What Is to Be Done? Palestine and the Futility of Liberal Sympathy

These remarks were delivered on November 19, 2025 as part of a virtual panel featuring the 2025 Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association Award Winners. In the essay below, I share the core arguments of my award-winning chapter, “Negotiating Indigeneity in Hebron: Criminality, Tourism, and Liberal Settler Colonialism,” which I have since expanded upon in my forthcoming book American Jews in Palestine: Tourism and the Limits of Liberal Sympathy. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork investigating alternative Jewish tours to Palestine, I argue that liberal identity politics, namely a preoccupation with Indigeneity and race that does not challenge the state or capitalism, ultimately maintains the status quo. Specifically, in the case of Palestine/Israel, an overemphasis on the identitarian elements of Israeli criminality and Palestinian victimhood have led to ineffective mobilizations against genocide that prioritize sympathy, blame, and shame over strategic maneuvers against material power. As a result, I argue that supporters of Palestinian liberation must move away from liberal frameworks of equality under the law, anti-discrimination, and criminality in their resistance to Israeli settler colonialism and instead adopt a broader anti-imperialist struggle that first and foremost targets global capitalism.