Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, by Marc Hill, Mitchell Plitnick
A political polemic with a very narrow target audience, and not much new information.
The New Press, 2021, 227 pages
In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which US policy has made peace harder to attain.
Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.
So I've decided to keep chugging through books about Israel and Palestine from various perspectives. Except for Palestine is a book from an unabashedly leftist perspective, but it's a leftist ("progressive") US one, so most of the time it holds back on the more over-the-top seething resentment displayed by Palestinian writers. It was written during Trump's presidency and published shortly after Biden's election (with a foreword commenting on the authors' minimally-hopeful-but-skeptical assessment of Biden's expected Israel/Palestine policies). So the biases are very clear: the introduction asserts as givens that capitalism is bad, America is a malignant force of imperialism, anyone who votes Republican is a white supremacist, and Trump is the living embodiment of evil. If you are even a little bit doubtful about any of these premises, then you may find it difficult to wade through this much smugness and self-righteousness. Nevertheless (despite being a little bit doubtful about some of those premises) I persisted.
The target audience for this book is those same American progressives. (Clearly no one would bother trying to talk to any non-progressives, since it's taken for granted that they are irredeemable xenophobes who cannot be appealed to.) The title of the book is its argument: that progressives are "progressive" about everything except Palestine, where they suddenly fall silent about their progressive values. The authors repeatedly compare the situation in Palestine with the situation on the US/Mexican border, despite repeatedly admitting that the situations are not the same (and then complaining about how they are not treated the same).
Hill and Plitnick start by addressing "Israel's right to exist." After the pro forma throat-clearing about how antisemitism is bad and no one should hate Jews, they essentially argue that the "Israel has a right to exist" argument is bad faith and should be dismissed because no one is denying that Israel, you know, exists and no one is advocating that millions of Israelis should be murdered or displaced. Instead, the authors say, we ("we" always meaning progressives) should be focusing on what sort of country Israel should exist as - namely, one in which Palestinians have equal rights.
Which all sounds very nice, because why wouldn't we be in favor of Palestinians having equal rights? The authors argue against a Jewish ethnostate and Israeli laws that have limited the rights of non-Jews. Now, speaking as a non-religious, non-Jewish person who doesn't think anyone has an inherent "right" to their own ethnostate and who doesn't give a fuck who "owned" a piece of land 2000 years ago - sure, maybe the real answer to peace in the Middle East would be Israel ceasing to exist as a Jewish state and becoming instead a multicultural single state in which Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others all coexist peacefully. This is what many Israel critics claim was the state of Palestine before the Zionists arrived, and the "one state solution," while dismissable as a realistic solution today (for that matter, after October 7, so is the "two state solution," but we'll get to that), seems like something that Western progressives who don't care much about a Jewish state for the sake of being a Jewish state should support.
There are a few problems with that, however, and they are problems that the authors skip over entirely and which a lot of progressives will shout at you and call you racist if you bring them up, but they are very evident if, like me, you actually watch Arabic media channels and read the comments.
The first (but really, the smallest) problem is the ahistorical nature of these claims. While obviously Israel has been constantly in conflict since its founding in 1948, relations between Jews and non-Jews weren't entirely peaceful even before the British Mandate. (And yes, Jews did live there even before Zionists started arriving at the end of the 19th century.) No, Palestine has not always been a land of milk and honey and egalitarianism until the Zionists arrived. Arabs were willing to accept small numbers of Jews in the Ottoman and pre-Ottoman eras, but as soon as they began arriving in number (even when they were buying land legally), the Arabs became alarmed, and hostile. (Oddly, this fact does not figure into the authors' comparison with Americans' rejection of illegal immigrants.)
The bigger problem is that many, many Palestinians very literally and explicitly do not want Israel to exist. And by that I don't mean "They don't want Israel to have its current government" or "They don't want Israel to be a Jewish ethnostate." I mean they literally want Israel (and Israelis) to cease to exist. For all that Palestinians complain about Israeli peace offers being made in bad faith (and some of them have been), you have to be deep in denial to pretend that going back at least to Yasser Arafat, Palestinian peace offers haven't only ever been offered as a grudging acceptance of current realities on the ground (i.e., "y'all don't have the ability to destroy the Jews right now") while they prepared for their real objective, the destruction of Israel. Now some progressives will acknowledge this insofar as they will say "Sure, a lot of Palestianins feel that way in their hearts because of decades of oppression etc. etc. but a real and lasting peace would result in the next generation softening their stance"... so, I guess eventually we'd get a Palestinian population that doesn't want to literally kill all the Jews.
