Not until the start of the Gaza war was it clear just how much the Western Left has embraced the Palestinian cause. Why, one wonders, of all the conflicts in the world, has this become such a reaction point around which so many campuses have erupted into chaos. While claim to any cause leaves out some factors, there seems to me just two main threads which lead back to the late ’90s and the politics of the day.

We all remember the (maybe overblown) power the religious right had over America at the turn of the century. The cultural fault lines before 2000 were about religion in general, with the counter-cultural positions championed by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. They had carved a cultural niche by their open anti-religious fervor and their many debates with the champions faith, all brought streaming to teens with an internet connections courtesy of YouTube. It really was the cultural edge, watching Hitchens in your bedroom while your family all prayed around the dinner table. It had all the right resonances for the era; It was avant-garde, it would piss off your parents, and it flew the middle finger to tradition. Then 9/11 happened.

Almost all politics are like a magnetic field, whatever one side attracts is equally repelled by the other side. If the current era of politics has taught us one thing, it is that nothing is sacred, and voters really only ever come to decide on issues post hoc. If all issues were put in a bag and pulled out at random by the parties, the next day a narrative as to why one must champion all the arbitrary issues of one’s side and hate the opposite would seem natural and right.

After the Twin Towers fell, both the Left and the Right were in natural alignment to assign blame to Islam, one because they were against religion, and the other because they were against all un-Christian religion. But both parties cannot have concord on anything, so it was for one party to flip. Would it first be the left, as all dis-harmonies could be explained away by recourse to ‘Respect for culture’ and an inherent anti-US bias (even though all the dictates of Islam were entirely contrary to the morals of campus culture)? Or would it be the right who would find an accord with Islam as a common faith as it had with Mormons, and the respect for traditional values (even though the actual tenants of the respective faith would exclude the other from the post-life paradise)?

Why it was that the Left blinked first I don’t claim to have an answer for, but the result was the Left taking on the cause of Muslims in the US and abroad. The narrative fit naturally into one of American misdeeds in the Middle East and 9/11 our just ends. On the Right, a cottage industry of Anti-Islam literature exploded and sat right next to the Christian section of any major book store. Sharia became a scare word on talk radio and the fight against it was then also a fight against the Left who became its promoter in the minds of the Ditto Army.

America and Israel had became allies more of chance than principle, a product of the cold war and a need for alliances in a strategic part of the world. The socialist inclinations of Israel from its origins through the ’70s were something overlooked by the US in exchange for Israel keeping its distance from the Soviets. A more natural economic alignment would not occur till Menachem Begin when Israel began to actually become a valuable trade partner at the same moment the soviet bloc was dissolving into its constituent elements. Who would then inherit the issues of the Middle East also fell to America once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan leaving us the only power broker.

In the meantime, religion in the US had had a turn to the prophetic, and the rantings of John Hagee and his ilk had incorporated the fate of Israel into the signs and symbols of the Apocalypse. It was only when the Jews once more controlled the temple mount that Jesus could come in a flash from the sky and remake all human relations in his image. This naturally fit into a preexisting realpolitik and did not have to wrestle with the contradictions of a communist Israel in Sunday sermons. And so while it was true that the Jews had killed Jesus, we still needed to send them US arms and advance their interests in the UN.

Thus it came to be over-determined that the Left would be all in for Palestine. It was too easy after the Religious Right had adopted Israel. It became more difficult to condemn Christianity while advocating Islam, but like all partisans everywhere, they managed it just fine. The cognitive dissonance was kept at bay by the distance to any actual Islamic country which took its faith seriously, and instead ended in such spectacles in the West as Queers for Palestine. While unsurprising, it is still amazing.