Objecting to bad things doesn’t require moral perfection. Demanding that someone first condemn all bad things before condemning one bad thing is lazy sophistry.
It’s also the case that Israel’s actions are uniquely reviled around the world and that people are quick to rally to oppose its crimes in ways that they are not willing to publicly oppose and condemn the crimes of other state actors. I saw previously few rallies when the Ethiopian government was murdering a million or more Tigrayans, mostly by starving them to death.
There are a variety of plausible reasons for this.
Israel is supported by many of the governments of the countries in which these protests are occurring. Protests might be more likely in places where people feel like they might actually exert a policy impact.
Israel is also extensively covered by the international press and, critically, English-language press.
Conceptually, I suspect most Westerners have internalized the idea of Israel as “one of us” and react to Israeli crimes as belonging to “our side,” with a concomitant sense of personal responsibility and sense that Israel might actually listen.
Causes sometimes also become popular by being popular, in the same way that the Mona Lisa is a good but not exceptional painting that became famous for being famous.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of countless people imprisoned in the US but became *the* cause celebre prisoner among the activist left primarily by being famous. Entirely separate from any question of the worthiness of his cause is the simple fact that calls for his release, and *only* him by name, have been omni-present at countless and entirely unrelated leftist events.
I suspect Israel is an example of this process, by which the prominence of activism against Israeli crimes reinforces its prominence in a positive feedback loop.
But it is also an inescapable fact that the world’s only Jewish state is also the target of a considerable proportion of the world’s public hostility to aggression and abuse by world governments.
Israel does many bad things. It is also not *uniquely* bad. There are many states that do many bad things around the world, to their own subjects and people across borders, that don’t receive anything like the volume and intensity of criticism that Israel does.
Some of the same people will say, with a straight face, that Ukrainian resistance to Russian state aggression is invalidated by the existence of the Azov brigade and that criticism of Hamas is tantamount to Nazism.
We cannot lose sight of anti-Semitism as a unique form of intersectional hatred that has operated *for at least a thousand years* in centuries of racial and class oppression and repeated genocides.
I’m not in a position to evaluate which of these causes outweighs the other, and I’m sure I’m grossly oversimplifying a complex situation.
One can object to Israel’s violence against Palestinians without first having established equal and comparable bona fides by condemning, say, the Saudi monarchy’s obscene and utterly pointless violence in Yemen. There are no teams but those with power and those without, my side always being on the side of those without power, and we don’t need to “both sides” every bad thing by identifying bad acts by a competing national team or racialized Other to condemn in balance.
But those of us with a western background must also be willing to be self-critical about the foundational role of anti-Semitism in western society. Anti-Semitism is not just one bigotry among many, but has been uniquely intense, consistent, widespread, and enduring. It is an original sin that has poisoned everything that came after, in the same way that seemingly obscure imperial Roman ideas about property from two thousand years ago continue to serve to ruin countless lives today.
It would be a cosmic coincidence if the one country that received this level of international opprobrium—even though it’s justified!—also happens to be the one country that is primarily populated by, and was founded as a national home for, the same people who were hounded out of virtually every country in Europe and the Middle East by centuries and centuries of murder.
I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.
Some of this is undoubtedly just a case of the banal “team sports” ethos that permeates so much of what passes for leftist discourse. Some folks have already pointed this out in the comments: in the same way that the US is seen as uniquely possessing agency, and thus being uniquely responsible for bad things in the world, Israel receives condemnation because it’s a key player on the “bad team.”
Ukrainians should surrender to Russia because Ukraine is “on the bad team.” Israel is widely reviled, at least in part, because it’s “on the bad team.”
And maybe it will pay off. Public pressure on western states to isolate South Africa played a major role in the end of Apartheid in that country, so maybe it will have a similar effect this time. One can hope!
@HeavenlyPossum I’m not sure about the Middle East … Arab Jews were not subjected to European type of antisemitism like some on the Israeli right started suggesting when reparations to the Palestinians was being discussed … but otherwise it’s true that there needs to be awareness that not everyone who rightfully criticizing Israel for its actions in respect to the Palestinians are doing so because they care about them.
But there’s also no doubt Israel has weaponized antisemitism when the right in Israel got to power, increasingly so after 1977. It used to be a complete taboo to talk about Nazis and the holocaust in the way Israeli officials are doing today, and Israel was doing that before October 7th.
Before the Hamas there was Amin al-Husseini that #Netanyahu tried to credit with the final solution. Yad Vashem had to publish research notes refuting and admonishing him. And before that, already in the 1950s Menachem Begin referred to the Arabs as Nazis, and before invading Lebanon in 1982 he said the alternative is Treblinka…
@HeavenlyPossum I'd say that another factor is there being a large Palestinian diaspora around the world, too
@HeavenlyPossum but yeah, that said, the way a lot of leftists hurried to defend Assad when he was bombing Palestinian refugee camps was definitely something