I do not want to explore whether or not nonviolence is the best strategic or moral form of anti-colonial resistance. The difference between violence and nonviolence is not as trenchant as most commentators imagine. Violence and nonviolence, both amorphous terms, are in constant dialectic, and no historical example can be found of either of these approaches being effective without the other present. Undertaking nonviolent resistance is an ethical and strategic decision with which I have no quarrel. In fact, I have tremendous admiration for those who practice this method at the risk of their personal safety and in the service of national liberation.

I dislike the frequent lecturing from Western liberals to Palestinians about the merits of nonviolence, an act as misguided as it is patronizing. Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, for example, posed the following hypothetical amid Israel’s January, 2009, massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip: “A hypothetical question for you. Suppose the Palestinian liberation movement, going way back to the founding of the PLO in 1964, had been dedicated to nonviolent struggle as opposed to armed struggle, and the Palestinians had had a Gandhi, and not an Arafat.” The Palestinians, Tomasky surmises, would have had a state over twenty years ago. His colleague Gershom Gorenberg argues that “[t]hrough violence—from airplane hijackings to suicide bombings and rocket fire—Palestinians have failed to reach political independence…. So why not adopt the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, the methods of Gandhi?” Gorenberg wonders, “Is that kind of radicalism imaginable in Islam?”

On CommonDreams.org, Marty Jezer explains, “Palestinian nonviolence seems a romantic fantasy, an idealistic dream. But perhaps idealism is the most realistic approach at this time; and nonviolence the solution most grounded in reality. I challenge anybody to come up with an equivalent strategy, one that assures Israelis their security and Palestinians their state.” Michael Lerner asks what he imagines to be a self-evident question: “Who are Palestine’s friends? Those who encourage a path of non-violence and abandoning [sic] the fantasy that armed struggle combined with political isolation of Israel will lead to a good outcome for Palestinians.”

It would be too time consuming to respond to all the problems in these passages, but in them we can identify some useful points of analysis. The most important point is that the Palestinians do practice nonviolence. They have done so ever since Zionists began settling their land, a process that is by its very nature violent. Today, as throughout the twentieth century, one can find ample examples of intrepid and imaginative civil resistance. I have met very few Westerners who have traveled to Palestine and didn’t return home inspired.

An interesting feature of Palestinian nonviolence is that it usually evokes a ferocious response by Israel. During the 1980s, peaceful demonstrators had their bones broken at the behest of Yitzhak Rabin. Earlier generations were deported and had their homes demolished. Today’s nonviolent activists are often shot, imprisoned, or beaten. The village of Bi’lin in the West Bank has done a weekly protest for over four years. During the course of these peaceful gatherings, the Israeli military has been utterly brutal. In April, 2009, soldiers shot and killed an unarmed demonstrator, Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahmah. Abu Rahmah was hit in the chest with a tear-gas grenade, the same weapon that earlier in the year cracked open the skull of American demonstrator Tristan Anderson. In June, 2009, one of the leaders of the Bi’lin demonstrations, Adeeb Abu Rahme, was arrested and kept in military detention without due process. The breathless appeals by concerned Western liberals for the Palestinians to practice nonviolence are both ludicrous and immoral in light of the historical record and the invidious violence of the Israeli state.

The Palestinians have always mixed violence and nonviolence, like all anti-colonial movements. It is through a host of racist presuppositions and an inherent commitment to Zionism that American liberals imagine that somehow Palestinians are a special case, that their reliance on violence is culturally innate (Gershon Gorenberg) or that they are motivated by factors other than liberation, such as anti-Semitism and civilizational envy (Alan Dershowitz). The inability or unwillingness of so many liberal intellectuals to recognize the long tradition of Palestinian nonviolent resistance bespeaks tacit racism in addition to a hypocritical devotion to Israel’s normative and continuous state violence.

