WITH ALLIES LIKE THIS, YOU NEED FRIENDS
Allyship is one of the buzzwords of the last decade and a bit. It is part of the jargon that has come to define progressive political activism, an in-group set of words including “praxis,” that achieves precisely the opposite of what political activists presumably hope to achieve: winning popular support for their goals.
The word allyship went through my brain after reading this, published a few days after Hamas’s October 7th massacres. It was written by David Hearst, an English (and Jewish) ally of the Palestinian cause.
This weekend, by force of arms, they [Hamas] exercised the right of return that was taken off the negotiating table 23 years ago …
The violence:
Will tell all Palestinian that resistance isn’t a lost cause … It will tell them that their will to resist is more powerful than that of their occupier.
These words appeared in Hearst’s publication, Middle East Eye, which is funded by Qatar. At one level this is not surprising. Hearst, who for many years wrote the foreign editorials (leaders) for The Guardian newspaper, has been a long time advocate of a unitary state in Palestine/Israel as a way of ending Zionism.
But it defies belief that a serious commentator could see in the Hamas massacres Palestinians exercising “the right of return” or that the butchery was in some way, “resistance.”
And it isn’t just at Middle East Eye that you can find the idea that Hamas’s actions were some kind of legitimate resistance. On elite American college campuses and in organizations that recruit on them, groups of students and some of their instructors have decided that Israel alone is responsible for the savagery the Hamas battalion inflicted on October 7th.
It was the articles written and petitions signed by people safely out of the area of combat that made me think of the word “ally”. With allies like this, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank need better friends. It also made me think of the Campus Fallacy:
The belief, usually found at elite campuses, that everyone in the world agrees with you because everyone in your immediate environment is on your side.
I don’t really mean to mock. Universities are the place which have evolved in our societies as the place where people make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Campuses are the first place many people get out from under parental constrictions. For some, attuned to the world’s imperfections, it is a place to scream about injustice in the passionate, child-like belief that shouting loudly while marching for a cause will convince the whole world to stop in its tracks and fix the problem.
I know a bit about the Campus Fallacy having lived it. I entered Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the autumn of 1968, a few weeks after the chaos at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. “The whole world is watching!” was the chant of the crowd as the city’s police force waded into them, cracking heads and other body parts in what was officially described as a “police riot”. At that moment the whole world. or at least most of America, probably was watching. But the people in Chicago’s Lincoln Park thought they were watching with disapproval. That was certainly the view of the Antiochians who had been in Chicago. In retrospect, I’m not so sure everyone tuned in to watch the convention disapproved.
Antioch was a small school in a village of 2500 people literally surrounded by cornfields. Our very left-wing voices were heard only by us and carried away on the wind into the fields. Only occasionally did the wider reality reach us.
I learned the Campus Fallacy forcefully in May 1970, when four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University at the other end of Ohio while protesting the Vietnam War. Everything at Antioch shuddered to a halt. Regular activities were replaced by rumours, meetings, and earnest discussions about what phase of revolution the Kent State massacre represented: was it 1905, the unsuccessful first attempt at Revolution in Russia or 1917, when bold action seized power?
As if by osmosis, in an age where a payphone in the dorm was the only connection to the outside world, students around the US organized a demonstration for Washington DC on Saturday May 9th just five days after the shootings.
My best friend Dan and I headed for DC. The further we got from campus the more it became clear, it was not 1905 or 1917 or 1848 or any other time when revolution occurred. America was going about its business as if nothing had happened.
In Washington, the demonstration gathered on the Ellipse between the Lincoln and Washington monuments. Newspaper reports underestimate the size of the crowd but, as I was there, believe me when I say it was north of 100,000.
And yet at the same time the city was filled with normal weekend tourists, visiting the various Smithsonian museums and the monuments along the Mall, trying to avoid getting too caught up in our event. When the speeches were over, the demo dispersed and I ended with a smaller group marching around the perimeter of the White House, which was surrounded by a barrier of DC busses, and joined a sit-in at Lafayette Square.
After a brief period, tear gas was used to move us along. Walking away from the fumes, I came across a friend who was working in Washington. He was sauntering along, window shopping and had no idea that our event had even taken place. It was an example of the Campus Fallacy in action. The Whole World is Watching—except when it isn’t.
Interestingly, the word “allyship” came into use on campuses in the same era.
I wonder if Palestinian radicals in 1970 took notice of this left-wing, university support.
I am certain they did. There were plenty of global get-togethers in those days between First World campus radicals and young, radical leaders of what was then called the “Third World”.
Did the various factions grouped under the PLO umbrella feel emboldened by these contacts, did they overestimate the power of the First World students’ voices? No way to know for sure, but my educated guess, based on conversations with people my age in the Middle East many decades later, is the answer is yes.
In the 60s and 70s, airplane hijackings became a regular tactic for groups all over the world to call attention to their political grievances. Various Palestinian factions joined in and were cheered on by campus radicals. In September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked five planes and flew them to a former British airfield in Jordan.
After Israel occupied the West Bank following the Six-Day War in 1967 many Palestinians fled over the Jordan River into Jordan itself. The PLO had set up a kind of state within the state there from which they could launch raids into Israel this explains why the hijacked planes were flown to the country.
These Palestinian radicals were a genuine threat to King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy and the hijackings precipitated the events of “Black September” two weeks later. Jordanian forces engaged the PLO in what can only be described as a civil war. By the time it ended early the following year, 3,400 Palestinian fighters were dead and the PLO had been forced to a new place of exile: southern Lebanon.
