Liberals Should Start Taking Anti-Israel Activists at Their Word
SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.”
Would progressives have taken a cooler view of the demonstrators had they possessed a clearer view of their objectives? Some might. But others would not. Progressives tend to take a romantic view of left-wing protest. Protesters occupy a special category of political actor, freed of any responsibility or agency and judged only as a counterweight against the worst excesses of whatever they oppose. They represent an idealistic impulse and revulsion at the status quo, and since the status quo is unjust, their behavior, by definition, cannot be. All that matters is that their actions are directionally correct.
To the extent progressives feel any discomfort with the goals or methods of protesters, they tend to rationalize them by invoking noble protests from past eras.
But the leaders of these specific protests, as Chait documents, have made their actual beliefs quite explicit, and one “common thread” is an “unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood.”
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