These calls for Palestinian nonviolence pretend to be ethically disinterested, but they are entangled with troublesome politics that are fundamentally destructive and undemocratic. For instance, they are often accompanied by appeals to avoid criticism of Zionism (Norman Finkelstein), to eschew effective nonviolent tactics such as boycott and divestment (Michael Lerner), and to reject counterproductive things like binationalism and right of return (Finkelstein and Lerner). In other words, the Palestinians should reject violence, and while they’re at it go ahead and give up all of their legal entitlements and decolonial aspirations.

My good friend, the philosopher Mohammed Abed, pointed out to me recently that the grueling endurance of life under military occupation—waiting hours at checkpoints, being denied medical care, having universities shut down—is itself a testament to an unusual commitment to nonviolence. I suspect that when many Western liberals urge the Palestinians (and other colonized people) to undertake nonviolence, they are using a truncated definition of the term informed by a poor or distorted understanding of the concept. In this usage, they conflate nonviolence with passivity. It is a great convenience to the liberal advocates of colonization to have a colonized population comprised of passive resistors. But colonized people are never as stupid and gullible as their liberal saviors imagine them to be.

The Palestinians, anyway, are far too evolved to listen to those who would use their courage and diligence to dispossess them of their right to active resistance. Violent or nonviolent, their choice of resistance isn’t the business of liberal armchair ethicists. Those ethicists are fond of claiming that if the Palestinians resisted nonviolently they would have already achieved their liberation. This claim is factually untrue. It is just as likely that if liberal commentators would assess their own profound support of violence they would have a lot less to say to others and more time to devote to their own failed selves.

It turned out that I had only one dissenter (from an admittedly small audience), an old professor of mine whose intellect and pedagogical style I had admired as a student (and still admire as a professional). I took three classes with this professor, finding all three valuable and interesting. I knew at the time that he was Jewish, just as he knew that I was Arab, but we transcended assumed political differences through a mutual passion for literature. I am still indebted to him for having written me a generous letter of recommendation for graduate school.

When my old professor turned up for the presentation, I had a feeling that he wouldn’t like what I was about to say despite the fact that I carefully avoided polemics and prepared a factual account of Israel’s early war crimes, referencing standard historiography. I struggled not to cringe when he raised his hand immediately after I finished speaking. A minute later we were arguing vocally with one another. I was mildly enjoying the opportunity to have at it with a former mentor and authority figure, but disturbed by the vitriol of his reaction to what I conceptualized as a tepid presentation. I’ve certainly said worse things about Israel on other occasions.

We soon reassumed our composure and attempted to think through our discrepant viewpoints. As audience members and the event organizer, another former professor of mine, interjected their commentaries I could see my antagonist growing progressively agitated.

“You don’t believe in the right of Israel to exist,” he suddenly declared. I was taken aback not by the intimation of the declaration, but by the fact that nowhere in my prepared comments or in our argument did such a topic arise.

“I don’t think anybody here has heard me say anything about destroying Israel, professor,” I responded coolly. He wouldn’t drop the subject, though, bringing it up over and again, each time impelling me to affirm Israel’s right to exist. Each time, I ignored him or flatly refused. He left the event shaking, inconsolable despite the doting of the event organizer.

There are lots of reasons why I declined my former professor’s demand that I recognize Israel. The first reason is practical: I never advocated for its destruction, and so it seemed peculiar to be asked to affirm its existence. Nobody has ever asked me to affirm another nation-state’s existence, a demand that I would in any case likewise decline. Like anybody who values humanity above capital and hierarchy, I believe it is people and not national institutions that require our empathy and attention. Besides, I was unhappy with the congenital violence implicitly ascribed to me while Israel’s entrenched violence, which I had spend 45 minutes illuminating, once again benefitted from an uncritical perception as normative.

The other reasons for my reluctance to acquiesce to my former professor’s peculiar demand are philosophical and political. It is remarkably brazen for a nation founded on the destruction of Palestine and now embroiled in vicious forms of ethnic cleansing to ask the victims of its malevolence for recognition. It is also a rhetorical trick that scarcely conceals some propitious imperatives: the legitimization of Israel as a Jewish-majority state; the whitewashing of Israel’s ugly past; tacitly absolving Israel of its immoral behavior; the privileging of Israel’s needs at the expense of basic recognition of Palestinian needs.

