The genius of a lost cause is that its adherents never have to defend its real-world consequences. Which is one reason such movements are filled with people who are dedicated to keeping the cause lost.
When we talk about those with incentive to keep the Palestinians as “refugees” forever, we usually think of the NGOs and other groups whose funding depends on perpetual crisis—UNRWA first and foremost, since its organizing mission itself is to keep Gaza locked in a cycle of violence and terror.
But we can’t forget the activist class in the West, which needs the flame of Gaza to burn in perpetuity because it powers a global anti-West and anti-democratic movement that has nothing to do with the Palestinians.
A perfect demonstration of this latter category was a gathering of such elective lost-causeniks—vultures who pick at the lost causes of others—this weekend in Detroit. As usual, the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith did yeoman’s work chronicling the People’s Conference for Palestine, a yearly event of activists and politicians who promote the work and messaging of violent Palestinian factions.
Among the more prominent such attractions at the intifada circus were Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the Detroit-born Democrat and anti-Semitic lawmaker. Also there was Mahmoud Khalil, the tentifada figure who has become a Democratic Party hero after the Trump administration moved to deport him for his pro-Hamas advocacy.
While Smith’s reporting should be read and watched in its entirety for a sense of the extremism and violence-promotion, conference speakers were also crystal clear that Gaza is a mere springboard to anti-American and anti-Western activism, and that it represents to these radicals a mindset.
Hatem Bazian, chairman of American Muslims for Palestine and co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine—the latter a key proponent of Hamas on campus—and a professor at UC Berkeley, put it plainly: “My campus is Gaza. The library is Gaza. The research is Gaza.” He added: “The time is today for a free Palestine. The time is today to liberate the university. The time is today for decolonization.”
Sean Eren, another SJP figure, told the audience that these pro-Palestinian groups “learn from different struggles… from Occupy Wall Street, the anti-war and anti-imperialist protests of the early 2000s, and we rearticulated them into something that didn’t quite fit within the boundaries of BDS.” He credited the George Floyd protests in 2020 as one movement in particular that “significantly shaped the minds of the organizers who would go on to carry out the student intifada last spring.”
Sachin Peddada, a research coordinator at Progressive International, took a more explicitly anti-American approach: “The average American will never understand the plight of the Palestinian person because the state of Israel is a carbon copy of the United States. Therefore, the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads” and undo the “the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism.”
Tlaib struck a similar tone, thundering against “the decaying halls of the empire in Washington DC.”
Others spoke of Gaza as “the vanguard of the second wave of decolonization.” There was, of course, children’s programming as well, ensuring that kids in UN schools in the Mideast aren’t the only ones raised to hate.
As has become apparent by now, when an event or movement is designated as “for Gaza” it is “for” anything but Gaza. No one in Gaza is going to be helped by a U.S. congresswoman promoting the collapse of her own country.
The vultures all have their uses for the Palestinians. They see it them a lost cause and therefore an excuse to forever foment unrest elsewhere.
But there’s another lost cause parallel here: that of the Lost Cause mythology that emerged from the former Confederacy after its defeat in the Civil War. The Lost Cause sought to reframe the outcome of the war as the loss of a culture and a way of life that had little to do with slavery. The Southern defeat in the war, meanwhile, was to be seen as the inevitable domination of a morally and spiritually superior civilization by a militarily and technologically superior conqueror. According to this ideology, the result of the war was to be lamented because it was a loss of much more than “mere” slavery.
The key of all this myth-making is to downplay the cause and purpose of the war. It is identical to the propaganda campaign centered on the “nakba” and Israel’s victory in 1948. The reason for the war was to wipe out the Jews and annul the Jewish right to self-determination by force. That’s it. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t suffering all around as a result of the Arab war. But, as with the Civil War and slavery, what is sometimes referred to as “Palestinianism” and the nakba-centric narrative—including the redefinition of “nakba” from its genocidal meaning into something sympathetic—is driven by the need to erase the despicable intent of its origin story.
