The heart of the American liberal aches for fairness in all things yet responds to every invocation of Palestinian freedom with excuses. Luckily, progress has never relied on a liberal’s courage to recognize that change is necessary.
BY MALAY FIROZ
MONDOWEISS
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, JOINED BY SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI (D-CALIF.) AND CHAIRMAN OF THE HOUSE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-N.Y.), PARTICIPATES IN A Q&A AT THE HOUSE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS ISSUES CONFERENCE, FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2022, AT THE HILTON PHILADELPHIA PENN’S LANDING IN PHILADELPHIA.
(OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY ADAM SCHULTZ)
The American liberal is defined by political vapidity. He regards himself an independent thinker besieged by absolutists on both the Left and Right, cautioning them to embrace one another’s humanity. In fact, the liberal is perhaps the most predisposed toward groupthink, repeating well-worn moral platitudes that serve little but his own self-image as the lone preacher of peace. That is why he finds it comforting to frame the ongoing brutalization of Gaza by the Israeli settler colonial state as a war between two monolithic identities — the Jew and the Muslim — for only by doing so can he regurgitate his insipid condemnations against “hate.”
Indeed, the liberal hates hate. He demands that everyone condemn Hamas, a now-ritualized act of moral expiation before which no discussion of political violence can begin. And in Zionism he encounters a fabricated moral union between a person, a people, and a state, that brooks no dissent, that resents every critique as hateful, that ultimately leads to totalitarianism. It is, therefore, easier for the liberal to condemn hate than political violence. After all, refusing hate does not test his innately limited empathy for Palestinian lives. If now is “the time of monsters,” then it is from monstrous perpetrators themselves that we hear a more honest assessment of the present crisis: this is a second Nakba, by intent and by design.
It helps in this regard that the American liberal understands very little about politics outside an American-centric frame. He has barely even learnt to question the framing narratives of mainstream U.S. news media. He disapproves of white supremacy at home but is rarely as troubled by the expressly articulated Jewish-supremacist project of the Israeli far right. Instead, he naively takes the Israeli government at its word and pardons its open embrace of genocide as intemperate statements born of grief. He purports to stand against border walls, state surveillance, and militarized policing but turns his gaze away when these forces are weaponized against Palestinians. He complains about the power of dark money but doesn’t challenge the political lobbies that advocate for Israeli state interests in the highest echelons of power. He proudly supports human rights but won’t acknowledge years of reporting by human rights organizations on atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military. He proclaims that Black lives matter but admonishes radical Black writers, intellectuals, and activists who rally for Palestinian freedom. He solemnly agrees that an irreparable harm was done to Native Americans during the European conquest of the “New World,” but cannot fathom why they — and people from across the postcolonial world — recognize their own history in the Palestinian experience.
Perhaps this is not surprising, for the American liberal is only recently and haltingly educated about the entrenched history of structural racism and white supremacy in the U.S., so he inevitably finds it difficult to apply the lessons of that history to the world around him. He fashions himself a hero who would have stood against Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid in their time, but somehow the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” appears too “complicated” to take a moral stand. In his mind, American democracy is an inexorably self-perfecting experiment, even though the institution was founded on genocide, slavery, and apartheid and is incessantly subject to anti-democratic capture today. Indeed, the liberal believes so wholeheartedly in this received concept of democracy that he invariably fails to apprehend how democracy can be democratically suppressed in ethno-majoritarian societies, and doesn’t ask himself whether any country can truly call itself democratic — let alone the “only democracy in the Middle East” — if a significant proportion of its population cannot participate in the democratic process. But then, perhaps he is reassured by the knowledge that democracy eventually comes to those who demonstrate their worthiness by dying in large enough numbers. After all, isn’t that why the Western powers “gifted” Israel to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, so that Palestinians could pay for the West’s guilt?
Historical memory ends with the Holocaust for the American liberal. He does not care very much for remembering how circumstances since then have brought us here. He is quite habituated to waking up when Jews are attacked and commencing his re-reckoning with anti-Semitism. The rest is background noise. Perhaps it is through this evacuation of history that the liberal also learns to speak in clichés. He is careful to warn that he is “not a Middle East expert” and lacks the contextual expertise necessary for condemning the slaughter of Palestinian children. This lack of familiarity does not, however, prevent him from chanting that “Israel has a right to defend itself” while studiously avoiding the thornier question of what legitimately constitutes colonial self-defense. Innocently, he advocates for a “two-state solution,” staying strategically silent on how Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank — aided and abetted by him for years — has now rendered a Palestinian state all but impossible. Having already forgotten the legacies of the War on Terror, he remains convinced that it is possible to eradicate a militant ideology by further destituting and murdering an entire people. What is the alternative, he asks in bewilderment, unwilling to entertain conversations about the only real solution there can be: dismantling the occupation of Gaza, ending ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and initiating a meaningful process toward Palestinian self-determination.
