America’s Progressives Demand a Multi-Ethnic Israel, Tolerate an Arab Muslim Palestine
From Adam Brody’s “Free Palestine” declaration to Peter Beinart and Jon Stewart, one question remains remarkably neglected: What kind of Palestine are progressives actually advocating?
By Hussain Abdul-Hussain
This week, Adam Brody became the latest prominent American celebrity to board the “Free Palestine” train. In a September 25 interview with GQ, the actor offered a blunt assessment of the war in Gaza: “Put me down as thinking it's a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine.” Read Brody’s GQ interview
He is hardly alone. A day earlier, actors Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder were among demonstrators detained outside the United Nations during a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another sign of how thoroughly the Palestinian cause has moved into the center of progressive American culture.
But beneath the increasingly fashionable slogan lies a question that is almost never asked: Free Palestine to become what?
An enormous blind spot has come to dominate the discourse of certain progressive Jewish-American commentators, most notably figures like Peter Beinart and Jon Stewart. Beinart has gone considerably further than Stewart, explicitly abandoning the two-state model in favor of a single political framework based on equal citizenship for Jews and Palestinians, while Stewart has provided one of America’s most influential platforms for a broader progressive critique of Israel. The two sat together on The Daily Show in 2025 for an extended discussion of Gaza, Judaism, Israel and Palestinian rights.
While their arguments are presented as an unyielding defense of liberal democratic values, their prescriptions for the Middle East contain a profound structural contradiction. The explicitly Jewish character of Israel is subjected to relentless scrutiny, and in Beinart’s case rejected as incompatible with genuine equality. Yet far less attention is paid to a Palestinian national movement that openly envisions its future state as Arab in national identity and Muslim in important elements of its constitutional character.
This inexplicable bias mirrors a broader cultural phenomenon in the West: a performative eagerness to replace traditional Western or Judeo-Christian cultural markers with secular, bland alternatives while going out of the way to loudly celebrate non-Western traditions. On Christmas and Hanukkah, the politically correct greeting is a generic “happy holidays.” On Islamic holidays, the politically correct greeting is the Arabic “Eid Mubarak.”
While these commentators believe their positions are steeped in fairness, ethics and universal humanity, their advocacy is frequently driven by an uncritical romanticization of the global non-West. By viewing what they perceive as “indigenous” or “native” cultures through a lens of unalloyed sentimentality, they treat Western institutional traditions as uniquely flawed while remaining strikingly incurious about the illiberal realities governing the societies they seek to empower.
On the domestic front, the progressive blueprint is exhaustive. The likes of Beinart and Stewart present a long list of injustices they demand to see fixed in America, championing gender equality, LGBTQ rights, the rule of law and robust social safety nets. These demands apply to Israel too. Yet when attention shifts to the Arab world, a different instinct frequently emerges: authoritarian governments, sectarian social structures and illiberal institutions become matters that outsiders are warned not to impose themselves upon.
America’s progressives rarely discuss Palestinians as a society that itself requires structural transformation regarding the rights of women, the protection of sexual minorities or the establishment of independent democratic institutions. The Palestinian struggle is instead reduced primarily to the mechanical concession of land and power. What happens to the Palestinian population after the borders are drawn is too often treated as an afterthought.
Geopolitical vacuums, however, are never filled by abstract liberal ideals. They are filled by the most organized, heavily armed and illiberal factions available. When a Palestinian is the tragic victim of an Israeli bullet, it can become an international crisis. Yet when Palestinians are imprisoned, silenced or killed by Hamas or other Palestinian factions, comparable international attention is often much harder to find.
It is easy to champion vogue, contrarian ideas when one has grown up in the security and prosperity of American suburbs. It is quite another to understand the harrowing reality of living inside a failing state.
My perspective on this matter does not come from academic theory, but from lived experience. I grew up in a dual-national, Iraqi-Lebanese household. In that environment, national identity was never engraved in stone; it was a fluid asset negotiable for survival. My family moved between Baghdad and Beirut to escape endless sectarian conflicts, constantly seeking whichever nation could offer a temporary semblance of stability.
In my adulthood, I continued this search for a better life and migrated to the United States, where I was naturalized and fully assimilated. Today, I consider myself a patriotic American. I carry the rich heritage of my ancestral homelands proudly, but my political allegiance belongs exclusively to the American republic.
