To the left of Israel on a standard map is the Mediterranean Sea, a tepid expanse teeming with life but devoid of power over its adjacent landmass. And unless something changes in both the American and Israeli progressive communities, the same will be said of the political left with regard to Israeli politics in years to come.

It has become sexy over the last few years for progressives to abandon Israel and look instead for ways to either bolster Palestinian claims or simply undermine the state completely. Listserv debates, protests and literature at Northwestern and elsewhere have increasingly adopted distinctly anti-Israeli, sometimes even anti-Semitic, rhetoric in an effort to make sense out of a chaotic political situation.

The intentions are mostly good, rooted primarily in what should be a universal disgust for the deprivation of human rights and basic liberties to the Palestinian people on the part of an increasingly violent and invasive Israeli government and military. And there’s a relatively old leftist tradition of such points of view, dating through the writings of Noam Chomsky and even back beyond the rhetoric of the 1970s-era Weather Underground.

So many in a political tradition that also once celebrated the kibbutz movement and the spirit of democracy under which Israel was to have been founded have just thrown up their hands altogether. Most torn are culturally Jewish progressives, who in many cases feel forced to either abandon their fight for peace and support the Sharon regime or turn completely away from Israel and simply push the Palestinian agenda. This is true as well in Israel, according to recent reports in the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper and the Chicago Jewish Star.

The end result is often a self-imposed irrelevance, nothing short of a surrender on the issue of Israel to the rhetoric and ideology of the right. Since Sept. 11 the Bush team has done nothing but reduce aneurysm-inspiring complex world affairs into a game of Stratego. Either you’re for the American global interests of major energy magnates or you’re just another target along the Axis of Evil. In that schema, rightist Israel can do no wrong so long as it maintains its military supremacy in the region and takes down the right people in the process.

There’s no room for shades of gray, or a progressive left looking to at least soften the military ties between the United States and Israel in an effort to achieve peace. You’re “with us” or “against us,” Israeli or Palestinian, and thanks for not blurring those lines and for filling up with Exxon Mobil. So progressives do choose sides, and in doing so seem to just hand the reigns to either Bush or the Arab world.

And just as wholesale support for the American government is a bad idea, standing squarely behind all Arab regimes and all Arab politics is not where you want to be if you’re fighting for peace. Support for the Palestinians as a people is right. Support for Yasser Arafat when he lives up to the rhetoric of his column yesterday in The New York Times is fine. But unequivocal support for whatever the Palestinian Authority, or Arab spokesmen or even anti-Israeli European parliaments has to say is subscribing to a hodgepodge of ethnic identity groups and cynical power players.

Israel wasn’t founded out of greed, lust or racist colonialism. It wasn’t just convenient one afternoon to hop a boat to the Mediterranean and look around for some villages to invade. The Jews who first settled there escaped unspeakable persecution in Russia, and the Jews who finally put it over the top had a little problem with the Germans about which you might have read. Israel was founded out of dire necessity, just as the Palestinian refugees are acting out of dire necessity now. Even the most ardent anti-Zionist who wishes they’d all just gone to Uganda or the moon has to admit that they had to go somewhere.

In the coming years, the fight for peace should be our primary goal. But in doing so we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are more than two sides at work within Israel and at home. There won’t be anyone around to advocate peace in the region if the left abandons its stake in Israel now.