Israel, the UAE, and the Industry of Victimhood

In Marxism, the proletariat is the class destined to liberate humanity through the revolution. Its claim to moral and political authority rests on its position as the exploited class, the ones from whom value is extracted, the ones whose chains the revolution will break.

What happened to the proletariat in the West, however, did not match Marx’s prediction. Across the 20th century, the working class in the United States and Western Europe did not radicalize. It got richer. It bought houses. It sent its children to college. It joined the middle class. By the 1960s, the Western proletariat had stopped being the revolutionary subject Marx had identified, and Western Marxists faced a problem: the engine of their politics had defected.

The pivot they made was to relocate the position of the oppressed from the working class to a series of identity categories. African Americans became, in this remapping, the new proletariat, the permanently oppressed group. Women became another. Colonized peoples became a third. Sexual minorities became a fourth. By the 1970s, the academic and activist left had abandoned the working class as its constituency and built a coalition around identities defined by their relation to historical injustice.

Herbert Marcuse, an influential European Marxist wrote: “the new revolutionary subject was no longer the worker but “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.” Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) had already made the analogous move for the colonized world. The Frankfurt School, the New Left, the second-wave feminists, the third-world liberation theorists, all of them were performing variations of the same operation. The proletariat had failed. New victims had to be found.

The Model

The West deserves enormous credit for being the first civilization in human history to abolish slavery. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, paying compensation that bankrupted the imperial treasury for decades. The American Civil War, fought primarily over the preservation and extension of slavery, cost six hundred thousand lives, a higher proportion of the population than any war the United States has fought before or since. The Western abolitionist movement, drawing on Christian moral reasoning, made the argument and won the political fight that ended an institution every other civilization in human history had practiced and were still practicing as the West was abolishing it. Not only that, but if it weren’t for the West, slavery companies could be listed on NASDAQ today.

Watch what the left has done with African Americans, one of its assigned constituencies. In every American classroom, every Hollywood film, every progressive news outlet, the West is framed as the unique villain in the story of slavery. America is read as the slave-owning nation, full stop, not as the nation that fought a brutal war to end it. The first Western civilization to abolish slavery is portrayed as the original and definitive sponsor of slavery, while the Muslim slave trade, which began in the seventh century, lasted into the twentieth, took an estimated seventeen million African captives, and routinely castrated the men so they would not reproduce, is barely mentioned in any American textbook.

The new Marxists’ model needs African Americans as permanent victims. If they are allowed to register that the country in which they live abolished slavery at enormous cost, that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded, that black Americans now have legal equality, voting rights, and access to every institution of American life, that they have produced the wealthiest and most influential black community in human history, then the moral capital the model extracts from their suffering begins to dissipate. So, the suffering must be kept in continuous circulation: every police killing must be read as a lynching, every disparity must be read as the persistence of slavery. The left does not want African Americans to thrive in a way that would close the wound. It wants the wound to remain open, because the wound is the capital.

Women is another example. The West has done more to advance the legal, economic, and social position of women than any civilization in human history. Equal access to education, equal employment law, the dismantling of the legal subordination that defined every pre-modern society and many of the post-modern ones, the emergence of women as full participants in every profession, these are Western achievements, accomplished within a century. Measured against any other civilization on earth, the West is the most pro-female civilization that has ever existed.

The left’s framing of this record is, again, the opposite. Women in the West are presented in mainstream feminist discourse as still oppressed, still subjugated, still in a condition of structural patriarchy that requires continuous activist intervention. The genuinely oppressed women of the world, those in Gaza, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, are absent from the same discourse, because attention to their condition would require the left to acknowledge that the civilization it is attacking is the one that gave women the freedom they have.

Immigrants too. In their framing immigrants come to wealthy Western countries as victims of those countries’ historical predations, that they are owed entry, that the host country owes them everything and they owe the host country nothing, that they should be encouraged to retain hostility toward the civilization that took them in. The actual record, again, is the opposite: immigrants from the developing world overwhelmingly come to the West because the West offers a higher standard of living, more freedom, and better institutions than the countries they leave.

Even the failures of post-colonial states are explained as the persistent legacy of Western colonialism. Western colonialism ended sixty to eighty years ago, and states that pursued the left’s recommended policies, autarky, anti-Western alignment, and redistributive socialism, collapsed, while post-colonial states that pursued opposite policies, open trade, alignment with the West, and market institutions, succeeded. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Botswana are absent from the discussion. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Cuba are heroically defended even after their collapses.

Across all of these cases, the pattern is constant. The left does not want its constituencies to escape the victim position. It wants to keep them inside it, because the victim position is what generates the political and moral capital the left spends.

The Model Breaker

The Jews had spent two thousand years as a persecuted minority across Christian Europe and the Islamic world. The Nazi murder of six million was the culmination of a long history that the left could plausibly claim as the worst single example of Western civilizational evil. By every metric the left uses to identify its preferred constituencies, the Jews should have been their model’s prized possession, the permanent witness to the West’s historical guilt, available indefinitely as moral leverage.

What the Jews did instead is what the left cannot forgive.

They survived. Then they built a state. Then the state succeeded. Then it became a developed country. Then it became a high-tech powerhouse. Then it built one of the most capable militaries on earth and demonstrated that it would defend itself with whatever force was required. The Jewish people, in two generations, transformed themselves from the model’s most useful victim into a thriving, sovereign, competent, and self-defending nation.

This was not supposed to happen. They were supposed to stay broken, to stay quiet, to accept perpetual victimhood as their identity, to function as the moral witness against Western evil. Israel was the rejection of all of this.

Why is a movement claiming to defend the oppressed obsessed with the destruction of the Jewish state? Why does it celebrate Hamas, an explicitly genocidal Islamic movement, as a liberation force? Why does it invert every fact on the ground, calling the only liberal democracy in the Middle East a colonial project, calling the Jewish state’s defensive war a genocide, calling actual genocidal language directed at Jews a justified expression of resistance?

The answer is the model. The left does not hate Israel because Israel is a colonial project, an apartheid state, or any of the other charges that fall apart on five minutes of examination. The left hates Israel because Israel is the most visible, most successful refusal of the victim position. The Jews were supposed to remain a perpetual moral asset. They became a sovereign nation instead. The left cannot tolerate this, because if the Jews can do it, the model loses its theoretical prestige. If a group with the most credible historical claim to permanent victimhood instead built a country and prospered, the entire model is exposed as the political extortion racket it has been all along.

The Islamic Version of the Model

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as Western Marxists were pivoting from class to identity, Arab nationalist regimes were building an explicit anti-Western political identity drawn from a fusion of Soviet-aligned Third Worldism and Islamic civilizational grievance. The framing was that The Muslim world had once been a great civilization. The West, by colonialism, by Zionism, by economic imperialism, by cultural penetration, had reduced it to its present condition. The path back to greatness ran through resistance to the West, through the recovery of Islamic authenticity, and through solidarity with every other oppressed people on earth.

The instrument the Arab and Islamic political classes built around this framing has, over sixty years, generated more political capital than any other propaganda operation of the post-war period. The Palestinians became its central asset. They were positioned, with extraordinary skill, as the permanent victims of the West, even though their displacement in 1948 was the consequence of an Arab decision to reject the United Nations partition and invade the new Jewish state, even though they have been kept stateless for three generations by Arab refusal to absorb them into the surrounding countries that share their language and religion, even though their living conditions in Lebanon and Syria are vastly worse than in Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories. None of this matters to the operation. The operation requires Palestinian suffering to remain in continuous circulation, calibrated for maximum extraction of moral leverage from Western audiences. UNRWA was built for this. The international media coverage was cultivated for this. The university programs were funded for this. Qatar’s al-Jazeera was launched in 1996 for this. The contemporary apparatus of perpetual Palestinian victimhood is the most thoroughly engineered grievance economy in the modern world.

But the operation has not stopped at the Palestinians. The same model has been extended across the entire span of Muslim political failure. Why has Pakistan failed? Western imperialism. Why is Iraq broken? American invasion. Why is Yemen at war? Western support for Saudi Arabia. Why is Syria destroyed? Western inaction, or Western action, depending on which sentence you are reading. Why is Iran a theocratic dictatorship? The 1953 coup, twenty-six years before the regime that made the country a theocracy was even installed. Why has the Arab Spring failed everywhere except where it produced renewed authoritarianism? Western interference. The frame is universal: every Muslim political failure terminates in the West.

This framing is the operating capital of the Muslim world. The Muslim Brotherhood runs on it. Hamas runs on it. Hezbollah runs on it. The Iranian regime runs on it. The activist class in Western universities, Students for Justice in Palestine, the various Muslim student associations, the academic departments of Middle East studies that have functioned as advocacy organizations since Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, runs on it. Western progressives have absorbed the Islamic version as a natural extension of their own categories. The two grievance economies merged.

Islam is already congenial to this structure. The doctrine of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the abode of Islam and the abode of war, already framed the world as a binary contest between the believing community and the hostile civilizational outside. The Quranic emphasis on the ummah as a single community whose wounds anywhere are wounds everywhere already provided the affective infrastructure of pan-Islamic grievance.

The Marxist model was introduced into this prepared theological soil, simply extending what was already there. It supplied a secular vocabulary, colonialism, imperialism, oppression, structural violence, and provided cover for the theological intent.

Another Model Breaker

The United Arab Emirates is a small Gulf country. By every metric the model uses to identify its preferred constituencies, the UAE qualifies. It is Arab. It is Muslim. It is post-colonial, formerly part of the British protectorate system that ended in 1971. It sits in the Middle East, in proximity to the Palestinian question, surrounded by states that have made hatred of Israel the operating premise of their foreign policy. By the model’s expectation, the UAE should have remained inside the system: anti-Israel, anti-Western, perpetually performing the wound, available indefinitely as a member of the Arab grievance bloc.

