Against the Law

In turning towards organizing practices designed to work in the American context and on nationalist terms, the Left often neglects these anticolonial principles and seeks out Jewish voices to validate Palestinian claims. In turn, it privileges Jewish discourse, anxieties, and histories in ways that marginalize Palestinians in their own struggle. At its least productive, the exclusion of Palestinian community voices from both popular narratives and organizing treats the question of Palestine as an intra-Jewish problem. In turn, this prods activists to organize for Palestinian rights under the Jewish state, towards multiculturalism and tolerance rather than justice, towards a better colonialism rather than the end of colonialism.