The Left, Israel, and “Pinkwashing”

Since 2010, members of the anti-Israel left have denounced any mention of the Jewish state’s open-minded attitude toward homosexuals as “pinkwashing”: i.e., a cover for Israel’s alleged crimes against the Palestinians. To make sense of this bizarre accusation, Jamie Palmer cites George Orwell’s analysis of the leftist intellectuals of his own day whose blind devotion to Communism led them to defend Joseph Stalin:

With the hopes and dreams of Communist utopia long since reduced to rubble, that once-unshakable faith has been quietly transferred elsewhere. Today, Palestinian nationalism is the cause into which thinkers are invited to empty the same intense moral certainty that Orwell’s deluded contemporaries once wasted on Stalin.

Only, notice a distinction: Western Communists and their fellow travelers defended the Soviet Union because they were persuaded of the nobility of Communist doctrine. Western support for Palestinian nationalism depends on the Palestinians’ nobility as a people: what Bertrand Russell called a belief in the “superior virtue of the oppressed.” The problem is that many of the ideas actually animating Palestinians and their leadership have turned out to be antithetical to the [liberal] values that Western intellectuals offer as evidence of their own moral [superiority]. . . .

[Thus] no appeal to the value of Israeli democracy can be allowed to pass unresisted. Palestinian nobility has to be protected at all costs. . . . Just as a fanatical attachment to Communism demanded a corresponding antipathy to Western capitalist democracy that was unanswerable to reason, so the Palestinian nationalism of its most fanatical adherents has become indistinguishable from a ferociously irrational anti-Zionism. . . .

As an aggressive piece of activist strategy, the “pinkwashing” charge is shameless and shrewd. As a piece of moral reasoning, it is inane.

Read more at Quillette

More about: Anti-Semitism, George Orwell, Homosexuality, Idiocy, Israel & Zionism, Leftism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF