FAN FAVE #15: 9 STEPS TO *ACTUALLY* FREE PALESTINE

THE PEOPLE WHO CHANT “FREE PALESTINE” ARE THE ONES ENSURING IT DOESN’T HAPPEN. HERE ARE 9 THINGS WE NEED TO DO (OR STOP DOING) RIGHT NOW!

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I painted a piece of cardboard with a slogan but Palestine’s still not free! WTF?

The people who chant “Free Palestine” don’t want to free Palestine. If they did, they would take steps to actually advance peace and Palestinian self-determination. Here are 9 things that should be obvious, but apparently aren’t, for those who actually want to free Palestine.

1.     ACKNOWLEDGE THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM.

If we do not acknowledge the root of a problem, we will not resolve it.

Overwhelmingly, the world has subscribed to a flawed narrative that portrays Israel as the lynchpin to peace, which is almost precisely the opposite of reality. There is only one side that can make peace, because there is only one side making war: The Palestinians and their Arab allies. It is a simplistic formulation but it is also true: if the Arabs put down their weapons, there would be no war; If the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be no Israel.

Since 1947 at the latest, up until today, Palestinian leaders and the broader Arab world have been intractably opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. The Arab League unanimously rejected the idea of Israel and attempted to destroy it at the moment of its creation.

The Arab world unanimously rejected the idea of a Palestinian Arab state in 1947 because, under the U.N. Partition Resolution, such a country would be born alongside a Jewish state. There has been endless nattering in the decades since about assorted details from that time — refugees, settlements, security — but these are all red herrings. The Arab world’s unanimous rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 was motivated by the uncompromising refusal of Arab and Muslim leaders to accept the concept of Jewish self-determination in the homeland of the Jewish people. That’s why there was no Palestinian state in 1948.

The Arab League did it again at the Khartoum conference in September 1967. Offered peace and a Palestinian state on a silver platter, the Arab world declared: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. That’s why there was no Palestinian state in 1967.

In the Oslo Process, Palestinians were offered 97% of the West Bank and Gaza – essentially everything that Western observers insist on believing the Palestinians want. Arafat rejected it and launched the Second Intifada. That’s why there was no Palestinian state in 2000.

Until activists and others reject the Palestinian movement’s core modus operandi – endless war until Israel disappears – there will be no peace and no Palestine. That won’t be Israel’s fault. It will be ours.

To free Palestine, we need to acknowledge that the root of the problem is the Palestinian and Arab refusal to accept the existence of the state of Israel. As I have writtten elsehwerre: The problem is, Israel is not the problem. We need to demand that Palestinians end their maximalist expectations (“From the river to the sea …”) and accept that the only way there will be a Palestine is if Israel is safe and secure in recognized borders.

2.     STOP REWARDING VIOLENCE.

On September 29, 2000, the political left in the West went off the rails. That was the day Arafat abandoned (his pretence of) peaceful negotiation and launched the Second Intifada. For people around the world – especially for people who self-identify as progressives, or leftists, or humanitarians – opinion should side, always, with negotiation over violence. Instead, in this instance, something entirely irrational happened. As violence exploded, a European and North American consensus evolved to support the Palestinians, who had given themselves over to violence, and to condemn the Israelis, who were sitting jilted at a negotiating table.

The West’s almost completely uncritical support for Palestinian violence began that day. The world has rewarded terrorism at every turn, justifying atrocities as the understandable actions of an oppressed people – as though there wasn’t a negotiating table awaiting a Palestinian partner for peace.

Since then, every time conflict flares up, the rewarding of terror takes an especially grisly form.

Hamas and other terror groups maximize the number of Palestinian dead for PR purposes. They place terror infrastructure in civilian neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and mosques. When human shields are killed, the terrorists wave those bodies across the international media. And Western activists and diplomats do exactly what the terrorists hoped and knew we would do. We count the bodies and blame Israel.

This macabre accounting does not suggest, as we 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. The only value that Hamas places on Palestinian lives is the value of the dead in a gruesome PR war. By rewarding the Hamas strategy, as we have repeatedly done, we are the reason innocent Palestinians are dying.

To free Palestine, we need to stop rewarding violence and demand that Palestinians commit to peaceful coexistence and a negotiated two-state solution..

