PALESTINIAN PRIVILEGE
Let’s talk about one of the most egregious examples in the world today of unequal treatment and unearned advantage.
Privilege. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, especially by “progressive” activists to illuminate inequality.
So let’s talk about one of the most egregious examples in the world today of unequal treatment and unearned advantage.
Palestinian privilege.
Do those two words strike you as incompatible? All we have heard in the past three years — if not the past 80 — is how Palestinians are downtrodden, mistreated, and even subjected to “genocide.”
Doesn’t sound very privileged, does it? But let’s look at facts.
According to the United Nations, there are 305 million people in the world today facing humanitarian disaster. There are two million people in Gaza. Even if every single person in Gaza faced humanitarian disaster, that would still be a fraction of 1% of the world’s population desperately requiring our attention. And yet to judge by media coverage, global protests, UN resolutions, and graffiti on practically every flat surface worldwide, you would think Palestinians were the only people in the world suffering.
That’s some pretty disproportionate attention. That’s Palestinian privilege.
But let’s look at some more facts — sticking closely to the UN itself for now.
A dedicated UN agency serves Palestinians alone. UNRWA ostensibly exists to address the problems facing Palestinians. It doesn’t. It perpetuates them. It is a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle that perpetuates the very Palestinian statelessness it pretends to seek to resolve. (This is key to this conflict and you need to know this.)
Also under the UN, an entirely separate definition of refugee exists. UNRWA defines Palestine refugees as people displaced in (Arab initiated) wars — and also their descendants. Even if they have settled in and received citizenship in another country, they are still counted as Palestinian “refugees” — one reason why the number of Palestinian refugees has skyrocketed from 700,000 in 1949 to 5.9 million today. Great job, UNRWA. The inheritable refugee status is a privilege granted to one people on the planet alone — Palestinians. That’s privilege.
Rather than seek any realistic durable solution to the Palestinian problem, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees pursues the futile, unfeasible, and it-will-never-happen “solution” of “return,” ensuring the Palestinian refugee status continues across generations (and, not incidentally, the ravenous, dollar-devouring UNRWA bureaucracy becomes more, not less, justifiable based on “refugee” numbers).
Rather than prioritize peace, coexistence or genuine Palestinian self-determination, UNRWA, UNHCR and the entire UN apparatus has signed on to a nihilistic, absolutist Palestinian agenda that actually harms Palestinians in their name and, by precluding any compromise, ensures the problem is never resolved.
The UN is obsessed with Palestine. The UN Human Rights Council has a standing agenda item — Item 7 — devoted specifically to Israel/Palestine, the only country-specific permanent item on the council’s regular agenda.
The same body has discredited its legitimacy by creating an ongoing Commission of Inquiry on Israel, the occupied Palestinian territory and East Jerusalem, with no fixed end date, massively disproportionate to any of the UN’s ostensible concern for conflicts affecting exponentially more people.
According to UN Watch, in 2025 the UN General Assembly adopted 16 country-specific resolutions criticizing Israel — more than the combined total directed at all other countries that year. (This was not an anomaly. Though specific numbers vary, it happens every year.)
In other words, the UN considers this one conflict more significant than every other humanitarian issue on the planet combined. Of course, this is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even a comparatively minor conflict can become the most significant if the world says it is the most significant. See how Palestinian privilege works?
But wait. There’s more. The UN has dedicated bodies, committees, days of observance, and conferences focused specifically on Palestine, way beyond what any other stateless or displaced peoples receive.
Leaving the UN aside, Palestinians receive vastly more global media attention than all other conflicts combined, including Sudan, Yemen, Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Syria, or the plight of Kurds, Uyghurs, Baloch, Tibetans (remember “Free Tibet”?) and Sahrawis.
Palestinian issues are treated by universities, unions, churches, NGOs and activist networks as the emblematic humanitarian cause, in a way not matched by other displaced peoples.
Western campuses are rampant with Palestinian propaganda and “solidarity,” including encampments, divestment campaigns, and institutional demands far beyond the attention given to all other conflicts combined. It’s creepy as hell, given that these are the very places from which our society’s truth, critical thinking, and wisdom are assumed to spring — yet they are in thrall to Palestinian privilege.
A sprawling international NGO, legal, academic, and activist infrastructure is devoted specifically to Palestinian claims — something the hundreds of millions of disadvantaged across Asia, Africa and elsewhere can only gawp at in envy.