In 1972, Black September was the nom de guerre of the group that invaded the Olympic Village during the Munich Olympics. The terrorists killed two Israeli athletes and took nine others hostage. The Israeli hostages would eventually be killed along with five of the Black September squad and one West German policeman in an abortive attempt to free them.
Kevin MacDonald’s 1999 Oscar-winning documentary about the event, One Day in September, contains an interview with the last surviving member of the Black September hit squad, Jamal al-Gashey. He told the filmmaker,
“I’m proud of what I did at Munich because it helped the Palestinian cause enormously. Before Munich the world had no idea about our struggle but on that day, the name of 'Palestine' was repeated all around the world.”
Is that really why he and his fellows killed the Israeli athletes? To make the name of Palestine heard all over the planet? “The whole world is watching”, is the voice of the campus speaking. It is the late adolescent preference for making gestures, even bloody ones, against injustice, rather than forming a serious plan for long term political or military action with a goal to be achieved.
Al-Gashey’s assertion was wrong. The name Palestine was already very well-known, not only because of the 1967 war and Israel’s subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but also because of the hijackings and other acts of terror prior to Munich.
And while there is no properly collected and evaluated research into global public opinion on the subject since 1967, anecdotally it would seem that a majority of people think these acts of terror hurt the Palestinian cause more than help it.
Over the decades, Palestinian and then Islamist terror have undone moments of public sympathy for their plight. From al-Qaeda to Da’esh/ISIS to Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), many reasons are given by the Islamist perpetrators for their bloody actions, but bringing an end to the “Zionist entity” is almost always among them. So the Palestinians get conflated with these groups and sympathy for their situation is much less than it might be.
And when Hamas, armed and trained by Iran’s IRGC, commits the kind of atrocities it did on October 7th the whole world is, indeed, watching but perhaps seeing the slaughter for what it is and not, as allies like Hearst write, seizing the “right of return” or exercising a “will to resist that is stronger than that of their occupier.”
Except on campus and its extension course for all ages: Twitter.
The above tweet put up following a march in London last Saturday (Oct 21st) is the Campus Fallacy in action: a slogan wrapped in an assumption—everyone agrees with me and my friends—and the solution to injustice is simple, just march against it. More than half a century of history proving that this is not the case hasn’t changed anyone’s tactics. Just as in the late 60s people substitute sloganizing in lieu of real political strategizing.
100,000 people marched in London on Saturday. As in Washington DC that long ago Saturday after Kent State, the city went about its business.
Those who want to provide meaningful support to Palestinians should leave the campus fallacy and its jargon—“Ally-ship”, “settler colonialism” etc—behind.
Ally, as too many progressives use it, has become a term of absolute commitment. What Hamas did is evil. It is possible to condemn their actions and still support the creation of a Palestinian state or to loudly deplore the current Israeli government’s actions in the West Bank. Yet these Western allies utter no condemnation of the atrocities. It shouldn’t be that difficult a task unless they really do like the idea of Hamas murdering Jews and kidnapping Israelis known to be working for a just resolution of the Occupation. As one speaker at the “All Out for Palestine” rally in New York said,
“The resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”
The allies laughed at that one, but a friend wouldn’t have. Friends tell friends when they are making mistakes, help them through dark periods, build the trust to tell them hard truths about themselves. What Palestinians need to hear are words a friend would speak, “Hamas’s actions were wrong, glorfying the massacres hurt the cause.”
One of the more remarkable bits of journalism since Oct 7th was this interview by Rasha Nabil on Al Arabiya, a Saudi news channel, with the head of Hamas, Khaled Mishal, at his home in Qatar safely away from the destruction of Gaza.
It was a masterclass in interviewing an ideologue.
Nabil: "How can you demand that the West, and the world in general, support the Palestinian cause, when the things Hamas perpetrated against the Israeli civilians are in the headlines? You know that Israel gained a lot of sympathy because of these scenes. Is treating civilians this way part of Hamas's ideology?"
Mashal: "Sister, I told you that Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and our military organizations focus their resistance on the occupation forces, on the soldiers, but in all wars, there are some civilian victims. We are not responsible for them."
I’m pretty sure Ms. Nabil is not a Zionist but in publicly questioning the hate-filled tactics of Mashal in this way she showed herself to be a true friend to Palestinians and their cause.
Friends don’t let friends commit acts of terror. Allies shouldn’t either.
This post has focused on the Palestinian side but I am nothing if not even-handed and in the weeks to come I will write about Israel’s bad choices over the decades. I also hope to write about something other than Israel Hamas 2023. I have learned a lot covering conflicts and conflict resolution over the last 35 years, so please:
Old Testament and Koranic texts cannot be changed or reconciled, despite uncertain authorship, and the blood for land, my own, and the world’s complicity in it continues. Zealous settlers and Hamas are hideous reflections of each other. Brazen land theft and open air prisons do not give the impression of a society interested in reconciliation. Who should be an ally, Israel, the Saudis, Qatar, or the Palestinians? Who has more to offer as far resources seems the answer. Perhaps if Jarod Kushner had committed to a partnership with the Saudis to create a Palestinian homeland with X trillion dollars at least might have helped. The cancerous conservative versions of beliefs are an anathema to the this conflicts resolution. Conquest bequeaths conquest. I’m an 80s street protester from Iran Contra days but across the pond but munitions factories are working overtime in Chicagoland and we have no functioning government for the foreseeable future and it’s starting to feel hot over here. Perhaps I read too much NYT… Take care Michael, and thanks as always.