3.     DEMAND AN END TO INCITEMENT.

Part of the narrative after October 7 was that the unbelievably inhuman atrocities perpetrated that day were, effectively, the unavoidable acts of a people so oppressed their rage demanded beheading babies, mass rapes, immolating people alive, shooting families dead one member after another and kidnapping hundreds of innocents.

But Palestinians – the Hamas terrorists who masterminded the attacks and the unknown number of “ordinary” citizens who followed them into Israel and aided in the killing and looting – did not behave this way because of anything Israel did to them. They behaved that way because they have been indoctrinated for generations with dehumanizing, demonizing Jew-hatred. It’s simple rote learning.

The violence so prevalent in Palestinian society is not a result of external factors but of their society’s degenerate curriculum of instilling just such a self-destructive drive in successive generations. We do not see this sort of carnage from other peoples facing far worse oppression than Palestinians. It is cultivated in them at every level of the Palestinian education system and throughout society. It is not a natural response to intolerable circumstance. It is self-destructive socialization in a society that is poisoned at the core.

To free Palestine, we need to demand a complete overhaul of the education system and a societal reformation that begins, finally, to inculcate the idea of coexistence and peace in Palestinians, instead of hatred and violence.

4.     END THE DENIAL OF THE “OTHER.”

The Palestinian National Charter of 1968 rejects any Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Arafat, Abbas and other Palestinian leaders have steadfastly insisted that the Jewish people are foreign usurpers on the land – despite all archeological and historical evidence. Somehow, people who came later are accepted as indigenous and the people who were there before are deemed newcomers.

Similarly, on the Zionist side, there is a mania to insist that the Palestinian people were invented in the 1960s. While it is true that the Arab people of the area did not identify as a distinct ethnic community called “Palestinians” until that time, this does not erase the rights of the people to live there.

Any just settlement of the conflict will require us all to put aside our assumptions about who belongs and doesn’t belong and ensure that those who do live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River find ways to do so in peaceful coexistence. Both peoples are there now. And if we claim to support peace and coexistence, promoting the erasure of either group’s existence or rights is not only inhumane, it’s counterproductive.

To free Palestine, we need to stop denying the rights of the other. If you are chanting “From the river to the sea …” you are not freeing Palestine.

5.     ACTUALLY DEAL WITH THE REFUGEES.

There is a conspiracy, created and perpetuated by the Arab world, to not resolve the problem of Palestinian statelessness, but to prolong it. The very idea is so counterintuitive to people who genuinely seek peace and justice that it is, for many, literally impossible to believe. It involves an abuse of millions of Palestinians so venal, on a scale so enormous that, even if we chose to believe it, we might still turn our faces in horror and pretend we hadn’t seen it. This is, in fact, precisely what we have chosen to do.

The Palestinian refugee problem needs to be resolved. It will be resolved by the creation of a Palestinian state. There is no “right of return” as the Palestinians and their advocates posit. A future state of Palestine is the right of return. You don’t get a state and a “return” of millions of Palestinians (inculcated for generations with Jew-hatred) to move to Israel. Until the Palestinians are willing to coexist and run their own affairs in a peaceful two-state solution (however distant), the refugees should be the responsibility of the countries where they live. Instead, as part of the conspiracy that began in 1948, those people (now three or four generations on) are held as stateless people by their Arab, ahem, friends. That’s the problem.

If we want to talk about justice for refugees, we also need to talk about justice for all refugees. Centering the experiences of 700,000 Arab refugees of 1948 (and the additional refugees of 1967 and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren) while erasing the experiences of 800,000 to 1 million Jewish refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa is morally unsustainable. If the historical claims of one group of refugees is legitimate, so are the claims of the other group.

To free Palestine, we need to reject the poison pill created in 1948 and resolve the Palestinian refugee problem through the creation of a state of Palestine, at which time every Palestinian refugee will have a homeland and citizenship. Until then, we should be condemning the mistreatment of Palestinian refugees by the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries. (It would be wise to bulldoze UNRWA, too, and replace it with something less despicably corrupt and degenerate but that is unlikely to happen.)

6.     STOP POLARIZING AND POLITICIZING.

Demonizing and boycotting Israel will not make Israel more flexible. If anything, it will entrench its most reactionary elements – and, more importantly (if you actually claim to be “pro-Paletinian”) it will not bring Palestinian self-determination any closer.

