, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side equally, you should support Israel.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quite possibly the greatest culmination of many human complications and nuances regarding identity. Not necessarily in the modern facts of war itself, but regarding what is Zionism or Palestinian nationalism, regarding the demographic history of the region. Nations and what exactly they are, ethnic groups and what exactly they are, ethnoreligions and what exactly they are. When and how exactly do each of them form. What is identity and what forms it. What is indigeneity, how long until one is or no longer indigenous, and does it even matter? The topic is to these questions what trolley problems and alike are to moral ones. If one is to truly understand the great mystery, they ought to fully wrestle with these impossible questions.

The trolley problem forces us to confront that even something as basic and overlooked as “just don’t kill people” breaks down under real conditions. It’s supposed to be a mirror to the face that life isn’t actually that simple. Suddenly the answer to “what is the right thing to do” breaks down, and yet you still have to decide whether or not to pull the lever. Similarly, this topic forces us to confront that concepts like “nation”, “indigenous”, or “identity” are not fixed truths but interpretations that can often overlap, conflict, and both remain internally valid. It is the equivalent mirror to your face that the answer to a question like “what is indigeneity” isn’t simple.