There has been much recent talk about the total impermeability of the radical anti-Israel movement to logical thought and factual discourse in relation to the Jewish State as well as to Jews themselves. Indeed, a plethora of ideas have been promoted touching on everything from social psychology to political ideology in an attempt to uncover the roots of this growing problem. However, it can be argued that all of these noble efforts have failed because the source lies outside the quotidian parameters of rational thought, resting instead in the twilight world of myth.
To understand this descent into the irrational, one must look to the French political theorist Georges Sorel and his seminal 1908 work, Reflections on Violence. Sorel posited that mass movements are rarely galvanized by reasoned policy, economic calculations, or verifiable historical timelines. Instead, the masses are swept up by what he termed a “social myth”—a grand, emotionally charged, and unalterable vision of total battle that completely polarizes the world into absolute good versus absolute evil. As Sorel presciently observed, “A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement” (Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings, pp. 28–29).
For the Sorelian disciple, the myth cannot be refuted by factual evidence because it does not operate as an intellectual position; it functions as a secularized religious conviction. The “Palestine First” fanaticism observed across Western institutions today is not a movement seeking pragmatic territorial compromise or diplomatic nuance. It is the modern manifestation of Sorel’s myth, where the act of revolutionary disruption becomes an end in itself, rendering its adherents entirely immune to the parameters of reason.
While Sorel explicitly conceived the “social myth” as a structural engine for proletarian revolt, its contemporary manifestation has undergone a critical mutation. The modern anti-Israel vanguard has decoupled these mechanics from materialist class warfare, translating them into a supreme secular myth. By doing so, they have weaponized Sorel’s revolutionary physics to fill a metaphysical void, operating with the dogmatic, liturgical fervor of a historic theology—but entirely stripped of God.
The Sorelian myth was expressly conceived as a tool for direct action to destroy what the French thinker considered the corrupt parliamentary system of the Third Republic—a means of coalescing a revolutionary cadre among the working-class elites. Sorel’s belief that direct, violent action could shatter a decaying bourgeois society and rejuvenate the nation, as well as his rejection of democratic compromise to justify destroying parliamentary democracy, find a strong echo in the platform of many contemporary radicals. He explicitly argued that the social myth acts to isolate the revolutionary cadre from the rest of society, making it completely unyielding to the compromises of parliamentary diplomacy.
Indeed, violence itself was sacralized as a means of regenerating the body politic through the elimination of its rotten elements via class warfare. He argued that violent struggle restores heroism and virtue to society, saving it from the corruption of compromise and soft moderation. As Sorel wrote, “Proletarian violence not only ensures the future revolution, but it also seems to be the only means by which European nations, stupefied by humanitarianism, can recover their former energy” (p. 77).
The contemporary crusade against the Jewish State cannot be dismantled by the traditional tools of academic debate or diplomatic compromise, for it does not exist within the realm of rational geopolitics.
Like many of today’s radicals, Sorel separated the revolutionary violence of the working class from the institutional force used by governments and politicians to maintain order. Unlike orthodox Marxists who demanded adherence to strict historical determinism, Sorel championed the pure, unpredictable physics of the clash itself. It should come as no surprise that his ideas exercised a strong influence on Benito Mussolini, himself a former anarchist and socialist respectively, who famously declared, “What I am, I owe to Sorel.”
“Palestine” is the fully crystallized realization of the modern Sorelian political myth—an ahistorical nation whose liberation from the “perfidious Jews” serves as the galvanizing force for society’s malcontents. Isolating, abusing, and even killing the former are purification rituals in the drama of societal redemption in the minds of the true believers. The myth itself is self-contained and not open to criticism or contradiction. Attempts by Jews and others at parrying this tale by referring to “Jewish indigeneity” or “Zionism as a de-colonial movement” are thus an exercise in futility.
To understand how this myth achieved such dominance, one must examine its symbiotic relationship with the academic industry of “de-colonial theory.” In the hands of contemporary campus radicals, de-colonization is no longer treated as a historical, mid-twentieth-century process of administrative withdrawal or institutional transition. Instead, it has been elevated into a supreme Sorelian abstraction. De-coloniality functions as an absolute metaphysical cleansing agent, a theoretical license that divides the globe into static zones of pristine victimhood and irredeemable criminality.
