Everything is Palestine

A distant conflict devours the European left.

Illustrations by Dorotea De Santis

What does safe cycling infrastructure in Europe have to do with the plight of the Palestinians? Nothing, you might think – and you would be right.

But not everyone agrees. There is a small but noisy group of people who feel entitled to insert Palestine activism into any vaguely left-coded gathering, from climate marches to Labour Day parades and even certain concerts and festivals.[1] They’re doing the left a great deal of harm.

Last week I attended Critical Mass in Brussels, a monthly gathering of cyclists intended to assert our right to a fair share of road space without being menaced by drivers. With the car threat neutralised by weight of numbers, cycling becomes carefree and joyous: a window into a better urban future. It’s successful largely because it’s fun, and not overtly political.

This time, though, somebody felt it would be appropriate to fly a large Palestine flag from the back of his bicycle. Another man draped a flag around his shoulders like a cape, and a third had stickers on his helmet. Several wore keffiyehs. One man had even dressed his child, who can’t have been older than five, in a Palestine-flag scarf. All of these people were white.

The entitlement they felt to bring these symbols to a completely unrelated, largely apolitical event points to a troubling degree of moral certainty. These people are not just showing their allegiance to a cause; they’re asserting that all right-thinking people must feel the same way, and nobody at a progressive gathering could possibly be offended by it.

I’ve written at length about the problems with Palestine activism. Regardless of its intention, it’s often antisemitic in effect because of its obsessive focus on the world’s only Jewish state. It relies on an inaccurate reading of the region’s history; and it wrongly blames Israel alone, rather than cynical Arab autocrats, for Palestinian suffering.

You may still disagree with me, but not everybody does. There are many people who care deeply about left-coded social causes, from active transport to workers’ rights, who are uncomfortable being part of a crowd that might at any point start shouting antisemitic slogans.[2] If the point of activism is to build a coalition for social change, then repelling these people counts as a failure.

Attack of the Omnicause

There is a trend on the activist left to declare that everything is related, that climate change and social justice “can’t be separated from” the Middle East or gender politics. The idea has roots in the American Civil Rights movement, when Martin Luther King said that “no one is free until we are all free” and that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

These are effective slogans, but in practice King was fighting a limited battle with a clearly defined objective: equality for black Americans. He did not particularly concern himself with, say, women’s rights – and the movements that successfully did so, such as the suffragists, were as narrowly focused on that goal as King was on his.

As the world has grown more interconnected and the range of potential social causes has expanded, activism has become muddled and unfocused. A simplistic view has taken hold that Western colonialism is somehow to blame for all the world’s ills, and that if only this could be undone then everything from gender inequality to African corruption would be solved.

In reality, these supposedly aligned causes often conflict with each other. There is tension between women’s equality and trans rights,[3] and between mass migration and workers’ rights. Nobody has worked out how to free Palestine while preserving a safe country for Jews. The world is complicated; you can't just wave a magic wand and 'decolonise' everything.

It takes a great deal of privilege to be able to ignore these contradictions. To be ideologically pure you must be politically insulated, which is why membership of the activist left is so heavily skewed towards the comfortable middle class.

Ultimately, raging against an imaginary global conspiracy is the coward’s way out. It allows for a sort of intellectual martyrdom where one can fail to achieve anything and still feel righteous, rather than doing the hard work of politics and compromise.

For every issue added to the Omnicause and arrogantly paraded at unrelated events, a group of people is excluded. Instead of building a coalition for change, the activist left is screaming into the wind as potential allies slink away.

Besides recruiting allies, activists must also win over neutral bystanders. Here too, the insertion of Palestine activism or other unrelated causes limits the number of people who might be persuaded by any given idea.

Imagine someone in a car watching Critical Mass go past. If they think it looks fun, or marvel at how many people can move along a road when they’re not in cars, then the activism has succeeded. If they see a peloton for Palestine and dismiss it as a bunch of lefty lunatics, then it has failed.

Who’s left?

The self-immolation of the left is already having political consequences. Youth climate leaders, who carried so much moral force just a few years ago, have degenerated into all-purpose angry leftists. Although a large majority of Europeans still support ambitious climate policy, there is no longer a credible, broad-based activist movement to agitate for it.

Across Europe, green and left-wing parties have collapsed while those on the right and far right surge. This goes right down to the local level, where my own trajectory as a swing voter offers food for thought.

After moving to Brussels in 2017, I had the chance to vote in local elections in 2018 and regional elections in 2019.[4] Both times I voted Green because I wanted fewer cars in my neighbourhood, better cycling infrastructure, and human-centric shared urban spaces.

The Greens won and delivered. Cafe terraces now sprawl onto public squares once littered with parked cars. Children play and learn to cycle on a pretty, shaded road next to a lake, protected from traffic. The air is cleaner, the streets quieter. It’s a great example of progressive local politics achieving tangible change for the better.

But by the next regional and local elections in late 2024, the tone had changed. At a debate ahead of the vote, a British man in a keffiyeh asked what the candidates intended to do about the “genocide” in Gaza (exactly what action he expected from Belgian municipal councils isn’t clear).

The Greens took the bait. In a pointless bit of political theatre, the mayor of my commune broke off a twinning agreement with an Israeli town just before the vote. Since then the Greens in the Brussels region have doubled down on Palestine activism.

They lost my vote, and with it the election. I switched my allegiance to a Flemish centre-left party that also supports progressive urbanism while staying out of distant conflicts. But control of my commune passed to conservative parties that have begun to reverse the urban progress made in the last five years.

A road protected for pedestrians and cyclists has been reopened to cars, so wealthy suburbanites can once more speed through my neighbourhood in their SUVs. The cycling network remains half-built, still too patchy to encourage vulnerable people onto bikes.

At the national level, climate action has been halted and company car subsidies remain. Landlords and inheritors still have their tax breaks.

And the activist left, wrapped in a keffiyeh, is screaming into the wind.

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[1] Emboldened by Palestine flags in the crowd, a performer at Glastonbury last week led a chant of “death, death to the IDF”.

[2] For instance, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” calls for the destruction of the entire state of Israel. Anyone who has spent five minutes in the Middle East knows that Jews would not be safe in whatever entity replaced it.

[3] Nick Cohen has written about how denial of this simple truth has undermined trans rights, here.

[4] The 2019 vote also included a national election, which I couldn’t take part in as I wasn’t yet a citizen.