The only thing that will free Palestine is a negotiated two-state solution. And that will happen only when Palestinians have demonstrated that they are willing to live in peaceful coexistence with – not instead of – Israel. That’s a long way off — never further than since October 7, 2023. But only Palestinians (and, to some extent, their overseas “allies”) hold that key.

Every time we encourage Palestinians to seek total victory over Israel (like chanting “From the river to the sea ….”) we push peace and Palestinian self-determination further away.

To free Palestine, we need to help Palestinians understand that they will never replace Israel. Coexistence is the only thing that will free Palestine.

7.     CONDEMN THE OPPRESSION OF PALESTINIANS – EVERY TIME.

Even when we know (or should know) that the Palestinian combatants are using children and other civilians as human shields and that every dead Palestinian is a propaganda triumph for the cause, still we reserve our visceral, vicious condemnation not for the depraved murderers who put their children and civilian adults between their own ramparts and Israeli soldiers, but instead we think up ever uglier and more animated denunciations of Israel.

We have stood uncritically with the autocratic leaders of Palestine, the very people who oppress Palestinians, ensuring that the prerequisites for peace and coexistence are averted.

Women in Palestine are among the most oppressed in the world. You don’t even want to know what life is like for LGBTQ+ people there. In fact, while to be a minority of any sort in Palestine is a miserable existence, being a member of the majority – a Palestinian Muslim man – is no great shakes, either. Because the governments of Palestine are among the most despotic, corrupt and oppressive on the planet. And yet they get away with it because the world is concerned about violations of Palestinian human rights only when they are perpetrated by Israel.

The global response to atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians by their own despotic leaders and by other Arab states elicits almost complete silence.

To free Palestine, we need to condemn the oppression of Palestinians no matter who the perpetrator is. In fact, we need to condemn it even louder when it is not Israel, because, someday (if freeing Palestine is our genuine goal) Israel will no longer be oppressing Palestinians. But Palestinians will still not be free. Because for all the raving and raging about “Freeing Palestine,” overseas activists have done effectively nothing to ensure that, if Palestine became independent tomorrow, it’s people would actually be free. They won’t be. Every scrap of evidence is that they will live in one of the most dystopic, repressive countries on earth. Thanks in part to overseas activists who have done bugger all to inculcate democratic values or respect for human rights in the Palestinian movement we have so uncritically signed on to.

8.     CONFRONT THE RACISM.

The Palestinian movement is rampant with anti-Jewish racism. Anti-Zionism began as a movement opposed to the existence of a Jewish state because it is Jewish. Anti-Zionism is antisemitic root and stem.

That’s bad enough on its face. But as is often the case, antisemitism (and other forms of racism) hurt the perpetrator as well as the target. When one’s political position is driven not by rational thought or even self-interest, but by race-hatred of the “enemy,” that makes compromise far less likely.

To free Palestine, we need to stop ignoring or excusing the antisemitism that poisons the anti-Zionist movement. We need to encourage Palestinians to see Jews not as an enemy but as future neighbors. Because until Israelis can be confident that an independent Palestine will not be a cyclone of murderious, chaotic terrorism like an independent Gaza, there will be no free Palestine.

9.     RECOGNIZE PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELIS AS HUMANS, NOT AVATARS.

Far too many overseas activists do not see Palestinians or Israelis as actual human beings. These two peoples have become avatars, symbols for our larger worldviews. The conflict has become a parable that Western activists (and Muslim leaders and others) exploit for their own ideological purposes.

To free Palestine, we need to recognize both Israelis and Palestinians as real people, so that we see every death as the grievous loss that it is, instead of a chit in a macabre game in which the side with the most dead wins moral victory. Far too many activists seem willing to fight for Palestine to the last dead Palestinian. That is not going to free Palestine.

These are a few prerequisites to freeing Palestine.

Of course, all of this presupposes that Western progressives are genuine in our concern for Palestinians’ welfare. Since we’ve basically adopted the Arab League’s conspiracy to use Palestinians as a battering ram against the Jewish state, this presupposition is probably generous.

But if we want to prove that we truly seek what we claim to seek, we need to behave in ways that advance peace and Palestinian self-determination. Until we stop what we’ve been doing for decades and start to put pressure where it belongs – on Palestinians – we will continue to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

That won’t free Palestine.