By Bettbeat Media – Sep 12, 2026

Du Bois described Arabs through backwardness and what he called a “fanatic belief in the Mohammedan religion.” If we cannot confront the prejudices of our heroes, what becomes of our principles?

Too often, on parts of the left, solidarity is confused with loyalty, and loyalty demands silence. Question the dubious foreign policies of BRICS, Russia, or China, and you risk being accused of serving Western imperialism (as though opposing one center of power requires suspending judgment about every rival). Criticism is welcomed when directed at our enemies and treated as betrayal when directed at “our side.” Das ist verboten.

This is where triumphalism becomes something more dangerous. Around individuals, it hardens into hero worship; around countries, into nationalism. Both undermine anti-imperialist thought by replacing principles with allegiance. The question ceases to be Who is being oppressed, and by whom? and becomes Whose side are you on? We risk reproducing the very habits we condemn in MAGA’s devotion to Trump: protecting the leader from scrutiny, defending the flag regardless of what is done beneath it, and mistaking obedience for political conviction.

An anti-imperialism that cannot criticize its own heroes is not a consistent opposition to domination. It is an opposition to domination by the wrong people.

That is the spirit in which we should revisit W. E. B. Du Bois’s “A Case for the Jews”: not to discard his legacy, but to refuse the idea that his stature places his arguments about Palestine beyond criticism.

Backward Mohammedans
In his 1948 essay “A Case for the Jews,” W. E. B. Du Bois described Palestine’s Arabs through poverty, political backwardness, and what he called a “fanatic belief in the Mohammedan religion.” Jewish settlement, by contrast, appeared as a source of modernization and democratic progress. These were not merely observations about competing political movements. They arranged the people of Palestine within a hierarchy of civilization.

That hierarchy deserves scrutiny. Not because discovering a great thinker’s failures makes us greater than him, but because admiration becomes intellectually useless when it requires us to look away.

The question is not whether Du Bois should be discarded. The question is whether we are willing to judge our heroes by the same standards we apply to everyone else.

Du Bois challenged domination, but he did not always escape the paternalistic thinking used to justify it. In The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, he warned against leaving vulnerable people “at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows.” Yet the very same discussion entertained the possibility of benevolent rule by supposedly superior neighbors. The warning against domination coexisted with paternalistic assumptions about who was qualified to govern whom.

When read alongside his writing on Palestine, this tension matters. His failure was not simply a momentary lapse by an otherwise infallible thinker. It invites us to examine how a struggle against racial hierarchy could remain entangled with assumptions about civilization, cultural superiority and progress.

Racism Among the Oppressed
Du Bois’s sympathy for Zionism did not begin with Israel’s establishment. In 1919, he drew an analogy between the African movement and Zionism, understanding both through the relationship between a dispersed people and an ancestral center. Part of Zionism’s appeal lay in this recognizable aspiration toward collective renewal.

Du Bois’s concern for Jewish suffering should not be dismissed as a convenient pretext. His visit to Warsaw profoundly affected him. In “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” published in 1952, he explained how encountering the destruction of Jewish life had enlarged his understanding of racial oppression beyond the particular history of Black Americans. Another people’s catastrophe had changed the way he understood his own.

That capacity for recognition deserves respect.

But respect does not require us to accept the unequal recognition in his argument about Palestine. His defense of Jewish refuge and national reconstruction also portrayed Arabs as beneficiaries of a modernizing project whose advantages he presumed to understand on their behalf. In his account, Jewish development would benefit Arabs as well as Jews.

That was his stated expectation. Not an acknowledgment of Arab consent.

The contrast is striking: he recognized Jewish suffering with profound sympathy, yet failed to extend the same moral attention to Palestinians facing dispossession and domination.

The contrast also points to a harder truth: experiencing racism does not automatically free us from the prejudices of the society that subjects us to it. A Black American can recognize anti-Black racism yet reproduce anti-Arab prejudice; an Arab American can recognize anti-Arab racism yet reproduce anti-Black prejudice. Recognizing the injustice directed at our own community does not guarantee that we will recognize (or refuse to participate in) the oppression of another.

In my academic work on cultural psychology, I return repeatedly to this problem: even anti-racists from marginalized communities can fail to recognize the paternalism in their own thinking. They may challenge stereotypes about their own people yet accept sweeping judgments about another. They may demand self-determination for themselves while assuming that others need guidance from those they consider more advanced or enlightened.

This does not make their own experience of oppression any less real. It means that suffering injustice is not, by itself, a safeguard against perpetuating it. The question is whether we extend to others the dignity and freedom we insist upon for ourselves, including the right to reject what we presume is best for them.