I have no desire to encourage these imperatives. Even if I did have the desire, I don’t have the authority: it is not up to me or to any other individual to relinquish Palestine under the pressure of a spuriously humanistic insistence by Zionists that their perfidy be excused because it will somehow make me a more respectful and responsible person.

Many people, anyway, have written in more detail about the insidiousness underlying affirmations of Israel’s “right to exist,” a phrase so ambiguous it should invoke any thinking person’s suspicion. Rather than limiting my discussion to philosophical, political, and practical factors, I’d like to mention a worthy psychological reason to refuse the demand that anybody who wants to enter into a conversation about the Israel-Palestine conflict must first proclaim devotion to Israel’s existence: principle.

Indeed, I would suggest refusing to acquiesce on principle. Zionists hold nearly all the power in the Israel-Palestine conflict and much of the power in the culture wars the conflict inspires. They have more funds, better access to corporate media, and the backing of the American military. The Palestinians, however, hold one form of power that doesn’t require money, media sympathy, or weaponry: the legitimacy that Zionists so desperately want us to confer to Israel. It is a small power, one without a material apparatus, but it is power, nevertheless, one I am unwilling to relinquish, one I have no moral obligation to relinquish. Zionists already took Palestine. Now they’re trying to appropriate our right to resist, too.

I am happy, eager even, to affirm the right of Jewish people to live in peace and security, wherever that may be, a right that all humans deserve in no particular order of worthiness. But I won’t celebrate Israel’s bloody founding and its goal of retaining a juridical ethnocentrism. Ultimately, when Zionists demand that you affirm Israel’s right to exist, what they are really asking for is your validation. Don’t give it to them. Until Israel treats the Palestinians equally and humanely, it won’t have earned the right to a celebrated existence.

It has been especially difficult for Israel’s doves to reside in a state being accused by leftist fanatics and furtive anti-Semites of such a horrible thing. That’s why I always take a moment to keep the true victims of Israel’s aggression in my thoughts. It’s not only the right thing to do; it’s the civilized perspective, the type of moral reckoning that matters. Such a terrible fate as the liberal Israelis’ should be illegal. Yet so-called human rights groups, with their tendentious prejudices, continue to bombard them with facts implicating their supposedly ugly behavior.

The testimonials of my liberal protectors break my unevolved Palestinian heart. In The Nation, always impressive for its proper sensitivity, Naomi Chazan declares, “These are bleak days for progressive Israelis.” And no wonder: the horrors in Gaza are clear in Israel “where bravado and intolerance threaten to eat away at the country’s democratic core and consume its internal moral compass.” Chazan is a woman who knows not to let silly things like ethnic cleansing detract from the need to save Israel from its occasional failure to light up other nations with inspiration instead of bombs and white phosphorous.

David Grossman is even more eloquent. He points out, “We cannot pardon the Palestinians or treat them forgivingly, as if it were obvious that whenever they feel put upon, violence will always be their sole response, the one they embrace almost automatically.” It’s clear why Grossman is a leading novelist and heir to Amos Oz’s dovish brilliance: he reminds us that we cannot forget that the Palestinians merely feel put upon (it’s not only the Crescent that’s fertile). His readers will understand that surely the Palestinians are mistaken, given as we are to uncouth hyperbole and fits of irrational violence. I must admit that Grossman is correct: I frequently complain, feel angry even, when I see Israel doing something loathsome. I remind myself that I shouldn’t merely focus on images of dead Palestinian babies—their skin peeled back from petrified faces, their organs spattered onto bloody asphalt—but I should also spare sympathy for my troubled Israeli friends.

I know it must be terribly difficult supporting an ethnonationalist state that wantonly slaughters little brown civilians. I know that it is excruciating to have democratic ideals disrupted by ungrateful natives. And I know how tough it must be to witness the death of other people’s children.

