The Progressive West’s Racism of Low Expectations

A large part of the Western progressive movement has convinced itself that supporting Palestinians means explaining away Palestinian responsibility. I think this has crossed into racism.

The racism is in the expectation.

Progressives speak about Palestinians as people entitled to dignity, political rights, freedom and self-determination. Then violence enters the conversation, and suddenly Palestinians are treated as though they have very little control over their own behavior. Their choices are traced back to occupation, humiliation, poverty, trauma, or some Israeli action that supposedly explains what came next.

The Palestinian making the choice slowly disappears.

I have spent most of my adult life teaching people to make decisions under pressure. In Krav Maga training, we deal with fear, anger, physical danger and the consequences of making the wrong decision. Pressure affects judgment. It doesn’t erase responsibility.

On October 12, 2000, Israeli reservists Yossi Avrahami and Vadim Nurzhitz accidentally entered Ramallah. Palestinian Authority police took them to a local police station. A mob stormed the building, reached the two men and murdered them. They were beaten and stabbed, and their mutilated bodies were later dragged through Ramallah.

Aziz Salha became the face of that day.

After participating in the killing, he appeared at a second-floor window with his hands covered in blood. The crowd below cheered. In later testimony about the Ramallah lynching, Salha described the atmosphere inside the station as a “craze to see blood.” He described stabbing one of the reservists while other people continued attacking him. A Palestinian Authority police officer admitted beating one of the men with an iron pipe.

The killing was horrific. The reaction around it tells us something deeper.

A group of people saw helpless men being tortured and killed. Others joined. The sight of blood became something to celebrate. The moral choice involved in that moment was simple.

This is where I lose patience with much of the progressive explanation.

Understanding history has value. I have written before about how badly people reason when they ignore context and simplify complicated situations, especially in decision-making under pressure.

Context still has limits.

A difficult childhood doesn’t excuse murder in New York. Racism doesn’t excuse randomly killing someone from another race. Economic hardship doesn’t excuse rape. Political grievance doesn’t excuse mutilating two helpless men while a crowd celebrates.

Yet with Palestinians, many progressives lower the standard.

They assume a level of helplessness they would find insulting if applied to almost any other group. The underlying message is that Palestinians can’t reasonably be expected to control their anger, reject violent ideology, resist indoctrination or make ordinary moral choices when they believe they have been wronged.

That is a deeply prejudiced view.

It becomes even clearer when you compare how Israel is judged.

Israeli intent is examined constantly. A soldier fires and people want to know what he was thinking. A military operation causes civilian deaths and motives are assigned before investigations are complete. Israel acts and critics question the decision. Israel hesitates and critics question that too.

That level of scrutiny assumes agency.

Palestinians deserve the same standard.

Instead, their intent is often replaced with victimhood. A stabbing becomes desperation. Terrorism becomes resistance. Incitement becomes a product of oppression. Celebration of violence is buried inside historical grievance until individual responsibility becomes hard to find.

The Ramallah lynching also can’t be dismissed as one spontaneous eruption of rage. Eighteen years later, Palestinian Authority television reportedly described three men involved in the lynching as “heroic”. The sister of one imprisoned participant told the program that she was proud of her brother.

That was eighteen years later. The immediate emotion had passed. Men associated with the lynching could still be presented as heroes.

A political culture should be examined through the behavior it rewards and the people it chooses to honor. Refusing to ask those questions because Palestinians have suffered is a lower standard disguised as compassion.

I also reject the description of acts like Ramallah as “animal behavior.”

Animals don’t carry our moral obligations. Human beings understand cruelty, humiliation, blood, pain, and death. Salha knew what he was displaying from that window. The people below understood why his hands were red.

Their humanity is exactly why they can be judged.

Supporting Palestinian rights doesn’t require stripping Palestinians of responsibility. Wanting Palestinians to have political freedom should include the expectation that they can use freedom responsibly.

This becomes especially important when Israel is asked to take risks for peace.

Israel is told to remove security restrictions, surrender territory, trust political commitments, and assume that a future Palestinian state will behave differently from Palestinian movements and institutions we have already experienced. Israelis who bring up history are often accused of allowing fear to prevent peace.

History is evidence.

Ramallah is part of that evidence.

So is the decision, eighteen years later, to describe participants in that lynching as heroes.

Israelis have every right to consider such evidence when deciding how much trust to place in another government, movement or political promise. Asking Israelis to ignore it requires very little courage from people who won’t live with the consequences if their prediction is wrong.

There is something fundamentally unequal about demanding extraordinary moral discipline from Jews while excusing basic moral failures from Palestinians.

A Palestinian who commits murder has agency. A Palestinian who celebrates murder has agency. A political institution that glorifies the murderer is making a choice. Those choices deserve moral judgment just as Israeli choices do.

The progressive movement can support Palestinian rights. It can oppose Israeli policies. It can argue for a Palestinian state.

It should also examine what it says about Palestinians when it expects so little from them.

If your explanation of Palestinian violence always ends with somebody else being responsible, you are denying Palestinians part of their humanity.

Human beings make moral choices. On October 12, 2000, the people inside that Ramallah police station made theirs.

So did the crowd outside. They saw the blood. They cheered.

A reasonable human should have been repulsed and shocked.
They celebrated and turned into local heroes. 

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh