The Progressive Movement’s Revealing Response to Hamas

Its position illustrates why the axioms of the entire movement should be rejected

The Hamas massacre of 10/7 set off celebratory rallies around the world. It was not the subsequent actions by Israel that sparked this reaction. Rather, starting directly after the attacks, a mixture of  Islamists and Progressive reactionaries supported the Hamas atrocities as a form of justified resistance to Israel and the Jews.

Many of the protestors are calling for the destruction of Israel within any boundaries. Although some Progressives seem not to understand what territory “from the River to the Sea” refers to, or defend the phrase as innocuous, when questioned further many admit to wanting to remove Israel from the map entirely, as students at Oxford and Cambridge revealed recently when speaking with commentator Ben Shapiro.

The hateful reaction by radical Islamists is not that surprising. Jews have historically been harshly discriminated against in most Muslim countries. At least 820,000 Jews were expelled from, or fled violence and discrimination in Middle Eastern countries between 1948 and 1972, as shown in this map (courtesy of the Jewish Virtual Library):

The reactionary Progressive movement’s doubling down on its opposition to Israel in concert with the Islamists has been more shocking to some, especially given a strong presence of liberal Jews in that movement. Yet the response is fully in harmony with the ideological underpinnings of the Progressive movement, and revealing of those foundations to anyone who did not previously understand them.

The first place to look to understand the reactionary Progressive’s response is its theory of social justice, under which individuals are judged primarily not on their own actions, but rather as members of an ethnic, religious, racial, or other identity. A view of the world that rejects the idea of individual responsibility also rejects traditional western philosophy. Individual responsibility is paramount to so much of the thinking that undergirds free societies, including that put forward by philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and individual responsibility is one of the pillars upon which the United States was founded.

For example, the reactionary Progressive left calls relentlessly for more wealth and income redistribution. If inequality exists in a given place, the Progressive movement’s solution is more government intervention and redistribution.[1] The idea that individuals play a significant role in their own fate seems to take a back seat to the idea that a person’s lot is determined by the group to which they belong. In this model, oppression of groups is the cause of unequal outcomes. This creates a world that is not about individuals but only about groups, and those groups are assigned to categories: a group is either a victimizer or victimized, an oppressor or the oppressed, a colonizer or the colonized.[2]

If some individuals or groups of individuals are less wealthy than others, the Progressive movement rejects the examination of the underlying social and cultural issues that might cause some to fail and others to succeed. The disintegration of the family and failing schools in poor communities are ignored, in favor of accusing anyone who is wealthier of exploitation. If one group is poor, the Progressive movement assigns the blame to another group that is richer.

Jews are a problematic group for this approach. They are a minority – amounting to some 16.1 million of the world’s 8 billion population, compared to around 2 billion Muslims and 2.4 billion Christians. Yet relative to the size of their population, and despite having suffered considerable oppression and violence against them over centuries, Jews have achieved prominent positions of success in many sectors of the economy.

And throughout history, Jews are the group most often accused of having derived their wealth from keeping others down.  Karl Marx despised Jews because of their alleged materialism.  He wrote:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
- Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844)

One need not go back to Adolf Hitler’s infamous 1925 book Mein Kampf to find bold displays of this accusation. Modern examples of much-lauded individuals who overtly state this theory include Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who in 2018 stated “let me tell you something, when you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door” – and he didn’t mean holds the door open – or statements by artist Kanye West in recent years suggesting that Jews exploit others for personal gain.

Just several months ago, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas (who also serves as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization) gave a speech claiming that Hitler was not motivated by hatred of Jews but by Jews’ control of money:  “They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. … The Europeans fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on and so forth.”

While it is false to downplay the role of religious hatred in the 20th century extermination of European Jews and the pogroms that came before and since, economic factors have indeed also been important. These atrocities involved extensive expropriation. The confiscation of Jewish property during the Nazi era is well documented, as are the economic motivations of participants in historical pogroms to join religiously motivated attackers for economic reasons such as seeking the elimination of their debts.[3]

The reactionary Progressive response to the Hamas attacks fits directly into this framework of those rejecting what they perceive to be unjust economic inequality joining with those who are religiously motivated. Jews have a special and despised place in the Progressive hierarchy, as a living refutation of the worldview that failure is generally the fault of others and discrimination and systemic racism are insurmountable obstacles  that hold groups back from thriving in the modern economy.

