Anti-Israel ≠ Pro-Palestinian
Not even close
There have been plenty of times over the last three weeks where my wife has caught me yelling at my phone or the television. Some examples are:
“Does anyone actually know the legal definition of genocide?!?”
“Israel is NOT purposely targeting civilians!!”
“Why are you interviewing Peter Beinart and Ben Rhodes again?!?”
“They are not fighters! They are terrorists!!”
“Independent Jewish Voices does not speak for the Jewish community! You don’t wear a tallit to a rally! There is no way there are more than 10 Jews in that group of people shouting “Jews against genocide!””
“Why have I just been invited to ANOTHER Whatsapp group?!?!”
But, nothing makes me shout louder than when someone calls the students on campus attacking Jews “pro-Palestinian”; or the protests in Toronto, London, New York or Sydney, as “pro-Palestine”; or people painting blue Jewish stars on Jewish-owned properties in Paris as “Pro-Palestinian.”
Why?
They are not pro-Palestinian.
They are not pro-Palestinian.
They are not pro-Palestinian.
They are anti-Israel.
There is a big difference.
Inconvenient Palestinians
I wrote about something similar in May 2023. At the time, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had launched 1,469 rockets at Israel over a five-day period (mere rocket fire seems so quaint in hindsight). Though Iron Dome did its job, swatting almost all the rockets out of the sky, one rocket landed in a field near Shokeda in Israel. The victim? Abdullah Abu Jaba, a Palestinian from Gaza. He was working in Israel. Did you not hear about it? Of course not. He was killed by Arabs, and it is only newsworthy when a Jew can be blamed for an Arab’s death.
During that week of fighting, many other Palestinians died at the hands of PIJ when rockets fell short and landed in Gaza. You did not read about them either, because their lives, and (more importantly) their deaths, are inconvenient to the anti-Israel narrative. You can only get angry in that narrative when the Jews are perceived to have done something wrong. As Stephen Daisley of The Spectator wrote at the time,
Western progressives aren’t alone in seeing Palestinians as symbols. To their political and paramilitary leaders, the Palestinians are archetypes, emblems of resistance and emblems of victimhood, their deaths peddled as martyrdom for the domestic audience and ethnic oppression for gullible CNN producers. Palestinians who fit into neither category lack instrumental value and may even prompt unhelpful questions about a leadership which has consistently failed its people.
…[Abu Jaba] needed to be someone else’s story and his death to bear a meaning it could not support. Because it couldn’t, Abu Jaba will quickly be forgotten like all the others who could not be made into symbols. He was an inconvenient Palestinian.”
Philosophum non facit barba
In English, this Latin phrase means, “Having a beard doesn’t make one a philosopher.” Well, I would argue that holding a Palestinian flag doesn’t make one pro-Palestinian.
In countless protests around the world in the last few weeks, we have seen anti-Israel activists waving their flags. They come out on the streets for one of two reasons only:
To celebrate when something bad has happened to Israel, like, say, the brutal murder, rape, and kidnapping of hundreds of Jewish civilians, or
When something bad happens to the Palestinians that can be blamed on the Israelis.
Otherwise, they’re fairly quiet. This is because they don’t really care about the Palestinian people. They only care about when the Palestinian cause can make Israel look bad.
Outrage for the Palestinians
Remember the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010? Those activists weren’t taking humanitarian aid to Gaza. They were trying to break the sea blockade, provoke Israel into boarding their ship, and trying to portray Israel as being overly aggressive against a “humanitarian convoy” (despite the fact that there was almost no humanitarian materiel on board). This was not pro-Palestinian, it was anti-Israel.
Or remember in 2007 when Hamas staged a coup in Gaza, brutally murdering perceived Israel collaborators, throwing PA supporters off of buildings, or dragging their corpses through the streets of Gaza City? Remember the outcry from the Pro-Palestinian supporters in Canada at the time, upset at what Hamas rule would do to the people of Gaza? Of course not, such outcry didn’t happen.
