In an interview a week earlier with the New York Times, Fetterman expressed surprise that so many of his former supporters seemed shocked by his position. “I do find it confusing,” he told the Times, “where the very left progressives in America don’t seem to want to support really the only progressive nation in the region that really embraces the same kind of values I would expect we would want as a society.”
In terms of the substance of the argument, this is the thinnest possible reed on which Senator Fetterman could hang his enthusiastic support for a state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing of an internal noncitizen population. It’s a fairly popular rhetorical strategy, though, and so it’s probably worth spending a moment explaining why it makes so little sense. Fetterman isn’t being terribly original. I’ve heard many apologists for the Israeli government using variations of this point — think about all the right-wing sneering about “Queers for Palestine” or about secular leftists in the West “siding with radical Islam.”
It’s true that, on average, the Palestinian population, especially in Gaza, is more religious and more socially conservative than the Israeli population. The full truth about this is complicated, since the most religious and conservative enclaves within Israel are very religious and conservative, and the political parties which represent that population have exercised quite a bit of political power from within various coalition governments. To pick an obvious example, it’s not as if same-sex marriage, for example, is legal within the “green line” separating Israel’s original territory from the Palestinian lands it conquered in 1967. But overall the Israeli population is vastly more secular and Israel’s laws within the green line are far more socially progressive than the ones in Palestinian areas that have been granted limited autonomy under the Israeli occupation — especially Hamas-run Gaza.
The real question is: What of it? How is that supposed to be relevant to anything in the context of talking about Israel’s atrocities against the noncitizen Palestinian population?
To spell this out, Israel is not fighting to impose secularism or liberalism on the population of Gaza. Whether the survivors of the current atrocities are allowed to stay in Gaza under direct Israeli occupation or whether — as some have suggested — they’re mass-transferred to the Sinai desert, neither scenario will lead to gay pride marches or secular education among the survivors. As obscene as it would be to endorse mass displacement and the indiscriminate mass murder of tens of thousands of innocents as a way of spreading progressive social policies, the Israelis have never pretended that this is a thing they’re trying to do. In context, talking about comparative levels of progressivism is a head-spinning non sequitur.
This would be true even if it made the slightest sense to call Israel a progressive nation. But it doesn’t — at least if you believe that ethno-religious pluralism and equal rights for everyone regardless of faith or ancestry are “progressive” values.
Belief that any sufficiently internally progressive nation has a right to engage in ethnic cleansing against groups it rules over would be truly grotesque. But the premise itself is absurd in this case. Would we consider the United States, for example, a progressive nation if it had achieved equal rights for women and gay people but also passed a law declaring it to be “the nation-state of” white Christians everywhere but not ethnic and religious minorities who actually live within the country?
If not, surely Israel’s grotesque nation-state law should count against its internal progressivism. So, for example, should the law forbidding Palestinian citizens of Israel who marry Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza from living together with their spouses inside Israel.
But the most important point here is the fact that Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians since 1967 without ever once offering them Israeli citizenship — because doing so would undermine what Israeli commentators often openly call the “Jewish character” of the state. That’s apartheid, and anyone who thinks apartheid is compatible with progressivism is using the word “progressive” in a way with which I’d prefer to have nothing to do.
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