This theoretical machinery transforms complex geopolitical realities into a binary morality play. Consider the boilerplate language found in the immediate post-October 7 statements issued by various Harvard undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committees or Columbia University’s Student Coalition for Justice in Palestine. These communiqués did not analyze the strategic or humanitarian calculus of the geopolitical situation; they asserted a metaphysical axiom. By declaring that the actions of Hamas were an “inevitable consequence of apartheid” and that the responsibility lay “entirely with the Israeli regime,” these student vanguards demonstrated a textbook Sorelian immunity to empirical tragedy. The immediate rush to sanitize atrocities as “resistance” reveals that the modern radical values the violent rupture not as a tragic means to a diplomatic end, but as a celebratory, purifying act of cosmic justice.
By stripping history of its intricate geopolitical friction, the de-colonial framework provides the modern radical with a pseudo-intellectual dispensation. Under this lens, the savage atrocities of October 7 are not evaluated as war crimes or strategic catastrophes; they are celebrated as the pure, unmediated physics of Sorelian direct action. The theory actively sanitizes violence by framing it as a clinical necessity for historical equilibrium. Consequently, the radical cohort is granted total moral immunity, enabling them to view the physical harassment and systematic exclusion of Jewish peers not as bigotry, but as the mandatory, painful friction of a grand historical correction. According to Sorel, proletarian violence “is a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of the class war” (p. 115).
This structural immunity to reason highlights the deep, often unacknowledged genealogical link between the modern radical left and the foundational mechanics of twentieth-century fascism. When Mussolini famously credited Sorel for his political awakening, he was recognizing a fundamental truth about mass psychology: that the ultimate political currency is not the cold rationality of materialist economics, but the intoxicating aesthetic of collective struggle.
The physical manifestation of this aesthetic became obvious in the coordinated campus encampments that swept Western universities. The encampment operates as a physical microcosm of Sorel’s autonomous revolutionary cadre—a literal liberated zone insulated from the laws and norms of the surrounding bourgeois institution. Within these barricades, the enforcement of ideological conformity, the ritualized chanting of absolute slogans like “From the river to the sea,” and the physical exclusion of the uninitiated are not viewed by the participants as totalitarian behavior. Rather, they are experienced as a form of sublime spiritual awakening. The absolute nature of the myth demands absolute space, free from the contaminating influence of external critique or institutional neutrality.
Orthodox Marxism faltered because its strict reliance on historical determinism and economic data required a patient submission to historical phases. Sorel shattered this paradigm by prioritizing the volcanic energy of the myth over the tedious calculations of the bureaucrat. Today’s campus radicals, despite being wrapped in the progressive lexicon of liberation and equity, are the direct psychological descendants of this Sorelian synthesis. They share an identical totalitarian contempt for liberal democratic compromise, institutional neutrality, and parliamentary patience. For both the mid-century fascist and the contemporary academic vanguard, the preservation of institutional stability is viewed as a form of moral decay. As Sorel stated, “The sublime is dead in the bourgeoisie and it is doomed to possess no ethic in the future… They are always ready to accept any compromise, to satisfy the demands of the crowd, provided only that they are not driven to extremities” (p. 229).
Ultimately, the contemporary crusade against the Jewish State cannot be dismantled by the traditional tools of academic debate or diplomatic compromise, for it does not exist within the realm of rational geopolitics. As Georges Sorel presciently demonstrated over a century ago, a social myth operates as an emotional monolith, entirely insulated from the corrosive influence of factual intervention. The slogans, iconography, and institutional dogmatism observed across the West today are not the products of a reasoned political movement; they are the liturgical expressions of a secularized religious fervor that values revolutionary disruption as an end in itself. To counter this growing tide,Western defenders of reason must stop treating the movement as a misinformed political debate that can be corrected with data. Instead, it must be recognized for what it truly is: a powerful, irrational Sorelian myth that threatens to dismantle the very foundations of objective truth and institutional stability.
