Who Is My Neighbor? or, I Don't Really Care, Do U

The notorious liberal pundit Matt Yglesias posted on Twitter that he could understand why Palestinians would care about Palestine, but not why American college students cared, or thought they should care, or pretended to care about Palestinians.

The thing about Rashida Tlaib is she's Palestinian, it makes perfect sense for her to be mad at Israel and fired-up about it ... what's sus is all the people who aren't Palestinian and seem to care 1000x more about this than any other humanitarian issue. I once met a Syriac Christian who told me with passion and detail about how his people had been wronged [by] American policy and I took it very seriously, but it would be weird if some average college student was obsessed with this.

This was in November 2023, not quite a month after the October 7 attack.  I should have written about it at the time, but I procrastinated - and then this month Yglesias repeated himself.  As far as I can tell, that post has been deleted, but someone saved a screenshot.

I see where he's coming from, but doesn't that mean it's "sus" for American Gentiles like me to care about Israel?  A commenter asked Yglesias about that, he replied that it's a "fair question" but didn't answer it.

One obvious riposte, made by most US critics of Israel I see, is that we are paying for Israel's crimes, with money, armament, and intelligence.  This isn't some obscure little conflict in some unknown corner of the world; the US government is obsessed with Israel.  

But I've always rationalized these matters in transactional terms: If I, as a gay man, want non-gay people to sympathize with and support my situation and movement, then I must do the same in return.  But my concern for other groups began before I thought of homosexuality as something to be supported. I read an account of a Nazi massacre of Jews when I was in sixth grade, which marked me forever after, and I grew up with the ascendance of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.  To me that's ordinary humanity, something that Yglesias seems to lack.

A feature of the Civil Rights Movement was the involvement of white people, including students and clergy, who traveled South and put their own lives on the line, hoping that their presence would deter white racists somewhat.  As anyone who knows about the period knows, it didn't always succeed. Similar involvement occurred with targets of US violence such as Cuba, Central America, and Vietnam.  I remember people like Yglesias in those days, who dismissed those activists as childlike, neurotic idealists.  Whole books were written by sober clinicians, explaining that they were just working through father issues.  I suppose that was kinder than frothing that they were Communists, a fifth column of useful idiots trying to undermine the American way, but both approaches represented a determination to ignore the issues at stake, a refusal to think.

I began losing sympathy with Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and my sympathy has been dwindling with each successive wave of their atrocities.  Even now, when it has dwindled to zero, I don't call for the destruction of Israel, except in the metaphorical way that a one-state solution would mean its end as a ethnonationalist state.  The only way to stop the cycle of violence is to stop it.  I don't know how that can be done, but I know that bombing Israel into the stone age wouldn't work.  The fantasy that you can terrorize your enemies into submission is a vain one; that approach never works for long.  One obstacle to a constructive solution is people like Matthew Yglesias, who's not the only supporter of Israel who shares his indifference to the suffering of others.  As Nathan Robinson's essay at Current Affairs shows in detail, his insular vision isn't even limited to Palestians: Yglesias casually dismisses the poor and weak of every variety, every class with the same smug callousness.  

As you'll see if you click through to the threads that set me off on this post, he and his supporters and friends take the same bemused view of his critics that most of Israel's apologists take: Why, they ask, do you guys only criticize Israel and Matty?  Why are you so obsessed?  Why don't you attack someone else?  The answer, which I've given many times, is that I attack other countries and pundits too.  So do other left writers.  Of course that just shows our immaturity and hypocrisy: we don't really care about black Americans, Vietnamese, refugees, or Palestinians - any more than Karl Marx really cared about children working in factories.  Yglesias and his ilk, they'd have us believe, really do care, which they show by opposing any ameliorative action at all.