For hardcore Progressives, Israel is the Jew of the world's countries both literally and in a figurative sense. Israel lifted itself out of poverty. A poor country at the outset, with much difficulty Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were forced to flee or were expelled. Israel would later absorb Jewish refugees from behind the Iron Curtain and Jews from Ethiopia, and is now absorbing Jews fleeing western Europe. These different groups of Jews have had many cultural, religious and social differences. Yet Israel has built a society melding these groups together in some respects, even while each maintains many of its own distinct traditions. 

From the beginning, Israel has consistently made the most of its opportunities, instead of making unmeetable demands, and learned from its experiences. Israel started as a substantially Socialist country with significant government involvement over the economy. Israelis realized that this model was not working and gradually changed their economy to a more capitalist model with great success. Israel’s transformative rejection of Socialism provides further ground for Progressive hatred for Israel. For Progressives, the failure of Socialism in real life can never show that Socialism does not work, but only that Socialism was not attempted properly or in pure enough form.  

Israel has taken the cards it has been dealt and made the most of them, including turning some of its biggest weaknesses into opportunities. For example, the lack of drinkable water and fertile land has led Israel to become a leader in desalinization and agriculture technologies. The exposure to security threats has led Israel to become a leader in cybersecurity. As a country, it has refused the mantle of victimhood.

The Progressive movement appears to attribute of both the lack of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jorden River and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict to Israel’s refusal to withdraw from all the territories captured in 1967. This fits nicely into the oppressor-oppressed framework, but it is contracted by facts. From before its founding, Israel has made extensive sacrifices and taken considerable risks to make peace with the Arab world, including the Palestinian Arabs. The Jewish leadership in Palestine accepted the UN Partition Plan which left just 55% of western Palestine to the Jews. This was even though more than 75% of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate allocated for “close settlement” by the Jews was previously transformed by Great Britain into the kingdom of Transjordan for Abdullah of the Arabian Hashemite family and entirely closed to the Jews.

The countries in the Arab League make up over 13 million square kilometers compared to just 22 thousand for Israel (including the 1967 territories excluding Sinai), but the Arab countries surrounding Israel and the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 refused to accept it at any size. When Israel declared independence, seven Arab armies invaded to assist Palestinian Arabs in wiping out the newly declared Jewish State. Israel’s survival shocked the Arab world. Their grievance was not the lack of a Palestinian Arab state, but Israel’s very existence.

Although portions of western Palestine were occupied by Transjordan (which occupied (which occupied an area extending from eastern Jerusalem to the Jordan River and named it the West Bank) and Egypt (which occupied Gaza) from 1948-1967, neither set up an independent Arab state in western Palestine. Instead, they kept the territories for themselves. Instead of resettling the Palestinian Arabs (as Israel had done for a similar number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and as was done after World War II for tens of millions of displaced persons), the Arab countries generally forced them to remain as permanent refugees. Yet Israel and the Jews continue to be the target of blame for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs.

Palestinians through their leadership have insisted on remaining wards of the UN and UNWRA instead of taking responsibility for themselves. Hamas recently explained to Russia Today TV that the extensive tunnel network it has created in Gaza is for Hamas military operations. When asked if Gazan civilians can use the tunnels for shelter from the conflict Hamas launched, Hamas said the civilians are the responsibility of everyone else - UNWRA, Israel - anyone and everyone but Hamas.

Instead of complaining about its oppression, Israel has focused on building: building a state and its institutions, building a society and building an economy. When the opportunity arose to reconstitute the Jewish State in just a portion of the Jewish homeland and surrounded by enemies who posed an existential threat to its existence, Israel did not declare the arrangement an “open air prison” and refuse to take responsibility for its people.  