Even if Israel offered this - either a real two-state solution or even a one-state solution - there are many Palestinians who are pretty explicit about being unwilling to accept even that. They view Israel as stolen land, period, the arrival of Zionists as a settler-colonial project, Jews as invaders who displaced the indigenous people of Palestine, and the only remedy is to give the land back. All of it. They might be willing to allow the Israelis to peacefully evacuate, but most aren't too particular about the details as long as the Israelis are gone.
So in the meantime, Israelis have to deal with Palestinians today, and believe that the "right of return" to allow all Palestinians back into Palestine (and Israel) and make them equal citizens would de facto end Israel as a nation and probably lead directly to a very bloody civil war. Plitnick and Hill dismiss this as racist paranoia. I cannot say that I found their arguments convincing since they seem to rely entirely on opinion polls that say the majority of Palestians "prefer diplomacy over armed conflict." I mean, duh, but if you're coexisting with a population only 30% of whom want to exterminate you (and the rest will grudgingly tolerate your existence because they have to), that still seems like a pretty big obstacle to a one-state solution. (Yes, this works in the other direction too, since there is an influential minority of Israelis who, masks off, will admit that they wouldn't mind turning Gaza into a desert to be resettled by Jews.)
Except for Palestine did nothing to change my view on this and I remain unsure if the authors are just delusional or deeply, cynically disingenuous. They argue at length that Israel's repeated demands that Palestinians formally and explicitly accept Israel's right to exist are a bad faith demand for Palestinians to accept their subjugation, to forfeit all claims to their personhood and national identity, and are basically a sort of humiliation ritual that Israel doesn't demand of any other Arab nation. The authors are particularly weaselly, IMO, in claiming that the PLO accepted Israel's right to exist "to the same degree" that Egypt and Jordan did. What they mean by this is that none of them said in those exact words, "Israel has a right to exist," but Egypt and Jordan did make peace with Israel and are no longer trying to make them stop existing. There is certainly some finesse required in the precise wording of these sorts of diplomatic agreements and maybe in what Palestinian leaders can sell to their people, but the authors ignore the reason Israel is so adamant about this point: because without that explicit acknowledgment, Palestinians are always pretty clear that they don't think Israel should exist, at all, and thus any peace agreement can only be regarded as, at best, a temporary cease fire. Even the authors never come out and say they think Israel needs to be dissolved as a nation-state, but they clearly think asking the Palestinians to stop demanding that is unreasonable.
Next, Plitnick and Hill turn to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction) movement, and surprise! I agree with a lot of what they say here. The BDS movement is an attempt to put international pressure on Israel by boycotting all Israeli products, refusing to invest in Israeli companies, and imposing sanctions for their treatment of Palestinians. Israelis and many American Jewish organizations claim that the BDS movement is antisemitic, some going so far as to claim that Islamic terrorist groups are behind it all. The authors examine these claims and mostly dismiss them (while admitting that certainly there are some antisemitic groups that have joined the BDS movement), but their main objection is a peculiar kind of lawfare that has arisen in the US in recent years with "anti-BDS laws." Essentially, some states (notably Texas) have enacted legislation that punishes any company or organization that joins a BDS boycott by refusing to do state business with them. Similar legislation has been proposed in Congress.
As a First Amendment enthusiast, I actually agree with the authors here that such government actions, particularly when applied on behalf of Israel and nowhere else, are unconstitutional and antithetical to free speech. I do think the BDS movement is wrong-headed and it often is just a mouthpiece for anti-Israeli (and antisemitic) propaganda - but it's also clearly protected free speech. To be clear, "anti-BDS" laws don't actually criminalize the BDS movement, as the authors claim, but using the coercive power of the state in any way (in this case, by denying contracts and in the case of universities, threatening to cut funding) is still wrong.
That being said, most progressives seem to be on the same page about this; the only leftists I've ever heard supporting anti-BDS legislation were Jewish groups. So this hardly seems to be an example of "Except for Palestine" in the progressive movement.
The next chapter is about recent developments in Gaza ("recent" meaning up to about 2020), with the failure of the PLO and Fatah and the rise of Hamas. Here the authors are as oblique as I have found some Palestinian writers to be. They at least admit that Hamas is kind of violent and does launch the odd rocket now and then at Israel, but it's all in the context of "armed resistance" which, they take pains to point out, is recognized by International Law as legal for an occupied people. That the majority of Gazans voted for Hamas is not, they argue, because Palestinians support terrorism and Hamas's explicit goal of destroying Israel, but because they were so fed up with the corruption of Fatah, the Palestinian political party that governed Gaza previously.
