Does Israel Expose the Hypocrisy at the Root of Most Liberalism?

Jewish people have long been the bedrock of American liberalism.  With their long history of persecution and their intellectual heft, Jews were the perfect vanguard of social and political efforts to create a more equitable world.  They formed a strong bond with the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed.  They were at the forefront of communist and socialist theory, the development of worker unions, the fight for civil rights, gay rights, abortion rights and other liberal crusades.

But when it came to finally achieving their own homeland in Palestine after the horrors of the holocaust, the Jewish diaspora found it impossible to reconcile the obvious injustice of their seizure of land from the resident population with their own fervent desire for a Jewish state.  So they did what human beings always do when confronted by their own hypocrisy – they rationalized.  On the subject of Israel, many Jews simply abandon their liberalism.

 

The Jews are not alone.  Most of us liberals are hypocritical to some extent.  We argue and fight for social justice until a housing project is planned for our neighborhood.  We celebrate public education but send our children to private academies.  We call for equal opportunity but do not hesitate to pull strings to get or give jobs.  We criticize income and wealth inequality but feverishly protect our bloated salaries and tax loopholes.  We lament the homeless problem but move our offices and homes as far away from them as possible to minimize our discomfort.

 

Lest I appear to be hypercritical of liberalism and supportive of conservative accusations of hypocrisy, let me say that at least liberals have recognized the injustices in this world, even if they often do not have the courage of their convictions.  Conservatives, on the other hand, perform logical and analytical gymnastics to avoid even confronting those injustices.  They lash out in deep-seated guilt with accusations of class warfare and naivete.  

 

Human beings are understandably selfish creatures.  Evolution will surely have bred into us both a tribal or communal need as well as the primal urge to look out for number one.  When blessed with good fortune, very few among us will willingly sacrifice to even the playing field.  We are passionate in our battles over abstract concepts and goals, but far less resolute when the practical realities of our ideals begin to threaten our own comfort or position.

 

The tribal instinct that nature has imbued us with is typically quite narrow, limited to our family or group of friends.  By the time warriors confront death and sacrifice on the battlefield, it is their comrades they will fight for, not the nation or the ideal.

 

There are of course Jews who wish to have the Palestinians share all of Palestine with them (the true meaning of ‘from the river to the sea’) and commit themselves to that cause, just as there are many liberals who are ready to make substantial sacrifices of their time and treasure for the ideals they have embraced intellectually.  But most of us are only willing to move incrementally and cautiously toward a more just world, rarely jeopardizing our own good fortune and status.  

 

Does that make most of us liberals hypocrites?  Perhaps, but we are only human and we live in a complex and broken world that does not lend itself to simple solutions.  We must all recognize the lurking hypocrisy and strive to do better.

The Voting Gap and Why Increased Wealth and Income Taxes Will Never Occur

Supposedly Jesus said ‘the poor will always be with us’.  If he did indeed say that (direct quotes that are written down 60-100 years after the fact are somewhat suspect) it is unlikely that he meant that they will remain poor because of voting disparities.  But today’s income and wealth disparities can at least partly be attributed to exactly that.

In the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections 67% percent of people with incomes over $100k voted, as compared to only 33% of people with incomes under $20k, who make up about 21% of the population.  This is an enormous difference.  If one makes the reasonable assumption that poor people will tend to vote quite heavily for candidates who will work toward higher taxes and more infrastructure to support the middle and lower classes, then this disparity in voting has a dramatic impact on our sociopolitical situation.

 

The situation is slightly better for presidential elections, but there is still a wide disparity in voter turnout as one goes up the income axis.  The graphs below show different estimates of voter turnout for several past presidential elections.

There has always been a strong distrust of true democracy in our country by more conservative groups. Initially, only white male property owners could vote.  Over time the vote was extended to all white males, then to black and white males, then finally to females.  But with each extension efforts were made to limit voting by groups with lower income and/or less education or based on racial codes.

