My mother comes from parents who survived the Holocaust. My father grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the son of a man who was born to ex-slaves. I am the product of those two histories, and I carry all of their stories. So when I woke up to the news of October 7, 2023, on that Saturday morning and saw my social media feeds flooded with images of murdered Israelis, I anticipated what the West’s reaction would be with dread.
After all, we had just been through the era of Black Lives Matter where sizable amounts of the population chose narrative over truth. Most decent people expected that there would be a universal condemnation against Hamas. Instead, the opposite happened. On my phone, I saw celebrations in places like Toronto and New Jersey in the name of Hamas — while the bodies of many Israelis still lay where they had fallen. What these decent people did not understand was that this attack was not simply terrorism. It was the latest and most violent expression of the liberation ideology that the Palestinians had been woodshedding for decades, one that had long since found its footing in the West’s Age of White Guilt.
The use of the word “Liberation” in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was intentional. The organization was founded in 1964 when Israel did not control any part of the West Bank or Gaza. The articles listed in the original PLO charter called for Israel’s elimination. Article 15 called for the “liberation of Palestine” to become a national duty and Article 19 backtracked to declare the 1947 partition and the establishment of Israel to be “entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time.” It was Article 20 that made it explicit that the Jews had no historical or religious ties to the land of Israel. The “Liberation” in the PLO name meant the very liberation of Israel and the return of Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv to the Palestinians. There was no concern for borders in the charter since Israel had no right to exist.
What is often overlooked about these early Palestinians was how skilled they were in fighting this war of liberation. They had the insight as well as the foresight to understand that the path to global sympathy for their cause was not through diplomacy but through ideology. The 1960s brought one culture war collision after another and these collisions broke the West’s hold on moral authority. In Europe, the colonial empires were collapsing and in America the Civil Rights movement exposed the raw pain of centuries of racism. The West stood condemned by the very people it had oppressed and its moral landscape was in disarray. The Palestinians knew that if they could condition the West with the accusation of collective guilt, they stood a chance to shape its moral conscience.
In one of its first moves, the PLO flattened the complexities of the 1948 territorial dispute into the Marxist formula of the oppressor versus the oppressed. The Marxist ideology never enters society on its own merits. It instead relies on the accusation of grievance and the white guilt accusation that the West was evil, racist, and colonialist provided that very grease for the PLO. And instead of relying on class as the dividing line, the PLO used both race and nationality.
Since then, Israel has been relentlessly cast as the white European settler state while the Palestinians were portrayed as the brown, indigenous people resisting occupation and genocide. The PLO pushed this argument because it traveled well. In Algiers, my father met the Black Panthers, who were told that the white supremacy that crushed black Americans was the same as the Jews crushing the Palestinians. Race and nationality had replaced the Marxist notion of class.
Hamas had no need for America’s white guilt politics to murder Israelis. Its charter treated the Jewish state as illegitimate and its existence as the crime. What the West supplied to Hamas was an indoctrinated audience. For decades, the language of liberation ideology had been taught in schools and universities and its graduates moved into the newsrooms, nonprofits, and boardrooms. This ideology flattened history to the point where the darker tribes were presumed to be indigenous and innocent while the lighter tribes were framed as the colonial oppressors or white supremacists.
When the world woke up to the terror of October 7, it was only hours before many in the West already knew which side to call the oppressed.
White guilt did not build the terrorists, but it made possible the ideological frame that allowed many Westerners to look at the slaughter and call it resistance.
Hamas shot families dead in their homes that Saturday in October. Dancers were murdered at a music festival and others were taken hostage. As the reports continued to trickle in we learned about the suffocated babies and the depraved sexual violence.
We saw the videos of the mangled bodies and innocents being marched or driven into Gaza to be held hostage, and yet there were those who saw the same footage and declared Hamas the oppressed victims. While scrolling through X, I came upon a red flier showing a Hamas paraglider with a machine gun flying toward the dancing Israelis.
The flier announced a “Day of Resistance” hosted by “CSULB Students United Against Apartheid.” I drove down to the Long Beach State campus three days after October 7 to film it. Part of me was naive enough to expect at least a moment of silence for the dead. Wasn’t this the generation of “be kind”? Instead the students, faces hidden behind masks and keffiyehs, launched a full attack on Israel, charging her with the Western evils of occupation, genocide, colonialism, and apartheid. They shouted their praise of Hamas into megaphones as they marched around the campus.
I scrolled through X for the quick takes and read online magazines for their depth as I tried to make sense of what was going on. Was it simply the oldest hatred wearing a new mask? Was criticizing Israel permitted or was it antisemitism? But none of what I saw seemed to get at the root of the issue. What none of these arguments accounted for was how October 7 revealed the extent to which white guilt had shaped the moral reflexes of many in the West. It was white guilt that gave them the grotesque permission and the moral vocabulary to take the horror flowing out of Israel that Saturday and recast it as resistance and liberation.
