Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left

Whatever you think of Israel, there's just no future in "global intifada" and "Death to America".

Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

Ostensibly, this is supposed to be an economic blog. So how are leftist protests, like the ones currently happening at Columbia University, related to economics? Unfortunately, there are several connections. First of all, leftists are potentially an important vector by which economic ideas enter our discourse — if it weren’t for the Bernie Sanders movement, we probably wouldn’t be talking about things like student debt relief, universal basic income, national health insurance, and so on. The Seattle WTO protests highlighted a bunch of problems with the way globalization was being done in the 90s, Occupy Wall Street made financial reform more urgent, and so on.

Second of all, leftists can affect electoral politics, which has a huge impact on which economic ideas get implemented. Right now, Palestine protests are occurring on college campuses and on urban freeways. But this summer, there will probably be major protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which could affect the tenor of media coverage of Biden’s reelection campaign — much like the protests of 1968. Although Trump is more pro-Israel than Biden, Palestine protesters feel that Biden has betrayed them, and focus all of their ire against him and other Democrats. Thus, it’s not impossible to imagine that leftists could ultimately tip a very close election to Trump.

So yes, leftists and their Palestine protest campaign are a thing I should probably talk about. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is the end of an arc of American leftism movement that began in the 1990s, gained strength from the Iraq War and the financial crisis, and reached its apex in unrest of the late 2010s. Leftists would like to believe that the Palestine protests are reinvigorating their movement; instead, I think they represent a dead end that the movement won’t easily be able to recover from, no matter who wins the election in November.

The reason, in a nutshell, is that the Palestine protests represent an unreasonable ideology. Even setting aside the extremists who show up to the protests and say antisemitic things and express support for Hamas and Iran — and it isn’t at all clear we should set them aside — the Palestine protests embrace an unworkable ideology. They represent a distorted, fantastical view of foreign policy, an anti-Americanism that can’t possibly be appeased or mollified, and a set of unworkable and often immoral policy demands.

This is a movement that’s going nowhere, and serves to do little except weaken the nation and misdirect the energies of the youth.

Steelmanning the Palestine protests

Before I bash the Palestine protests, I want to make sure I’m not being unfair to them. In some circles, this is called “steelmanning”.

Newspaper columnist Will Bunch recently tweeted the following:

Bunch is, of course, wrong. The America half a century ago had plenty of protesters whom most Americans would regard as unreasonable today. Anti-nuclear protests, protests in favor of population control, the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage”, and many other leftist protests of the time look misguided or just plain stupid in retrospect — and that’s to say nothing of right-wing protests that were happening at the same time. We tend to remember the successful movements, like the Vietnam War protests or the Civil Rights marches, and forget about the ones that failed.

But most protests are rooted in some sort of real grievance, however tenuously. An unreasonable movement can usually be connected, by some sort of lengthy chain of associations, to a reasonable political proposition. In the case of the Palestine protests, it’s not difficult to see what that reasonable position would be.

Israel is undeniably acting brutally in Gaza. Yes, there is a ton of misinformation and overheated rhetoric out there about Israel’s actions, but the truth is bad enough. In order to avoid ground casualties, the IDF has resorted to standoff attacks — basically blowing up buildings from afar when they contain someone they think might be a Hamas fighter. Those attacks end up killing a lot of innocent bystanders, and the IDF doesn’t seem too concerned about that — or at least, not nearly as concerned as the U.S. would be in their place.

Israel has also risked a humanitarian catastrophe by forcing an already extremely overcrowded Gazan population into a tiny area called Rafah in the south of the strip. With insufficient food and medical supplies, the civilian population there is suffering enormously, despite playing no role in the October 7 attacks. And that’s before a planned IDF military offensive in that sole remaining refuge area. This is the kind of thing the Syrian military or the Houthi militia might do, or other brutal Middle Eastern regimes — it’s not the kind of thing the U.S. would do.

Even American writers who support Israel’s existence and right to self-defense have been horrified by its brutality in this war. Overall, support for Israel’s actions has fallen across the board in America. Biden is considering making aid to Israel conditional if it attacks Rafah.

Nor has Israel been a particularly good ally to the United States under Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has ignored American leaders’ concerns about the conduct of the war in Gaza, and has brazenly and openly demanded that the U.S. vote the way he wants it to at the UN Security Council. America’s leaders are getting fed up, and rightly so.

And on top of all that, the U.S. has very little to gain from being involved in the Gaza war, either morally or militarily. It’s a diversion of resources and attention from Asia, which is by the far the most important theater of conflict in the world today, and from Europe, where Ukraine’s cause is infinitely more unambiguous than Israel’s. A smart move, both in terms of resources and international opinion, would be for the U.S. to wash its hands of this conflict, offer to mediate peace talks, organize Arab states to help guard against Iranian meddling, and pivot entirely to Asia and Europe.

