Protesting for Peace and Calling for War

Decolonization, Irredentism, and the Moral Failure of Pro-Palestinian Protests

A scene from the pro-Palestinian “National Day of Resistance” on October 12, 2023 (ie, after the October 7 attacks and before Israel invaded Gaza). This photo was taken in Damascus, Syria… sorry, Columbus, Ohio. Source: Becker1999/Wikimedia Commons

I was attending high school in Canada on 9/11. While the vast majority of students reacted to that day with solemnity and horror, a few openly cheered the attacks. The celebrants were uniformly foreign-born and motivated by hatred of the US because of perceived injustices done to their home countries or co-religionists. Prominent among them was Milosh, a Serbian immigrant enraged by the American-led bombing campaign that ended the Kosovo War. Soon after 9/11, Milosh—who would frequently make racist and antisemitic comments to his friends in class—was distributing pamphlets for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) in anticipatory protest of the American invasion of Afghanistan. The image of Milosh—a racist who supported Serbian aggression in the Balkans—campaigning against war and racism has informed my view of subsequent protest movements. The more idealistic the rhetoric, the deeper the hypocrisy one can expect.

I was reminded of Milosh by a recent piece by Jonathan Chait titled “Why Anti-Israel Protesters Won’t Stop Harassing Jews.” Chait reviews the Israel-eliminationist stances of Students for Justice in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime, two groups leading campus pro-Palestinian protests.¹ He notes that despite the anti-war rhetoric of the protests, “the groups themselves are very clearly not advocating for ‘peace.’ They are for war. Their objection is not to human suffering but that the wrong humans are suffering.” Vivid demonstration of their intent comes from a report by a counter-protester at Columbia University, who recounts hearing chants like “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.” While not all protesters share the same bloodlust, or are even students, Chait’s point is that these slogans “are part of the ideological character of the movements that give rise to them. Dismissing this pattern as the actions of ‘inflammatory individuals’ is to evade the question of who is inflaming them.”

Chait calls settler-colonist theory, which provides the ideological framework for the campus protests, “a left-wing version of blood-and-soil nationalism, positing that every ethnic group possesses an inherent attachment to certain lands and is inherently alien to others.” Most likely, settler-colonist theory is motivating the keffiyeh-wearing blonde woman holding an “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets” sign next to the pro-Israel counter-protesters at Columbia. (The Al-Qassam Brigades are the Hamas wing that perpetrated October 7.) But we should not let academic rhetoric blind us to the simple ethnoreligious irredentism—not a “left-wing version”—that motivates many of the participants and the main beneficiaries (ie, Hamas) of the protest movement. As historian Jeffrey Herf observed, the pro-Hamas “fusion of the Islamist Right and the secular Left was the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact that leftist organizations made common cause with a movement of the extreme right.” That crowds chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in English but "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab" in Arabic encapsulates the dynamic at play.

Irredentism refers to territorial claims to land perceived as belonging to one’s nation (“irredenta”), usually because of historic or ethnic ties. For example, my old friend Milosh the peacenik was an irredentist who supported a Greater Serbia that included all territory ever controlled or inhabitants by Serbs. The Russian war on Ukraine (formerly part of the Russian Empire) is motivated by irredentist claims, as are Chinese designs on Taiwan (formerly part of the Chinese Empire). The maximalist Palestinian position (ie, destroy Israel) is based on both Arab and Muslim irredentism. According to pan-Arab irredentism, all of Israel/Palestine is rightfully part of the Arab nation, which has been falsely divided by colonially imposed borders. Muslim irredentism, meanwhile, is based on a theological injunction not to relinquish lands previously conquered by Islam, compounded by the holy status accorded to Jerusalem (which ultimately stems, of course, from its holy status in Judaism).² In practice, Arab and Muslim irredentism typically go hand-in-hand, as in the Hamas charter: “The liberation of Palestine is the duty of the Palestinian people in particular and the duty of the Arab and Islamic Ummah [nation] in general.”³

The charter assumes that Palestine is a primarily Arab and Muslim cause. That the liberation of Palestine is now also seen as a duty by secular American college students has delighted Hamas, which issued a statement calling them “the leaders of the future." Settler-colonist theory justifies left-wing “allyship” to ethnoreligious irredentism, as long as the irredentist movement is coded as non-white and oppressed.⁴ The self-righteousness that comes from championing the victim can then coexist with the thrill of bullying the oppressor. In the case of college students role-playing as anti-colonial revolutionaries, that means permission to intimidate and attack Zionists, or simply Jews. Lacking their own cultural and religious traditions, or taught to feel ashamed of them as “colonizers,” progressives can live vicariously through those of others by donning a keffiyeh and calling for intifada. The forbidden fruit of nationalism—waving a flag, chanting about lost territory, rallying against a rival nation—may then be enjoyed in the name of the oppressed.