Living as a national in both Iraq and Lebanon meant living within states that conceptualized public space through a singular, majoritarian lens. As a Muslim-born Arab, my cultural identity naturally aligned with much of the dominant apparatus of the state. Moving to America changed that dynamic completely. Unlike the traditional nation-states of the Old World, America largely decouples cultural identity from national belonging.
What determines an individual’s Americanism is not blood, faith or ancestral lineage, but a shared commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the republic.
While American identity was undeniably shaped by the Judeo-Christian traditions of its founders, the structural separation of church and state remains one of its cornerstones. English acts as the de facto language of governance, yet it seamlessly coexists with Spanish and dozens of other languages depending on the region.
This multi-ethnic civic model is historically unusual. Many nations around the world, including mature Western democracies such as France or Denmark, retain strong cultural, linguistic and historical identities tied to a majority nation. This majoritarian structure becomes significantly more pronounced in the Middle East, where public space in many countries is explicitly Arab and Islamic. Iraq features Allahu Akbar on its national flag. Syria’s official designation remains the Syrian Arab Republic, despite the presence of Kurds, Assyrians and other minorities.
And this is where the debate over Palestine becomes particularly revealing.
The February 2026 draft constitution for the State of Palestine leaves little ambiguity about the national character being envisioned. It declares that Palestine is part of the Arab homeland and that the Palestinian Arab people are part of the Arab nation. Islam is the official religion, the principles of Islamic Sharia are designated a primary source of legislation, and Arabic is the official language.
To be accurate, the same constitution also declares Palestine a representative parliamentary democracy, promises equality among citizens and explicitly states that the rights of Christians are respected. The issue is therefore not that Palestinian constitutional texts formally deny non-Muslims citizenship. It is that Palestine is emphatically not being envisioned as the culturally neutral, post-national state that some Western progressives increasingly demand Israel become.
Palestinians are being encouraged to exercise Arab national self-determination. Jews are increasingly told that exercising Jewish national self-determination is itself the problem.
That contradiction becomes even more striking when examining Israel as it actually exists. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, but more than two million Arab citizens participate in its political system, form parties, serve in the Knesset and debate how best to influence the direction of the country. As a recent Mid.East Journal analysis of Arab voters in Israel’s 2026 election showed, Arab citizens can maintain Palestinian, Arab, religious and Israeli components of identity simultaneously while participating directly in Israeli politics.
The question, then, is not whether Palestinians are entitled to national identity. Of course they are. The question is why Palestinian Arab nationalism is treated as the legitimate fulfillment of self-determination while Jewish nationalism is increasingly portrayed by the same intellectual circles as an obstacle to equality.
The history of minorities in the region makes this question more than theoretical. Once-flourishing Jewish communities across Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Libya virtually disappeared during the twentieth century, while Christian communities in countries such as Iraq and Syria have suffered dramatic demographic decline through combinations of persecution, war, instability and emigration. The history of the region’s ancient Jewish communities is worth remembering precisely because Jews were not foreign arrivals to the Middle East; communities existed across the region for centuries before their near disappearance in the modern era. Mid.East Journal: Where Are Jews From?
That history does not prove that a future Palestinian state must repeat the failures of Iraq, Syria or Yemen. But it should explain why Israelis might be skeptical of arguments that national sovereignty can simply be surrendered on the assumption that liberal pluralism will inevitably emerge afterward.
There is a profound irony in the geopolitical debate I am engaging in here: a Muslim-born Arab immigrant like me finds himself defending the necessity of a secure, sovereign Jewish state against the destabilizing idealism of Western commentators who demand that Jewish national identity meet a standard they rarely impose on the surrounding region.
True introspection requires looking inward to address the historic failures of Arab and Islamic governance regarding pluralism, institutional stability and minority rights.
Palestinian self-determination cannot be evaluated only by asking how much territory Palestinians should control. We should also ask what institutions will govern that territory, what protections its minorities will enjoy and whether the political culture being constructed can sustain the liberal values its Western advocates claim to champion.
Progressive advocacy must confront the Middle East as it actually is, rather than as it appears from the safety of the West.
If liberalism requires Israel to transcend Jewish nationalism, its advocates should at least explain why Palestinian Arab nationalism is asked to make no comparable journey.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the author of The Arab Case for Israel. He is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He is a frequent contributor to Mideast.Journal.