Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP Photo
A pro-Palestine protester gestures to a person holding the flags of the U.S. and Israel during the “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza” march, October 28, 2023, in New York.
The catastrophe that is Israel-Palestine continues to compound, imperiling populations and political alignments alike. Among the latter, it has driven a largely generational wedge in the American left-liberal community, at a moment when a largely unified neofascist American right (see: House Speaker Mike Johnson, unanimous Republican support for) looms as our possible future.
Polling makes clear that Americans under 35 are no particular fans of Israel, even as support for Israel has risen among their elders. A more acute generational split is evident within most progressive institutions, dividing elders who have long called for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state from their younger cohorts—often, their employees—who now call for a cease-fire and some of whom refuse to fault Hamas for its murder raid into Israel. That rift is evident even among former staffers for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (Warren, Sanders, and other senators called for a humanitarian pause in Gaza on Friday, which does not rise to the level of what is being demanded of them.)
Sad to say, this rift isn’t all that difficult to explain. Americans under 35 have known Israel only since it came under the rule of right-wing nationalists determined to confine the Palestinians in the occupied territories to ever-smaller Bantustans or to compel them to move to other lands altogether by making their daily lives unbearable and increasingly dangerous. This view of Israel is shared by their progressive elders, too, but those elders (among them, me) also affirm Israel’s right to exist within its pre-1967 borders, and most of us think of Israel’s historic establishment not as a deliberately colonial state but as a refuge state for Jews fleeing European antisemitism.
The U.S. laws enacted in 1924 (and on the books until 1965) banning immigration from Eastern Europe closed off what was by far the chief alternative to Palestine as a destination for Jews desperate to get out of Europe. This was less colonialism than “any port in a storm.” More recent immigrants to Israel have come from other Middle Eastern states like Syria and Iraq, to which they cannot plausibly return. The Nakba was indeed ethnic cleansing, but ethnic cleansing of Jews would have been the result if the Palestinians had prevailed as well.
A full 75 years later, the only plausible solution to this miserable crisis is the establishment ASAP of two fully sovereign states. And that should be the sine qua non of any U.S. aid to Israel, which needs to be conditioned on a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and its concomitant recognition of a Palestinian state. In the real world, of course, that is not about to happen, but conditioning U.S. aid on that could be a cause that not only ensures Israel’s survival but begins to reunite what has become a fractured American left.
While not reducing their rightful rage against Hamas, many Israelis have come to understand how much of an albatross the West Bank settlements have become to Israel’s future. The Netanyahu government has now demonstrated to its citizens the price for coddling and expanding the settlements over all other concerns (well, all others save increasing the influence of the anti-modernity, anti-Enlightenment ultra-Orthodox over the distinctly pro-modernity Israeli majority). The radically pro-settlement, anti-Palestinian parties and leaders on whose support Netanyahu now relies have weakened Israelis’ military security and strengthened, quantitatively and qualitatively, Israel’s Western (most especially, American) critics.
Those Americans, and American Jews, who have defended Israel’s right-wing governments over the past two decades are just as culpable as Bibi himself in turning young Americans—indeed, young American Jews—against the state they profess to champion. Groups like Democratic Majority for Israel, which led campaigns against incumbent Democratic members of Congress for daring to suggest that Israel’s best interests would be served by getting out of the West Bank—a campaign that the group waged to successfully unseat Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, a liberal House Democrat who was also president of his local synagogue—demonstrated a level of moral and political obtuseness that only served to weaken those forces in American Judaism that could make a plausible case for a better Israel to young Jews inclined to repudiate it altogether.
Militarily, Israel can only really eliminate Hamas in Gaza by effectively eliminating Gaza, a morally impossible option.
What would it take to repair the generational rift that now threatens the effectiveness of American progressivism and perhaps Democratic electoral prospects as well? First, a reaffirmation on both sides of that rift of the universalism of progressive, or even just human, values: that the killing of innocent children or targeting of civilians, at no matter whose hands, is wrong. (We can debate the degrees of evil in deliberately targeted individual killing and the mass killing of aerial attacks, but that’s why Dante created nine circles for Hell.) Second, an acknowledgment that a two-state solution, however currently improbable, is at least possible, which a one-state solution clearly is not. Third, that the U.S., with as many allies as it can assemble (and Joe Biden has proved to be pretty damn good at assembling allies) should make clear that support for Israel is conditioned on its withdrawal posthaste from the West Bank. Fourth, that we support what Sanders, Warren, and others have termed a humanitarian pause in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, during which a hostages-for-cease-fire deal must be cut.
That may not be the sum total of what everyone in the progressive coalition wants at this anxious moment. It also doesn’t, I acknowledge, eliminate Hamas, a group that has shown as little concern for Palestinian life as it has for that of Israelis. Its murder raid of October 7 was precisely calculated to trigger a massive Israeli military response, in the hope that Israel would kill so many Palestinian civilians (half of whom are children) that it would lose all remaining international support. For that matter, Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007 without even once holding elections, which does not indicate much concern for Palestinians’ actual desires (which may not lean toward Hamas’s embrace of fundamentalist misogyny).
Militarily, Israel can only really eliminate Hamas in Gaza by effectively eliminating Gaza, a morally impossible option. (I wish it were otherwise, as Israel has every right to eliminate Hamas, but it’s not.) Other means—political means, like bolstering the Palestinian Authority by getting the hell out of the West Bank—must be found. That’s a long and difficult slog that almost every Israeli will find frustrating, at minimum, and enraging at maximum. But it really is the only plausible way to seriously diminish the existential threat that Hamas could pose to Israel and its Jewish population.
Only if the liberal community can come together around such perspectives, and in particular around the belief that the settlements pose the greatest long-term threat to Israel’s continued existence, can the Biden administration be prodded to condition future aid to Israel on its withdrawal from the West Bank. As it stands today, President Biden’s strategy appears to be to embrace Israel in its moment of crisis so he can have the credibility to push it to change course. This is a little like hoping you can draw to an inside straight, but it would become more plausible if the Democrats came to share the analysis that helping Israel requires a fundamental shift in that nation’s policy toward the Palestinians. The sooner the liberal community can forcefully advance that perspective, the sooner Biden can embrace it, and the sooner that support for his candidacy—over, let us never forget, Donald Trump’s—becomes less of an issue of controversy on the left.
What else might be required to reduce this growing gulf on the American left? I think geezers like me should understand how and why so many young people feel the way they do, just as the young ’uns should understand that most of us left geezers have been calling for a viable Palestinian state and opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank for as much as half a century. Each side needs to support the other side’s right to make its case without fear of punishment. And above all, each side needs to understand that unless the left supports universalist rather than particularist values, it loses whatever moral claim it has on its legitimacy and on its own future prospects.
