Participating in an interfaith conference on race relations in Birmingham, Alabama, Joshua Berman, an American-born Israeli rabbi and scholar, was struck by the refrain, expressed by several black intellectuals in attendance, that African-American leaders have betrayed their community by cultivating a sense of victimhood and rage. Berman draws some instructive parallels to the situation of the Palestinians:
[O]ne after another, these speakers—leading black conservatives—rejected the identity politics of victimhood dominant in black America as detrimental to black self-interest and to efforts toward racial reconciliation. . . . [F]or the Black Power movement, [which exerted increasing influence after the murder of Martin Luther King], permanent victim status must be maintained; as [the political commentator] Derryck Green noted: “Leaders of the movement will keep the ‘conversation’ [about race] going interminably because of the amount of social virtue and capital associated with the assumption of white guilt and black victimization.”
Well-meaning whites also contribute to the corrosive effects. . . . In his book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, the black theorist Shelby Steele argues that white Americans view blacks as victims to ease their guilty conscience, and blacks attempt to turn their status as victims into a kind of currency that does nothing to assist blacks in improving their own lot. The result is that blacks internalize their sense of being beholden to the white bureaucrats who now control their lives. Government handouts based on race discourage . . . personal responsibility, thus diminishing their recipients’ self-worth further. . . .
As I followed these arguments it was hard not to see that Palestinian . . . politics suffers from the same set of ills. . . . Grass-roots criticism of the Palestinian leadership is disallowed because it threatens the collective Palestinian identity. Failing to establish the institutions of a functioning state, Palestinian leaders turn to globetrotting in “a virtue-signaling, look-busy-while-doing-nothing action plan of self-righteousness,” [to take Green’s description of African-American leaders]. They insist the world must come and save them.
Palestinians pluck the chords of European colonial guilt in order to receive generous aid, with the result that Palestinians internalize their sense of being beholden to their European benefactors, further discouraging Palestinians’ personal responsibility and diminishing their self-worth. But above all, the Palestinian narrative of victimhood sabotages efforts to achieve a lasting peace with Israel.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/blacks-palestinians-and-the-disastrous-politics-of-rage/