They are united around a shared desire to see the destruction of the West.
T here is something strange happening in the “social justice” movements du jour: They have all been fused with anti-Israel activism. Rioters in L.A., environmental activists, anti-capitalists, feminists, and a New York City mayoral candidate — at this point, the anti-Israel movement has become fully intertwined with every progressive movement, in ways that seem not only counterintuitive but fundamentally contradictory.
Recent political events supply many examples of the apparent contradiction. Take the recent L.A. riots. Among a sea of Mexican flags were just as many, if not more, Palestinian flags and keffiyehs. You’d think pro-immigration protesters would support Israel, with its diverse population of not only Jews, Christians, and other ethnic groups, but also Arabs, who comprise 20 percent of the population and enjoy full and equal civil rights. By contrast, neighboring Arab countries have purged all their Jews and most other minority populations. In Gaza, the only Jews are hostages.
Look also at the state of environmental protest. There’s Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who wants to “crush Zionism” and recently took to sea on a flotilla to break the “blockade” of Gaza. If the cause is climate change, why oppose Israel? Israel is a global leader in clean technology and water desalination. Hamas, on the other hand, in addition to terrorizing civilians, intentionally destroys land with incendiary devices, and contaminates groundwater with its tunnel infrastructure.
Gender activists and feminists have also taken up the anti-Israel mantle. There is, of course, the baffling “Queers for Palestine.” But beyond that absurdity, there is real anti-Israel animus within these movements. Take Linda Sarsour, architect of the 2017 Women’s March. She ostensibly promoted “gender equality” and an end to “sexual violence,” but she also claims that “you can be a Zionist or a feminist, but you can’t be both.” Her mission to exclude Jewish and Israeli women has proven successful in a post–October 7 world.
All this is backwards. Women in Israel have full and equal rights. It is the only place in the Middle East where women have served in the highest echelons of the military and government, including as prime minister. By contrast, women in Israel’s neighboring Arab countries can be stoned to death for such sexual “misconduct” as being the victim of rape. Even in more moderate countries, like Egypt, marital rape is not a crime. Feminists are untroubled by any of this, or the systematic rape, assault, and torture of Israeli women on October 7.
And what do Palestinians have to do with the Black Lives Matter movement, whose original platform called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and included a link to a BDS website? Not only was BLM’s anti-Israel stance irrelevant, it was incongruous. The story of Exodus, in which the Jews escaped from Egyptian slavery, was a galvanizing force behind the American anti-slavery movement. And no group has stood more firmly with black civil rights leaders, both in the 1960s and beyond, than have Jews.
Even left-wing darling Zohran Mamdani should admire Israel’s rich culture of kibbutzim — small, collectivist communities. Yet he ran for mayor of New York City on a platform of boycotting Israel, arresting its prime minister, and refusing to condemn the globalization of an intifada, right alongside his promise of free busing and cheap groceries.
None of it makes sense on its face.
While this contradiction is ridiculous in many ways, we cannot quickly cast this phenomenon aside as childish ignorance or pseudo-academic jargon. A closer look reveals there is a spirit that unites all of these seemingly incompatible ideas: a deep hatred for the West. It is not a series of disparate causes but an amalgamated movement to destroy the Western “establishment” in all its manifestations — businesses, capitalism, institutions, nation-states, the nuclear family, organized religion, and all the foundations of Western civilization that have been built up over centuries.
And believers don’t make any secret of it anymore. At rallies, they burn American flags next to the Israeli flags. They chant “death to Israel” and “death to the West.”
The prominence of the anti-Israel movements in the social justice arena is therefore not a coincidence. To the contrary, it exposes what “social justice” was always about and why the movements are deeply interrelated. Neither cause seeks to build or improve society but to tear it down. Both worldviews are inherently destructive, not constructive.
Rather than support the improvement of Palestinian society by ridding it of Hamas and working toward peace, the anti-Israel crowd overtly supports violence (“intifada”) and dons Hamas headbands while spraying graffiti in university libraries. Rather than help people build businesses to benefit from capitalism, they’d set small business storefronts on fire (often small businesses owned by immigrants). Rather than dedicate time and resources toward improving underdeveloped neighborhoods, they’d throw Molotov cocktails at the police who protect and serve those neighborhoods.
Although the veil has recently been lifted, this is not a new phenomenon. The fusion of the anti-Israel movement and progressive anti-Westernism has its roots in the U.S.S.R. and has benefited from billions in funding from Muslim countries. America’s enemies have fostered those destructive ideas for decades. And since the 1960s, the post-modernist, deconstructionist schools of thought have given it a veneer of academic legitimacy — describing the world through the simple binary, which is now known as the “oppressor” and “oppressed” dichotomy. Jews and the West both fit into the former bucket and are therefore targets for “deconstruction.” Anti-Western and anti-Israel ideology came from the same laboratory, exactly as the Soviets and their allies intended.
The merging of social justice causes and anti-Israel activism that we see in the L.A. riots, on college campuses, in Brooklyn coffee shops, and on Greta Thunberg’s yacht began in academia decades ago, but it has now fully taken to the streets. And this is more than just an amalgam of mismatched, incongruous ideas. It is more than just hypocrisy. We must recognize that there is a deeper and even more dangerous anti-Western philosophy that fuses them all together. If we don’t recognize it for what it really is, and if we don’t address it appropriately, it will destroy our society — just as it aims to do.
Mark Pinkert and Susan Greene are litigation and appellate partners at the law firm Holtzman Vogel. They work in Miami and New York, respectively.