"Pro-Palestine" is a "They", Not An "It"

There is no doubt that one major development in American politics over Israel/Palestine over the last two years has been a dramatic expansion and mainstreaming of pro-Palestine political advocacy. It's no longer a given that all or nearly all politicians will ritualistically intone "I am pro-Israel." It's no longer the case that self-identified "pro-Palestine" actors are confined to a tiny fringe leafleting outside UC-Berkeley.

One upshot of this growth is pluralism. As a movement gets larger, it encompasses a wider range of perspectives. Social movements, I've long argued, "moderate as they mainstream", and this moderation effect often frustrates the original "hardcore" of the movement, who may view the newcomers as engaging in coopting or even selling out. The moderates, for their part, may well view the old guard as hidebound, extremists, or simply unrealistic. It's a common pattern, and it's pretty clear it's being replicated here as well.

That said, there are a lot of people with strong incentives to downplay this pluralism and instead treat pro-Palestine as a monolithic thing.

Consider the reports that, in the wake of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, Hamas has launched a bloody crackdown on dissidents and rivals, including public executions of those they are accusing of being "collaborators". Given that this by all appearances is an extra-legal terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, one would expect it to be condemned, and one need not search far to find various pro-Israel voices running lines to the effect of "now that Israel isn't involved, 'pro-Palestine' groups are silent -- or even support it!" On the latter point, they're not making things up: the National Students for Justice in Palestine organization, following these reports of Hamas' killings, called for "death to collaborators" in apparent endorsement. As awful as it is to see, it appears there are prominent, non-fringe elements of the pro-Palestinian movement who more or less support Hamas engaging in violent terror not just against Israel (we knew that) but against Palestinians as well.

Yet, on another level, the pro-Israel voices I mentioned above are making something up, because the NSJP is by no means the only "pro-Palestine" organization out there, and in fact it is not at all difficult to find pro-Palestinian voices who are horrified by Hamas' rampage of terror. The Palestinian Authority lambasted Hamas' killings as "heinous crimes"; a Palestinian human rights NGO similarly accused Hamas of "extrajudicial executions" which "constitute a legal and moral crime that requires immediate condemnation and accountability."

In the abstract, there isn't anything especially odd or complicated here. "Pro-Palestine" is a "they", not an "it"; it contains a wide range of different groups and outlooks. Under that broad umbrella, why would it be hard to grasp that there might be some people who flatly support Hamas and others who find them risible?

But it's also not hard to see why many players in this drama are so enthusiastic on sweeping that pluralism under the rug. The pro-Israel commentators want the NSJP's pro-murder posts to be the paradigm example of what the pro-Palestinian movement stands for. "This is what this movement really is." In doing so, they can discredit all of the other members -- including those who are rightfully horrified by Hamas' brutality -- by association. And on the other side, obviously groups like NSJP have an incentive to present themselves as the sole and authentic representation of what "pro-Palestine" means. They want the broad, inchoate energy behind "pro-Palestine" to be channeled through them. Groups which take a softer or moderate tone are not allies, they are threats. And with strength in numbers and in unity, there is a lot of tacit pressure to defer to the leadership of established organizations and not disturb their decrees regarding what views "count" as pro-Palestine and what do not -- even if those decrees are often based more on internal political considerations than any healthy respect for pluralism and disagreement.

Yet incentives aside, we would all do better not to indulge in this game. One theme I've been returning to over the past several months is that many pro-Palestinian activists are speedrunning a realization many pro-Israel activists have also had to start grappling with: the reality that many -- not all or even potentially most, but many -- of the people who march under your flag really are exactly as extreme and nasty and blood-thirsty as your worst enemies describe them as. We like to think of these attacks as smears, and often they are insofar as they present sweeping and general guilt across the whole movement. But on the pro-Israel side, it actually is the case that there are many non-negligible figures whose outlook towards Palestinians is one of simple, naked racism; who do not remotely "just want peace"; who absolutely openly endorse human rights violations of the most vicious kind in the name of "security" or "greater Israel". And likewise, on the pro-Palestine side, it actually is the case that there are many non-negligible figures whose outlooks towards Israelis and Jews is one of simple, naked antisemitism; who do not remotely "just want peace"; who absolutely endorse human rights violations of the most vicious kind in the name of "decolonization" or "freeing Palestine." I and many other Jews who identified with Israel had to work through that reality, and so too must the pro-Palestine community work through the reality that it is not a slur or a slander or a bad-faith attack: groups like the NSJP really are right now endorsing Hamas' murder spree targeting Palestinian civilians.