This did not happen by accident. As my father says in the White Guilt documentary, it is almost as if Hamas knew the world was ready for its message. In America’s ethnic studies materials the Palestinians had been placed alongside the blacks under the same oppressor-oppressed lens. And we saw this in the streets, too. When we made What Killed Michael Brown?, the locals in Ferguson told us how Palestinian activists had come to the protests, trained street organizers, and made the explicit parallel that they and the blacks shared the same struggle against a common enemy. This solidarity grew after George Floyd’s death, a death that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar seized upon, telling a VICE interviewer that “the same type of racism that killed George Floyd” was the racism Israel used against Palestinians. He did not mourn Floyd. He exploited him. So Hamas gambled that if they attacked Israel, enough of the world would blame Israel and not pause to consider that the Palestinians had rejected every peace offering, or that many Palestinian children had been deliberately taught to hate Jews. None of that would matter. White guilt was their cover. All Hamas had to do was step into the driver’s seat left warm by BLM.
My father wrote in 2010: “Today the world puts its thumb on the scale for the Palestinians by demonizing the stronger and whiter Israel as essentially a colonial power committed to the ‘occupation’ of a beleaguered Third World people.” White guilt doesn’t evaluate facts. It assigns roles, and once they are assigned, no atrocity can disrupt them.
This is the tribalism that white guilt built. A world sorted into two camps by immutable traits, where horror itself is sanctified by the right skin as resistance. When the wrong skin suffers the horror, then the suffering is either made invisible or justified.
The Jews of Israel and the West are not the canary in the coal mine in this Age of White Guilt. They are its latest victims. Some will say antisemitism was always there, and that is true. But antisemitism needs permission to come forward, a lie that gives raw hatred the cover of righteousness. White guilt supplied it and powerfully so. The old hatred put on a new face: the Jew became the Zionist, and antisemitism was reborn as anti-Zionism.
Long before October 7th, Liberation ideology had already made its run through the other groups, and the wreckage it left behind has been the best warning of its cold destructiveness.
Coming out of centuries of oppression, blacks were fed policies of dependency by white guilt liberals, and when those policies failed, they were fed policies of lowering standards. They were told that their salvation lay in victimhood, not in the development and building of lives and communities. The result was that many blacks were locked into a black underclass of failing schools, limited opportunity, and endless violence. Chicago has had two black mayors in a row in a city with no shortage of liberals, and yet far too many of its schools are abysmal failures.
Only 11.5 percent of the black eleventh graders are proficient in reading and that number drops to 7.4 percent for math. There are dozens of schools where not a single child is proficient. The city’s charter schools take the same poor black students and send far more of them to college, and yet the teacher’s union and the mayor have moved to shut these schools down rather than build on their success. The question is not why this happens but why it has been allowed to happen. The blacks who escaped this world did so largely through American principles.
The ideology did not stop with the group it was built on. Whites, too, are ongoing victims of white guilt. The whites of today are told that the sins of past whites are theirs to carry, and that atonement means yielding ground to the oppressed in hiring, college admissions, and in the public square. Ideological cudgels were created like white privilege, white fragility, and white supremacy to seed doubt among whites and keep them in line. If any of them spoke out, they were charged with racism. Many whites joined the white guilt machine, if not as allies, then through their fearful silence.
Perhaps the most absurd victims are the Asians who were told that their success was a form of injustice. Chinese immigrants suffered much in America, especially during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Japanese suffered as well, the internment camps during World War II being a black mark on American history. Yet the Asians, despite their non-white skins, are not accorded victimhood status due to their immeasurable success overcoming oppression. The white guilt Americans have denigrated them as white-adjacent and subjected them to the same white supremacist quota system that elite universities imposed on Jewish applicants in the 1930s. This was the very white supremacy that, ironically, Liberation ideology claims to oppose.
Each group was fitted within the same binary, oppressor or oppressed. The Jews were the hardest case, because the racial order had to stretch the farthest to reach them. Many Jews allowed the white guilt racial order to render them white. They accepted the designation and even welcomed it, because it came with the goodwill that followed from declaring allyship with the oppressed. They took on white privilege, white fragility, and the rest of the vocabulary as their burden to carry, proof of their solidarity, their innocence, their place on the right side of history.
The warnings were there long before October 7, and I witnessed several of them firsthand. When I traveled to Coronado, a small island off San Diego, to film what the media had branded a racist incident — Coronado High School students throwing tortillas at a mostly Hispanic school after a championship basketball game — what I found revealed a different story. The tortillas had been brought to the game by a forty year old Latino political activist and everyone in the crowd had refused them except for two excited 14 year old JV players. Before the truth was established, the ADL — the Anti-Defamation League, the organization founded to fight antisemitism — condemned the multiracial Coronado team as white and racist. I also learned that ADL’s No Place for Hate program had been pushing CRT into the schools, dividing students into oppressed and oppressors, a framework that explicitly places Jews into the white box.
