Are American Settlers Hypocrites for Protesting Israel’s Colonialism?
The impossibility of integrity, and the nature of faith
What if those of us in America who are against Israel’s occupation of Palestine got everything we wanted? Imagine we convinced Israel and its enablers to end the violence. Imagine Palestinians got their freedom, the right to govern themselves, their land back, and reparations for every atrocity.
Couldn’t a Zionist then turn to us and say, “Alright, now do America.” And wouldn’t they have a point?
Why Don’t We Protest Western Governments the Same as Israel?
In real life, this kind of challenge is typically “whataboutism,” cynical, unprincipled deflection. But I am not deflecting. I’m asking a question about our consistency.
Israel is facing enormous opposition to its bombardment of Palestine, its broader occupation, and even its existence as a state that operates for the benefit of a specific ethnic and religious group. The sheer numbers of people protesting, the diplomatic pressure from around the world, and the wide-ranging calls to boycott, divest from, and sanction the country are on a large and encouraging scale. Yet it has undying support from the world’s largest superpower. A country that exemplifies what awaits when genocide and land theft are successful.
Still when I march for a ceasefire in Manhattan, I doubt very many of us in the crowd are thinking about the Lenni-Lenape. Their former trade route we call Broadway. The Wall we built to keep them from returning, now synonymous with our country’s vast wealth. Their numbers decimated. Their people displaced as far as Ontario, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma, their language and customs in need of “revitalization efforts.” Their islands, ours to do with as we please. And all this, we said, because our God wanted it so. Most of the time, we do not spare them so much as a thought. It’s unavoidable: New York City is Israel’s wildest dream come true. We can serve as its blueprint, manual, and North Star. The circumstances are no different across America and much of the Western Hemisphere. And the Europeans whose ancestors unleashed all this death and destruction, they protest Israel as well.
How can we march against them? Why don’t we direct the same fervor, the same amount of time and resources, toward ourselves? Do we think we get a pass because our genocides happened a long time ago? Because they feel completed? Irreversible? Because we got them in before all these international human rights norms?
And then I wonder if at least part of the explanation is simple, staring us right in the face. If demands for accountability are significantly louder for Israel than any equivalent demands of Western powers, what is the obvious difference? What is the impact? It’s accountability for Jews, and not for us.
I care very little about the intent of individual protestors like myself. The outcome of this double standard is what it is. There’s no getting around that. And there is certainly no getting around the fact that our protests, encampments, and organizations have sometimes displayed explicit and terrifying anti-Semitic bigotry.1 We are not immune to the influence of 2,000 years of Western history.
I’m guessing we don’t want to talk about anti-Semitism because we don’t want to concede ground to Israel’s supporters, who casually and constantly weaponize the word against critics. I’ve never liked that kind of political excuse-making though. It’s hypocrisy, downplaying the significance of dehumanizing Jewish people because some Jewish people use that as a cover to dehumanize others. Plus, I don’t want to let considerations like this stop me from thinking my position all the way through. Fear of losing ground in a political battle is rarely a starting place for nuanced and fruitful thoughts.
What Do We Do in Light of this Hypocrisy?
Speaking of fruitful thoughts, what difference does anything I’m saying make in the real world? Regarding Israel’s violence in the short term, relatively little. Keep fighting. As Jonathan noted in February in our newsletter, Israel’s violence will most likely end when the US and other Western powers decide. Your marching, phone calls, social posts, and emails—they matter. The difference is we need to speak out against actual anti-Semitism, wherever it comes from.
But then why bring up hypocrisy and indigenous people in the West? Because if the world “whatabouts” you, the response should be to deepen your integrity. Turn the bad faith question into an opportunity for more consistent, and therefore more powerful, advocacy for your cause.
We need to take the call to undo settler colonialism everywhere as seriously as we do in Israel. This means educating ourselves and others on the history of our own genocides of indigenous people. It means supporting native political causes, often revolving around issues like tribal sovereignty, environmental protection, abuses in the child welfare system,, funding for government services to tribes, and many others. It means supporting the nascent Land Back movement. And above all, it means listening to indigenous voices for political direction. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean all of us as individuals. I mean “we” as the movement at large. Not everyone can spend all their time fighting settler colonialism on one front, let alone any place it shows up.
Is Opposing Settler Colonialism Just too Big of a Task?
But if we start down the road of consistency, despair can kick in quickly. Justice for people whose destruction was the premise of White, Western society is beyond daunting. What would justice of that magnitude even look like? And if you could answer that question, how on earth would you go about implementing it? Are we really going to think about giving indigenous people their land back? What happens to the whole society we built on top of it? Also, just ending Israel’s current violence in Palestine will be difficult to accomplish, let alone freeing Palestine and creating some kind of justice for the last 80 years of suffering. And then if we lose steam after that, was the movement really interested in justice? Or were we just making sure Jewish people didn’t get the opportunity to act like us?
This is where I’ve been stuck for a while. If you want to be consistent, the scope and breadth of oppression you have to acknowledge are enormous. And by all my own experience and knowledge of history, we will never have any significant impact on that level of oppression. Thinking on this grand of a scale to me feels both necessary and pointless. Necessary, as I’ve said, for consistency’s sake. And because it’s the scale on which colonialism operates. Pointless because no one is going to do anything about it. No one can. We don’t have the political will. Even talking about “political will” seems absurd. Who has ever heard of the political will to upend the foundation of the world’s most powerful countries?
The Faith to Fight for Justice without Having Every Answer
My only way through this is faith. Not the notion of faith many people grow up with, the spiritual cop-out. The shoulder-shrugging excuse to stop thinking about something difficult. I mean faith as a way to move forward without a path. The motivation to put one foot in front of the other when things appear hopeless and the world doesn’t care. I mean exercising the ability to “be sure of the things we do not yet see” (Hebrews 11:1, FNV). We need to insist that impossible tasks do not stop us from working because we do not place hope in the fact that we have solutions, that we know the way forward, or that we can get the job done. We have hope because, as that same verse says, we trust God. God has shown us over and over that we don’t need answers to live justly or follow him. He makes a way out of none. He never asked us to solve every problem, just to keep going after him. To keep testifying to the truth of the peaceful kingdom that is near.
That passage in Hebrews continues, praising people who lived by faith, though they never saw the true impact of their work. People like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who lived in tents in the hope of one day seeing a city built by God. Or Sarah, who by faith gave birth when birth should have been impossible, founding a vast people. “Every one of these people died still trusting in Creator. Even though they did not receive all that had been promised, they took the promises to heart and welcomed them from afar” (Hebrews 11:13). This is our task, to work for the just kingdom of God. Not because we will see in our lifetimes what we imagine, but because we have faith in a God who does not fail. He will be with us, and all those who come after us, on the long and winding road to peace.
I should say explicitly what I’ve implied. Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Neither is holding views critical of Israel, or even arguing that it should cease to exist in its current form because states built for the benefit of one people group are inherently repressive.