 

Those who remain suspicious of truly universal suffrage argue that lower education levels or a lack of civic responsibility in the lower classes precludes them making thoughtful election choices.  Whether this is a sincere argument or a subterfuge to mask a basic political strategy of limiting voting by lower income groups is of course an interesting question. 

 

Why is there such a large disparity in voter turnout?  The right would argue that it is because these lower income voters are less conscientious citizens who lack the motivation and discipline to vote.  The left would argue that there are enormous obstacles to voting when one is poor – transportation, absence from work (elections are held on workdays), registration hurdles, etc.- and that these obstacles are purposely placed by those who fear a larger voter turnout.

 

One of the great failures of the left in the last 30 years has been its inability to strengthen the middle and lower classes when in power.  This has led to the flight of many of those voters to the populist politics of the republican party and Trump, aided in part by the culture wars that have been waged by the right.  This has also led to apathy among some groups of voters, who do not see any hope for change and thus lose interest in the election process.

 

Whatever the reason for the voter turnout gap, I would argue that the only way for a more egalitarian society to emerge without revolution is for voters at the lower end of the scale to be mobilized.  I am not optimistic that this will occur simply because the history of voting in the USA does not give any compelling reason to believe things will change.  If a way could be found to make people aware of the impact that a change in voter turnout could have, then perhaps lower income voters would respond.  But that type of analysis is difficult to get across (shades of Ross Perot and his charts and graphs!).  Still, it would be worth a try.  Slinging mud is definitely not working!

History Repeats Itself in Palestine

There is nothing new under the sun in the way of tragic human conflict.  What is happening today in Gaza and throughout former Palestine is similar to so many events in the past.   There is little hope for reconciliation and the violence and heartache will likely continue for many years to come.

One sad parallel is the colonization of the USA.  People yearning to escape persecution or economic hardship (and also plenty of opportunists) come to a new land.  There are people already inhabiting the land, but the new people believe it is their right to take at least some of the land because the current occupants are ‘under-utilizing’ it.

 

The new people assuage their consciences (when their consciences are in distress at all) by making agreements that allow the other people to continue to use some of the land.  The former occupants react with anger and unmitigated hatred, attacking the new settlements, and in some cases, committing rape, torture and mutilation.  The new people, whose military might and resources are vastly superior to those of the former occupants, respond with a bloodlust that knows no bounds, vowing to exterminate their enemies, whom they no longer regard as human.  They justify further encroachments on the land and wipe out whole villages indiscriminately.

 

Sound familiar?  The use of the word colonization in referring to the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank has been condemned by Israel and much of the United States, but I don’t see how one can interpret the events in any other way.  The Zionists who established the state of Israel were well aware of the conflict they were creating and expected to eventually claim all of Palestine.  

 

In the wake of the horror of WW2, the tragedy of the Palestinians being forced to give up their land for a persecuted and traumatized Jewish diaspora didn’t seem particularly harsh to Western sensibilities, especially when compared to the long history of rapacious Western colonization.  But it was still unjust and tragic.

 

I don’t see a long-term solution of any kind.  Israel has severely damaged its moral status in the world, even if it still can count on military and diplomatic cover from the USA.  The disproportionate killing of 30,000 Gazans, most of whom are women and children, will no doubt create ten new recruits for every Hamas fighter and leader they have eliminated.  Israel will have less peace rather than more.

 

Hamas accomplished its goal – putting the Palestinian question back into the public eye and probably killing the trend toward Israeli/Arab détente in Saudi Arabia and other gulf states – but in doing so they may have made the fate of the Palestinian people even more precarious than it was before.  And sadly, the October 7^thattacks seem to have unified the Jewish population in refusing to consider future diplomatic overtures and sharing of the land. 

 

The tragic dynamic of human conflict is that violence begets more violence and hatred is long-lived.  Justifications of the Israeli and Palestinian causes and arguments about who is right and who is wrong become moot and there is little hope of avoiding a bitter future of attacks and reprisals.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I am.