They were far from alone. I will never forget how more than 600 Jewish organizations signed a full page New York Times advertisement in 2020, after the death of George Floyd, declaring their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. It would be easy to assume that this was the work of a few radical anti-Zionist groups, but it was not. Many of the signers were from mainstream organizations: the ADL, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, local chapters of the Jewish Federations. The establishment did not resist the framework, choosing to showcase their white guilt innocence over the reality. In another case, Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, publicly embraced the idea of white Jewish privilege and called on white Jews to atone for their whiteness. To this day, my mother, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, never reduced her Jewishness to whiteness.
A month after Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, I found myself making another documentary in the Bay Area that investigated the explosion in antisemitism in the local schools. Many Jewish organizations were initially enthusiastic about screening the film and getting the word out. Then they learned that the film argued that DEI and liberation ideology were the root cause of antisemitism in those schools. The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco went cold. When we pressed, they offered to screen the film for a $10,000 rental fee — a single room for a 38 minute film. What they were really saying was that they could not afford to be seen challenging the racist and ideological framework that they had spent years embracing. Their supporters and donors wanted the false innocence that came with supporting these so-called “civil rights” efforts. Their allyship with the white guilt whites cost them the capacity to name the source of the hatred aimed at their own children.
And when Hamas attacked on October 7 many of these Jews looked to their allyship with other social justice warriors for support. There was none. Often, the Jews were bluntly ostracized as whites with blood on their hands.
The Jews were also the most revealing case because their case required the ideology to travel farthest from its origins. Someone had to take an ideology largely built on America’s racial wounds, evolve it to include other tribes, and then import it overseas to a conflict that most in the West failed to connect to its origins. And the cruelest part is that the better Israel defends its people, the more guilty it looks. My father saw this coming in 2006: “Israel’s historical contradiction, its torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap it in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.”
In my readings on antisemitism and anti-Zionism post-October 7, most of the writers describe the hatred and its horrors, but they never answer this question: what is the reward? Hatred this durable does not survive on hatred alone. I believe the reward, for many in the West, was the innocence bestowed by white guilt. Americans had just come through the Black Lives Matter era, where years of conditioning taught us that blacks were the oppressed and whites the beneficiaries of a systemically racist nation. After October 7, Hamas simply followed this formula, Palestinians as black and Israelis as white. Suddenly, the white guilt machine had fresh grievances to exploit. Its elites seized upon the mounting casualties in Gaza and called it genocide. The reward was the same one that white guilt always offers: innocence through accusation.
What happened after October 7 also created divisions in the American right. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens had spent years attacking the oppressor-oppressed narrative when the subject was blacks. After Hamas attacked, they reached for the same narrative that they had mocked. Israel became the white aggressor and the Palestinians the brown victims.
Owens veered far from reality when she called Israel a “cult” and treated the Star of David as a “hexagram” and said that it was satanic. Carlson gave white supremacist Nick Fuentes a fluff interview while going after Ted Cruz for defending Israel. Both Carlson and Owens infamously claimed that they were only asking questions. But they seemed to ask none of Hamas. They did not read its charter to their audiences.
When the subject was blacks, Carlson and Owens rejected this ideology. But when it came to the Jews, they embraced it to the point that they became politically unrecognizable.
The insidiousness of white guilt is that it needs its tribal boxes filled in order to feed off them. It needs blacks locked into the permanent underclass and other tribes locked into their assigned roles in order to manufacture the narrative that white oppression keeps whites collectively guilty.
When I watch Western institutions reframe the murder of Israelis as resistance, I know what I am seeing. I grew up with this. My mother’s parents survived the Nazis, who scapegoated the Jews as the poison holding back civilization, subhumans that had to be destroyed. The Nazis too enjoyed much sympathy in the West, until the number of the dead became too high to ignore. The protesters that we saw on the campuses and in the streets of our cities are not Nazis. But they are pushing a similar hatred, one that white guilt has rewritten and sanitized.
Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is a death cult that murdered twelve hundred people that Saturday morning and called it justice. Far too many in the Western world willfully ignored this truth for their narrative. There was no confusion in their rush to recast the bloodthirsty terrorists as freedom fighters. They saw the same videos we did, the ones the killers themselves had filmed, and felt joy. They were supported by an ideology that denied the possibility of victimization to the Jew. Once white guilt puts a people into the oppressor box, nothing they suffer can move them out of it. So the dead of October 7 were not mourned. And, once again, the sin was put back on the Jew.
My father has spent his life warning that white guilt turns evil into good and vice versa. October 7 and its aftermath are the latest example. Before that was the Black Lives Matter era which saw a surge in the number of murdered blacks in 2020. How much longer will we dress tribal hatred in the clothes of justice? Why do so many of us stay silent and hope this evil will pass over us? That is a civilization that has stopped naming the evil that devours it.
Eli Steele is a filmmaker.
