JOIN THE RESISTANCE!

PALESTINIANS AND OVERSEAS ALLIES JUSTIFY ATROCITIES BY CLAIMING “RESISTANCE” TO TYRANNY. BUT WHEN YOU START THE CONFLICT AND PERPETUATE IT, YOU DON’T GET TO GET TO CLAIM “RESISTANCE” TO ANYTHING.

While the horrors on October 7, 2023, were still taking place, some people worldwide were already posting things on social media like “This is what resistance looks like.”

If Palestinian “resistance” is beheaded babies, families immolated alive, women bound and raped, innocent people executed in amphetamine-driven frenzies of mass murder, and the kidnapping of people ranging in age from 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, down to nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, then, as McCartney and Lennon said, you can count me out.

If that is the “resistance,” there is not a decent person on the planet who should be onside with that manifestation of Palestinian nationalism.

But I’ve got a bigger bone to pick. It’s the idea that the Palestinian movement is, in any sense, a “resistance.”

The assumption that many people in the West have succumbed to is that the panorama of violence that represents the Palestinian movement writ large is a response to something. Resistance, by definition, is a reaction. Of course, Palestinianism is an extraordinarily reactionary movement — as I keep harping on, there is no explanation for how or why people who call themselves progressive should in any way be affiliated with the Palestinian movement as it is constituted today. It is, only by the most liberal interpretations, a nationalist movement. It is a misogynistic, homophobic, genocidal, antisemitic ideology appropriating a regalia of social justice, progress and national self-determination. In that political sense, it is reactionary.

But it does not represent “resistance.”

Had Palestinian (and the broader Arab and Muslim) leaders ever been willing to live in peaceful coexistence with Jews, there would be nothing to “resist.” Had the Palestinian and Arab leadership accepted the partition resolution in 1947; had they not launched genocidal war in 1948 and again in 1967; if they had accepted the invitation for a Palestinian state in 1967, instead of responding with the famous three no’s); if they had accepted any of the endless opportunities to live in a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state, there would be peace and Palestinian self-determination today.

There isn’t, of course. And that has precious little to do with either Israel’s existence or any imagined intransigence on the part of successive Israeli governments. Labor or Likud, hawk or dove — not one has been able to find a way to negotiate peace and a two-state solution with the Palestinians. That’s not the fault of Israelis. That’s the fault of Palestinians and their allies.

In other words, the Palestinian violence that we saw on October 7, which is a perpetuation of the aggressive antisemitic violence we have seen for decades masquerading as “resistance,” is not a reaction to anything Jews or Israelis have done — indeed, it is the cause of whatever Israelis have done.

The root of this conflict is Palestinian and Arab/Muslim intransigence, the refusal to tolerate so much as the idea of Jewish national self-determination. This is why there is a conflict.

The use of the term “resistance” implies that their behavior is defensive. It’s not. Their side started this conflict, perpetuates it, and could end it today. The Palestinians and their allies are the only ones who can make peace because they are the only ones making war.

The defense, such as it is, against this reality, is that the “Palestinian resistance” is valid because, basically, “the Jews came in and stole their land.”

I’ve never understood how anyone with any knowledge of archaeology or history, or the meaning of the term “indigeneity,” can accuse the people who were in a place first of “stealing the land” from people who came later. That’s not how indigeneity works. But anyways.

Even when the Palestinian movement condescends to “resist” peacefully, as they do through the BDS movement, that is still not resistance. It is aggression. Because what they are ostensibly resisting is not Israeli occupation or tyranny or anything else. It is the existence of Israel. (I say this yet again — if this is news to you, you have no place in this discussion until you educate yourself.)

The ones who are resisting, in this instance, are Israelis. Since 1948, at the latest, Israelis have been resisting incessant attempts by Palestinian, Arab and Iranian-backed terrorists, as well as, at intervals, the combined militaries of all neighboring states, to commit genocide and eradicate the Jewish presence in the Middle East.

This is why I get my back up when I see the word “resistance” misused by Palestinians and their allies.

They are not “the resistance.”

We are.

We are the real resistance.

Jews, Israelis and their allies have, for 76 years, been resisting forces that seek the destruction of the Jewish state and, in many cases, the annihilation of the Jewish people.

Join the resistance.

We’ve been waiting for you.

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