A New Path for a Free Palestine

David Blankenhorn was once a formidable opponent of legal marriage equality. As a writer, activist, and government official, Blankenhorn, now 70, has spent much of his life devoted to strengthening traditional marriage, a commitment that inspired him to found the now-defunct Institute for American Values in 1987. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Blankenhorn to serve on the National Commission on America’s Urban Families. Two decades later, when the movement for same-sex marriage gained steam, Blakenhorn sided with conservatives. Perhaps his most important contribution to the cause was The Future of Marriage, which laid out a case for traditional American marriage between one man and one woman. 

Then, Blankenhorn did the rarest of things: he changed his mind. Though he remained committed to strengthening marriage, Blakenhorn abandoned his campaign against same-sex marriage, believing it caused more harm than good. “Instead of fighting gay marriage,” Blankenhorn wrote in The New York Times, “I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.”

Among the reasons Blankenhorn did so was that the movement against same-sex marriage depended on the mobilization of anti-gay prejudices. As he lamented in the Times, back in 2012, “much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus,” a fact he found “morally disturbing.” 

Blakenhorn saw no tension between opposing same-sex marriage and respect for gay Americans. In practice, though, he could no longer deny that the two positions were not always fused in the hearts and minds of Americans. 

Since October 7, 2023, many pro-Palestinian activists have insisted that anti-Zionism is a principled stand for an immiserated people, untainted by antisemitism. Surely it is in many cases. But like Blakenhorn, anti-Zionists should see that darker sentiments also fuel their cause.

Consider the facts. In the wake of October 7, anti-Zionist rage was coterminous with a wave of anti-Jewish attacks. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tells the story. In the five years that preceded 2023, the ADL reported an average of 2,485 antisemitic incidents per year. Then the dam broke. In 2023, there were 8,873 antisemitic acts, a new record. The following year, there were 9,354 incidents, another new record. FBI hate crime data shows the same pattern. In the previous five years before 2023, the U.S. averaged 882 hate crimes against Jews. Then hate crimes against Jews surged to 1,989 cases in 2023 and to 1,938 incidents the following year. Both were historic highs.

Since October 7, some of the most extreme antisemitic violence has been committed in the name of Palestine. After Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot dead in Washington, D.C., just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum, their assailant said, he “did it for Palestine.” When a man threw a Molotov cocktail into a synagogue in Boulder, Colorado, killing one elderly woman, he yelled, “Free Palestine.” Earlier this year, when an arsonist set fire to Governor Josh Shapiro’s home while his family was sleeping after celebrating the Jewish Sabbath, he suggested that he did it for the Palestinian people. The assailant who stabbed a man just outside a Chabad in Crown Heights, Brookyln declared, “Free Palestine.” And a 69-year-old participant at a November 2023 pro-Israel rally in Thousand Oaks, California, was bludgeoned by a pro-Palestinian activist; he later died of a brain hemorrhage. 

If anything, the bloodletting in the name of anti-Zionism has been worse abroad. As the mass murder of Jews celebrating Chanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach underscored, the post-October 7th wave of antisemitism hasn’t yet crested. For some, this is what it means to globalize the intifada.

None of this means that today’s pro-Palestinian activists should abandon their cause altogether. Palestinians need good advocates. Their suffering is deep and widespread. And if the Jewish experience has shown anything, it is the importance of having their own state. 

But like Blakenhorn in his day, pro-Palestinian activists should be profoundly disturbed and self-reflective about the violence and harassment against Jews that has attended the growing popularity of their movement. Indeed, they have more reason to be troubled than Blakenhorn in his day. When Blakenhorn changed his mind about same-sex marriage, there had been no spike in anti-gay incidents. Hate crimes against gays and lesbians had, in fact, been decreasing.

This blood-soaked moment should prompt Israel’s critics to seek a serious course correction, one that advances the welfare of Jews and the immiserated Palestinians. They might shift their advocacy away from decrying the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state toward the constructive advocacy of a Palestinian one. That advocacy could recognize Israel’s right to exist, allow the Palestinians to have a separate state, and take the security concerns of the Jewish state seriously. And while this abandonment of a one-state solution would certainly alienate Israel’s most antisemitic critics who believe the last 75 years of Jewish statehood can be erased, it would also better reflect the sentiments of Palestinians in the region, rather than their Keffiyeh-wearing champions on American campuses and in the streets of Dublin and Paris. On the ground, in Ramallah and Gaza City, a plurality still seems to prefer two states.  

Blankenhorn understood that opposition to same-sex marriage emboldened anti-gay bigotry and distracted from his main cause—strengthening marriage. Thus far, pro-Palestinian activists have largely evaded this moral dilemma by denying a link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They have been willfully blind to violence against Jews done in the name of anti-Zionism. 

There is nothing unusual in the claims of innocence from the anti-Israeli activists. Barry Goldwater, the conservative leader, U.S. Senator from Arizona, and Republican presidential candidate in 1964, was a principled defender of state sovereignty and was not personally a racist. Goldwater even led the charge to desegregate the Senate cafeteria, ensuring his Black legislative aide would be served alongside everyone else. But Goldwater, who opposed the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s, nonetheless failed or perhaps refused to see that a crusade for more “states’ rights” was fueled, less by high-brow notions of freedom, than by racist sentiments in the American public.     

Israel’s most vocal critics should recognize that antisemitism and anti-Zionism often march together, however divisible they might seem in humanities seminars. That means that morally responsible activism on behalf of Palestinians should confront this reality squarely and honestly. They should follow Blankenhorn’s lead, not Goldwater’s.