Over the past couple of years, I have been quietly building on a theory that what really causes the American Left, and perhaps their foreign ideological brethren, to favor the Palestinians over Israel is actually rather simple to understand. The Left thrives on, and is obsessed with creating new categories of underdogs[1] (the poor, minorities, or anyone whose reduced power position is assumed to render them ‘oppressed’). This usually requires a narrative fallacy, such as unarmed black males are unjustifiably killed by armed white police officers (“Black Lives Matter”), or that the Palestinians are the perpetual victims of the State of Israel (the BDS crowd). The thing about narrative fallacies is that they can be rather attractive, particularly for people with a penchant for intellectual laziness. Populist rhetoric seems to pay dividends for politicians, but there seems to be some limit to its policy effects. (more…)