All this could have made for a humane, reasonable, and just Palestine protest movement. Decrying Israeli brutality on the battlefield, denouncing Netanyahu, and demanding that the U.S. adopt a position of neutrality in the conflict would make sense. In fact, I’m sure that at least a few of the Palestine protesters believe that this is what they are, in fact, protesting for.

On top of all that, I don’t think the Palestine protests are inherently antisemitic. Just as criticism of China doesn’t imply racism against Chinese Americans, and criticism of Iran or Saudi Arabia doesn’t imply Islamophobia, criticism of Israel doesn’t imply antisemitism. Some people fear that bashing Israel will lead to a rise in antisemitism among the American people more broadly, but I am not worried; as Musa al-Gharbi and Matt Yglesias have both pointed out, most of the antisemitic attitudes in the U.S. are still on the political Right.

So I can see an alternate world in which the Palestine protests were reasonable and good, and in which I would support them. But that is simply not the actual world we live in, or the actual protest movement we got.

Why the Palestine protests are unreasonable

The biggest problem with the Palestine protest movement is that despite sometimes calling for a ceasefire, it is not a peace movement in any meaningful sense of the term. It is, by and large, a movement in support of violent, armed struggle against Israel and any country in support of Israel.

Shortly after the October 7 attacks, I noted that many leftist protesters, including a bunch of DSA chapters, came out in support of the violence — even before Israel struck back:

Western leftists have lost the plot

As Israel’s campaign in Gaza intensified, the protest movement shifted to calls for a ceasefire. But as Hamas rejected ceasefire proposals again and again, protesters gradually shifted away from the “ceasefire” messaging. As the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, protesters in the U.S. started chanting “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.”

Now, at the new round of protests, even more warlike messaging has become the norm. The Yemen chant was modified to “Al-Qassam you make us proud, kill another soldier now.” Another chant called to “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground”. Protesters danced to rap lyrics declaring “Israel gon’ die bitch”. Many protesters chant “intifada, revolution” or call to “globalize the intifada”. One tent at Columbia had a sign addressed to “the scum of nations and pigs of the Earth”, declaring that “paradise lies in the shadow of swords”. Other protesters declared that October 7 would be the beginning of a global revolution. Here’s a viral tweet that typifies the attitudes I see coming from leftists:

This is not a peace movement or an antiwar movement. This is a militant, pro-war movement.

Now, I’m not trying to claim that peace movements are the only good protest movements! Countries have a right to resist invasion, occupation, and destruction, just like Ukraine is now resisting Russia’s invasion. But the Palestine protesters want more than the expulsion of Israel’s army from Gaza and the West Bank; they want Israel to be destroyed by armed force, because they believe that the land of Israel rightfully belongs to the Palestinian people.

A movement in favor of the armed destruction of an internationally recognized nation-state is at an inherent moral disadvantage. That destruction would doubtless involve the slaughter of a great many Israelis and the ethnic cleansing of most of the remainder — an even greater atrocity than Israel is now wreaking upon Gaza. And it would also overturn the international norm of territorial integrity that has largely prevailed since World War 2 — the idea that countries shouldn’t be invaded and destroyed.

Israel has undoubtedly violated that norm, with its land grabs in the West Bank. But the destruction of Israel in the name of an irredentist Palestinian land claim would violate that norm to an even greater degree. Palestine protesters are thus using one atrocity as an excuse to call for an even greater atrocity. That’s not just inhumane; it’s an invitation to global chaos. It’s a call for a return to the law of the jungle, where nations press ancient land claims with invasion, ethnic cleansing and genocide. That’s not a future most people in the world want, and insisting on it will ensure that Palestine protesters are widely regarded as extremists.

On top of that, the Palestine protesters have made their movement an explicitly anti-American one. The Iranian government’s chant of “Death to America, Death to Israel” has already made appearances at some rallies. Leftists regularly post on social media about how the Palestinian cause will ultimately lead to the destruction of the U.S.:

And at the University of Michigan, some protesters are now passing out flyers declaring that “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America:

This is stupid; almost no American is going to support the destruction of their country in the name of Palestine. By attaching their dreams of revolution and the destruction of the U.S. to the Palestinian cause, the protesters have condemned the latter to be permanently on the fringes.

These fundamental problems are already enough to consign the Palestine protests to ignominy. But on top of that, the protesters seem to have no real idea of how to get from a tent encampment on a university lawn to the goal of destroying Israel. The Columbia protests apparently began because some students realized that the university’s endowment owns shares of some ETFs that includes, among many other assets, shares in companies that sell equipment to the Israeli military. The idea that divesting from those ETFs would in any way inconvenience the IDF shows a deep and profound misunderstanding of how finance works. Meanwhile, other protest demands just come off as confused, such as calls for an end to “land grabs” in Harlem, NYC.

In other words, the Palestine protesters have no idea what they’re demanding or why, other than the destruction of Israel, and possibly America too — things that no university administrator, city council, or tech company can provide them.

