I recently heard Democratic political strategist Van Jones on the Being Jewish podcast with Jonah Platt, explaining that the Palestinian people want the same things everyone else wants: dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and human rights. Hamas, he asserted, stands in opposition to those aspirations, as they oppose democracy, women’s rights, and gay rights, among other things. It is an appealing distinction, although I suspect its appeal has rather more to do with the intellectual predicament of Western progressives than with the actual beliefs of the Palestinian people. Jones seems less interested in describing Palestinian society as it exists than in carving out a philosophically defensible island upon which he can stand, supporting the Palestinian cause without having to account for the considerable tension between his own liberal values and the illiberal convictions of Hamas and of Palestinian society.
The trouble with words like “dignity,” “freedom,” and “justice” is that they are sufficiently abstract to command universal agreement while concealing almost limitless disagreement about their meaning. What, precisely, constitutes dignity? To a Western liberal, it might mean equality between men and women, religious liberty, and the freedom to live according to one’s own conscience. To a religious fundamentalist, it might mean preserving traditional hierarchies, enforcing religious orthodoxy, and subordinating individual autonomy to divine authority. Both can invoke dignity while advocating societies that are fundamentally incompatible. Everyone wants freedom until we ask freedom to do what, and everyone wants justice until we ask justice according to whose principles.
Nor can we simply presume that Hamas represents an alien ideology imposed upon an unwilling Palestinian population. Hamas, after all, did not arrive in Gaza from another planet. It emerged from Palestinian society, cultivated a substantial political constituency, and won the 2006 legislative elections. That hardly establishes that Hamas represents every Palestinian, much less that its present rule enjoys democratic legitimacy. But neither does it support the convenient fiction that Hamas and Palestinian society occupy entirely separate ideological universes. Indeed, polling has repeatedly demonstrated that socially conservative attitudes remain widespread among Palestinians, particularly concerning homosexuality and women, even among women! The proposition that Palestinians secretly aspire to the social liberalism of contemporary Western progressives is not something to be assumed merely because it would make their cause more politically palatable.
In his memoir A Journey, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair made an observation about the Islamic world that is considerably more sophisticated than the comforting binary Jones offers. Blair described a spectrum of attitudes toward Islamist extremism, ranging from those who actively embrace terrorism, through those who sympathize with its objectives while rejecting its methods, to those who oppose both the violence and the ideology that animates it. The distinction is enormously important. A person may condemn suicide bombings while nevertheless favoring the establishment of an Islamic theocracy, the subordination of women, or the criminalization of homosexuality. Blair thus recognized something Jones seems determined to avoid: rejecting the methods of an extremist movement does not necessarily entail rejecting its objectives, much less embracing the liberal principles of Western democracy. There is an enormous ideological territory between supporting Hamas and wanting to live in a society that resembles contemporary America, and it is precisely that territory which disappears when we insist upon dividing the world into terrorists and people who supposedly share our values.
None of this diminishes the human rights of Palestinians, which exist independently of whether their political convictions resemble our own. One can defend the rights of people whose values one finds objectionable without pretending that those objections do not exist. Indeed, if we believe in national self-determination, we must recognize that people may choose to govern themselves according to principles we find objectionable; and if we believe in universal human rights, we must be prepared to defend those rights even against the wishes of the societies whose sovereignty we champion. These are difficult questions, which is perhaps why it is so much easier to retreat into the reassuring abstractions of dignity, freedom, and justice. But there is something intellectually dishonest about defending a people by inventing a more congenial version of them. Such an exercise may provide a comfortable refuge from ideological contradiction, but it does little to illuminate the world beyond it. The purpose of political analysis, after all, ought to be to describe the world as it is, not to rearrange it until we can find somewhere comfortable to stand.
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