The goal of “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators who celebrate the murder of 1,200 people in Israel last Oct. 7 is not simply the destruction of the Jewish state.
Yes, they certainly hope to wipe Israel off the map, every bit of it “from the river to the sea.” But that is not the final destination yearned for by urban and campus activists wearing their uber-cool terrorist headscarves, waving their green, red, white, and black flags, and sullying the American polity with their ignorance as much as they sully its buildings with their graffiti.
To see where their logic leads them, look at what their placards demand. They mention such disparate objects of hatred or veneration as the CIA and the Stonewall riots. But the key expression of hope is on the simplest placard reading, “Palestine Will Be Free.”
What exactly does this mean? What does it imply, and where does it lead?
Most obviously, the freedom demanded is Palestinian freedom from the state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. It is an expression of the ancient visceral bigotry that reviles the Jews, which has seethed and erupted among ethnic Arabs and Europeans for centuries.
This gut hatred is given sanction and the force of holy writ by Islam’s principal texts. But the Quran and other articles of Muslim faith do not motivate most young New York or California lefties who’ve embraced the cause of antisemitic genocide in the past year. They are convinced and inspired, instead, by what they understand of “settler colonialism.”
In their historical ignorance, they regard Israel as a colonial state established on land stolen from its true owners, Muslim Arabs. This perspective is sometimes given expression in the phrase, “History didn’t start in 1948,” which one sees often in smug social media posts. It is intended to convey the false notion that the speaker is smart enough and knowledgeable enough to know what came before Israel was founded and recognized by the United Nations 77 years ago.
The land Israel occupies was called Palestine, but the implication that its proper owners are the Palestinians is false. The majority of Palestinians are probably descended from Syrians who moved to Palestine in the first third of the 20th century at a time of parallel Jewish immigration. But all Palestinians, whether or not recently arrived from Syria, aren’t the “original” inhabitants of the Holy Land but are descended from Mohammedan conquerors who swept out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century and took the land from the Byzantines.
The Byzantines were heirs of Rome, whose legions arrived before Christ was born among his fellow Jews, a people who had been there by then for more than a thousand years. It is by right of conquest and colonization that Arabs lay claim to the land that the Romans named Palestine to punish indigenous Jews for rebellion against Caesar.
But Arab settler colonialism is not the settler colonialism taught in American colleges, which animates the international Left in support of Islamist butchers. Theirs is a virulent self-hatred — the late, great philosopher Roger Scruton dubbed it “oikophobia,” from the Greek — which focuses only on European colonialism. The majority of Israelis are descendants of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, but the state was founded by European Jews. This and its liberal democratic principles, its dynamism, and its Western-style success, make it the Left’s enemy.
In the mouth of the Left, the phrase “settler colonialism” implies complete illegitimacy, even though every scrap of land on Earth is occupied by people other than its original inhabitants. The Left uses the idea and the utterance of “settler colonialism” to disqualify any people or nation to whom the label is attached.
Today, Israel is the most prominent intended victim of this denigration. But even now, the pro-terrorism crowd, who justify murder, torture, rape, mutilation, and kidnap as “resistance,” have America in their sites. The United States, the city on the hill with enlightened ideas built into its foundations, is the true prize that the Left targets for demolition.
It is the anti-historical theory of “settler colonialism” that underpins land acknowledgments that so often now precede speeches at universities and other events at centers of left-wing anti-Americanism. They are incantations of the belief that the entire land of America is stolen from the pre-Columbian tribes who lived here before. Their express purpose is to delegitimize America and its institutions.
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Just as the government of Israel, and the claims of the Jewish people of a right to live there, are treated as illegitimate and a moral nullity, so too the federal and state governments of America are to be regarded as evil settler authorities to be condemned and resisted.
It is not a coincidence that “pro-Palestinian” protesters burn American flags along with the flag of Israel. Our homegrown leftist haters are following the precept of Descartes to proceed from the simple to the difficult. Destroying Israel is somewhat easier than destroying America. But those who want the first, also want the second.