The Ideological Fuel of a New Left: Revealed by Hamas

The Ideological Fuel of a New Left (full series)
Three Axes | Everything Leftism’s Rise | Revealed by Hamas
The People of Everything Leftism | Cross-Pressures

Everything Leftism Revealed by Hamas

Everything Leftism as an ideology jumped out of the political background and into the forefront after the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023. Almost immediately after the attacks, radical-left organizers from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, International ANSWER, the Democratic Socialists of America, and other groups staged mass demonstrations in major (Democratic-controlled) cities and on college campuses (controlled by left-wing administrations) in support of “Free Palestine” and “ceasefire” (in practice, Hamas victory). Abroad, the living secular saint of the environmentalist movement, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, joined the demonstrations.

American Jews, who are by a comfortable majority liberal Democrats with sympathy for the tenets of 2020-vintage progressivism, wondered how their allies could turn so forcefully to the anti-Israel side, especially given Israel’s cultural liberalism on matters of religion, gender expression, and sexuality in a region not known for liberal tolerance of any of that. Some were driven out of employment within liberal institutions for their support—even liberal-facing, pro-two-state-solution support—of Israel.

Everything Leftism supplies the answer. Israelis inhabit a rich, relatively culturally Western, relatively capitalist, militarily powerful country allied with the United States; therefore, they are oppressors. Palestinians inhabit a poor, culturally non-Western, relatively socialist, and militarily weak statelet opposed to the United States and its allies. All those are hallmarks of the global oppressed. Add in the ongoing disputes over “occupation,” whether of parts of the West Bank or of the State of Israel proper, and the Palestinians become arguably the prototypical oppressed group, rich in intersectionality points and Everything Leftist power.

The “bucketing” of Palestinians and their pseudo-governance by an Islamist terrorist group as “oppressed” explains the confusing images and alignments that have marked the 2024 “riot season” of “Hamas glampers” on college campuses and in parks and streets in New York City and Washington, DC. How can Queers for Palestine exist when Gaza is ruled by a theocratic Islamist terrorist group that violently suppresses homosexuality while Israel is a relatively liberal democracy that tolerates same-sex intimate relations? (A quirk in Israeli marriage law means that while same-sex marriages cannot be performed in Israel, the government recognizes those performed abroad or by virtual presence abroad, most notably by Utah County, Utah.)

Everything Leftism provides the answer: Both Western “queers” and Palestinians go in the “oppressed” bucket, regardless of the actual policies of Hamas-ruled Gaza or Israel toward gay and lesbian residents. Thus, the “queers” must be for Hamas-ruled Gaza, not relatively liberal Israel.

Similar bucketing, often mixed in with a helping of Cold War–era Communism or critical theory, aligns Black Lives Matter movement institutions, the Democratic Socialists of America, Antifa, Code Pink, and other radical groups with the broader left-of-center political movement. That movement normally manages its coalition by the practice of mutual backscratching, with each discrete interest in the Left coalition getting its most important “thing.” Thus, the Green New Deal is not just about environmentalism, but also about compulsory unionization, state ownership of the means of production, and DEI requirements.

In the next installment, it is impossible to know what proportion of the Democratic voter base is sincerely Everything Leftist.