I almost didn’t comment on this but now I feel like I have to.
Palestinians or their supporters have never been allowed to have “idealistic” positions. That is blatantly false. For more than 70 years, Palestinians have been told and repeatedly forced to compromise, negotiate, moderate their demands and accept less and less, culminating in genocide.
And even the most basic demand of stopping the genocide has not been met. There is no such a thing as a reasonable realistic demand for Israel.
The genocide is still treated as something endlessly debatable, and people who use the word are punished for it. Judges have been sanctioned. People have been arrested for attempting to deliver aid to Palestinians. One main funder of Palestinian causes is siting in prison in Spain right now. Meanwhile, demands that are considered perfectly legitimate and “realistic” when discussing Ukraine are often treated as completely unacceptable when Palestinians make them.
So the idea that leftists have somehow adopted a “hyper-realistic” foreign policy toward Ukraine while holding “idealistic” positions on Palestine is egregiously ignorant and dishonest.
Palestinians have been occupied, dispossessed and ethnically cleansed. They have lived under siege and occupation, in refugee camps and tents, while their homes and land are taken from them. Israel wants ALL the land - not a part of a huge country. They want all Palestinians gone. Palestinians are being subjected to mass killing and destruction. They are not allowed to have an army. No one is arming them in the way states arm Ukraine. While Europe and US sanction Russia with new packages all the time and prohibit even Russian news channels, and reorganization in academia and institutions against Russians and Russian language - mostly those already against the Russian government have taken place, the West has more antisemitic laws and tasks forces and more defense against antisemitism instead - which is just cover for Israel by using the Jewish people as their shield. There were no flurry of policies to protect Palestinians. On top of it, Iran is sanctioned not Israel. Iran gets bombed not Israel.
And even saying that Palestinians have a right to resist, or saying ‘Hamas’ has the right to resist the ongoing genocide can be enough to cross the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse with punishments to follow!
We are literally at a point where even discussing whether Zionism is racism, is treated by many institutions as an outrageous proposition. Denunciations all around!
And somehow, after all of this, your conclusion is that Palestinians and their supporters are the ones being hyper-idealistic? Zionism is racism is just too crazy?!
It’s quite comical to think that you can have a more reasonable realistic demand on Israel and that somehow that will convince Israel. They don’t give a fuck about the size of the demand - the answer to all demands is NO.
Something which makes me suspicious: People who are hyper-realist on some foreign policy issues and hyper-idealist on others. E.g thinking both 1) In the interests of peace, Ukraine should come to some compromise settlement with Russia, whether or not all their sovereign territory is returned (hyper-realist) and 2) The only acceptable outcome in the Middle East is a single secular Palestinian state where jews and Palestinians live peacefully side-by-side (hyper-idealist).