In 2021, Peter Beinart wrote an article for Jewish Currents that noted that the term “anti-Palestinian” never featured in US political debate. As Beinart pointed out, this was “not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare but because it is ubiquitous . . . if the concept existed, almost everyone in Congress would be guilty of it, except for a tiny minority of renegade progressives who are regularly denounced as antisemites.”
The events of the last year have shown us how right Beinart was. If anything, he greatly understated the extent of the problem. Not only is anti-Palestinian racism ubiquitous — it is the most virulent and pervasive form of racism to be found in the Euro-American political mainstream, the one that can be expressed most blatantly, with the least stigma attached to it. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz and Viktor Orbán can all shelter under the same capacious umbrella, united by the belief that Palestinian lives are worth less than those of Israelis or the citizens of Western countries.
At first glance, the depth and breadth of such prejudice seems hard to explain. We are not talking about a relatively large and visible immigrant community, like Mexicans and their descendants in the United States, or Turks and their descendants in Germany. Nor is it a straightforward legacy of empire: Britain is the only Western country to have ruled over the Palestinians directly in modern times, and even there, the Mandate period has not left the same imprint on popular memory as the experience of colonizing Algeria has left in France, for example.
Hostility to Palestinians is clearly the flip side of a strong attachment to Israel on the part of Euro-American power elites. That attachment…
Auteur: Daniel Finn