What the Criticism Must—and Must not—Claim
Precision is essential here. Supporting refuge for persecuted Jews is not, by itself, evidence of supporting Palestinian expulsion. Nor should Du Bois’s endorsement of Zionism be treated as approval of every action taken by Israel, then or afterward.

The stronger criticism is narrower: his argument relied on anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes that compromised the equality it ought to have defended. It offered a sympathetic account of one people’s national aspirations while approaching another people through a language of deficiency. Scholars examining his Zionism have identified precisely these Orientalist assumptions.

That failure cannot be separated from the historical stakes. Before and during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s establishment, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes. Palestinians remember this dispossession as the Nakba (the catastrophe).

May 14, 1948 Was Not ‘Independence of Israel’ but Colonization of Palestine

Their losses cannot be made morally secondary by the sincerity of someone else’s hopes. Neither should recognition of Palestinian dispossession require minimizing the separate issue of Jewish persecution in Europe.

An argument that diminishes either people’s humanity has already abandoned the universalism it claims to defend. The same demand for consistency applies to our political loyalties: if we condemn one country’s trade with Israel but excuse comparable ties when an ally is involved, we are judging by allegiance rather than principle. In other words, we become nationalists.

The challenge is not to choose which suffering deserves recognition. It is to refuse an account of liberation in which another people’s freedom becomes expendable.

This is also why historical context must explain without automatically excusing. We need not demand that a writer in 1948 foresee every subsequent development. We can ask whether the people originally living in Palestine received the same seriousness, complexity, and moral consideration he extended to those seeking a homeland there.

The History Does Not End in 1948
An honest reckoning must also follow Du Bois beyond the passage that supports our indictment.

In 1956, Israel joined Britain and France in attacking Egypt. Du Bois responded with “Suez,” published that December, a poem condemning the intervention and depicting Israel as “the shock troop of two knaves.” The state he had championed was now being criticized for serving imperial powers. Nadia Alahmed’s scholarship examines this development as a significant transformation in his political understanding of Israel.

We should neither suppress this change nor exaggerate it.

Condemning an invasion of Egypt is not, by itself, a comprehensive reconsideration of Palestinian dispossession. The poem does not establish that Du Bois retracted every earlier assumption about Arabs or developed the position a contemporary reader might wish him to have held. But it does prevent us from treating his views as permanently frozen in 1948.

To omit his earlier prejudices in order to protect his reputation would be dishonest. To omit his later criticisms of Israel and sympathies for Pan-Arabism in order to strengthen a prosecution would be dishonest too.

The purpose of intellectual history is not to assemble an acquittal or a conviction. It is to understand how judgments are formed, where they fail, and how they can change.

Beyond the Protection of Reputations
Why discuss this at all?

Because concealing a contradiction leaves its underlying logic unexamined. If our answer is merely that Du Bois was a great man, we have substituted authority for argument. If our answer is merely that he was a hypocrite, we have substituted denunciation for understanding.

Neither response asks enough of us.

This brings us back to the habit of defending “our side” at any cost. Admiration for Du Bois should not put his arguments beyond scrutiny, just as opposition to Western imperialism should not put Russia or China beyond criticism. These are not equivalent cases, but the same principle applies: who someone opposes does not excuse what they themselves defend or do.

When we excuse in our heroes what we condemn in our enemies, admiration becomes idolization. When we do the same for countries, solidarity becomes nationalism. In both cases, we stop judging the exercise of power and start defending whoever exercises it. As long as they belong to our side.

The more difficult questions concern our own habits of solidarity. Do we recognize injustice consistently, or only when its victims resemble us or command our sympathy? Do we excuse serious wrongs committed by those we admire or identify with, while dismissing the aspirations of people whose freedom would challenge them? Solidarity becomes selective when our loyalties determine whose suffering matters, and whose oppression we explain away.

These questions apply both to Du Bois’s unequal consideration of Jews and Palestinians and to our own political commitments. If we defend Palestinian freedom, we must be willing to scrutinize Russia’s friendship with Israel (not exempt it because we regard Russia as a counterweight to Western power). The situations are different, but the standard should be consistent: admiration for a thinker or allegiance to a country must not override the rights of those their arguments or policies neglect.

The value of Du Bois’s work does not depend on our pretending that his behavior always lived up to the principles we admire in it.

We can preserve what is illuminating in a thinker without inheriting what is unjust. Indeed, that is what serious engagement requires.

We do not honor Du Bois by pretending that his vision had no limits. We honor the emancipatory possibilities of his work by refusing to let those limits become our own. Anti-imperialism must hold our heroes and our allies accountable. Not give them permission to do what we condemn in our enemies.

– Karim

(Substack)

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