This is a good post to segue into a mild rant.
Part of my unease with leftish analysis of the situation in the ME is that some people on the left have a very evident tendency to choose what to me appears exactly the wrong analogies to approach the current situation with. This is natural enough, because there is a human situation to look for analogies in which the ‘right’ side ‘won’. in the past.
Hence the desire to see in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict something either exactly alike, or at least closely akin, to the “decolonization” movements of the 50s through '60s, or to “Apartheid” - with the Israelis cast, respectively, as colonialists or South African Whites.
The problem, of course, is that these analogies don’t fit in the slightest, meaning that “lessons learned” from these prior situations are not going to be applicable.
The Israelis are not “colonists”. A “colonist” is someone who, ultimately, has a “metropolitan” to look to for support and if necessary for shelter. Hence, it is perfectly possible to terrorize or propagandize a “colonist” into simply giving up his or her colonial efforts, packing their bags, and returning to the ‘homeland’ if the going gets too rough.
Israelis can’t do that. They are already living in what they consider their ‘homeland’ and have nowhere to go. So the tactics used against ‘colonists’ simply can’t work on them. All terror does is make them nastier and all propaganda does is convince them that the person producing the propaganda can’t be trusted.
Similarly, they aren’t engaged in “Apartheid”. What White South Africans were doing, in essence, was creating a society in which racial discrimination artificially kept a minority of Whites at the top of a society in which the majority of the population was Black - a system of economic exploitation used by an ‘overclass’. The Israelis do not rely on economically exploiting Palestinians - while some do employ Palestinians from the WB, this is tangential to their economy, and if necessary they can and will cut all contact without suffering much. Moreover, Jewish Israelis are an absolute majority within Israel - they are not a small exploitative minority. Again, the same tactics that worked against South Africa will not work on Israel, because they are fundamentally unlike.
In reality, what is going on with Palestine vs. Israel is nothing unusual - it is a perfectly normal clash of ethno-nationalisms, both created at much the same time; somewhat complicated these days by the fact that the Palestinians have been caught up, as has much of the ME, with a very unpleasant fundamentalist religious revival (in their case, Hamas). Look not to “decolonization” or to “Aparthied”, but to situations like the break-up of Yugoslavia into competing ethno-nationalist states.
Why does this matter? Because by barking up the wrong tree, I am convinced, those uncritically plugging the modern-leftish line are doing more harm than good - to the Palestinians above all. They, poor saps, have been led to believe that such tactics will work (when you have nothing you are easy to convince) and this has led them to putting their energies in the wrong places - looking always to get back at Israel, rather than looking forward to either building new lives elsewhere, or a country that could actually be a possible rival for Israel in what land they can get. Why should they, when they have been promised that any day now Israel will be swept away and they can get their old villages back, down to the last pre-1948 well?