Remember in October 2022, when the severed head and decapitated torso of a 25 year Palestinian named Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh was found on the side of a road in the West Bank? It was reported that he was brutally murdered for being gay - a serious taboo in Palestinian society - and that he was killed by another Palestinian. Remember the utter outrage and noise from Queers for Palestine on the streets of Toronto? Of course not. Such outrage was missing.
Or remember when over 3,000 Palestinians were killed by Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian Civil War, and crowds took to the streets screaming “Genocide!” and “Ethnic cleansing!” against the Syrian dictator? Of course not because, you guessed it, this protest didn’t happen.
The Palestinian people only merit the attention of the masses when the Jews can be blamed for their misfortune. The Palestinians, according to their “supporters” abroad, are simply incapable of being responsible for their own actions. They are given no agency over their decisions. Everything - EVERYTHING - is Israel’s fault.
This was highlighted beautifully recently by Israel’s Eretz Nehederet (like SNL) who in a recent skit pretended to be the BBC covering the rocket strike near the al-Ahli Hospital. In the skit, the BBC reporter, time and time again, absolutely refused to believe the evidence that showed the rocket originated from the Palestinians, until they eventually said, “It’s still Israel’s fault indeed because the Israeli blockade prevented Hamas from getting proper functioning missiles, and this is why tragic accidents like this happen indeed.” There’s always truth in jest.
What is a pro-Palestinian activist?
I am simply trying to make clear what these people are not. And though it is not my job to say what someone else should stand for, I would imagine that someone who is actually Pro-Palestinian would, at the very least, be:
Pro-peace. They have had 75 years to try and destroy Israel, and they have failed. Perhaps it is time to accept that Israel isn’t going anywhere, that their military is stronger, and that bad things happen to Palestinians when the Israelis are provoked, threatened, or murdered. Objectively, there is no doubt that it would be in the Palestinians’ best interests to live at peace with Israel.
Anti-Hamas. I get that there are Palestinians in Gaza who are scared to speak out against Hamas. Hamas after all has a track record of torturing and murdering dissenters. But, surely, Palestinians in the Diaspora can speak out against Hamas or call for regime change? Surely non-Palestinians in the West, who have no skin in the game, can call for Hamas to be deposed, for them to actually give some aid to the Palestinian people, and to stop putting civilians in the line of fire. How could anyone who is pro-Palestinian be pro-Hamas when Hamas keeps bringing death down on the people of Gaza?
A pro-Palestinian activist should theoretically want what is best for the Palestinians. If what they want the most for the Palestinians is the destruction of Israel, then what defines them is their being anti-Israel, not pro-Palestinian. They are anti-peace, they are pro-Hamas, they are pro-conflict, and they are anti-progress. They are anti-Israel.
Palestinians deserve better
The Palestinian people deserve better. They deserve better than being led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is corrupt, a thief, a Holocaust denier, and who seeks only to maintain the Palestinian people in a state of poverty and dispossession, because it makes Israel look bad. They deserve better than Hamas, whose leaders are worth at least $10 billion combined, who allow their people to languish in poverty, who have not set foot in Gaza in years, and who are perfectly happy using civilians as human shields so Gaza can be used as a launch pad for attacks against Israel. The Palestinians deserve better than the neighbouring Arab governments, who clutch their pearls and act offended when something happens to the Palestinians, but who make no effort to send aid or even allow in Palestinian refugees.
Importantly, the Palestinians deserve better than the anti-Israel activists around the world who say they support the Palestinians, but don’t.
They deserve better than those who put a Palestinian flag in their usernames and troll Jews online, or hang a flag from their car and honk their horn to celebrate when Israelis are killed, or who use the Palestinian cause to virtue-signal, when all they are doing is celebrating the misery that is Palestinian life in Gaza to dunk on Israel.
The Palestinian people are used by their own government, neighbouring governments, and by activists worldwide as pawns in a game designed to shame Israel. This has tragically been their fate for the last 75 years. In that time, the Palestinians have suffered, whereas Israel has flourished.
The Palestinians deserve better, and one thing we can do to help is make clear who is on their side, and who is not.
Anti-Israel activists do not care for the Palestinian people. They simply wish the worst for the Jewish State. The opposite of pro-Israel is anti-Israel, not pro-Palestine.
Sad truth