The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is one of the most beloved of lawyers among American liberals. Brandeis was one of the socialists members of the court in history, a support of nearly every imaginable government control on the economy. “I am rapidly becoming a Socialist,” he once declared.

Besides Marxism, Brandies had another love: Zionism. Brandeis never lived to see the birth of modern Israel, but he worked ceaselessly to rally American Jewish in support of the Zionist movement (Brandeis was never a practicing Jew). Brandies’ support for Zionism was during a time when most American Jews were either indifferent or opposed. Most American Jews were anti-Zionist in the early years. America was their “Promised Land,” and many Jews feared that the establishment of a Jewish state would raise questions of dual loyalty. It was only the horrific nature of the Holocaust that galvanized American Jews in support of a Jewish state.

But Brandies was an only convert, and while Brandies preached enlightenment values of equal rights and human rights as an American lawyer like a many Zionists he did not apply those values when it came to the Holy Land.

Brandies was not only a Zionist, but one whom was entirely racist and indifferent to the Arabs in Palestine. For Brandies, the Zionist cause was one where the rights of Arabs in the Holy Land simply did not matter.

“As against the Bedouins, our [Zionists] pioneers are in a position not unlike the American settlers against the Indians,” he once wrote.

What is Brandeis saying here? Brandeis knows what happened to the Indians at the hands of American settlers: White Europeans settlers massacred millions of Indians, pushed them off their land, humiliated then and endlessly subjugated them. Brandeis is not shocking by such matters, simply because he followed a philosophy of believing that their are superior people - Westerns - and that they have ever right to conquer and enslave the savage inferiors - Everyone Else.

Brandies argues precisely that for Palestinians: that Jewish “pioneers” so treat Palestinians akin to the way Indians were treated by European “pioneers.” And both people have their myths: the latter “Manifest Destiny” while Israeli have “a land without a people for a people without a land” and “made the desert bloom.”

Brandies was an ardent Zionist, and his racism and contempt for the right of Arabs is the core of Zionist ideology. And Brandies was a man of the Left and still beloved by liberals, and in that he illustrates the manner in which American liberals still approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: one of romanticize of Israeli crimes and dehumanization and shunning of Palestinians.

Never a more vapid people.