Progressives must today be “anti racist”. Complexity and nuance has been collapsed into a one-dimensional axis of oppressor/oppressed. This is based on immutable things like racial identities; character is irrelevant.
The word evil has lost meaning. This matters because when we see actual and obvious evil we don’t have the language to distinguish it from common American day-to-day activities. This is not only unfortunate but dangerous. Why? Because a society - like a business - must prioritize the issues it will address, and allocate resources accordingly. This being the case we must norm our terminology.
- Nazism is evil because it dehumanized - then systematically murdered - people based on their identity: Jews, Gays, Gypsies etc.
- Soviet 5 year plans were evil, but less obviously so. These policies killed tens of millions of farmers through starvation. Prioritizing economic gain over the lives of one’s citizens is evil.
- Pol Pot’s peasant revolution in Cambodia was evil because people were murdered because of their relatively higher education levels.
Marxism is counter-intuitively evil. The intention seems intuitively good, but the outcomes have been very clearly bad. - School shootings in America are evil. But is there an ideology here that we can attack? Is it the gun lobby? Social media? What is the root cause? are the kids themselves evil? This is a systemic problem combining some mix of social media, hormones, parenting, American values, and access to guns. It’s not so clear.
Now to Israel. I hear a lot about how Israel is evil (apartheid, genocidal, colonizer, etc.) - look at the Palestinian suffering! But let’s pause a moment and understand the situation.
- Acute, brutal event is less evil than sustained retaliation. There is a steady drumbeat of imagery and suffering projected across the world in Gaza.
- Intention matters! If it didn’t any event resulting the death of a man at the hands of another would be called a first degree murder. We all know there is nuance (if you leapt to “kids are dying, no time for nuance”, please pause).
- Israel is stronger militarily. This makes them “bad”, again optics. It’s an easy frame slip into schoolyard analogies of a big bully against a weaker kid. But note that literally billions of dollars have gone to Gaza. Was this used for building society and the next generation? Or was this used to indoctrinate the next generation into this holy war against Jews?
- Jews are seen as “white”, and have been relatively successful in America despite small numbers. Did you know that >30% of Israeli society is non-white? Indigenous people must fight the colonizers. Nevermind that israel is incredibly diverse - many non whites there! vibrant lgbtq community; strong women/role in society including military; welcome Arabs into parliament, the list goes on.
It is seductively tempting to slip this frame into our innate American civil rights / anti-racist mental reference frame:
- White + Jewish + Powerful = Israel/Jews
- Indigenous + Islamic + Weak = Palestinians (proxy for any oppressed group)
A few questions worth pondering if the above seems to fit your view on the situation:
- Why are Jews not allowed into the “oppressed” club? It’s almost like an allergic reaction, despite obvious allyship marching together in blm, declaring pronouns in meetings, etc. and if you think Jews haven’t been historically oppressed…then I can’t help you, read a history book.
- Why is the conversational window so narrow in progressive narratives on the topic? For example: always Israel vs Palestinians. And yet Iran - or the broader Arab world - is seldom referenced. For anyone that understands the dynamics in play this is curious. Palestinians have played a role in getting us here.
- The mainstream narrative is very much about Israel having agency (Israel acts upon Palestinians) and ascribes nearly zero agency on Palestinians for the situation in which they find themselves. Why is this?
As progressives it’s important to understand that American social justice frames do not map cleanly onto foreign situations.