A report in The Atlantic on “the People’s University for Palestine” (ie, squatter encampment) at Columbia University describes students who “sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide.” Yet on the streets around the campus, men in cars roll down their windows and shout “Yahud, Yahud [Arabic for ‘Jew, Jew’], fuck you!” Under the banner of anti-Zionism, academic obfuscation and straight ethnoreligious hatred share a common cause. Of course, the line between the two is not so clear-cut. A leader of Columbia’s student protest movement, who describes himself as an “anti-capitalist” and “anti-imperialist” on his X bio, has said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Hamas itself revised its charter in 2017 to include progressive rhetoric (“The Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project”) alongside religious claims (“Palestine is the spirit of the Ummah and its central cause”).

Undoubtedly, many protesters are also motivated by genuine concern for Palestinian suffering. But their anti-colonial and irredentist ideologies mean that, as Matthew Yglesias has written about Arab public opinion, “their concern is the success of the Palestinian Cause (the reversal of the Nakba) rather than the welfare of the Palestinian people.” One can argue whether the British Mandate of Palestine should have been partitioned into Arab and Jewish states in 1947. One can also argue whether the British Raj of India should have been partitioned into Muslim and Hindu-majority states that same year.⁵ But to believe, like Hamas and the protesters chanting “From the river to the sea” do, that an established country of almost 10 million people—many the descendants of refugees—could or should disappear is an amoral fantasy. The amorality was demonstrated on October 7, when Hamas showed what the reversal of the Nakba looks like in practice: mass murder, rape, and kidnapping. The fantasy was revealed by the aftermath—a war that only brought more Palestinian suffering—and reports that Hamas actually believed it could conquer Israel, going so far as to divide its territory into cantons.

In 1947, Jews accepted the United Nations plan to create two states in Mandatory Palestine. Arabs rejected the plan and subsequently launched the first of many wars to destroy Israel, all of which they lost and none of which improved the lives of Palestinians. If protesters truly wanted to ease Palestinian suffering, they would call for the internationally mandated principle of partition to be adopted by both sides. That would mean rejecting the irredentism of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in favor of “From the river to the sea, Jews and Arabs will live in peace.” Israel has its own irredentist movement, which seeks to settle and annex the Arab-majority West Bank. (Though significantly, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982: signs of a country capable of accepting territorial loss.) A protest movement that rejected Arab-Muslim irredentism would also have the moral authority to call out Israeli-Jewish irredentism and criticize the Israeli government.⁶ Instead, pro-Palestinian protesters call for the abolition of Israel itself, a sentiment that has only brought disaster to the people in whose name it is expressed. By claiming to stand for peace while promoting ideologies of war, the protest movement sweeping campuses is as practically anti-Palestinian as it is rhetorically anti-Zionist.

1. For example, Within Our Lifetime’s website states that “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.” As an aside, the organization’s consistent refusal to capitalize “Zionist” or “Zionism” is an example of the spite-based spelling and grammar popular among eliminationists. “Isr*el” is commonly used by trolls in comment sections, while Jordan-based Roya News English has an actual editorial policy of only placing Israel or Israeli in quotation marks, eg, “‘Israel’ previously rejected a proposal to exchange one ‘Israeli’ soldier for 50 Palestinian prisoners, including 30 with life sentences.”

2. As summarized by scholar Franck Salameh, according to traditional Islam, “territories that Islam has already conquered and claimed for Muslims should be clung to by any means, and should never be ceded back to the world of disbelief. Israel, and for that matter a Lebanon of earlier times where Christians had sovereign prerogatives, both fall within that category: lands that have been conquered and Islamized beginning in the seventh century, that should never have been allowed to lapse into Jewish or Christian hands, and whose Dhimmi peoples [a subservient but protected status in Islam] should be prevented from exercising political or military authority over Muslims.”

Or per the 1988 Hamas Covenant: “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that.“

3. Revanchism, a concept closely related to irredentism, refers to a policy of seeking to recover lost territory. It is derived from the French word for “revenge,” which indicates a "dream not of changing the world but of changing places with the victors of the last war" (Ivan Krastev). Arab and Muslim support for Palestine is often motivated by a desire to reverse Israel's War of Independence and recover lost territory (revanchism), but this maximalist position is part of a broader ambition to restore the Arab and Muslim world's historic borders and achieve unity within them (irredentism). While Islam is not a "nation" as such, it is often seen in supra-national terms by its adherents.

4. Hence the lack of interest by the left in Milosh’s Greater Serbia dreams.

5. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 (what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe”). Shortly thereafter, over 800,000 Jews were displaced from Arab countries, with the majority finding refuge in Israel. Unlike the descendants of the displaced Jews, most descendants of the displaced Palestinians are still accorded refugee status.

Around the same time, over 7 million Muslims were displaced from India to the newly formed nation of Pakistan, while around the same number of Hindus and Sikhs were displaced from what is now Pakistan to India. Curiously, though Pakistan was created to be a South Asian Muslim homeland just as Israel was created to be a Jewish homeland, there is no mass movement to abolish Pakistan.

6. Though it should be noted, in the words of historian Benny Morris, that “the settlements and the occupation are obstacles to peace, without doubt; but the bigger obstacle is the essential rejectionism of the Palestinian national movement. The religious wing of the Palestinian movement is open about this, while the so-called secular variety (which is really not so secular) is more subtle. But for both, their rejectionism is the essential driving force of the conflict.”