Messaging Boomerangs and the Perils of the "Pro-Palestinian" Frame

Like many, I am overcome with bilious revulsion at the sight of the bloody and mangled remains of children strewn among the rubble in Gaza. For Netanyahu’s psychopathic coalition of Israeli theocrats, that is just the messy ground-clearing phase of the ethnic cleansing required to make the area safe for Jared Kushner’s beachfront condos.

Some may view the carnage as merely the unavoidable sum of the IDF’s cost-benefit analysis: how many civilians must die for every Hamas fighter killed. However, accepting that story requires ignoring the explicit aims of Netanyahu’s allies. Some of them have called for the nuclear annihilation of Palestinians. Others have recommended starvation as the best and final solution to the Palestinian problem.

The Mass Grave, c 1945 by Pablo Picasso

To protest that grotesque state of affairs, groups opposing Israeli war crimes have described their movement as “pro-Palestinian,” an appellation eagerly adopted by journalists across the political spectrum. It is a label driven by an earnest desire to express solidarity with the besieged civilians of Gaza. However, that framing (in contrast to one that is “pro-human rights”) unintentionally invites incorporation into the narrative of Israel’s ethnic cleansers: the war is a zero-sum tribal conflict from which only one group can and should survive. The moral barricade established by that rhetoric positions antagonists in a battle over whose civilian bodies must be protected and whose can be sacrificed.

By depicting their effort to stop Netanyahu’s exterminationist campaign in terms of the ethnicity of the victims, protesters undermine themselves. The tribal frame is the Right’s linguistic Trojan horse; once taken in, the battle is lost. It enables journalists to engage in all manner of intellectually dishonest reporting – eliding the movement’s extensive Jewish support, portraying critiques of Zionism as anti-Jewish, and rendering opposition to the war as pro-Hamas.

A classic example is Michael Powell’s Atlantic piece on the Columbia occupation. While he grudgingly acknowledges a Passover celebration within the encampment, the only Jewish students with whom he speaks are Zionist critics on the outside who denounce the “antisemitism” of the protesters. For him to do otherwise would rupture the tribal narrative.

It must be acknowledged that a minority of Left opponents of Israeli apartheid measures initially celebrated the Hamas mass murder of Israelis as a righteous act of liberation, something I analyze in my forthcoming book on political tribalism, Hatreds We Love. That was likely driven by a desperate longing for heroes who could lead the charge in the Manichean tribal imagination of a few naïve militants. But it seems pretty clear they have been almost entirely eclipsed by a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-national coalition of anti-Gaza-war activists. They do not equate Zionism with Judaism, anti-Zionism with antisemitism, or Palestinian civil rights with the oppression of Jews. Those are the cynical conflations of the pro-apartheid Right, like Elise Stefanik and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Then there is the chant uttered at nearly every Left protest against Israeli actions, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Its origins are as ambiguous as its meaning, a rhetorical Rorschach. To Palestinians and most Israel critics, it refers to a future landscape where Palestinians have political autonomy and full civil rights. To some Jewish Israelis and supporters of Netanyahu in the US, it is a slogan that denotes a wish that the region be free of Jews, an Arab call for a new Holocaust.

When a chant is so fraught with conflicting interpretations, using it in protests is political malpractice – an invitation to be defined by your opponent. It brings to mind the fate of the unfortunate meme “defund the police” that was uttered at protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of cops. Intended as a call for economic leverage in the campaign to enforce accountability in law enforcement, it became weaponized by the very forces seeking to exonerate cops who kill unarmed Black people.

The cluelessness of Left messaging aside, at the present moment, it is primarily supporters of Israeli policy that have been able to overlook or rationalize genocide. To make efforts by the MAGA Right, Democratic proponents of Israeli moral exceptionalism, and fundamentalist holy warriors of all persuasions more difficult, protesters must shift the focus to a universalist, trans-tribal perspective. We must talk about human rights, not group rights. We must make it clear that the slaughter of civilians is an abomination – not because they are Palestinian or (in the case of the October 7 attacks on Israelis) because they are Jewish but because we are all part of a global interdependent community of people bound by a shared right to life.