This is probably true. Fatah was extremely corrupt. Unfortunately, so is Hamas, and Plitnick and Hill don't touch at all on whether Hamas represented any kind of improvement in Gaza, any more than they mention Hamas's practice of throwing Fatah supporters off of rooftops. They do kind of address whether or not Hamas is capable of actually negotiating with Israel by pointing out that Hamas has repeatedly offered truces, which have occasionally held for as long as five months(!). In fact, there is some complexity in Hamas's position; they started out as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood with the explicit goal of destroying Israel, but they have "softened" a bit in their willingness to accept 1967 borders with Israel (while not recognizing Israel as a nation, which is one of Israel's sticking points, which as I mentioned above, Hill and Plitnick argue is an unreasonable expectation on Israel's part).
Leaving aside my personal views on "International Law" (which is that it is a polite fiction that UN member nations use to pretend that there is some kind of regulatory body above any given nation-state, so that all you really need to keep wars and genocides from getting too out of hand is muster enough votes), the authors do a quick about-face when complaining that Israel and the US use Hamas's targeting of civilian populations (which they admit is true), which is also against International Law (also true) as an "excuse" to label Hamas terrorists and refuse to negotiate with them.
Of course I don't expect a detailed history of Hamas in this short cri de coeur for Western leftists, but nonetheless the omissions struck me as more evidence that the authors only ever see bad faith and "violations of International Law" going in one direction.
Finally, we get to Trump and American foreign policy. As you may recall, in 2017 President Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy there. This, predictably, enraged the Arab world and was an intentional slap in the face to Palestinians. Trump also withdrew US funding from UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) in 2018. (President Biden restored it upon taking office, until the US withdrew again after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack.) That Plitnick and Hill criticize these moves is expected; what they actually argue is that they were really just an extension, and not a deviation, of existing US foreign policy. The US had been perpetually postponing a move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for years; technically we recognized Jerusalem years ago but that was one of those diplomatic formalities that was never executed and has been postponed in the constant game of diplomatic kabuki that is Middle East politics. Until Trump blundered in and said "Fuck it," to the delight of Israelis and most American Jewish groups and the outrage of the Palestinians. Hill and Plitnick's argument that Trump basically just did in deed what the US has been doing in words for decades is not wrong. As for UNRWA, well, that's a subject about which more books could be written. On the one hand, it was a humanitarian lifeline for millions of Palestinians. On the other, after October 7, I find its critics to have been more right than wrong that it was at best an obstacle to any sort of permanent resolution to the Palestinian refugee situation, and at worst, literally just another grift to be subverted by Gaza's leadership (meaning, at this time, Hamas).
Mitchell Plitnick is an American Jewish writer and Israel critic. Marc Lamont Hill is an American journalist and activist. Curiously omitted from most blurbs about this book is that Hill is also a host on the Al Jazeera network. Now a lot of people think Al Jazeera is a propagandist anti-Israeli mouthpiece for the Qatari government. As someone who has watched a fair amount of Al Jazeera (both in English and in Arabic), I can tell you: it is a propagandist anti-Israeli mouthpiece for the Qatari government. That said, they do actual journalism and contrary to what you might think, they don't (overtly) call for the destruction of Israel or the death of Jews. So reading Except for Palestine was rather like watching an Al Jazeera "documentary" about Israel and Palestine. The facts are true, in rough outline, but a whole lot of context is skipped over and there is no actual interrogation of opposing perspectives. Do Israelis or Israeli supporters have any reasons for believing the things they do and doing the things they do that go beyond paranoia and hatred of Palestinians? According to Hill and Plitnick, no more than anyone votes for Trump for reasons beyond hating black people.
Except for Palestine is written by and for leftists. In fairness, it is pretty explicit about that being its intention. If you want to understand what the "leftist" view is, this book is a pretty good summary of all the talking points. If you have some broader knowledge of the history of Israel and the conflict in Palestine, even if you are left-leaning yourself, you might find yourself frequently saying "Okay, but wait a minute--" as I was. This book is not meant to persuade hardcore Israel supporters or non-leftists, Will it persuade someone who is a pro-Israel leftist to reconsider? The argument is that being pro-BLM, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist requires one to be pro-Palestine. This may be true, but I found the argument to have too many internal contradictions to be persuasive.
