INVERTED SELF-INTEREST

WHAT IS GOOD FOR PALESTINIANS IS BAD FOR “PRO-PALESTINIANS” AND VICE-VERSA.

Your mouth says “Peace.” Your every action says, “Fight to the death!”

If we ever hope to see peace between Israelis and Palestinians, we need to recognize two fundamental truths that prevent a peaceable outcome.

For different reasons — and in diametrically different ways — Palestinians and their self-declared overseas “allies” are acting in ways that ensure continued conflict and prevent Palestinian self-determination.

The first thing we need to accept is that the interests of Palestinians and “pro-Palestinians” are inextricably at odds.

What is good for Palestinians is bad for “pro-Palestinians” and what is good for “pro-Palestinians” is bad for actual Palestinians.

The basic gist nobody seems to acknowledge is this: it is in the interest of “pro-Palestinians” — whether liberal churches, trade unions, street activists, academics, DEI enforcers, politicians on the left, campus activists and the entire gamut who self-identify under that trendy umbrella — to perpetuate the conflict, not resolve it.

The reasons, as I noted in recent posts, are diverse.

The conflict has been the greatest boon imaginable to tyrants and dictators across the Middle East and North Africa, distracting the oppressed masses from their own indigenous oppressors and deflecting rage outward toward Israel. Without the distraction of “Palestine,” a great many despots would have been strung up by their feet over the past 80 years. Resolving that conflict is obviously the last thing these autocrats want.

The conflict in Palestine is a driver that brings donations pouring in to NGOs. Without images of Palestinian tragedy and hysterical headlines blaring across dunning envelopes and digital ads, these groups would be forced to fundraise off the backs of the 303 million non-Gazans facing humanitarian crises similar to, or worse than, those facing the two million Gazans — 303 million people no one apparently cares about. The pecuniary incentives for perpetuating the Palestinian disaster are obvious.

Palestinianism provides all range of ideological cover for the most venal ideologies. Movements that could attract few to no followers in the West — Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist groups, primarily — piggyback on the nightly news to draw ignorant acolytes. For them, Palestinian and Israeli lives are irrelevant to the larger hope that, somehow, this conflict will erupt into the conflagration that finally ushers in the classless utopia and the people’s Eden.

For a lot of the young people who make up this movement on campuses worldwide, giving it the bloodcurdling enthusiasm that typifies the cause, Palestinianism provides a sense of meaning, without which an entire generation of activists would probably lose their entire political raison d’être. Resolving this conflict would strip them of the only political identity they have ever known and leave them bereft, without meaning in a scary world.

Among the massive and diverse demographics that make up the “pro-Palestinian” movement, the one primary motivator in the whole shebang is self-interest. Each has their own reason for declaring themselves “pro-Palestinian” — and in every instance, the interests of actual Palestinians rank somewhere far down the list. In fact, for many of them, tallying the numbers of dead Palestinians is, ironically, evidence of their own sanctimonious do-gooderism, creating a negative incentive in which the more dead Palestinians, the better for overseas “pro-Palestinians.”

Everything the overseas “pro-Palestinian” movement undertakes — it’s every strategy, message and action—prevents reconciliation and instead throws accelerant on the inferno, ensuring continued war and more dead Palestinians (and, though this may not be a disincentive to them, more dead Israelis).

Now I come to the most dismal tragedy of this entire conflict, the counterintuitive, self-destructive truth of this eight-decade catastrophe.

Amid this massive constellation of global activists, diplomats, leaders, commentators, clergy and ragtag bunches of spray-painters and resolution-passers who self-designate under the moniker “pro-Palestinian,” it seems the only ones who are not acting in their own self-interest are Palestinians.

Palestinian people, for four generations, have been indoctrinated by their political, religious and cultural leaders to value the goal of eradicating the State of Israel (and, in many cases, the Jewish people) above the price of life itself.

Children in Palestine are brainwashed to see their fullest self-actualization not in becoming doctors or poets or in any other way contributing constructively to society, but in becoming suicide bombers, detonating themselves in crowds of Jews, to “Beware of natural death,” as a monument at Al-Quds University warns: “do not ‎die, but amidst the hail of bullets.”

This is, as I have said repeatedly, the absolute core of the conflict. All the criticisms of Israel — however valid they may seem in the context of geopolitical discourse — are specious red herrings. That is because, while Western interlocutors accept this conflict as a geopolitical one, many or most of the people in Palestine and across the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds, view it as a theological one.

Like the People’s Temple acolytes of Jonestown, voluntarily consuming the toxic Kool-Aid because intensive programming had dissolved their concepts of self and self-interest, one of the most comprehensive and destructive processes of dehumanizing indoctrination in human history (but on an exponentially larger, societal scale) has successfully obliterated the ability of individual Palestinians to act in their enlightened self-interest.

Palestinian politicians, clergy, education systems, popular culture and social norms have sublimated the Palestinian instinct for self-preservation to the nihilistic cause of Palestinianism. Rarely in history have we seen the level of fanaticism that leads “ordinary” citizens to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their children for the cause of national self-determination, let alone descending to the unimaginable depths of merciless depravity witnessed not only on October 7, 2023, but consistently across the decades of the Palestinian movement.

This is because almost no other national liberation movement in the world is so intrinsically tied up in eschatological theology. Again, Western observers think we are having a geopolitical disagreement. Many Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims believe they are in an end-times battle of light over darkness. Their own deaths, the deaths of their children, the deaths (according to the Hamas-run Gaza “Ministry of Health”) of 64,000 residents of Gaza are no price at all to pay if it brings them closer to the end-goal of this cosmic conflict.

A death cult disguised as a national liberation movement is not going to sit down at a negotiating table and discuss terms. Yasser Arafat pretended to do that for a while in the ’90s, but he was never serious. If he had been serious, he may well have ended up like Anwar Sadat or King Abdullah I of Jordan, murdered for daring to engage with the Jews.

The end of the Oslo Peace Process, which Arafat destroyed on September 28, 2000, was so counterintuitive to rational minds that 25 years of obfuscations and ridiculous justifications have been invented to explain it.

The bottom line is this: No peace process, no compromise, no coexistence is possible or desirable as long as the conflict is viewed as an apocalyptic encounter between the forces of righteousness and the embodiment of evil.

And there will be no course correction from this self-destructive theological certitude as long as Palestinians forsake self-interest, self-preservation and the lives of their children in the cause of triumphing over the reviled Jews.

Until Palestinians are convinced to act in their own self-interest, this conflict will only intensify.

And until overseas allies who misappropriate the term “pro-Palestinian” stop egging on Palestinians to fight to the death, no matter how many thousands perish in a fruitless refusal to coexist, these worldwide “peace activists” will continue to throw fuel on the firestorm.

Until Palestinians begin acting in their own self-interest — and until millions of overseas allies stop acting in their self-interest and begin demonstrating concern for the lives of Palestinians — this ruinous cycle will only continue.

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