In respect for troubled Israeli liberals, then, I would like to forget about the Palestinians and focus on them instead. I may be able to help them solve their dreadful quandary. I would suggest—humbly and respectfully, of course—that they emulate American liberals, who have perfected the art of dispossessing indigenous peoples while pretending to love them. There’s no need to antagonize the savages so crudely when you can displace them quietly and simultaneously appropriate all they hold sacred. Hummus was a good start. And tabbouli was a bold move, one that has been improbably successful. I know this is difficult for you to hear, but now you must quit emphasizing your own feelings and say that everything Israel does actually helps the Palestinians. It’s a great way to enhance your humanitarian credentials, without—get this—having to give up any of your entrenched authority.

In the meantime, I will continue to urge my Palestinian compatriots to do the right thing. We are not merely Israel’s enemies; we are in the way of progress, stubborn impediments to the dream of modernity. So let’s go ahead and drop this irrational emphasis of ours on freedom, dignity, self-determination, and survival, and instead start praying that Israel’s true peacemakers finally learn how to overcome the travails of their colonial privilege.

We condemn Israel’s recent (December 2008/ January 2009) breaches of international law in the Gaza Strip, which include the bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods, illegal deployment of the chemical white phosphorous, and attacks on schools, ambulances, relief agencies, hospitals, universities, and places of worship. We condemn Israel’s restriction of access to media and aid workers.

We reject as false Israel’s characterization of its military attacks on Gaza as retaliation. Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is part of its longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people.

We reject as untrue the Israeli government’s claims that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields, and that Hamas is an irredeemable terrorist organization. Without endorsing its platforms or philosophy, we recognize Hamas as a democratically elected ruling party. We do not endorse the regime of any existing Arab state, and call for the upholding of internationally mandated human rights and democratic elections in all Arab states.

We call upon our fellow writers and academics in the United States to question discourses that justify and rationalize injustice, and to address Israeli assaults on civilians in Gaza as one of the most important moral issues of our time.

We call upon institutions of higher education in the U.S. to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, dissolve study abroad programs in Israel, and divest institutional funds from Israeli companies, using the 1980s boycott against apartheid South Africa as a model.

We call on all people of conscience to join us in boycotting Israeli products and institutions until a just, democratic state for all residents of Palestine/Israel comes into existence.

Mohammed Abed
Elmaz Abinader
Diana Abu-Jaber
Ali Abunimah
Opal Palmer Adisa
Deborah Al-Najjar
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany
Amina Baraka
Amiri Baraka
George Bisharat
Sherwin Bitsui
Breyten Breytenbach
Van Brock
Hayan Charara
Allison Hedge Coke
Lara Deeb
Vicente Diaz
Marilyn Hacker
Mechthild Hart
Sam Hamill
Randa Jarrar
Fady Joudah
Mohja Kahf
Rima Najjar Kapitan
Persis Karim
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
Haunani Kay-Trask
David Lloyd
Sunaina Maira
Nur Masalha
Khaled Mattawa
Daniel AbdalHayy Moore
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Nadine Naber
Marcy Newman
Viet Nguyen
Simon J. Ortiz
Vijay Prashad
Steven Salaita
Therese Saliba
Sarita See
Deema Shehabi
Matthew Shenoda
Naomi Shihab Nye
Magid Shihade
Vandana Shiva
Noenoe Silva
Andrea Smith
Ahdaf Soueif
Ghada Talhami
Frank X. Walker
Robert Warrior

Modernity, which the United States says it is trying to preserve through constant military interventions, is not an epoch or an institution as much as it is an invention of the Western liberal imagination, a self-perception arising from a Western belief in cultural superiority. Modernity is a state of mind that denotes being civilized and enlightened, which have some prerequisites: free-market capitalism, diligent secularism (often in conflict with social values), technological industriousness, nominally democratic governance, adoration of wealth, the burden of exporting civility. These features of modernity supplement the maintenance of elite power, a fact that is too convenient to be a coincidence. Preemptive war, then, is indivisible from modernity.

I make these points to foreground analysis of some peculiar justifications for Israel’s brutality, the ones claiming that Palestinians must learn the hard way, though force, to quit supporting terrorism (i.e., to stop electing parties that do not express adequate fealty to Israel).

