You Have Missed the Deadline to Become an Ally of Palestine
They have stopped taking applications
This weekend, California state senator Scott Weiner was harassed by “pro-Palestine” activists in San Francisco — the second such incident targeting Weiner in a week. A clip is below, and you can watch the whole incident here, but honestly, the clip captures it — I have not edited out a nuanced discussion of the Oslo Accords.
Say what you will: These people are doing yeoman’s work to ameliorate the housing shortage in San Francisco, because nobody will want to live in the Bay Area if this is the type of shit that happens there.
Scott Weiner is not a right-wing, pro-Israel hawk. He’s actually not right-wing at all — he’s very far left — and he’s refused to take money from AIPAC, wants to end aid to Israel, and recently called Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide”. But the key word there is recently — Weiner didn’t use the g-word immediately. And fans of this video have explained that that’s why Weiner became the subject of this impromptu, extremely one-sided Socratic debate.
And the conclusion that anyone must draw is: In the eyes of some activists, it’s too late to become sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. They will deem any new allyship insufficient. If you’re not already in the club, you blew it — don’t send your application, there are no openings. If you so much as had a notion to express scepticism of Israel’s tactics, or criticize Netanyahu, or observe that a Palestinian state has never seemed farther away than it does right now: Stand down. You missed the window and your day-late-and-a-dollar-short conversion to The One True Path is frankly embarrassing.
Some might observe that “you have missed the chance to switch to our position” is an insane position for a political movement to adopt. After all: Isn’t activism an attempt to persuade? And when someone is persuaded, isn’t that success? The makers of this video have answered that question with a firm “no”. They persuaded Scott Weiner but remain furious that they had to work so hard to persuade him. To them, their cause is like insurance: You can join during the open period, but when the window closes, it takes a lot of balls to show up and try to wheedle your way into the group.
So: If not to persuade, then what is the point of this activism? We’re forced to speculate. And since I’m forced…here goes:
This has nothing to do with Palestine. Some people find their identity by crusading against “the enemy”, whoever that may be. People like that rally around the fashionable cause of the moment, which today is Palestine. Yesterday, the cause was police abolition, before that it was climate change, those causes have been largely abandoned despite very little having changed because affecting change is not the goal — affirming one’s identity is the goal. Performative activism is not a means to an end; it is the end, and that’s why the maker of the video felt that harassing a guy until he left a public event was — by itself — a victory.
And that is both the good news and the bad news for Palestinians who want a better life, such as the few hundred extremely brave protesters who marched against Hamas in Gaza this weekend. The bad news is that in much of the West, the Palestinian banner is often carried by some of society’s most toxic nitwits. The good news is that they will eventually move on to some other cause. It may be possible one day to have a real discussion about how to get from Point A to Point B, with Point B being a peaceful and independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Point A being a loud and hostile clusterfuck dominated by the world’s worst people. I hope that day arrives sooner rather than later. But at the moment, the battle lines are firm, and some have gone so far as to show a total disinterest in attracting converts from the other side.
Windex Ain’t Scared: Here’s Our Statement on Israel/Palestine
***What follows is a guest column from Windex Customer Relations***
Why Are Palestinians Cursed With These Morons for Advocates?
A Palestinian who just wants to live their life in peace is a gold medal contender at the Olympics For The Cosmically Fucked. There should be a message board where peace-loving Palestinians can swap stories with North Koreans and gay Mormons about how fate, for some reason, loves kicking them in the taint. The only wisdom I’m aware of that might speak to their shocking string of bad luck comes not from Socrates or Aristotle, but from the comedian
"They persuaded Scott Weiner but remain furious that they had to work so hard to persuade him."
Because it increasingly seems like a huge chunk of the modern progressive left hates and resents the idea that they might have to persuade people to accept their ideas and get on board with their proposals. Perhaps because it implies that at least some of their ideas are not so self-evidently brilliant and correct that everyone will / should just immediately accept them, meaning that there is in turn a chance that they are actually not On The Right Side Of History (which in itself speaks volumes -- they're less interested in doing the right thing as in making sure that posterity records that they were on the side of the right thing). It's harder to feel morally righteous if you have to debate your ideas, thus risking the discovery that you might actually not be morally righteous, or at least that the issue might be more complicated than you acknowledge.
One could argue that their actual major project over the last decade and change -- more than climate change, more than police reform, more than racial equality, more than trans rights, more than Palestinian liberation -- has actually been to find ways of ensuring that they can 'win' arguments without actually having to have the argument. Just look at many of their favoured rhetorical devices, many of which are all about shutting people down and instantly dismissing their positions without actually having to engage with them. He's "mansplaining". She's "bothsidesing". You need to "stay in your lane". "It's not my job to educate you". And if that doesn't work, then just hit them with the good ol' ad hominems.
So yeah, not even changing your mind is good enough to satisfy these people. Because in their world having to be persuaded to change your mind in the first place is the ultimate insult.
If these idiots are going to make the Israel/Palestine conflict their Spanish Civil War, I really wish they'd go all the way, fly to Gaza, and join the fighting.