Michel Warschawski is a veteran journalist and peace activist. He founded the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, a Palestinian-Israeli organization that disseminate information, research, and political analysis on Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while promoting cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis:

Warschawski writes:

Beyond the left-wing Zionist and in conflict with him are the men and women who have broken with the national consensus and its values. But has the colonizer of the far left (of which I am one) succeeded in breaking with the behavior and character traits of the dominant community, which his privileged existence is likely to have imposed on him? Not always.

Just like the left-wing Zionist, the anti-Zionist activist often knows, better than the Palestinian, what's best for him. He has read Lenin and Bauer, sometimes even Fanon and Cesaire, and that training gives him the authority to understand what is right and what is wrong. On the other hand, he's read nothing of the political literature of the Arab national movement; but is that really necessary, since he already knows in advance what the Palestinian liberations movement must be like to deserve his support?

His difficulty in identifying with the Palestinians often derives from an ideological differentiation. Of course, he supports the struggle of the Palestinian people, sometimes unconditionally, but it is more of an abstract struggle, not the real battle unfolding right in front of him, because that one is not left wing enough, or too nationalist, or not nationalist enough. It matters little why he separates himself from the real struggle of those whom Israel oppresses; what does matter is that, often, his total and unconditional support becomes critical non-support.

Although he recognizes the right to self-determination of the Palestinians, the far left colonizer does not "recognize" the PLO, which is to say the Palestinian national movement such as it is. Often he treats it as if it were a group of collaborators, and he would prefer a mythical national movement, which in fact would be no more than an imaginary reflection of himself. He also has a tendency to fashion the colonized in his own image, namely that of a European revolutionary ready to sacrifice every single Palestinian in order to obtain his own utopia. In so doing he provokes either rejection or indifference on the part of the Palestinian nationalist, who rightly sees in this far left-wing militant just another variant of colonial paternalism.

Again, as [Albert] Memmi says:

Wanting to compete with the least realistic nationalists, he speaks like a demagogue, whose excesses only increase the mistrust of the colonized. He suggests obscure and Machiavellian explanations for the acts of the colonizer, or, to the irritated astonishment of the colonized, he loudly justifies the behavior that the latter has just condemned.

If he does not make a conscious effort to remind himself where his words and actions come from, if he does not behave modestly, the far left-wing settler runs the risk of finding himself in the same boat as the left-wing Zionist, whom he believes he is fighting against. He will oppose the emancipation movement of the Palestinians or he will not give it all the support that it has the right to expect from those who believe in anti-colonialism and the right of the colonized to self-determination (which is to say, the right to decide for themselves, including the right to make the compromises they judge necessary).

A few months after the signing of the Oslo accords, in 1993, in the course of a discussion that included activists of the Palestinian and Israeli far left, I heard an Israeli woman militant explain, like a teacher presenting a lesson to her students, that accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was pure and simple treason.

She received a curt response from a Palestinian militant who had been in all the battles and had spent years in prison, "Why do you take it upon yourself to refuse us an independent state, even a tiny one, in less than 22 percent of our national territory? Are you going to endure fifty more years of occupation and violence?"

But it was the insensitive response of the Israeli militant that needs to be pondered: "I see that even the Palestinian left has lost the desire to fight...

SOURCE:
Michel Warschawski,
ON THE BORDER
South End Press, 2005, pps.137-139)

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Other fighters against illusions include:
THE MILITANT: Cuba at the Crossroads (1960)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/catc.html

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: Axis of Evo (Wall Street Journal, 2005)
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2006w05/msg00105.htm