Neoconservative partisans like Daniel Pipes have long encouraged Israel to more aggressively pound the Palestinians into submission, not only to generate a better negotiating position but also to teach them a lesson in humanity. Upon Israel’s 2006 Lebanon invasion, such a viewpoint became mainstreamed, as when Richard Cohen of The Washington Post warned, “The only way to ensure that babies don’t die in their cribs and old people in the streets [in Israel] is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.”

Now Thomas Friedman has taken up this discourse, albeit with his infamously terrible prose, which nevertheless conveys the meanness of his spirit. In a recent column, he writes, “I have only one question about Israel’s military operation in Gaza: What is the goal? Is it the education of Hamas or the eradication of Hamas? I hope that it’s the education of Hamas.” Of all the things he could have questioned about Israel’s behavior — its massacre of babies, its targeting of schools and ambulances, its use of white phosphorous, its deployment of experimental weapons, its massive violations of international law — Friedman chooses to question whether Israel is being adequately fierce and steadfast.

Endorsing the notion that Arabs are “implacably hostile,” Friedman goes on to observe, “Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.” Friedman applies the same logic to Israel’s current bloodletting, although Hamas isn’t actually a non-state actor; it is a democratically-elected ruling party. The underlying idea here is common, though it hasn’t been articulated cleverly since Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: the unpolluted Western soul is corruptible when it is unwittingly coerced into an engagement with dark legions of the pre-modern.

Friedman’s viewpoint is stated more eloquently (and honestly) by an unnamed protestor in Max Blumenthal’s frightening video of a pro-Israel demonstration in New York. “They’re forcing us to kill their children,” the protestor complains.

These narratives are racist because they render Palestinians incapable of the sort of love proffered by more civilized people, but they are also proactive. Situated in an Enlightenment logic that celebrates the violence of modernity as a force of good in the world, the narratives rationalize war because it’s not enough that Palestinians hate indiscriminately — they must be taught through widespread death the value of human life. The justification for Israel’s belligerence never has to move beyond the presence of Palestinians, whose very existence threatens Israel’s colonial ambitions.

The glorification of Israeli modernity in opposition to Palestinian pre-modernity has pervaded corporate media coverage. Two features of this media coverage stand out: 1) the Palestinians, no matter who is dying, whether it’s a bearded gunman or a baby, are always called militants, terrorists, or some other term that suggests they are never civilians; and 2) the Israeli invasion is almost uniformly deemed retaliatory, even among progressives like Robert Sheer and Akiva Eldar, who takes a moment to assert “her national right, as a Jew, to live in [Israel].” This national right, it should be mentioned, has no basis in any legal system anywhere in the world beyond Israel’s insidious Law of Return.

Both corporate media coverage and Eldar’s obduracy suggest that the Palestinians are unworthy of the freedom that Jews naturally deserve. Palestinian deaths therefore become unremarkable. Most commentators can only view Palestinians in the context of Israel’s whims and desires. And these days Israel wishes to conduct the business of its colonization and ethnic cleansing without the inconvenience of those ungrateful Palestinians rejecting the whip of modernity in favor of basic dignity and freedom.

Most Americans are familiar with the verbal infelicities involving Arabs that became common as Election Day approached. The most notorious of these infelicities entailed a flabbergasted John McCain taking the microphone from a concerned spectator accusing Barack Obama of being “an Arab.” McCain promptly issued a defense of Obama that reinforced the spectator’s notion that being Arab is inherently bad: “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.”

In fact, Americans heard the same tacit message repeatedly during the general election campaign, particularly from Obama and his supporters: being called Arab or Muslim constitutes a smear because apparently being Arab or Muslim is objectionable in itself. Obama inspired a nation. In the meantime, Arab and Muslim Americans solidified our standing as the quintessential domestic stranger. Obama wouldn’t have accepted anything less. He didn’t need to, in any case, because Arab and Muslim Americans supported him despite his constant insults, both tacit and explicit. Those of us untaken by Obama were deemed idealists or even heartless. As Obama’s hawkish and neoliberal Cabinet selections thus far indicate, it wasn’t Obama’s skeptics who were being idealistic. And the Palestinians who always suffer the brutal aftermath of liberal pragmatism can explain better than I exactly who is being heartless.

