OCTOBER 7 IN “CONTEXT”

Other oppressed peoples do not behave like this. Why do Palestinians? There’s a simple answer.

What Western activists think legitimate resistance looks like.

This is the third instalment of a three-part series. Read the first part here and the second part here.

Apologists for the sort of revolting Palestinian violence we saw on October 7 like to remind us that those atrocities did not take place in a vacuum. There is a “context” to what happened on that day, we are told.

They’re right.

But they do not make the case they think they are making.

“Pro-Palestinian” activists — those who see October 7 as legitimate “resistance” — want us to believe that the barbarism of October 7 was a natural, almost inevitable response to years of Israeli oppression.

This narrative is part of an ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians in which Western activists depict Palestinians as a sort of single-cell organism capable only of responding to external stimuli. Palestinians, in this ridiculously common narrative, are incapable of human restraint, driven to acts of unprecedented bloodthirst as though they lack all behavioral control. This racism of the lowest expectations permeates the Western activist imagination, an Orientalism that has no parallel in progressive politics as it applies to any other group on earth.

Polls indicate that Palestinians overwhelmingly endorse what happened on October 7. And Western “peace activists” declare, “Of course they do! Who wouldn’t?”

Two things are happening here: Overwhelming Palestinian popular support for the most brutal, inhuman violence, and overwhelming overseas acceptance that, if Palestinians think they need to burn Jews alive to meet their legitimate national aspirations, well, who are we to argue?

When apologists for October 7 say that those events took place in a particular context, this is the context.

Palestinian people have been sensitized for decades by their political, religious, social, cultural and educational leaders to view the most deplorable violence as a starting point for their national liberation “struggle.” They tried negotiations for a while in the 1990s, but not really. That was always a subterfuge to buy time for the final military victory.

So when you hear Western activists declare a “context” for the mass rapes, infanticides, immolations, beheadings, kidnappings and mass murders of October 7, recognize this: The context is not Israeli oppression; the context is a Palestinian population instructed for decades to see the most grotesque violence as entirely legitimate. Almost no other oppressed peoples resort to these sorts of morally debased, unimaginable crimes. Why do Palestinians? As I said at the end of my first post in this series: It’s simple rote learning.

Decades of top-down cultural pressures to choose violence as a first resort and to continually innovate on brutality (if nothing else in society) have led to widespread support for (and apparent nonchalance toward) actions that should make any decent human’s skin crawl.

A 2016 poll reported a decline in support for stabbing Jews — only 58% of Palestinians “support … use of knives in the current confrontations with Israel,” a drop from 67% three months earlier.

The report from a Palestinian polling agency outlines support for stabbings among geographic and demographic groups in bizarre detail:

Support for knifing attacks in the Gaza Strip stands at 82% and in the West Bank at 44%. Three months ago, support among West Bankers for knifing attacks stood at 57% and among Gazans at 85%. Support for knifing attacks is also higher among men (60%) compared to women (57%), in cities and refugee camps (62% and 58% respectively) compared to villages (40%), among those whose is age is between 18 and 22 (62%) compared to those whose age is over 50 years (55%), among refugees (66%) compared to non-refugees (52%), among those who work in the public sector (63%) compared to those who work in the private sector (53%), among those who hold a BA degree (59%) compared to illiterates [sic] (53%), among the religious (65%) compared to the somewhat religious (51%), among supporters of Hamas and those who have not decided to whom they will vote in new elections (82% and 64% respectively) compared to supporters of Fatah, third parties, and those who will not participate in new elections (49%, 48%, and 45% respectively), among those who are opposed to the peace process (74%) compared to supporters of the peace process (47%), and among those who use social media on daily basis (61%) compared to those who do not use social media (53%).

The previous poll, in which the numbers supporting stabbings were higher, also contained a notable caveat. While 67% of Palestinians supported stabbing, 73% opposed “the participation of young school girls in the stabbing attacks …”

To clarify: more than a quarter of respondents thought “young school girls” should be stabbing Jews.

Or perhaps they answered “Not sure/Don’t know” — the question of whether “young school girls” should or should not participate in stabbing attacks being a real headscratcher for some people.

If we wonder how such vast numbers of people in a society could conclude that stabbing civilians is a legitimate political act, look at the model demonstrated for them by the globally recognized face of their people. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ official Facebook page features a photo of Abbas embracing a 14-year-old who was injured while trying to stab Israelis at a bus stop. (And you thought your teenage niece was a hellion.)

When Palestinians perpetrate unspeakably gruesome crimes, the world tends to strike a remarkably composed response. On and after October 7, in fact, we learned that plenty of overseas activists endorse and celebrate rape, decapitation and mass murder. That was an eye-opener only to those who have not been paying attention for the past 25 years or so to Western progressives’ dispassion about Palestinian violence.

Western activists justify the worst atrocities in the world — if they are perpetrated by Palestinians. Here’s the logic: Palestinians only react. They have (in the minds of overseas activists) effectively no filter on their violent impulses and so respond in direct proportion to Israeli “provocations.”

Therefore, the grislier the attack, the bloodier the murder, the more victims the car-ramming killed, the more justified the terrorist must have been, by definition.

In the dissolute worldview we have signed on to, Palestinian atrocities are justified by their very severity — if a pair of Palestinian teenagers sneaks into a Jewish village, enters a home and stabs parents and three children to death, wow, they must be really frustrated. Because we blame “the occupation” for almost everything that happens in the region, these darn kids must have experienced some really traumatic treatment at the hands of the Zionist occupiers to knife a family that thoroughly.

The almost instant forgiveness Western leftists grant to Palestinian murderers is premised on assumptions that no progressive person should carry. If you listen to the words of “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West, you can be forgiven if you think you’re reading something by Edgar Rice Burroughs. A movement that ostensibly has at its core respect for cultural difference depicts Palestinians as noble savages, incapable of agency, responding only to external stimuli.

When Yasser Arafat spoke to the UN General Assembly for the first time, in 1974, he helped create the template for the world’s credulous acceptance of Palestinians’ inability to control themselves.

“Today I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter’s gun in the other,” Arafat warned the world. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat, do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

What a drama queen.

Suffice to say, Arafat never really got the whole olive branch thing. He never had much of a grasp on it, but dropping it, as he always knew he would, was preemptively blamed on someone else.

Arafat may not have invented the prevailing narrative, in which Palestinians have no ability to self-regulate when it comes to violence, but this was an ideal example. Palestinians don’t want to be violent, the Zionists just bring out the murderer in them.

And Western activists swallow this nonsense enthusiastically. Imagine the same people who rightly condemn any attempts to deflect blame for domestic violence on the victim but then coolly assert that, if Israelis didn’t do XYZ, Palestinians wouldn’t be forced to decapitate Jewish babies.

When Palestinians blow themselves up in Israeli restaurants or stab Jews on Jerusalem streets, the narrative declares that it’s not their fault. They are driven to these acts by desperation, frustration, the occupation.

This is not part of human nature. People do not behave this way without a concerted, external force acting upon them.

But , no, that external force — that “context” that drives Palestinians to mindboggling carnage — is not Zionism. It is not Israeli actions, or checkpoints, or the occupation or any of the other litany of excuses and deflections activists around the world employ to justify inhumanity.

It is incitement. It is a carefully nurtured, cultivated and constantly stoked intolerance, antisemitism, dehumanization and demonization that is bred into Palestinian people through every facet of their society.

This is the root of this conflict. All the rest is commentary.

Until we acknowledge and confront this fact, we will never advance peace and coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis.