FAN FAVE #14: “PRO-PALESTINIANS” AREN’T

WORTH REPEATING: Those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” are enemies of Palestinians. That’s why I use scoff quotes around the term, and you should too!

If you are on the side of justice … why hide your faces?

I use scoff quotes when I employ the term “pro-Palestinian.” Why? Because most of the people who call themselves that aren’t helping Palestinians. In many cases, anti-Palestinian would be a better term.

After years of attending “pro-Palestinian” events and covering them for media (admittedly including unapologetically pro-Israel media), I can attest that most of those who self-define as “pro-Palestinian” are not making things better for Palestinians. They are making things worse.

For all their chanting and terrorizing of Jews, “pro-Palestinians” rarely do anything that helps actual Palestinians. They don’t raise much money for Palestinian aid. (In fairness, they don’t need to; Palestinians receive, by most accounts, more humanitarian aid per capita than any people on the planet, yet still the dystopic mess.)

They do not volunteer for or fund organizations that might create the infrastructures of a civil society in an eventually independent Palestine.

They have done precisely nothing to encourage democratic development there.

They do not advocate for academic freedom or demand equality for women and minorities in Palestine.

They do not promote economic growth in Palestine — in fact, they support a BDS movement that ghettoizes Palestinians from the economic engine of the region, Israel, ensuring continued unemployment, stagnation and hopelessness.

They are slacktivists who serve mostly as apologists for tyrants and killers. And I’m talking here about the “decent,” “moderate” activists — leaving aside the pro-pogrom degenerates who actually celebrate the beheading of babies, the immolation of families, the kidnappings, rapes, and mass murders. The overtly pro-Hamas maniacs are probably beyond redemption. The people who infuriate me most are not the crazy-eyed street screamers, but the feminist spokeswomen, the liberal clergy, the thoughtful humanitarians, the hand-wringing foreign ministers, the sincere “peace activists.”

These activists claim, ridiculously, that they stand with the Palestinian people, not their terrorist governments, but that’s demonstrably untrue. Even leaving aside the overtly pro-murder activists, beheading supporters, kidnapping promoters and members of the pro-rape community, the best of the bunch make absolutely no demands of either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

Their ideology is so messed up that they straight-facedly claim to support the Palestinian people while making excuses and justifications for the leaders who oppress them. Everything is Israel’s fault and not a whisper of condemnation or even constructive criticism is aimed at the Palestinian leadership, the rampant celebration of violence and hate in their society, or the genocidal antisemitic incitement that is the actual root of the conflict.

They absurdly accuse Israel of apartheid, while making common cause with a Palestinian Authority whose “moderate” leader Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly promises that an independent Palestine will be entirely Jew-free.

For decades, “pro-Palestinian” activists have helped ensure that the lives of Palestinians remain mired in violence, poverty, oppression and hopelessness.

Had overseas “friends” encouraged Palestinian leaders to stop inciting their people to blow themselves up and instead to accept any of the countless proposals put on the table by Israel, the United States, the Quartet, Arab states and others, going back to the UN in 1947, there would be peace and a Palestinian state now. If worldwide activists demanded it, that state of Palestine might even be a democracy. At the very least, they could demand an end to the kleptocracy that impoverishes and oppresses Palestinians, but they won’t even do that.

Is Palestine freer because of what “pro-Palestinian” activists have done? Not at all. Arguably, it is less free than ever — not coincidental to this activism, but as a direct result.

Because the narrative insists that the only guilty party is Israel, and that nothing the Palestinian terrorists or governments do deserves condemnation, they have emboldened the repressive and corrupt dictators who dominate Palestinians.

When Palestinian leaders prime their people to reject coexistence and instead to accept nothing less than complete victory over the Zionists — a guarantee of generations more violence and Palestinian and Israeli deaths — Western activists cheer them on. Even while cynically wrapping themselves in the language of peace.

Have feminist activists made life better for Palestinian women? Hardly. Western feminists have overwhelmingly refused to condemn the Palestinian leaders who perpetuate women’s subordination, instead devoting untold efforts to pillory and isolate the only country in its region where women have anything remotely close to what Western feminists would recognize as equality.

Have gay rights activists who jumped on the Palestinian bandwagon made life better for LGBTQ+ Palestinians? Not at all. They have exerted no pressure whatsoever on the Palestinian leaders, who are among the most homophobic leaders in the world, keeping their powder dry to exclusively assail Israel, a comparative gay paradise where refugees from around the Arab world risk their lives to seek refuge. While gay Palestinians are being hanged from scaffolds, thrown from buildings or murdered by their neighbors, brothers and fathers, gay rights activists accuse Israel of “pink-washing.” Gay activists who have joined the Palestinian movement have let gay-bashers and homophobic murderers off scot-free, while turning our greatest friend in the region into a pariah.

Have liberal churches made things better for Palestinian Christians? On the contrary. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing (and safe). Palestinian Christians have fled abroad as Islamic extremism has gained ground both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In 1950, Bethlehem was 86% Christian. Today, Christians make up 12% of the town. Do the endless “fact-finding” missions sent by Canada’s United Church and U.S. Presbyterians, Quakers, United Church of Christ and other do-gooder denominations express concerns about this? Nope. They inevitably “find facts” that reinforce their preconceived notions. (You don’t need to read the endless “reports,” “urgent alerts” or fundraising emails. I’ve done it for you and can summarize them in four words: It’s all Israel’s fault.)

For all the energy, resources and money that have gone into the Palestinian cause, the entire movement has achieved nothing of substantive benefit for Palestinian people.

The movement has prolonged, not shortened, war and conflict, by refusing to insist that Palestinians compromise, as Israel has repeatedly and consistently done, instead cheering on the Palestinians when they demand 100% plus more and use violence as a means to get it. The movement has impoverished, not enriched Palestinians, by turning a blind eye to the billions misused by Palestinian despots, terrorists and warlords.

If there is such a thing as a genuine pro-Palestinian activist, I don’t think I’ve met one yet, despite spending most of my career in places where I might reasonably expect to find them. At the dozens of “pro-Palestinian” meetings and rallies I have attended, whenever a hat has been passed to raise money, it has not been to fund anything of value to Palestinians. It’s usually to facilitate yet more junkets by grandstanding tragedy tourists. The only value these publicity stunts seem to have is producing PowerPoint extravaganzas that tsk-tsk the plight of Palestinians — a plight these “pro-Palestinians” themselves perpetuate. The apparent objective is not alleviating the problems, but crowdfunding more trips to conflict zones for thrill-seeking Israel-haters.

As we have seen catastrophically in this current war, Hamas has a deliberate (and fabulously successful) strategy of putting its own civilians in harm’s way, confident that when the inevitable happens, the useful idiots of the “pro-Palestinian” movement will tally the dead and declare moral victory.

In times of conflict, as the death toll rises, “pro-Palestinian” activists show their real humanity. They revel in the number of dead Palestinians vs. dead Israelis. Their macabre accounting does not suggest, as they seem to imagine, anything close to reverence for human life. It is a World Cup of martyrdom in which the side with the most dead wins.

Differences in military technology account for some disparities in the tragic numbers. But the variances in death tolls are mostly because, as an Israeli military spokesperson noted, Israel “uses its weapons to defend its civilians. Hamas uses its civilians to defend its weapons.”

Hamas knows that the activists of the overseas Palestinian movement will count Palestinian bodies and blame them on Israel, perpetuating the narrative of Israel as a demonic oppressor and the Palestinians as saintly victims.

For behaving exactly as Hamas knew they would, rewarding the use of human shields instead of condemning it for the barbarity it is, activists in the West bear some of the blame for these deaths.

There are terms for people like that, but “pro-Palestinian” doesn’t seem like the right one.