RESISTANCE IS EVERYTHING. (BUT WHAT ARE THEY RESISTING?)

Here is what pup-tent protestors on university campuses are resisting: Nuance. Truth. Compromise. Peace. Learning. Coexistence. Dialogue. Humanity.

Koko the Gorilla may have had a larger vocabulary than today’s unhappy campus campers.

Have you stopped to chat with the students “occupying” your local university campus? These “pro-Palestinian” activists have set up camps on campus across North America, ostensibly (I guess) in solidarity with Palestinians.

I haven’t visited. I’ve had plenty of chats with students of this bent over the years. I know their “arguments.”

If you have a stronger stomach than I do, you might ask them who their favorite Palestinian writer is. What is the specific injustice they are protesting? What steps could Israel or the international community take to resolve the crisis? What is their opinion on the final status of Jerusalem? Why has the Palestinian refugee problem persisted for almost 80 years, rather than being resolved (however unsatisfactorily) like almost every other such displacement? Do they think it would be fair to adjust the Green Line to accommodate adjacent Jewish West Bank settlements in exchange for equivalent land inside what is now Israel?

There is no end of reasonable questions you could ask these unhappy campers. What I can almost guarantee is that you will never receive reasonable answers.

You may — may — get a response along the lines that the most extreme action that advances presumed Palestinian interests and disadvantages Israelis is the optimal outcome — because there is no dirtier word than “compromise” to these ideologues.

More likely, you will get the sort of bellowed response one expects from a toddler coming down from a sugar high: Israel needs to be ended. Stop apartheid! It’s genocide!

It is quite likely that references to “Green Line,” “final status” and other terms that people who have prioritized this issue should be conversant in will instead attract the blank stares of a seminar participant who didn’t do the readings.

First, a caveat: I’m deeply concerned by the knee-jerk reactions of governments and university administrators who think that the way to deal to these campus campers is to clear them away.

If they are breaking the law, sure. If they are clearly promoting hatred or genocide, they should be dealt with. (This depends on the country where these are taking place. In Canada, we have laws around this. The United States takes a broader approach to free speech.) But “trespassing” is not a serious crime. It is often used (for example, in the case of homelessness) as a means for the privileged to avoid seeing things they really need to see.

If students cannot protest on North American campuses — about the war in the Middle East, the cost of tuition, the lack of avocado toast in the caf, whatever — what has campus become?

On the other hand …

The level of political discourse in the “pro-Palestinian” movement these days is what one might expect from Koko the Gorilla, who learned 1,000 words in great-ape sign language. It is not so much intellect that we see from these activists but rote learning of a few key phrases. (I fear I am doing a disservice to Koko here.)

With a few exceptions, the pup-tent protestors would do themselves and the world a favor by being in class rather than partying for Palestine on the quad.

But this is not about educating themselves or others. A core tenet of the Palestinian movement (in Palestine and around the world) is an intransigent belief that the proponents of the cause have nothing to learn. No facts or alternative information will alter their position. This is the definition of fanaticism. Which comes as no surprise to anyone who has engaged with these activists.

There is more to it, though.

What is the primary refrain? What is the one word that rises above almost all others at these encampments and related protests?

Resistance.

October 7, as we have been reminded, was an act of “resistance.”

As I noted in my last post, “pro-Palestinian” activists mostly view Palestinians, in a massively dehumanizing way, as a sort of single-cell entity, incapable of reason or judgment, responding only to external stimuli.

Even Koko the Gorilla could express her desire for kittens. In the racism of low expectations Western activists apply to Palestinians, all Palestinians can do is blow stuff up out of “frustration.”

The idea of “resistance,” which is central to the Palestinian cause in Palestine and worldwide, is inherently oppositional.

There is, for all intents, no pro-Palestinian movement. There is only an anti-Israel movement. (Again: this is why I always use scoff quotes around “pro-Palestinian.”)

There is no nation-building in Palestinianism. There is no vision (utopian or otherwise) of a “Free Palestine” — only the empty words “Free Palestine” from people who seem to give no shits about whether Palestine would actually be “free.” (It wouldn’t be — not for women, not for queer people, not for minorities, not even for the most privileged men. Despite the incessant misuse of the term “human rights,” there is effectively no Palestinian human rights movement.)

The Palestinian movement is (as I have written previously) the perfect cause of Gen Z activists: It has no constructive aspects. The goal is simply to burn it all down. (It, of course, being Israel. What happens next is immaterial because Palestinianism is a nihilistic movement bent on tearing down, not building up.)

Where are the movements for genuine civil rights in an eventually free Palestine? (Banned.) Where is the Palestinian Mandela? (In jail or sensibly silent.) Where is the vision for a Palestine that can realize the ideal of an independent state among the family of nations? (It doesn’t exist.)

“Resistance” is the perfect word to define Palestinianism because it only opposes. Both in its Palestinian form and in its overseas cheering (jeering?) sections, it does not advance anything constructive.

And what is it they are resisting?

Is it “the occupation”? 

Sort of.

But it’s not the occupation that naïve North American observers might think these people are talking about. The core duplicity of the Palestinian movement worldwide is that two people, side-by-side, can chant “End the occupation now!” with one meaning what reasonable people might consider “the occupation,” West Bank and Gaza, which Israel gained in a 1967 defensive war against all its neighboring states, while the other means “the occupation,” of 1948 — the very existence of the state of Israel.

For overseas activists to be truly “pro-Palestinian,” we need to demand what Palestinians themselves and, especially, Palestinian and broader Arab leaders, have refused to do: Plan, create, build, envision.

Enough with the resistance!

Tearing down has gotten Palestinians precisely nowhere.

The only thing that will result in peace and Palestinian self-determination is compromise and coexistence. As I keep saying, the answer is quite simple: No peace? No Palestine.

If overseas activists really wanted to “Free Palestine,” they would urge, support and demand a civil society movement in Palestine. They would demand equal rights for all people in Palestine, regardless of gender, religion, sexual identity or orientation, opinion or other characteristic.

They don’t. And they won’t.

Because this is not about freeing Palestine. 

It is about privileged North Americans centering their own experiences. 

It is about projecting onto a complicated conflict a simplified (and doubly racist) narrative. 

It is about self-righteous ideologues forcing Israelis and Palestinians into boxes where neither of them fit in order to accommodate a perverted worldview. 

It is about self-proclaimed antiracists falling right back on the same scapegoats their ancestors back thousands of years opted for when they couldn’t explain the world or needed a victim.

It is, in short, about a generation of short-attention-span know-nothings trying to relive the Spanish Civil War or the anti-Vietnam War movement or gay rights activism … but doing it in the most useless way imaginable, using the model the Palestinian movement has taught them: Through resistance.

Resisting nuance. Resisting truth. Resisting compromise. Resisting peace. Resisting learning. Resisting coexistence. Resisting dialogue. Resisting humanity.

And this resistance will get today’s campus activists precisely as far as it has gotten Palestinians.

Nowhere.