The problem is not that fear-baiting tactics around Arab ethnicity went uncontested. They were condemned widely. The problem is that they were rarely contested beyond their effect on Obama’s candidacy. Everybody was so focused on how the so-called smear of being Arab or Muslim unfairly represented Obama they forgot to mention that over a billion people were also being smeared, including millions of Americans.

As a child of Arab immigrants, I found this election remarkably difficult to follow. Obama was somebody easy to be excited about for a person of my background. We are both ethnic minorities. We both have funny names. He is young and eloquent, and looks much more like the Americans of my generation than do typical politicians. Obama has that effect on others. I was happily surprised to see so many young people mobilizing and participating actively in American political discourse.

On the other hand, I was disappointed that Obama never stood up for Arab and Muslim Americans. I often found myself feeling betrayed that he didn’t use his influential position to improve the situation of Arab and Muslim Americans dealing with the slander of being deemed terrorists, enemies, and fifth columns. Instead, it was another supposedly transcendent figure, Colin Powell, who came to our defense: “Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? The answer’s no.”

The imaginary Arabs and Muslims from whom Obama constantly distanced himself don’t at all resemble actual Arabs and Muslims. The Arabs I know, including those who raised me, are peaceable, honest people who participate in American cultural, economic, and political life in various ways. It would have been appropriate, and it certainly was necessary, for one of the candidates to have mentioned this fact. Such an omission was expected from the dreadful McCain. From Obama—the racial healer, the steadfast hoper, the heavenly dreamer—that omission was unconscionable.

In a historic election that is widely believed to have mitigated or even ended racism, it is ironic that racism against Arabs and Muslims constituted its most important rhetorical feature. This racism has been overlooked in the euphoria of Obama’s victory, but for many Arab and Muslim Americans the merriment of 2008 is premature. We are aware that the candidate supposedly representing the demise of racism achieved victory in an election that reinforced Islamophobia and relegated Arabs to the status of an absurd ethnic spectacle. The sort of racism engendered by the election is now omnipresent but somehow forgotten.

Nothing makes this class of politico so hysterical as somebody choosing to exercise the right to vote for a candidate who best represents his or her own positions. That hysteria exposes the carefully-unexamined assumption that the purpose of voting is to fortify institutional Democratic agendas. The use of pragmatism to justify this pandering is meant to suggest a political reasonableness, but it actually functions to reinforce complicity in the same centers of power these liberals claim to challenge.

These matters illustrate another reason why voting in the United States is mostly disport, a way for the unwitting enablers of imperial neoliberalism to feel like they are participating in a civic and economic system in which they are political surplus, useful only insofar as they spend and consume. Whether or not they vote, the system will continue to operate unabated, its managers welcoming voting because it convinces would-be agitators that they are actually effecting change.

Now that these qualifications are out of the way, let’s focus on what this essay will be about: why I won’t vote for Barack Obama. I hope others will likewise eschew Obama, but I welcome them to vote their conscience. Or, I welcome them to not vote at all. There are better ways to procure a right to complain.

I won’t vote for Obama because he once was promising but has morphed into an unusually charismatic but typically mediocre politician. A man once known for engaging the issue of Palestinian liberation in Chicago’s Arab American community now can be found sharing his message of Israel-love to anybody who will listen. This change of opinion intimates a lack of integrity. Obama’s supporters will argue that he is simply doing what allows him to become a viable contender for president, to which I would respond: if one wishes to keep his or her integrity intact, then that person shouldn’t seek national office as a Democrat. Obama is willingly forfeiting his integrity for his ambition. That is his choice and it isn’t my place to make the decision on his behalf. However, it is my place to decide not to vote for him based on that choice.