The heart of the American liberal aches for fairness in all things. He responds to every invocation of Palestinian freedom with “to be fair,” and asks why we can’t criticize both an overwhelming military power and the residents of a concentration camp equally. He is deeply concerned about the supposed double standard of people boycotting Israeli institutions when other regimes have done worse, but sees no inconsistency in the disproportionate military aid the U.S. allocates to Israel. He denounces antisemitism—as we all should—but willfully ignores the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that have equally poisoned our public sphere. He vociferously defends free speech until the moment Palestinians start speaking and inconvenience his sense of “balance.” He rightly anguishes over the transgenerational trauma of Jews, but expects that Palestinians must endure the bombing of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, UN compounds, evacuation corridors, and border crossings, with no trauma, anger, or pain. When he acknowledges Palestinian humanity at all, he does so as a perfunctory qualification about the “tragedy of war,” in order to advance an argument in support of further war. Having already decided who falls within his racial ambit of humanity (which fortunately includes Ukrainians) and who does not, the liberal mourns for the Israeli “women and children” killed on October 7 — as we all should — but finds no such symbols of vulnerability in Gaza. He shifts restlessly in his seat every time someone raises the subject of Palestinian death, eager to interrupt, to change the subject, to say “yes, but….” In his mind, Israelis are killed as “babies” and “grandmothers,” their lives grievable in the West, whereas Palestinians die like flies, rarely distinguishable between civilians or terrorists, in numbers that can’t fully be trusted.
The American liberal feels bleak about the future but lacks the imagination to envision it differently. He cannot imagine another lesson from the cry “never again” besides the Zionist right to settle. He cannot imagine solidarity with another kind of Jewish citizen who courageously declares “not in my name,” or a different political project for which the “Holy Land” could stand. Raised on a steady diet of American binaries between red and blue, pro- and anti-, us and them, he cannot imagine a different result to the current game than that one “team” should prevail. And he cannot understand that Israeli safety and Palestinian freedom are mutually intertwined conditions. Ever so slowly, the needle of the liberal’s conscience may eventually be moved. All it takes is time and death, and we have yet to determine the “exchange rate” for Palestinian lives.
But let us not despair. Progress has never relied on a liberal’s courage to recognize that change is necessary. Progress occurs when enough people are moved to reject not only neofascist populism, but liberalism’s racist hypocrisies masquerading as humanism. And there are millions of such people marching for Palestine all over the world. Ultimately, the American liberal will be transcended by his own irrelevance. Palestinians have no need of his allyship; they will secure their own freedom and future. When that day eventually arrives, we can look forward to the liberal’s revisionist memory that he was on the right side of history all along.
The American liberal is defined by political vapidity. He regards himself an independent thinker besieged by absolutists on both the Left and Right, cautioning them to embrace one another’s humanity. In fact, the liberal is perhaps the most predisposed toward groupthink, repeating well-worn moral platitudes that serve little but his own self-image as the lone preacher of peace. That is why he finds it comforting to frame the ongoing brutalization of Gaza by the Israeli settler colonial state as a war between two monolithic identities — the Jew and the Muslim — for only by doing so can he regurgitate his insipid condemnations against “hate.”
Indeed, the liberal hates hate. He demands that everyone condemn Hamas, a now-ritualized act of moral expiation before which no discussion of political violence can begin. And in Zionism he encounters a fabricated moral union between a person, a people, and a state, that brooks no dissent, that resents every critique as hateful, that ultimately leads to totalitarianism. It is, therefore, easier for the liberal to condemn hate than political violence. After all, refusing hate does not test his innately limited empathy for Palestinian lives. If now is “the time of monsters,” then it is from monstrous perpetrators themselves that we hear a more honest assessment of the present crisis: this is a second Nakba, by intent and by design.
It helps in this regard that the American liberal understands very little about politics outside an American-centric frame. He has barely even learnt to question the framing narratives of mainstream U.S. news media. He disapproves of white supremacy at home but is rarely as troubled by the expressly articulated Jewish-supremacist project of the Israeli far right. Instead, he naively takes the Israeli government at its word and pardons its open embrace of genocide as intemperate statements born of grief. He purports to stand against border walls, state surveillance, and militarized policing but turns his gaze away when these forces are weaponized against Palestinians. He complains about the power of dark money but doesn’t challenge the political lobbies that advocate for Israeli state interests in the highest echelons of power. He proudly supports human rights but won’t acknowledge years of reporting by human rights organizations on atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military. He proclaims that Black lives matter but admonishes radical Black writers, intellectuals, and activists who rally for Palestinian freedom. He solemnly agrees that an irreparable harm was done to Native Americans during the European conquest of the “New World,” but cannot fathom why they — and people from across the postcolonial world — recognize their own history in the Palestinian experience.
