The Red-Green Alliance is the Main Vector of Hamas Support

At the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit in August 2025, activist Nidal Jboor called for the “neutralization” of American, European, and Israeli leaders, saying violence was necessary to remove “Jewish supremacists” and “Christian evangelicals” from “thrones of power.”¹ Sachin Peddada, a PhD student and research coordinator at the Progressive International, called to “destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads.”²

Other conference participants included Hossam Shaheem, a convicted terrorist recently released in a hostage exchange; Mahmoud Khalil, the Hamas-linked protest organizer from Columbia University; AMP/CAIR-linked activist Linda Sarsour; anti-Zionist Imam Omar Suleiman; Israel adversary U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of the progressive “Squad,” and UC Berkeley and Islamic Zaytuna College professor Hatem Bazian, whose Students for Justice in Palestine organization explicitly endorsed Hamas’s attack, calling to “dismantle” Zionism after October 7.³

The conference exemplified how the Red-Green alliance – the convergence between Leftist radicals and Islamists or those who support them – provides intellectual legitimacy for opposing Israel’s existence. Decades of Marxist, post-colonial “Third World” and Critical Theory indoctrination in educational curricula propagated and amplified by campus protests, and the media have mainstreamed extremism against Israel and the West.

Historical Development

Today’s Red-Green Alliance traces back to the conglomerate of support between Iranian Marxists and Western radicals like Michel Foucault for Ayatollah Khomeini during Iran’s 1979 revolution.⁴ Foucault and other progressives saw Islam as a revolutionary force with the power to upend corrupt Western civilization.⁵ For example, in 2006 at UC Berkeley, radical academic, BDS activist, and queer theory originator Judith Butler said, ‘‘Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.’’⁶ On the other side, Hizbullah, Hamas, and their Iranian regime sponsor have all publicly thanked the global left for their support after October 7.⁷

Hamas, drawn from former PLO members, was inspired by Iran’s Islamic revolution, also absorbing militant and political lessons from Marxist liberation movements, Palestinian and otherwise; it now presents itself as an Islamic liberation vanguard.⁸

The precursor to the modern Red-Green alliance was the union between Western leftists and “revolutionary” Arab nationalists in Soviet-linked states such as Algeria, a key promoter and sponsor of the Palestinian cause since its independence in 1962.⁹ Emulating Algeria, the PLO began to present its cause as anti-colonial, but also paid homage to pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, aligning with the ideologies of Egypt’s Nasser and his Soviet sponsor. During this period, as Nasser battled the Muslim Brotherhood, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat obscured his past affiliations with that organization and his admiration for his Nazi-affiliated relative, “Grand Mufti” Haj Amin Al Husseini, a pan-Islamist who had riled up pogroms against Jews.¹⁰ The post-colonial “non-aligned movement” provided an ideological home for the Palestinian cause.

The PLO’s Palestine Research Center in Beirut promoted Third World solidarity with its 1965 “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” booklet, becoming the template for reframing the Arab-Israeli conflict.¹¹ The PLO’s revised 1968 charter emphasized its liberation movement identity, allowing it to utilize the UN’s anti-colonial resolutions to justify political violence.¹² The Soviets built this narrative, instructing Arafat to depict Zionism as racism, resulting in UN Resolution 3379 of 1975.¹³ That resolution was revoked in 1991 after the USSR fell, but its core premise – that Jewish nationalism is uniquely illegitimate – has been mainstreamed by the UN-associated Durban conference in 2001.¹⁴ A few years later, after the Second Intifada, academics established the BDS movement. Critical Theory’s renewed popularity then opened the door for Palestinianism to be included in “intersectionality” activism.¹⁵

State powers opposing the West, from Leftist to Islamist, formerly or presently communist, and authoritarian – Russia, China, Iran, Qatar, South Africa, North Korea, Chile, and Turkey – perpetuate the Red-Green alliance on a state level, assisting Hamas in its public opinion war against Israel. Their objective is to weaken Western influence and Israel support via higher education programs, protest funding, international diplomacy, and digital media manipulation.¹⁶ Since October 7, even “friendly” Western states, in reaction to skewed reports on Israel’s war conduct, plan to or have already declared their recognition of a Palestinian state, a victory for Hamas.¹⁷

Strategic Evolution

Especially after October 7, the pro-Hamas axis utilized “woke” left “Zionism is racism” messages as well as “woke right” anti-Jewish conspiracies in social media narratives on TikTok, X, and Instagram – primary news sources for young Americans.¹⁸ Algorithmic amplification of emotional, image-driven content has created viral Hamas propaganda, harnessing the internet’s exponential potential through targeted cyber operations, bot farms, and manipulated social media, weaponizing antisemitism and anti-Zionism while morally implicating Western support for Israel. The Red-Green alliance has managed to penetrate right-wing American non-interventionist quarters, creating cross-sectional solidarity.¹⁹

Hamas began appealing to progressives in 2014, joining International Red Cross classes on the international law of war in 2015.²⁰ Its 2017 social justice-themed appendix to its antisemitic 1988 charter, though, maintained commitment to Israel’s destruction while claiming “the Jewish problem” is “fundamentally linked to European history.”²¹

In its 2018 “Great March of Return,” Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh spoke about “marching to freedom” before a giant poster of Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela.²² This method aligned with Iranian appeals to young Westerners: on the Black Panther Party anniversary in 2018, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tweeted Tupac Shakur lyrics, repeating this during George Floyd’s killing in 2020.²³

Added to this are well-funded street and SJP-led campus protests and encampments. The Alliance’s success appears in polling: half of young Americans pay attention to the Hamas-Israel conflict, and close to half sympathize more with Palestinians. Israel support was once bipartisan; today, Democrats sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by nearly 3-to-1 (59% vs. 21%).²⁴

Defeating the Narrative

The Red-Green alliance is pervasive; deflating its propaganda requires revealing its true face, especially its state supporters’ geopolitical motivations masquerading as social justice concerns. Israel must take the offensive to expose foreign influence in social media and higher education, revealing its enemies’ actual racism, quasi-slavery, and discrimination, and their hateful, bigoted, and anti-democratic ideologies.

The UN and international organizations must also be held to account for perpetuating libels through rapporteurs, resolutions, and rhetoric, which also work against Western democracies.

Israel’s informational and educational war requires defeating falsehoods about Jews, Israel, and Judaism – the sources of viral antisemitic conspiracy theories. Israel must assert its legal and border rights in international forums.

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Notes