Israel’s economic success despite this adversity, especially compared to Gaza, compounds the Progressive opposition. The Palestinians living in Gaza are worse off economically than those living in Israel, therefore (regardless of the reason) the Progressive movement gives them the “right to resist”. Like poverty in the US, the Progressive movement isn’t interested in examining the underlying cause of Gaza’s troubles, which is the dedication of societal resources, and billions in foreign aid, to seeking the destruction of Israel, rather than improving Gaza. In fact, Gaza’s economy experienced considerable growth following Israel’s takeover from Gaza until Israel turned control over to the PA in 1993. Life expectancy rose considerably as did the share of households with electricity and running water.[4]

The Progressive left is entirely untroubled by (or even celebrates) the history of Palestinian Arab leaders rejecting offers by Israeli leaders for nearly all of the territories Israel seized in 1967. Egypt accepted such a land-for-peace deal when Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula in 1982 in exchange for a true end to hostilities.[5] But the PLO has consistently followed the example of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mandate-area leader of the Palestinian Arabs, who allied with Hitler and refused a Jewish State in any size. What has happened when Israel has made similar offers to the Palestinian Authority leaders? Yasser Arafat responded to Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer in 2000 of nearly all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria by launching a war against Israel featuring shootings and bombings. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority (PA) President Abbas a state with land area equaling 99.5% of the these 1967 territories, which Abbas declined, later boasting: “I rejected it out of hand.”

And then of course Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely in 2005 expelling every last Jew, even digging up the bodies of dead Jews from Gaza's cemeteries. Israel handed Gaza over to the PA, including valuable agricultural infrastructure, in the hopes that would advance peace.  

What Progressive theory justifies support of Hamas’s “resistance” under these circumstances? One explanation in theory would be that supporters are absolutists in the belief that Arab Muslins have a right to 100% of the land, and the Jews to none at all. Yet if so, they are unusually absolute about this issue, as most Progressives are not as absolute on other matters of rights to historical land. For example, Progressives perhaps believe in extensive recognition of and compensation for the fact that essentially all US territory was Native American land before European settlers came, but few are literally demanding that every inch of US soil be returned to the descendants of Native Americans. Similarly, we have not seen extensive calls by the Progressive left for the millions of Syrians displaced by Bashar al-Assad to be compensated for their losses or returned to their land. Nor for that matter have we seen any calls by Progressives for Jews who were expelled from Europe and the Arab countries in the 20^th century to have any of their property in Europe and the Middle East returned to them and their descendants.

Or perhaps reactionary Progressives simply reject Israel completely, a country including many refugees established under a vote of the United Nations on land recognized by the League of Nations as belonging to the Jews. But what theory makes this attitude consistent with the general support that Progressives have for open-border policies towards refugees in their own countries?

The internal inconsistencies in light of the facts call into question the entire premise of the Progressive movement. The Arab-Israeli conflict simply doesn’t fit into the Progressive Framework – the actual conflict contradicts that framework entirely, requiring false narratives about the Israel-Palestine conflict to be established in order to support Israel’s placement within the reactionary Progressive Firmament.

As if this were not enough for anyone still adhering to the Progressive narrative, there is the reactionary Progressive support for actual terrorism to redress the wrongs they believe Israel has inflicted. And although progressive support for terrorism against Israel has intensified, it is not new. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), heavily aided by the USSR, became a cause célèbre in the Progressive movement. The PLO was founded in 1964 by the Arab League for the purpose of destroying Israel, not to “liberate” territories taken by Israel in the 1967 war. Its original charter did not even call for an independent Palestinian state. The PLO eventually established its headquarters in Lebanon where it helped train both Marxist and Islamist terrorists from around the world.. The Palestinian Arab cause as originally conceived by the Arab League, and currently maintained by the PLO, is centered on destroying Israel rather than on establishing a successful state alongside Israel. To the extent that Progressive movement views terrorism against Israel and the West as a legitimate means of addressing injustice, it views violence as justified if it moves towards the redistribution of resources that serves its social justice goals.

