How the Left Learned to Hate

Having spent most of my twenties on Ivy League campuses, I had expected condemnations of Israel. I had expected cries of “free Palestine!” I had even expected justifications: well yes, killing children and raping women is terrible, but it is all the fault of the occupation.

I hadn’t expected this.

By now, you’ve heard the stories. Open cries for a global intifada and a Palestine from “the river to the sea.” Chants of “glory to the martyrs.” Posters with celebratory pictures of parachuting terrorists on their way to massacre several hundred college-age students at a music festival. Expressions of “exhilaration” at the freedom-fighting events of October 7th. Denials that the massacres had happened at all.

You’ve also, probably, read some attempts at explanation. The Free Press’s Bari Weiss blamed it on the proliferation of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives during the childhoods of the current crop of protesters, encouraging them to assign moral value in proportion to victimization. Israelis are whiter, more western, and more privileged than the Palestinians; this (not, it should be said, entirely accurate) impression is enough to decide who is the evil oppressor, and who the virtuous oppressed.

She’s right, I think, but only up to a point. DEI has helped to make Israel and the Jews vulnerable to progressive hatred, and might well explain what I was seeing on campus ten years ago. It still doesn’t explain how a person dedicated to anti-racism and human rights winds up celebrating the brutal murder of entire families.

Many have pointed to that old hatred, anti-Semitism. That’s part of it too, of course; unlike the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, I harbor no confusion about whether calls for genocide are anti-Semitic. So is cancelling a Chanukah menorah lighting because you think it would signal support for bombing Gaza. So is shooting at a synagogue while shouting “free Palestine”!

But I don’t think anti-Semitism fully accounts for it either. Most of the people calling for intifada probably don’t think that shooting at a synagogue in Albany is legitimate resistance. They hate Israel enough to think that beheading a baby on a kibbutz is (“by any means necessary”!) But their hatred of Israel comes more, I think, from the fact of it being the progressive obsession du jour rather than from any particular hatred of Jews. That Israel wound up becoming such an object of obsession is no coincidence, but the majority of people buying into it are likely more useful idiots than committed anti-Semites, at least in the traditional sense. They are, ironically, blatant anti-Semites by the standards they themselves use in assessing any other form of prejudice. Yet their attitudes toward Jews by and large lack the element of ineradicable ethnic taint that was for centuries a core feature of anti-Semitism. Often, even conversion wasn’t enough to escape it; it might (or might not) save your life, but the taint in your blood would remain, keeping you always suspect and apart. True during the Inquisition and the Holocaust, it was true, to a far, far milder extent, as recently as the era of “restricted” country clubs and Ivy League quotas, which lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century. No matter how assimilated, a Jew was a Jew.

The Students for Justice in Palestine, by contrast, are perfectly happy to accept anti-Zionist Jews like their friends in Jewish Voice for Peace. If these Jews, as some of them do, celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays, wear kippot, and remain active in progressive Jewish communities, so much the better. If they really hit it off, the many atheists and nominally religious among them would probably be willing to date or marry a Jew, under a chuppah and with an appropriately anti-Zionist rabbi, if their partner wanted. After the Tree of Life shooting, they were likely appalled, and might have even made an appearance at a vigil or rally. The shooter, after all, was an old-fashioned, far-right anti-Semite, and the victims—members of a non-Orthodox congregation in Pittsburgh—were, at least when Israel wasn’t up for debate, the right kind of Jews.

No, in searching for how these progressive lovers of humanity so lost their moral compass, we need to look elsewhere. They don’t celebrate October 7^th because they hate Jews. They celebrate it because it has become disturbingly easy for them to hate almost everyone.

It is the difference between a hate group and a cult.

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I left the US in the first year of the Trump presidency. I didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t like him, and, in the months that passed between his inauguration and my move to Israel, occasionally protested against his policies. Beyond policy disagreement, I shared the sense of many Americans that Trump represented something different and dangerous in American politics, a crass demagogue whose defiance of political norms was corrosive rather than refreshing.

Yet in those months, I noticed something else. I suspect most people forget that Hillary Clinton, in her infamous line, called only half of Trump’s voters deplorables; later, she apologized for exaggerating in her estimate. But for many progressives in Cambridge, where I lived at the time, it seemed her mistake ran the other way. It was now taken for granted that those who voted for Trump—nearly 50 % of the American electorate—were irredeemable, necessarily bigoted, stupid, and cruel. Voting for Trump was seen as grounds for ending friendships or distancing oneself from family.

But it didn’t stop there. In the heightened rhetoric of the moment, one’s views on nearly every political issue became a profound moral choice and reflection of character. If one supported a disfavored policy, it could only be for the worst and most sinister reasons. “The cruelty is the point,” declared Atlantic reporter Adam Serwer of Trump’s supporters, in an article title that became a meme. Opponents of abortion were misogynists who wanted to control women. Law-and-order voters were modern-day segregationists participating in “The New Jim Crow.”  Economic conservatives were privileged fat cats who hated the poor, and especially poor minorities.