Genocidal slogans like “Globalize the intifada” that would never be tolerated by “progressive” or any other decent people are enthusiastically accepted and spread, aligning with the widespread acceptance by erstwhile humanitarian activists of the most barbaric crimes as justifiable in this solitary instance. That’s Palestinian privilege.
Palestinians do face crises. Obviously. But these are neither the only nor anywhere near the most serious in the world, based on the crass measure of quantifiable casualties or individuals affected. Not by a longshot.
Only Palestinian privilege could allow this one issue, this one people, to eclipse all other causes and catastrophes on the planet.
But why? How could this have happened? What explains this Palestinian privilege?
Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet and public intellectual, may have captured the reality most succinctly.
“The world’s interest in us stems from its interest in the Jewish question. We are unfortunate to have Israel as our enemy… Yet we are fortunate, because the Jews are the centre of the world’s attention.”
Bam.
Even so, you may respond (as apparently millions do) Palestinians are suffering and I am trying to diminish that.
It may look that way. But, ironically, people like me — pro-Palestinian Zionists — are the ones who are actually advancing a future for Palestinians that does not include endless conflict, continued statelessness, and fruitless “resistance” that leads to nothing but martyrdom.
It is the people who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” who obsessively perpetuate the stubborn refusal to coexist in peace — the only thing that will lead to Palestinian self-determination and an end to perpetual conflict.
Palestinian, Arab and Muslim elites are responsible for the plight of Palestinians today. And global activists have signed onto one of the most appalling acts of exploitation and abuse ever imagined. Collectively, they have ensured that Palestinian Arabs never live in peaceful coexistence beside Jews. Arab and Muslim elites have launched every war and intifada. They have instigated every conflict that leads to Palestinian deaths. They have rejected every opportunity for peace and Palestinian self-determination.
It is hard to know exactly what Palestinians themselves think. In a totalitarian society, public opinion is impossible to accurately gauge. But 80 years of indoctrination in immersive antizionism and antisemitism have humanity,certainly had some of the effects desired by the elites who have exploited the Palestinians as a battering ram against the Zionist usurpers. This apparent Palestinian hatred of Israelis (and Jews) gives license to activists, diplomats and commentators worldwide to side with the violent, intolerant, genocidal Palestinian narrative because that, they conclude, is what the downtrodden Palestinians ask of them.
This uncritical allegiance, demolishing as it does the credibility and ideological legitimacy of genuine progressive values, is yet more evidence of Palestinian privilege.
Which brings us to now.
After October 7, after decades of Palestinians’ unrelenting refusal to coexist and live in peace, after 80 years of the Arabs never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, the world overwhelmingly blames Israel for the state(lessness) of Palestinians and holds harmless the culpable elites who are the real culprits of the Palestinian tragedy.
Blaming the victims (Israelis) and siding with the masterminds of the entire disaster (Arab and Muslim elites bogusly acting in the name of Palestinians) is an atrocious rejection of reason, humanity and critical thinking.
In the name of their cause, Palestinian terrorists (and, let us not ignore, hundreds of “ordinary” Palestinians) invaded Israel, beheaded babies, immolated families alive, mass raped women and men, inflicted torture seemingly beyond the imaginings of the rational human mind, kidnapped and mass murdered hundreds of Jews.
And, overwhelmingly, the world looked at the evidence and said, These seem like the people we want to champion. This is the basket we want to put our eggs in.
There is, evidently, literally nothing that Palestinians can do to turn the world away from obedient, unquestioning devotion to their cause.
That’s some privilege.
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Well said. But, the fact of the matter is that the more intransigent the Palestinians become, the more the world sides with them.
Hmmmmm. Why, it’s almost as if the world doesn’t REALLY support the Palestinians, it just hates Jews! But, it couldn’t be THAT, could it??????
Pat, you're spot on.
As I read your article, I kept thinking it could almost be written in reverse from the Israeli perspective. What many call "Palestinian privilege" exists largely because of the extraordinary attention, sympathy, institutional support, and double standards directed against Israel. Tiny Israel receives more scrutiny, more UN resolutions, more activism, and more outrage than conflicts affecting vastly larger numbers of people.
To me, that raises the real question: why? Whether conscious or subconscious, I think much of this reflects the world's obsession with Jews and the Jewish state. The enemy of Israel is elevated, excused, and romanticized in ways that would be unimaginable elsewhere. In many ways, what you call Palestinian privilege is simply the flip side of the unique treatment reserved for Israel and the Jewish people.
Pro-Jew, Proudly Zionist