My complete list of book reviews.
The New Press, 2021, 227 pages
In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which US policy has made peace harder to attain.
Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.
So I've decided to keep chugging through books about Israel and Palestine from various perspectives. Except for Palestine is a book from an unabashedly leftist perspective, but it's a leftist ("progressive") US one, so most of the time it holds back on the more over-the-top seething resentment displayed by Palestinian writers. It was written during Trump's presidency and published shortly after Biden's election (with a foreword commenting on the authors' minimally-hopeful-but-skeptical assessment of Biden's expected Israel/Palestine policies). So the biases are very clear: the introduction asserts as givens that capitalism is bad, America is a malignant force of imperialism, anyone who votes Republican is a white supremacist, and Trump is the living embodiment of evil. If you are even a little bit doubtful about any of these premises, then you may find it difficult to wade through this much smugness and self-righteousness. Nevertheless (despite being a little bit doubtful about some of those premises) I persisted.
The target audience for this book is those same American progressives. (Clearly no one would bother trying to talk to any non-progressives, since it's taken for granted that they are irredeemable xenophobes who cannot be appealed to.) The title of the book is its argument: that progressives are "progressive" about everything except Palestine, where they suddenly fall silent about their progressive values. The authors repeatedly compare the situation in Palestine with the situation on the US/Mexican border, despite repeatedly admitting that the situations are not the same (and then complaining about how they are not treated the same).
Hill and Plitnick start by addressing "Israel's right to exist." After the pro forma throat-clearing about how antisemitism is bad and no one should hate Jews, they essentially argue that the "Israel has a right to exist" argument is bad faith and should be dismissed because no one is denying that Israel, you know, exists and no one is advocating that millions of Israelis should be murdered or displaced. Instead, the authors say, we ("we" always meaning progressives) should be focusing on what sort of country Israel should exist as - namely, one in which Palestinians have equal rights.
Which all sounds very nice, because why wouldn't we be in favor of Palestinians having equal rights? The authors argue against a Jewish ethnostate and Israeli laws that have limited the rights of non-Jews. Now, speaking as a non-religious, non-Jewish person who doesn't think anyone has an inherent "right" to their own ethnostate and who doesn't give a fuck who "owned" a piece of land 2000 years ago - sure, maybe the real answer to peace in the Middle East would be Israel ceasing to exist as a Jewish state and becoming instead a multicultural single state in which Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others all coexist peacefully. This is what many Israel critics claim was the state of Palestine before the Zionists arrived, and the "one state solution," while dismissable as a realistic solution today (for that matter, after October 7, so is the "two state solution," but we'll get to that), seems like something that Western progressives who don't care much about a Jewish state for the sake of being a Jewish state should support.
There are a few problems with that, however, and they are problems that the authors skip over entirely and which a lot of progressives will shout at you and call you racist if you bring them up, but they are very evident if, like me, you actually watch Arabic media channels and read the comments.
The first (but really, the smallest) problem is the ahistorical nature of these claims. While obviously Israel has been constantly in conflict since its founding in 1948, relations between Jews and non-Jews weren't entirely peaceful even before the British Mandate. (And yes, Jews did live there even before Zionists started arriving at the end of the 19th century.) No, Palestine has not always been a land of milk and honey and egalitarianism until the Zionists arrived. Arabs were willing to accept small numbers of Jews in the Ottoman and pre-Ottoman eras, but as soon as they began arriving in number (even when they were buying land legally), the Arabs became alarmed, and hostile. (Oddly, this fact does not figure into the authors' comparison with Americans' rejection of illegal immigrants.)
The bigger problem is that many, many Palestinians very literally and explicitly do not want Israel to exist. And by that I don't mean "They don't want Israel to have its current government" or "They don't want Israel to be a Jewish ethnostate." I mean they literally want Israel (and Israelis) to cease to exist. For all that Palestinians complain about Israeli peace offers being made in bad faith (and some of them have been), you have to be deep in denial to pretend that going back at least to Yasser Arafat, Palestinian peace offers haven't only ever been offered as a grudging acceptance of current realities on the ground (i.e., "y'all don't have the ability to destroy the Jews right now") while they prepared for their real objective, the destruction of Israel. Now some progressives will acknowledge this insofar as they will say "Sure, a lot of Palestianins feel that way in their hearts because of decades of oppression etc. etc. but a real and lasting peace would result in the next generation softening their stance"... so, I guess eventually we'd get a Palestinian population that doesn't want to literally kill all the Jews.
