Members of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel dance during a ceremony marking the holiday of Sigd in Jerusalem, Nov. 11, 2015. Photo: Reuters / Amir Cohen.

The progressive worldview favors moral binaries such as oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, etc. Instead of moving beyond the relevance of race, progressives claim that we need it in order to make sense of the world. In fact, the two groups that focus primarily on race are racists and progressives.

Where do Jews fit into this reductive calculus?

Jews are not racially homogeneous, but progressives don’t seem to appreciate that. Most Jews in the West are “white-passing” and well-off, so progressives throw them in with the list of oppressors. When looking at Palestinians, these uninformed progressives believe they see relatively weak, poor BIPOC people. If there is a conflict between powerful “white” people and poor brown people, the progressive worldview requires that they stand with the latter.

However, unlike American Jews who are largely of European descent, 55% of Israeli Jews are either Sephardi or Mizrahi. The former descend from Jews exiled during the Spanish Inquisition, and the latter are from North African and Middle-Eastern Jewish communities. They are not white. There are, for example, about 160,000 Black Jews living in Israel who emigrated from Ethiopia.

Jews don’t fit neatly into the overly simplistic worldview that has become gospel among progressives. In their attempt to make sense of the Mideast conflict using this reductive framework, progressives tend to ally themselves with terrorists and the most illiberal people on Earth, and denounce the only liberal democracy in the region.

If progressives support indigenous rights, they should support the State of Israel. After all, Jews are indigenous to that land, and the archeological record supports this. Hebrew was spoken and Judaism practiced on that land 1,00 years before Arabs came to the region with the Muslim conquest (i.e, colonization) of the 7th century. The only people with the same language and culture as the people living there over 2,000 years ago are Jews.

Jerusalem does not appear in the Koran, nor was it ever the capital of any Arab state. It is, however, mentioned in the Torah 700 times.

The land upon which Israel sits was a colony of empires, whose seat of power was elsewhere, such as the Ottomans and the Romans. Only the Jews ever had their seat of government in that place. When progressives deride Israel as a colonialist state, ask them what country Israel is a colony of. Israel isn’t an outpost of any other power.

Progressives do not acknowledge the more than 3,000 years of history and Jewish life on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, because it does not fit with their image of what indigenous people look like. If Palestinians are the weaker, browner people in this conflict, then they must have had their land stolen by the stronger, whiter group. Facts don’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter.

This is the psychology animating the protests on college campuses and elsewhere across the country.

The fact that progressives use the whiteness of some Jews as an argument against Jewish indigeneity in Israel is especially repugnant. The only reason that white Jews exist is because Jews fled persecution in their ancestral homeland and bred with local populations in Europe. When progressives and antisemites make this argument, they are using the effects of ethnic cleansing against the actual victims of ethnic cleansing.

Some will claim that Israel is a pariah among nations because it is an apartheid state. However, this claim does not survive scrutiny. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Arab. Arab Israelis vote, sit as judges in Israel’s courtrooms, and as legislators in Israel’s parliament. Moreover, they have equal rights — the same rights as every Jewish citizen — and they have more freedoms than citizens of any other state in the region. For example, they can attend the Middle East’s only gay pride celebrations in Tel Aviv.

So why do progressives protest when Israel defends itself, but not when Hamas beheads homosexuals in Gaza? Why do progressives protest the accidental and unintentional killing of civilians in Gaza but not the 230,000 civilians killed during the ongoing, decade-long Syrian civil war? Why have they not protested the 150,000 civilians killed in Yemen?

The most common explanations offered for this selective outrage are that these protestors are just virtue signaling hypocrites or that they are antisemites. And sure, some of them are. But it is too easy to simply dismiss them all in this manner.

Hanlon’s Razor is a principle of critical thinking, which states that one should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. In this instance, we should not brand all these protestors as antisemites when their actions flow directly from their flawed worldview.

The more charitable and intellectually satisfying explanation is that progressives don’t protest the wholesale slaughter of civilians in places like Syria and Yemen, because those conflicts don’t have a “white-passing” participant. Those conflicts don’t fit neatly into progressives’ simplistic worldview that everything is about race and oppression.

People who aren’t stuck in this misguided dogma were taken aback by the way that progressives sought to contextualize the Hamas massacre of October 7. But these progressives’ callousness is not just a function of antisemitism or confirmation bias. It stems from their adherence to the misguided belief that race and power are the most salient heuristic to determine who is right in any given situation. Israel has tanks and warplanes manned by “white pilots.” Palestinians are “brown” people hurling rocks at those tanks. From the progressive perspective, that’s all that matters.

Why is this way of thinking so predominant among young people? This is where conservatives had it right all along. Academia — and even lower levels of education — have been hijacked by progressive intellectuals who do not sufficiently respect their audience or their profession. It is a misuse of the trust placed in educators to indoctrinate impressionable young people. They should be teaching students information and concepts, so that students can reach their own conclusions. Instead, progressive academics grade their captive audience on how well they can regurgitate the conclusions that have been force-fed to them.

Students are encouraged to become activists, and told that “silence is violence.” For too long, the rest of us didn’t see the harm in the hypersensitivity to microaggressions, the self-flagellation of “white fragility” and “doing the work” of renouncing their privilege, or confessing their oppression. The harm is now apparent, and it’s scary.

What is the solution?

As they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant. The reason that terror apologists take down posters of children kidnapped by Hamas is because it shows the lie of their misplaced allyship. Those images create a painful cognitive dissonance that these progressives prefer to suppress. Make progressives keep tearing them down. Project them on buildings. Let those images haunt their dreams and weigh upon their conscience.

The Supreme Court recently invalidated affirmative action policies, but the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit policies designed to increase intellectual diversity on college campuses. These schools should publicly commit that they will stop hiring terror apologists, and that their employment contracts will require that professors not abuse their power by imposing their beliefs upon students. Let’s not forget that higher education in the US is a business, susceptible to the same market pressures as other businesses.

After the shocking testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT before Congress, donors are now aware of what is going on at these schools. They should continue to speak with their checkbooks. Students who value intellectual freedom on campus should divert their applications to institutions that welcome a diversity of opinions rather than the superficial diversity of complexion that these bastions of DEI have fostered.

Kenneth Blake teaches Critical Thinking and Government at a private high school in northern California.