Just over a year before Donald Trump invoked the specter of “radical Islamic terrorism” in his inaugural address, pledging to “eradicate” such terror “completely from the face of the Earth,” the then-presidential candidate had found a logical hole in one of his opponent’s positions.
“Hillary Clinton said that it is OK to ban Muslims from Israel by building a WALL,” the soon-to-be President tweeted, “but not OK to do so in the U.S. We must be vigilant!”
Neither Clinton nor any other high-level Democratic diplomat favored banning Muslims from entering Israel, but Trump nonetheless struck a chord, and not just among his base of nationalists envious of Israeli security measures. Instead, it was many on the left who saw how Trump had stumbled into an essential truth, one they had been urging on their progressive peers for years: If it’s wrong to abuse migrants and racial minorities in the U.S., it’s wrong for American tax dollars to support the same brutality in Palestine.
Two important voices laboring to convince the broader left-of-center world of these parallels are Mitchell Plitnick and Prof. Marc Lamont Hill, co-authors of “Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.” Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy, a 501(c)(3) focused on connecting domestic and foreign policy issues; Hill is a Temple University professor, author, activist, and until recently, a frequent cable news contributor, a gig he lost in 2018 after a speech calling for Palestinian liberation “from the river to sea.”
Plitnick and Hill’s book arrives hot on the heels of another Israel-related firing, with leftist editor and writer Nathan J. Robinson having lost his column at The Guardian last month over a handful of tweets about U.S. aid to Israel. Such cancelations are evergreen: A few years earlier, for example, Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita lost a professorship over tweets about Gaza (he is now driving a school bus), and not long before that, Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure for his long history of scrutinizing Israel.
These firings occurred in liberal professions like media and academia, and concerned criticism of a foreign nation with half the population of New York State. In “Except for Palestine,” Plitnick and Hill write about why this became the norm, exploring the intellectual underpinnings of how America and Israel see themselves, each other, and the Palestinians.
The “right to exist” and other double standards
While Hill’s firing was surely a motivator in co-authoring this latest monograph, he and Plitnick make clear from the start that their book is in part a direct response to the actions of the Trump administration, which allowed the already decaying hopes for a compromise between Israelis and Palestinians to crumble completely. Republicans stripped all mention of a two-state solution from their party platform in 2016, a symbolic omission that Trump put into practice with unprecedented actions like moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli dominion over the Golan Heights.
But as the authors note, Trump “merely did away with even the flimsy pretense of American even-handedness” in the conflict, following through on decades of bipartisan policies and rhetoric that “positioned Palestine as an exception to which core liberal American values are not applied.”
Many Democrats condemned actions by both Trump and the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as detrimental to the peace process, but have continued to show their unabashed support for pro-Israel policy, including legislation meant to curtail private support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Plitnick and Hill point to this contradiction in Sen. Cory Booker, who swims in the shallow waters of progressivism as easily as any of his colleagues, but bolts for dry land when the topic turns to Palestine. Booker backed a version of anti-BDS legislation in 2019, framing his support as a stance on behalf of private companies facing threats to their First Amendment rights.
This reverse engineering of bans on BDS into a “protection of free speech” rather than a restriction is indicative of a major, if unstated thread in “Except for Palestine”: the Israeli government and its advocates have shown a knack for projecting the country’s bad behavior onto the Palestinians and their supporters, while asking for treatment they themselves won’t grant to their neighbors.
Plitnick and Hill question this contradiction specifically in demands for Palestinians to acknowledge Israel’s “right to exist.”
“Does Palestine, as a nation, also have the right to exist? Do Palestinians have a right to a state in their homeland, whether as part of a binational entity with Israelis, as an independent sovereign entity of their own, or as part of a shared single, democratic secular state?” the authors ask.
As Plitnick and Hill show repeatedly, Israel is hardly the country that should be viewed by American lawmakers and other nations as unique; that status more accurately applies to the Palestinians, who are repeatedly asked to recognize the sovereignty of an occupying state, even as that nation’s militarized borders continue to shift further into Palestinian territory.
A growing pull away from Israel, but a long way to peace
Plitnick and Hill’s arguments are more fair-minded and less combative than other leftist polemics on Palestine, while their prose avoids the formulaic structure, academic jargon and sometimes interminable length of more comprehensive, scholarly works. “Except for Palestine” is the book that pro-Palestinian activists should be distributing to their skeptical liberal friends, a text that meets progressive-minded people on their level and attempts to deconstruct their notions about the conflict.
Such writing and advocacy has seen a renaissance since the late Obama years, as the peace process imploded and the broad liberal middle ground on Israel and Palestine became untenable. Plitnick and Hill point to increasingly strident criticisms of Israel and the Netanyahu government by Sen. Bernie Sanders in his presidential campaigns in both 2016 and 2020, as well as the elections of Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in 2018, the first Muslim women elected to Congress, both of whom support BDS.
Sanders, Tlaib and Omar stepped into a political space that had been opened up by years of work by activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, who built bridges with popular left allies across issues like policing and immigration. They were also joined by a reinvigorated Jewish left, represented by publications like Jewish Currents and organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, where Plitnick was formerly co-director.
“The partisan divide on Israel is much stronger than it has been historically, but within the Democratic Party, there is a clear, strong, and growing movement opposing the United States’ one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies and actions,” Plitnick and Hill write.
The progressive fight over Palestine will not be easily won by either side, as the increasing grassroots energy must overcome a Democratic Party leadership in Congress and the White House still united in their commitment to Israel. The peace process itself is on life support; the Arab nations who were once Palestine’s strongest allies are moving to normalize relations with Israel, and the Israeli government continues to expand settlements into the West Bank.
Palestinians themselves will also soon have a say, with presidential elections scheduled this year for the first time in over a decade, pitting longtime president and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas against the insurgent political wing of Hamas. As Americans may know first hand, when it comes to elections, desperate circumstances may lead to desperate choices.