And then, of course, there’s the antisemitism. Sure, opposing Israel isn’t inherently antisemitic, but these Palestine protests have definitely platformed a ton of antisemitism. One featured calls of “Yehudim, Yehudim, go back to Poland.” Another called for Jews to “Go back to Europe,” claiming they “have no culture”, and that all they do is “colonize” (Note: More than half of Israeli Jews are descended from Middle Easterners rather than Europeans). Meanwhile, there are numerous reports of students being assaulted for wearing Jewish religious hats, threatened for wearing a Jewish star necklace, and so on. Then there are signs like this one, from Columbia:

Source: Visegrad 24

There are still some Jewish people in the protests, of course. And many of the protesters probably find antisemitic displays distasteful and unhelpful. But the degree to which antisemitism has found a safe space and a platform at these events shows that the protests have essentially no ability to police their tone or stay on message. Which suggests that the Palestine movement in the U.S. is the kind of chaotic, disorganized movement that can never be appeased or negotiated with.

In other words, the Palestine protest movement is so utterly unreasonable that it will probably not be able to win much, and it will probably not be remembered as being one of the good movements 50 years from now. All it will do is create a sad spectacle, cause minor inconvenience, make a lot of people mad, and discredit the American leftist movement of the early 20th century.

Welcome to the New 1970s

My big thesis about America’s age of unrest is that the 2020s are the new 1970s. After 1971, unrest in America began to ebb; terrorist attacks and protest marches became less common, and most of the young people who had been riled up by the late 1960s went back to normal life to find jobs and families. But even as the masses got exhausted and retreated from street politics, those who stayed in the activist scene got crazier and crazier. I’m talking about the Symbionese Liberation Army, Ray Levasseur, the Black Liberation Army, and various other crazies. For a good overview of the general mood of exhaustion, read The Invisible Bridge, and for a good overview of the extreme crazies of the 70s, read Days of Rage. Unrest has a sort of “evaporative cooling” property — as the moderates drift away from a movement, the extremists become more extreme.

The American leftist movement feels like it’s in a similar position. There’s a clear difference with the Floyd protests of 2020. Those protests drew tens of millions into the streets, including people from all walks of life. Leftists marched, but moderates marched right alongside them. And some recent research by Gethin and Pons (2024) finds that unlike most protest movements, the Floyd protests were persuasive; they actually created support for Democrats and concern about racial discrimination in the areas where they happened.

Contrast this with the Palestine protests. They’ve drawn tens of thousands of activists across the nation, but that’s hundreds of times smaller than the Floyd protests. The country just isn’t pouring into the streets to support the Palestinian cause, nor is it going to. Part of that is because the issue is so morally murky and complex, part of it is because the Palestine protesters are so extremist, but mostly it’s that Americans aren’t that riled up about foreign affairs unless the U.S. itself is involved in the fighting. Polls show that Palestine is far down the list of issues that Americans — even young Americans — consider important.

Due to the lack of popular enthusiasm, the Palestine protesters are going to spend essentially of their effort protesting Democrats instead of Republicans. Everyone is worried about protests at the DNC, but no one’s worried about the RNC; this is even though the GOP is generally more pro-Israel than the Dems.

It reminds me a bit of when Bernie Sanders, no doubt at the urging of his radicalized campaign staff, tried to make his 2020 campaign all about toppling the Democratic establishment:

Being forced to fight your own side is the sign of a weak movement. The Floyd protests railed against police brutality, Donald Trump, fascism; that was a cause that moderates and liberals felt comfortable joining in, because they hated police brutality, Donald Trump, and fascism too. But moderates and liberals aren’t joining the Palestine protests; they are the target of those protests.

Perhaps if rightists — the Proud Boys, the Charlottesville “alt-right”, and so on — turned out into the street to battle the Palestine protesters, then liberals and moderates would get involved. But rightists just don’t care. In fact, when they see leftists smacking yarmulkes off the heads of Jewish kids on college campuses, alt-right types are more likely to pop open a beer and grab some popcorn.

In other words, the Palestine protests aren’t activating America’s broad, deep-rooted partisan instincts — instead, they’re one faction of extremists trying (and inevitably failing) to take over a center-left party that they’re nominally affiliated with but actually deeply despise.

The Palestine protests are the end of the line for the New Left, not because the protests are going to convince everyone that leftists are bad, but because they’re going to bore the heck out of the country while painting the leftists into an ideological corner.

America is just very damn tired. A decade of fighting over race and gender and Trump and fascism etc. has left the vast majority of people without the energy to fight the cops over some grubby, nasty Middle Eastern conflict half a world away. And they’re certainly not going to get up off their couches to fight for “Death to America” or “global intifada”.

So here we are in the New 1970s. The news headlines are still full of revolution and unrest, but the actual set of people driving those headlines is shrinking fast, even as it becomes more strident and extreme. I won’t be surprised if ten or fifteen years from now, we look back and wonder what happened to the Left.

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