Perhaps this is not surprising, for the American liberal is only recently and haltingly educated about the entrenched history of structural racism and white supremacy in the U.S., so he inevitably finds it difficult to apply the lessons of that history to the world around him. He fashions himself a hero who would have stood against Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid in their time, but somehow the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” appears too “complicated” to take a moral stand. In his mind, American democracy is an inexorably self-perfecting experiment, even though the institution was founded on genocide, slavery, and apartheid and is incessantly subject to anti-democratic capture today. Indeed, the liberal believes so wholeheartedly in this received concept of democracy that he invariably fails to apprehend how democracy can be democratically suppressed in ethno-majoritarian societies, and doesn’t ask himself whether any country can truly call itself democratic — let alone the “only democracy in the Middle East” — if a significant proportion of its population cannot participate in the democratic process. But then, perhaps he is reassured by the knowledge that democracy eventually comes to those who demonstrate their worthiness by dying in large enough numbers. After all, isn’t that why the Western powers “gifted” Israel to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, so that Palestinians could pay for the West’s guilt?
Historical memory ends with the Holocaust for the American liberal. He does not care very much for remembering how circumstances since then have brought us here. He is quite habituated to waking up when Jews are attacked and commencing his re-reckoning with anti-Semitism. The rest is background noise. Perhaps it is through this evacuation of history that the liberal also learns to speak in clichés. He is careful to warn that he is “not a Middle East expert” and lacks the contextual expertise necessary for condemning the slaughter of Palestinian children. This lack of familiarity does not, however, prevent him from chanting that “Israel has a right to defend itself” while studiously avoiding the thornier question of what legitimately constitutes colonial self-defense. Innocently, he advocates for a “two-state solution,” staying strategically silent on how Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank — aided and abetted by him for years — has now rendered a Palestinian state all but impossible. Having already forgotten the legacies of the War on Terror, he remains convinced that it is possible to eradicate a militant ideology by further destituting and murdering an entire people. What is the alternative, he asks in bewilderment, unwilling to entertain conversations about the only real solution there can be: dismantling the occupation of Gaza, ending ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and initiating a meaningful process toward Palestinian self-determination.
The heart of the American liberal aches for fairness in all things. He responds to every invocation of Palestinian freedom with “to be fair,” and asks why we can’t criticize both an overwhelming military power and the residents of a concentration camp equally. He is deeply concerned about the supposed double standard of people boycotting Israeli institutions when other regimes have done worse, but sees no inconsistency in the disproportionate military aid the U.S. allocates to Israel. He denounces antisemitism—as we all should—but willfully ignores the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that have equally poisoned our public sphere. He vociferously defends free speech until the moment Palestinians start speaking and inconvenience his sense of “balance.” He rightly anguishes over the transgenerational trauma of Jews, but expects that Palestinians must endure the bombing of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, UN compounds, evacuation corridors, and border crossings, with no trauma, anger, or pain. When he acknowledges Palestinian humanity at all, he does so as a perfunctory qualification about the “tragedy of war,” in order to advance an argument in support of further war. Having already decided who falls within his racial ambit of humanity (which fortunately includes Ukrainians) and who does not, the liberal mourns for the Israeli “women and children” killed on October 7 — as we all should — but finds no such symbols of vulnerability in Gaza. He shifts restlessly in his seat every time someone raises the subject of Palestinian death, eager to interrupt, to change the subject, to say “yes, but….” In his mind, Israelis are killed as “babies” and “grandmothers,” their lives grievable in the West, whereas Palestinians die like flies, rarely distinguishable between civilians or terrorists, in numbers that can’t fully be trusted.
The American liberal feels bleak about the future but lacks the imagination to envision it differently. He cannot imagine another lesson from the cry “never again” besides the Zionist right to settle. He cannot imagine solidarity with another kind of Jewish citizen who courageously declares “not in my name,” or a different political project for which the “Holy Land” could stand. Raised on a steady diet of American binaries between red and blue, pro- and anti-, us and them, he cannot imagine a different result to the current game than that one “team” should prevail. And he cannot understand that Israeli safety and Palestinian freedom are mutually intertwined conditions. Ever so slowly, the needle of the liberal’s conscience may eventually be moved. All it takes is time and death, and we have yet to determine the “exchange rate” for Palestinian lives.
But let us not despair. Progress has never relied on a liberal’s courage to recognize that change is necessary. Progress occurs when enough people are moved to reject not only neofascist populism, but liberalism’s racist hypocrisies masquerading as humanism. And there are millions of such people marching for Palestine all over the world. Ultimately, the American liberal will be transcended by his own irrelevance. Palestinians have no need of his allyship; they will secure their own freedom and future. When that day eventually arrives, we can look forward to the liberal’s revisionist memory that he was on the right side of history all along.
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