Even if Israel offered this - either a real two-state solution or even a one-state solution - there are many Palestinians who are pretty explicit about being unwilling to accept even that. They view Israel as stolen land, period, the arrival of Zionists as a settler-colonial project, Jews as invaders who displaced the indigenous people of Palestine, and the only remedy is to give the land back. All of it. They might be willing to allow the Israelis to peacefully evacuate, but most aren't too particular about the details as long as the Israelis are gone.
So in the meantime, Israelis have to deal with Palestinians today, and believe that the "right of return" to allow all Palestinians back into Palestine (and Israel) and make them equal citizens would de facto end Israel as a nation and probably lead directly to a very bloody civil war. Plitnick and Hill dismiss this as racist paranoia. I cannot say that I found their arguments convincing since they seem to rely entirely on opinion polls that say the majority of Palestians "prefer diplomacy over armed conflict." I mean, duh, but if you're coexisting with a population only 30% of whom want to exterminate you (and the rest will grudgingly tolerate your existence because they have to), that still seems like a pretty big obstacle to a one-state solution. (Yes, this works in the other direction too, since there is an influential minority of Israelis who, masks off, will admit that they wouldn't mind turning Gaza into a desert to be resettled by Jews.)
Except for Palestine did nothing to change my view on this and I remain unsure if the authors are just delusional or deeply, cynically disingenuous. They argue at length that Israel's repeated demands that Palestinians formally and explicitly accept Israel's right to exist are a bad faith demand for Palestinians to accept their subjugation, to forfeit all claims to their personhood and national identity, and are basically a sort of humiliation ritual that Israel doesn't demand of any other Arab nation. The authors are particularly weaselly, IMO, in claiming that the PLO accepted Israel's right to exist "to the same degree" that Egypt and Jordan did. What they mean by this is that none of them said in those exact words, "Israel has a right to exist," but Egypt and Jordan did make peace with Israel and are no longer trying to make them stop existing. There is certainly some finesse required in the precise wording of these sorts of diplomatic agreements and maybe in what Palestinian leaders can sell to their people, but the authors ignore the reason Israel is so adamant about this point: because without that explicit acknowledgment, Palestinians are always pretty clear that they don't think Israel should exist, at all, and thus any peace agreement can only be regarded as, at best, a temporary cease fire. Even the authors never come out and say they think Israel needs to be dissolved as a nation-state, but they clearly think asking the Palestinians to stop demanding that is unreasonable.
Next, Plitnick and Hill turn to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction) movement, and surprise! I agree with a lot of what they say here. The BDS movement is an attempt to put international pressure on Israel by boycotting all Israeli products, refusing to invest in Israeli companies, and imposing sanctions for their treatment of Palestinians. Israelis and many American Jewish organizations claim that the BDS movement is antisemitic, some going so far as to claim that Islamic terrorist groups are behind it all. The authors examine these claims and mostly dismiss them (while admitting that certainly there are some antisemitic groups that have joined the BDS movement), but their main objection is a peculiar kind of lawfare that has arisen in the US in recent years with "anti-BDS laws." Essentially, some states (notably Texas) have enacted legislation that punishes any company or organization that joins a BDS boycott by refusing to do state business with them. Similar legislation has been proposed in Congress.
As a First Amendment enthusiast, I actually agree with the authors here that such government actions, particularly when applied on behalf of Israel and nowhere else, are unconstitutional and antithetical to free speech. I do think the BDS movement is wrong-headed and it often is just a mouthpiece for anti-Israeli (and antisemitic) propaganda - but it's also clearly protected free speech. To be clear, "anti-BDS" laws don't actually criminalize the BDS movement, as the authors claim, but using the coercive power of the state in any way (in this case, by denying contracts and in the case of universities, threatening to cut funding) is still wrong.
That being said, most progressives seem to be on the same page about this; the only leftists I've ever heard supporting anti-BDS legislation were Jewish groups. So this hardly seems to be an example of "Except for Palestine" in the progressive movement.
The next chapter is about recent developments in Gaza ("recent" meaning up to about 2020), with the failure of the PLO and Fatah and the rise of Hamas. Here the authors are as oblique as I have found some Palestinian writers to be. They at least admit that Hamas is kind of violent and does launch the odd rocket now and then at Israel, but it's all in the context of "armed resistance" which, they take pains to point out, is recognized by International Law as legal for an occupied people. That the majority of Gazans voted for Hamas is not, they argue, because Palestinians support terrorism and Hamas's explicit goal of destroying Israel, but because they were so fed up with the corruption of Fatah, the Palestinian political party that governed Gaza previously.