Of course, policy choices are often moral choices. The problem was the refusal to grant to these choices or the people making them any complexity at all. The progressive’s straw-man Trump voter was always voting for Trump because of, not in spite of, his worst qualities. He couldn’t be allowed to be misguided or simply wrong about foreign policy or immigration or tax cuts, but malicious; he knew these policies would bring grief and ruin to the less privileged and reveled in it. Any sincere conviction guiding him, from religious belief to philosophical commitment, was unworthy of respect. If a BIPOC committed a serious crime, his poverty, difficult upbringing, and experience of racism were put forward in amelioration. But for Trump voters, there were no mitigating circumstances, no understanding that the worldview of, say, an Appalachian coal miner might be shaped by rather different “lived experiences” than those of a New York attorney.

But it didn’t stop there either. About half of Americans voted for Trump. But increasingly, positions held by sizeable numbers of Democrats, too were beyond the pale. Support for Israel is one obvious example. While no longer the consensus position it once was, the vast majority Democrats in Congress still register reliable—if sometimes qualified—support for Israel. But for the furthest of the far left, even the most tepid support of Israel means backing racism (Zionism=racism, you know), settler colonialism, and genocide. So it isn’t only Trump voters, or Trump voters plus never-Trump Republicans, or those groups plus Joe Manchin, “blue dog” Democrats on the far right of that party who are deplorable—for how could a supporter of genocide not be deplorable? It is also Joe Biden and former progressive darling John Fetterman and most other Democrats to the left of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

The same holds true on any of a laundry list of issues. Not supporting affirmative action is racist. Objections to trans women and girls competing against biological females contribute to the trans suicide rate. Once, in a discussion about abortion access, I said that of course there had to be some limit past which it was no longer legal to end a healthy pregnancy. I was not expecting this to be controversial; Roe set a limit of 24 weeks, and while some states permit exceptions beyond that, the idea of a woman in the third trimester of a healthy pregnancy seeking or obtaining an abortion is more a right-wing strawman than a reality.

“Then you’re just another forced birther,” responded one woman.

Being a forced birther, would, needless to say, be a very bad thing to be, anti-woman and frankly totalitarian. Beyond the moral pale. And she was using it to refer to opposition to a hypothetical case of someone terminating a healthy, full-term pregnancy.

Even those with the right opinions can be tarred by association. You can’t really “cancel” Donald Trump, but I fully understand why former friends and associates from his pre-political life have stopped taking his calls. Social ostracism seems less fair to me in the case of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who were by most accounts moderating voices within the administration with attitudes well within the centrist mainstream. Even so, in becoming and remaining part of his administration, they made themselves legitimate targets. The same cannot be said of Karlie Kloss, the model married to Jared Kushner’s brother. Kloss and her husband are outspoken Democrats. Yet that is not enough, apparently, to avoid at least social media pile-ons, if not real-life consequences. Her only crime, it would seem, is not having cut off her in-laws.

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I am not trying to suggest that all drawing of lines is harmful. Indeed, sometimes—as those Ivy League presidents so recently reminded us—it is morally essential. We shouldn’t cry wolf; it doesn’t follow from that that wolves don’t exist. Reasonable people will disagree over exactly where those lines should be drawn. But those who draw them too narrowly risk becoming moral monsters, the kind of people who fight for human rights while hating most actual humans. Who would rejoice at your murder and call it social justice.

Social justice, at its best, arises from empathy with the plight of others. At its worst, it produces a profound failure of empathy, one that leaves the great majority of people outside the scope of moral concern. In the most extreme progressive order, almost all of us are deplorables, guilty of crimes—many of them thought crimes—for which no punishment can be too severe. The only people that matter are the people in their political tribe, who speak with one voice and think with one mind.

If pressed, progressives might acknowledge that Israeli children don’t (yet) deserve to die. That it is sad that some of them had to be sacrificed for the glory of the martyrs. But they’ll still cheer, because the Israeli child is an abstraction to them. They no longer have the imagination, these idealists, to really feel that child’s terror or consider his or her suffering. They no longer have the imagination to allow or care for any other mind that isn’t one of theirs, who of all peoples, in all times, are the only ones to have finally gotten it right.

In the end, the Palestinian child, too, is no more than an abstraction. Many have pointed out the irony that the terrorists they praise would, in any context other than the war against Israel, represent the antithesis of progressive ideology. The same is true, to a less extreme degree, of minority groups in the US, whose lack of privilege does not prevent them from some decidedly problematic opinions.  The progressive left’s refusal to judge these wrong-thinkers and doers, as the linguist John McWhorter has observed, robs these groups of moral agency. Perhaps the chanting students pity the people of Gaza. But they won’t acknowledge any more complexity in them than they do to the Republican, or the moderate Democrat, or anyone who lived before the dawn of Progressive Enlightenment offered a path toward salvation for our sins.

If the result is useful support, I can see why this leftist condescension might not much matter, from a Palestinian perspective. Yet it should. The Palestinians are now playing the victim’s part in our Progressive morality play. But what happens if they win?

Just ask the Jews.