However, this realization is not an accuse to swing all the way in the other direction. Those who endorse Hamas' murder spree are not an inauthentic, fringe, or fake part of "pro-Palestine", but neither are they the authentic, true, or sole representative of it either. The notion that every person who sat at a pro-Palestine campus encampment is now elated to see Hamas executing Palestinians in the streets is simply not credible. Pro-Palestine is a they, not an it. It is irresponsible to deny the presence of this particular faction; it is equally irresponsible to cede it the status of being the only relevant faction.

Overcoming Hardship versus Flourishing with Support

One of the interesting things about "equality of opportunity", as a concept, is that while it's often used as a conservative talking point ("equality of opportunity, not equality of result"), if one actually takes it seriously, it would require a pretty radical reordering of our social structures from top to bottom. Do you know how hard it is to actually establish equality of opportunity? For example, one would have to either eliminate economic inequalities altogether or (this is no easier) eliminate their impact in terms of how they affect the starting positions of young people. Whatever world that looks like, it's very distant from our own.

In the meantime, though, those of us who do take "equality of opportunity" with a modicum of seriousness try to accommodate the actually extant inequalities with some imaginative guesswork. We see two candidates, one with perhaps slightly lower test scores but who has overcome significant adversity, the other with higher numbers but no such disadvantages, and try to ask ourselves the counterfactual: "How would the first candidate have performed had they started on equal footing with the second?" It's an imprecise art and that leaves a lot of room for subjectivity (and complaints), but it at least tries to answer the question nominally posed by "equality of opportunity" in a realistic manner.

Yet there's another dimension of equality of opportunity that I think sometimes gets overlooked, which is that even where starting points are equal, results may differ depending on what the starting point is. Let me explain:

Imagine we were trying to rank the "merit" of 100 people, and assume for sake of argument it is possible to do this in an objective way (we can rank everyone from 1 to 100). The equality of opportunity issue noted above concerns how we make "adjustments" to the ranking based on differences in starting points -- some faced significant hardships and adversity, others were provided substantial mentoring and support for them to flourish -- and the problem is that this is all counterfactual. 

But suppose we could do the social scientist's dream and send all 100 people to an alternate reality where they start off in exactly the same position -- they all face (the same) significant hardships and adversity which they need to overcome. If they all faced the same hardships, we might say that that the resulting 1 - 100 ranking was an objective determinant of merit.

However, now suppose we send those same 100 to a different alternate reality. Here, too, they all start off in exactly the same position. But this time, instead of all facing (the same) hardships and adversity, here they all are provided the same support and nurturing (they start of equivalently advantaged, rather than disadvantaged). Once again, at the end of the experiment we rank everyone 1 - 100. But my guess is that the rank order in Alternate Reality #1 would be different from that produced in Alternate Reality #2. The skillset that yields high performance under conditions of adversity is not the same as the skillset that yields high performance under conditions of support and nurturing.

All of this is a long-winded way of asking: which do we care about more? Again, note that this isn't the easy in theory/hard in practice question of comparing one candidate who faced adversity against another who was given support. In our hypothetical, all candidates are both equally supported and equally disadvantaged (in the two realities). So the question here is whether our vision for the "best" candidate -- the ideal we are trying to approximate via our guesswork adjustments -- is the person who thrives under conditions of adversity or the person who outperforms in ideal circumstances.

Of course, the actual answer is "it depends". Some jobs or social roles we know demand significant resilience in the face of hardship, and so we want the person who can perform best in those circumstances. More broadly, I think we find intuitively attractive the idea that this sort of scrapper is particularly praise-worthy compared to those who "had it easy". Yet there is another frame where we would want that everyone would get the support, resources, and nurturing that would best position them to thrive. We don't want to haze people for its own sake; we should hope to construct social roles in such a way that their occupants are not having to scrape and scrap for traction but are put in the best position for success. Yet the fact that different people would be (even under a genuine "equality of opportunity" ideal) the "best" performers under these two frames is interesting to me; it underscores how there is an inescapable element of normative choice even in the best case scenarios of what a meritocracy might be.

There's no big moral here, just another meditation on the complexities of equality.