In September 2020, the UAE signed the Abraham Accords with Israel. The Accords were the first peace agreement between an Arab state and Israel in twenty-six years, and they were structurally different from the cold peaces Egypt and Jordan had signed in 1979 and 1994. The Egyptian and Jordanian agreements were ceasefires between governments while the populations remained hostile. The Abraham Accords were, on the UAE side, an explicit civilizational normalization, direct flights between Tel Aviv and Dubai, joint commercial ventures, joint research initiatives, kosher restaurants opening in Abu Dhabi, Israeli tourists welcomed openly, a Jewish community center inaugurated in the heart of the Emirates. The peace was popular among Emiratis. The country went all-in.

The UAE built itself into the most successful and prosperous Arab state in modern history. Dubai became one of the world’s leading commercial and financial centers. Abu Dhabi built a global museum complex, partnered with the Louvre and the Guggenheim, and positioned itself as a regional cultural capital. The UAE invested heavily in artificial intelligence, in renewable energy, in space exploration, sending a probe to Mars in 2021 and an astronaut to the International Space Station. It welcomed Hindu temples, Christian churches, and Jewish synagogues into its public landscape. It pursued every policy the Muslim Brotherhood-Iranian-Qatari grievance bloc had spent fifty years insisting was a betrayal of Arab and Islamic identity.

The cost the UAE is paying for this departure is the operative evidence of how the model punishes its falsifications.

From the moment of the Abraham Accords, the UAE became the principal target of Iran’s regional proxy war. The Houthis fired ballistic missiles and armed drones at Abu Dhabi. Iranian intelligence was caught organizing assassination plots inside the country across multiple years. Then, since the beginning of the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, Tehran has fired 438 ballistic missiles, 2,012 drones, and 19 cruise missiles at targets inside the UAE, exceeding what it fired against Israel itself.

While Iranian missiles rained on Abu Dhabi, the Egyptian government positioned itself closer to Iran than to the UAE. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the supposed leader of the Sunni Arab world’s modernization project under Mohammed bin Salman, bombed Emirati-linked vessels on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen, funded Brotherhood-affiliated movements in Somalia and Sudan, and declared a silent war against the UAE.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE banned and proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2014, ran the campaign against the country through every Western capital. Despite the Sunni-Shia divide it is supposed to honor at the level of doctrine, the Muslim Brotherhood aligned with Tehran against the UAE. Qatar’s al-Jazeera has run a sustained delegitimization campaign against the UAE since 2017.

The Western left, taking its cues from the same Brotherhood-Qatari information apparatus, joined the campaign with the same vocabulary it deploys against Israel.

Conclusion

Both Israel and the UAE were assigned roles inside the model. Israel was assigned the role of the West’s permanent victim, the survivor of European persecution, the Holocaust witness, the moral asset whose suffering would underwrite the model’s case against Western civilization indefinitely. The UAE was assigned the role of the Arab member of the grievance bloc, available to fund the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned political projects, vote anti-Israel at the United Nations, and provide the diplomatic cover the grievance economy required. Both refused. Israel refused by surviving its assigned victimhood and becoming a sovereign nation. The UAE refused by abandoning its assigned hostility and pursuing prosperity through normalization. Both have been punished by the same coalition for the same structural reason: they falsified the model, and the model cannot tolerate falsifications.

What makes the UAE case especially instructive is that it removes a series of objections the left routinely raises against the Israeli case. The UAE is not Jewish. It is not a Western settler project. It does not have a 1948 founding. It is not a liberal democracy. It is, on every metric the left ordinarily uses to attack Israel, defensible by the left’s own stated criteria, an Arab Muslim state pursuing modernization, prosperity, religious pluralism, and regional peace. And yet the left attacks it anyway, with the same vocabulary it deploys against Israel, for the same structural reason. The UAE is breaking the model.

The left’s hostility is not, and never was, about the specific characteristics of the targets it attacks. It is about whether those targets are performing the assigned role. Israel performed the wrong role by being Western and successful. The UAE performed the wrong role by being Arab and successful. The role assignment is the operative variable, not the actual content of the policies, governance, or behavior of the country in question.

Anyone who plays the assigned victim is funded, defended, celebrated. Anyone who refuses is punished. The model has no other rule. The Jews showed, by building Israel, that the cage could be walked out of at the level of an entire people. The Emiratis are showing, by building what they have built, that an Arab Muslim state can do the same. The two demonstrations are now in front of every other constituency the model has held captive, including the populations of the Muslim states themselves. The cage is visible. The capital it runs on is visible. The exit is visible. Whether the rest will walk out of it is the question on which the next half-century turns.