This is probably true. Fatah was extremely corrupt. Unfortunately, so is Hamas, and Plitnick and Hill don't touch at all on whether Hamas represented any kind of improvement in Gaza, any more than they mention Hamas's practice of throwing Fatah supporters off of rooftops. They do kind of address whether or not Hamas is capable of actually negotiating with Israel by pointing out that Hamas has repeatedly offered truces, which have occasionally held for as long as five months(!). In fact, there is some complexity in Hamas's position; they started out as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood with the explicit goal of destroying Israel, but they have "softened" a bit in their willingness to accept 1967 borders with Israel (while not recognizing Israel as a nation, which is one of Israel's sticking points, which as I mentioned above, Hill and Plitnick argue is an unreasonable expectation on Israel's part).
Leaving aside my personal views on "International Law" (which is that it is a polite fiction that UN member nations use to pretend that there is some kind of regulatory body above any given nation-state, so that all you really need to keep wars and genocides from getting too out of hand is muster enough votes), the authors do a quick about-face when complaining that Israel and the US use Hamas's targeting of civilian populations (which they admit is true), which is also against International Law (also true) as an "excuse" to label Hamas terrorists and refuse to negotiate with them.
Of course I don't expect a detailed history of Hamas in this short cri de coeur for Western leftists, but nonetheless the omissions struck me as more evidence that the authors only ever see bad faith and "violations of International Law" going in one direction.
Finally, we get to Trump and American foreign policy. As you may recall, in 2017 President Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy there. This, predictably, enraged the Arab world and was an intentional slap in the face to Palestinians. Trump also withdrew US funding from UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) in 2018. (President Biden restored it upon taking office, until the US withdrew again after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack.) That Plitnick and Hill criticize these moves is expected; what they actually argue is that they were really just an extension, and not a deviation, of existing US foreign policy. The US had been perpetually postponing a move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for years; technically we recognized Jerusalem years ago but that was one of those diplomatic formalities that was never executed and has been postponed in the constant game of diplomatic kabuki that is Middle East politics. Until Trump blundered in and said "Fuck it," to the delight of Israelis and most American Jewish groups and the outrage of the Palestinians. Hill and Plitnick's argument that Trump basically just did in deed what the US has been doing in words for decades is not wrong. As for UNRWA, well, that's a subject about which more books could be written. On the one hand, it was a humanitarian lifeline for millions of Palestinians. On the other, after October 7, I find its critics to have been more right than wrong that it was at best an obstacle to any sort of permanent resolution to the Palestinian refugee situation, and at worst, literally just another grift to be subverted by Gaza's leadership (meaning, at this time, Hamas).
Mitchell Plitnick is an American Jewish writer and Israel critic. Marc Lamont Hill is an American journalist and activist. Curiously omitted from most blurbs about this book is that Hill is also a host on the Al Jazeera network. Now a lot of people think Al Jazeera is a propagandist anti-Israeli mouthpiece for the Qatari government. As someone who has watched a fair amount of Al Jazeera (both in English and in Arabic), I can tell you: it is a propagandist anti-Israeli mouthpiece for the Qatari government. That said, they do actual journalism and contrary to what you might think, they don't (overtly) call for the destruction of Israel or the death of Jews. So reading Except for Palestine was rather like watching an Al Jazeera "documentary" about Israel and Palestine. The facts are true, in rough outline, but a whole lot of context is skipped over and there is no actual interrogation of opposing perspectives. Do Israelis or Israeli supporters have any reasons for believing the things they do and doing the things they do that go beyond paranoia and hatred of Palestinians? According to Hill and Plitnick, no more than anyone votes for Trump for reasons beyond hating black people.
Except for Palestine is written by and for leftists. In fairness, it is pretty explicit about that being its intention. If you want to understand what the "leftist" view is, this book is a pretty good summary of all the talking points. If you have some broader knowledge of the history of Israel and the conflict in Palestine, even if you are left-leaning yourself, you might find yourself frequently saying "Okay, but wait a minute--" as I was. This book is not meant to persuade hardcore Israel supporters or non-leftists, Will it persuade someone who is a pro-Israel leftist to reconsider? The argument is that being pro-BLM, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist requires one to be pro-Palestine. This may be true, but I found the argument to have too many internal contradictions to be persuasive.
My complete list of book reviews.