The national leadership of Black Lives Matter has officially endorsed the boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) movement and incorporated all sorts of calumnies of the Jewish state into its manifestos. So perhaps it is no surprise that, when Wilfred Reilly first encountered one of the recent anti-Israel demonstrations that have erupted in U.S. cities, he “felt an incredible sense of déjà vu.”
For what is the “Free Palestine” movement in America more than a recapitulation of Black Lives Matter and other forms of black American activism over the past decade? In both cases, leftwing partisans who see human interactions in terms of oppressor/oppressed dynamics are claiming their group faces serious problems because of external abuse—and denying that their group has played any role in the controversies involving them. In both cases, whatever truth there may be in the initial complaint, the matters that trigger these movements are far more complex and have almost entirely internal causes. And, in both cases, shameless self-billed “local leaders” and other hucksters prevent any discussion of how to fix these real problems.
In both the Palestinian and black American cases, the critical final point is this: achieving what is presumably every sane person’s end-game goal—actual improvements in the lot of currently troubled communities—will require total rejection of trendy oppressor-vs.-oppressed narratives and demand a hard focus on what the actual problems in each case are. In reality, . . . the farther-away issues of Palestinians have far less to do with “unchanging, unprovoked Israeli oppression” than with rule by bloodthirsty terrorist kleptocrats who literally refuse to make peace.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/wilfred-reilly/oppressor-oppressed-narrative-free-palestine-blm/