#13 The White Front
They cannot bear our agency. Liberal institutions and foundations—led, generation after generation, by graduates of a ruling American establishment—cannot accept a world in which they are not the masters.
The first wave of backlash after October 7 was marked by the swift punishment and defunding of Palestinian and solidarity organizations. This response, which began as the suppression of political expression, has since crystallized into a policy that more fully embodies the logic of liberal white supremacy.
Today’s new waves of defunding demand a deeper, sharper reading than simply "punishment for political positions."
We face the consolidation of a united front between American liberal foundations and Zionist organizations falsely described as the "Israeli left." Israeli groups are amply funded not only to organize communally and at the grassroots, but to engage in direct partisan participation—running for municipalities, competing with established political parties, openly declaring their intention to run for parliament—pursuits typically considered taboo in the philanthropic world.
Meanwhile, funders have set about cleaning out from their portfolios any meaningful Palestinian and solidarity community and organizational work that remains, confining Palestinian advocacy to American- and Israeli-controlled frameworks and supporting Israeli political organizing that seeks to shape Israel from within.
The liberal Zionist counterinsurgency principle at work here is not simply to defund the Palestinian. It is to defund Palestinian agency itself: organization, mobilization, community building, and grassroots power.
This is what Palestinians and their supporters are forbidden from doing.
Palestinians are permitted to exist only through the American and the Israeli. You have the right to exist if you plead your case in Israeli courts, if you persuade American intellectuals and corporations of your rights, if you forget liberation and stay within reform and co-existence frameworks.
White supremacy 101: the masters decide who is entitled to political agency. █