And the terrorism that those who celebrated the Hamas attacks appear to be supporting went far beyond just killing. Hamas and its Gazan allies tortured their victims, committed widespread rape, and then mutilated the bodies. Hamas tortured and raped parents in front of their children, killed the children in front of the parents, and them eliminated the parents. Hamas tied together Jewish children and burned them to death. Hamas broke into one house, tortured and killed the father, raped and killed the mother, and burned their baby to death in the oven. Hamas kidnapped more than two hundred Israelis and foreigners that it found in southern Israel, including elderly Holocaust survivors and infants. Hamas terrorists filmed themselves beheading a wounded Thai worker. The savages filmed their exploits for the entire world to see, bringing their own video equipment, and using the phones of their victims. 

The disturbing level of support in the West and America for nihilistic terror against Israel makes it clear that the situation in the Middle East strikes a particular chord with the reactionary Progressive movement. On the one side, the complete and total dedication of large parts of Palestinian Arab society and resources to Israel’s destruction, instead of building their own state alongside Israel, fits into the resistance narrative of the oppressed. Indeed, Hamas has taken billions of foreign aid and used it to construct a terror apparatus for attacking Israeli civilians. Cement for construction and economic development has been used for building the Gaza “Metro”, perhaps the most extensive system of tunnels supporting terror infrastructure in human history. Hamas has taken water pipes and turned them into missiles. This form of “resistance” is not constructive for Gaza or anyone else, but it fits into an archetype of the victim resisting the oppressor.

On the other side, Israel’s economic success despite great hardship make it a challenge to the Progressive left’s narrative of oppressor, and one that they must meet by twisting Israel into their ultimate portrait of a colonizer. Indeed, the entire Progressive narrative is at stake in the world’s perception of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Although the Palestinian Authority has continued to reject Israel’s right to exist, parts of the Arab world have realized that Israel is here to stay. Several Arab countries (the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco) signed the Abraham Accords with Israel, recognizing that peace and cooperation with Israel is mutually beneficial and should not be contingent on the approval of the Palestinian Authority. In some parts of the Arab world, feelings towards Israel have started to significantly change for the better, especially amongst the younger generation. This realization is not universal throughout the Arab world, as decades of indoctrination against Israel and the Jews are having long-lasting effects. Some governments have been far ahead of their peoples in cooperating with Israel.

Some Arab rulers have also taken steps to liberalize their societies, but have been reluctant to move quickly, fearing harsh reaction from Islamists as they saw in the so-called Arab Spring. Progressives concentrate their ire on those Arab rulers most interested in seeking better relations with Israel and who are slowly liberalizing. They insist on aligning the US with countries like Qatar and Iran that are most vehemently opposed to Israel's existence and have even worse human rights records.

The situation is the opposite in Iran where the Iranian people have sympathy for Israel, while the Islamic Republic government is actively trying to wipe Israel, the so-called “Little Satan,” off the map, with the “Great Satan,” the United States, next in line.  Iran has been the main backer of Hamas in recent years, with Qatar and Turkey also providing important support.

Israel and the Jews are apparently such a threat to hardcore Progressives that they prioritize their support for Hamas to the point they are willing to overlook the fanatical opposition of Islamists like Hamas and their Iranian supporters to the all-encompassing Progressive social agenda, including the role of women in society and LGBTQ rights. Even beyond the Progressive movement’s support for Hamas, the distorted narratives about the entire Arab-Israeli conflict that these reactionaries insist on ramming into their social justice framework should cause anyone following or considering following the Progressive movement to reject it entirely. What is required instead is a renewed embrace of the principles of individual and communal responsibility that undergird free societies.

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[1] See for example The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) by Paul Krugman.

[2] For a critical appraisal of this movement, see Discrimination and Disparities (2018) by Thomas Sowell.

[3]  See for example the history of the 1190 Massacre in York, England as illustrative of many others.

[4]  In contrast, from 2007 -2022, Gaza’s real GDP growth averaged just 0.4 percent, with real GDP per capita declining at an annual average rate of 2.5 percent. Sources: World Bank and CAMERA.

https://www.sixdaywar.org/long-term-effects/palestinian-economic-growth/

[5] Israel has withdrawn from over 90% of the territories captured in 1967, also including 1967 territory returned to Syria after the Yom Kippur War, and 1967 territory given to Jordan following the 1994 Israeli-Jordan Peace Agreement.