Why have many Australian progressives abandoned Israel and the Jews?

For more than 40 years, I have argued that both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have legitimate rights to national self-determination, and so any realistic conflict resolution strategy has to advance and protect the national rights of both peoples. Unfortunately, that moderate two-state perspective is no longer the dominant view on the Australian Left and has probably not been since September 2000 when the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada induced many progressives to retreat to a binary view of the conflict.

Instead of seeking a win-win solution that involved saying “Yes to Israel and Yes to Palestine”, many regressed to a zero-sum approach based on chanting “Yes to Palestine and no to Israel”.

In essence, the new pro-Palestinian orthodoxy assumed that national and human rights for Palestinians could only be advanced by harming Israelis and denying their national and human rights. That binary perspective was informed and reinforced by a number of political and ideological factors and events:

Since October 7, that unqualified endorsement of the hardline Palestinian nationalist agenda seems to have become the new norm, not only in segments of the fringe Marxist Left where it was always prevalent, but in far wider sections of the Australian community.