The primary but not exclusive impetus for my displeasure with Obama is his suddenly avid support of Israel. It is an issue that I and many of my peers in the Arab American community cannot dismiss, as do other progressive supporters of Obama. We may be accused of shortsightedness by rejecting Obama based largely on this issue, but nearly everybody privileges one or few concerns when entering into the American political arena: religion, abortion, a particular foreign policy, immigration, the economy. I cannot listen to the man smilingly discuss the continued dispossession of millions of people who have already suffered unspeakably and then endorse such treachery with a vote.

In any case, there is no need to apologize for or shy away from emphasizing Israel’s brutality. Far from being a marginal item in the life of the United States, American support for Israeli colonization has serious moral and geopolitical consequences. It, more than any other action, generates justifiable anger toward the United States in much of Europe and almost uniformly throughout the Southern Hemisphere. It extends the bloody tradition of settler colonization in the American polity and in its imagination, a state of mind that helps facilitate so many of today’s imperialist adventures. And it renders every politician who has ever lectured an Arab nation about human rights glaringly hypocritical.

Obama’s wasted potential as a candidate is exemplified by his already-legendary “Race in America” speech. Obama critiqued the topic of race in a way that would be considered tame in an Ethnic Studies department, but that was audacious by the standards of mainstream politicians. Unexamined in the chorus of praise, however, was the following statement, offered as a rebuke of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s beliefs, which Obama patronizingly dismissed as misguided despite his refusal to condemn their messenger:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

The statement does lots of things at once. From a public image standpoint, it allowed Obama to further distance himself from accusations that he is secretly Muslim while simultaneously cozying up to his still-slightly-suspicious Zionist patrons. As rhetoric, it enabled Obama to fulfill the requisite demand that whites be made adequately comfortable, a demand that entails the condemnation of anything that might actually threaten their privilege. This injunction is de rigueur for people of color.

But I don’t want to highlight these stupid political games. I’m more interested in what the statement doesn’t do, which is to convey anything even incidentally truthful. Obama’s claim is a profound insult not only to the Palestinians who have courageously fought for their physical and cultural survival, but to anybody who values the use of evidence to express an informed opinion. In no framework other than Zionist extremism can the Israel-Palestine conflict be attributed to “radical Islam.” Even those who disagree vehemently about the history of Palestine concur that the conflict is fundamentally territorial.

The very construct of a “radical Islam,” in fact, means nothing of substance; it is a rhetorical ploy for the intellectually vacuous. Much of Palestine’s resistance, in the past and present, has been conducted by members of the Christian minority. Palestinians, far from being religious extremists, are noted for their progressive secular institutions. The first Palestinian suicide bombing, an act said to exemplify “radical Islam,” didn’t even occur until 1994. To Obama, this is apparently the point at which the Israel-Palestine conflict started.

It is utterly indecent for a person to deem himself a moral authority on tolerance while concurrently recycling an anti-Arab racism whose existence has been devastating for the Palestinians.

For these reasons, I won’t vote for Barack Obama. His liberal supporters claim that as a complete package Obama is superior to any other candidate, despite whatever flaws may exist in his platform (if flaws are even acknowledged). To me, though, his revivalist Zionism is a flaw that I cannot overlook and that liberal pragmatists should not ignore. Obama made a choice to court the AIPAC bloc, and we fail in our duty as citizens of a democracy if we do not hold him accountable for his immorality. We fail to strengthen the well-being of our own society, and we fail in our moral obligation to those who suffer the brute end of the imperialism our taxes bankroll. Obama should therefore be punished for his choice by those who stand against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

When the liberal cognoscenti lecture Nader supporters for our obstinacy or naiveté, they are yet again performing the conceit of the privileged: they are telling us that they know our needs better than we do. (It happens right around the time they accuse Nader of egomania.) They are telling us that a commitment to Palestinians, whose dispossession the United States underwrites, is silly or unimportant. And they are telling us, without having to confront any of the consequences, to accept the permanence of Israel’s violence. We should know well enough that what they imagine to be virtuous or commonsensical is ultimately a projection of their own needs and interests.

So, consider voting for somebody other than Obama. Or consider not voting at all. It’s your choice, after all. Whatever you choose, though, just quit telling the Palestinians that their lives don’t matter.