In my previous post, I made the case that people who genuinely seek peace and coexistence would not belong to a Palestinian movement that promotes intolerance over coexistence, maximalism over compromise, and bloody “resistance” over peace.
That argument was premised on the assumption that “pro-Palestinians” actually believe in peace and coexistence.
That was a whopper of an assumption on my part.
All evidence, in fact, suggests that than
Stay with me. If you think it through (and it’s really not that complicated), you will realize Palestinians have no worse enemy that overseas “pro-Palestinians.”
Since October 7, 2023, the façade has come down. Activists who used to give lip-service to a two-state solution (that is, to peace and coexistence) now openly call for a very different outcome: A “Palestine” stretching “from the river to the sea.”
An end to Zionism. The disappearance of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
That is the consensus position now. It’s almost unanimous, judging by the “pro-Palestinian” rhetoric.
Let’s leave aside for now the morality of that position and focus on the practicalities.
How, exactly, do you imagine that happens?
Israel is home to roughly 10 million people, about eight million of whom are Jewish. These are the Israelis the world hates, of course — the world doesn’t have a problem with the two million Christian and Muslim Arab Israelis. In fact, ask people who have made hating Israel their life’s work and you’ll find a bunch of them don’t even know there is such a thing as an Israeli Arab. They have been so busy condemning Israel as a “religious ethnostate” that they haven’t had time to learn that Israel is pretty much the only country in the region that isn’t a religious ethnostate.
They sure as hell don’t know that the two million Arabs in Israel enjoy more freedoms and rights than Arabs anywhere in the Middle East or North Africa, and many or most of them wouldn’t trade living in a “Jewish religious ethnostate” for citizenship in a tinpot Palestinian dictatorship.
But, of course, the fate of Israeli Arabs is of absolutely no concern to the overseas activists who know what’s best for Palestinians and the region.
But back to the topic these “pro-Palestinian” activists really care about: Jews.
The overwhelming majority of Jews have nowhere else to go — despite the frequent demands from some of your comrades that they “go back to Poland.”
Again, the ignorance of the activists allows them to imagine Israelis as white interlopers who arrived en masse from Europe in 1948.
Their ignorance knows no bounds. There was a little thing in history that prevented European Jews from flooding into Israel in 1948.
The Holocaust.
No, the Jews for whom Israel would be a home and a refuge, and whose descendants make up more than half the population, are Jews from families expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
Should they go back to those places? Not your problem, I know.
As I noted in my previous post, your activism endorses an intolerant, absolutist, violent binary in which one side must win absolutely and the other must totally lose. No compromise. No coexistence. No peace until Israel is annihilated.
But — again — Israel will not be annihilated. It just won’t. And your insistence that it can be, that it will be, just sentences thousands more Palestinians to death in a fruitless battle.
If you, your colleagues, the UN, Amnesty International, European diplomats, smartypants commentators, and the rest of the overseas idiots would demand Palestinian elites end their use of Palestinian people as cannon fodder and instead prepare to live in peace and coexistence, we would be a long way closer to your alleged goal of a “free Palestine.”
Instead, the few Israelis who still believed the conflict could be ended simply by making enough concessions, had their illusions shattered on October 7, 2023.
This is one of the things that makes today’s breathless, outraged news reports about Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank so ridiculous and exasperating.
According to the wise minds of the Western world, by creating more apparently permanent settlements in the area the world views as Palestinian territory, Israel is killing the two-state solution.
That’s the killing the world sits up and notices.
Dead Jews on October 7? Reason to celebrate.
Dead two-state solution? Frame the Jews.
The Palestinian elites killed the two-state solution in 2000. Israelis can’t kill something that has been dead for 26 years.
As I wrote in my previous post, you can continue doing what feels good to your self-righteous ego, or you can do something that might actually lead to Palestinian self-determination and an end to deaths on both sides.
But ending the deaths on both sides is not your goal. Peace and coexistence, despite your cooptation of the language of peace, are not on your agenda.
It has been said that Palestinians want peace — they just don’t want it with Israel.
This is key to the Palestinianist ideology: They talk of peace, but that is a peace that comes after the Jews are routed and/or annihilated.
And that is the genocidal ideology swallowed whole by Western “progressives,” the UN, NGOs like Amnesty and, it seems, judging by propaganda everywhere I go in the world, the average idiot on the street. (I’m in the Netherlands today and boy do I have stories for you — stay tuned).
Politics begins with reality, not wishful thinking.
So here is the tragic consequence. Every chant demanding Israel’s disappearance. Every banner celebrating violent “resistance.” Every campus rally insisting Zionism must be dismantled. Every slogan glorifying “intifada” — none of this moves a “free Palestine” any closer.
It pushes it further away. And, in the process, it guarantees more war. And, as an obvious consequence of the imbalance of power between the two parties you are always railing on about, that means exponentially more dead Palestinians than dead Israelis.
I know you hate that imbalance of power. But it seems you love dead Palestinians more — because your every word and deed hastens more of them.
Again, practical politics recognizes reality. Israel is more powerful.
You can hate that fact. But it does not make it any less true.
So you can encourage Palestinian elites to negotiate with that power, or you can encourage them to keep throwing more generations of Palestinians into the war machine they started and that your activism fuels.
Your activism does not move Israel one millimetre closer to disappearing. It does not advance a “free Palestine.”
It only convinces Israelis that military strength is its only insurance policy.
Who pays the price?
Not the activists marching safely through London or Vancouver or New York. Not the professors, the influencers, the celebrities. They live their comfortable lives and return to their homes, safe and sound, self-satisfied that they have made lives better for Palestinians when they have made things worse.
Palestinians pay. Every time.
The cruelest feature of this movement is not that it asks the impossible. It is that it persuades Palestinians the impossible remains attainable.
It whispers that total victory is just one more protest away. One more boycott. One more resolution. One more intifada. One more generation.
Just a few more thousand dead Palestinians and victory will be nigh.
History says otherwise.
For nearly 80 years, every attempt to destroy Israel has failed. Every war, every intifada, every campaign of terrorism, every effort to isolate Israel diplomatically — Israel has not disappeared.
It has become stronger, more prosperous, more technologically advanced.
One can celebrate that or lament it.
But denying it is not analysis. It is fantasy.
The anti-Israel movement (because, for all intents, that is all the “pro-Palestinian” movement is, in reality) offers Palestinians dreams instead of strategies.
Dreams featuring rivers of Jewish blood, but dreams nonetheless.
Dreams of vindication instead of state-building. Dreams of resistance instead of governance. Dreams based on maximalism instead of compromise.
The result is measured not in slogans — and certainly not in the advancement of Palestinian self-determination — but in graves. Palestinian graves, mostly. And that is not Israel’s fault. It’s yours.
The deepest tragedy is that there is another path. There has always been another path.
A movement that genuinely wanted a Palestinian state would devote its energy to preparing Palestinians for statehood. Building institutions. Demanding accountable leadership. Rejecting corruption. Discarding terrorism. Teaching that Jews are neighbors, not invaders. Preparing children not for martyrdom but for citizenship. Encouraging investment rather than endless revolution.
That work is not as glamorous or romantic as the fist-raising, slogan-chanting Last Great Cause of Palestine.
It attracts fewer hashtags. But it has far fewer dead Palestinians, too.
And this is how countries are actually built.
Instead, much of the international movement has encouraged precisely the opposite.
It has rewarded maximalist rhetoric, romanticized violence, excused terrorism as understandable and legitimate, and assured Palestinians that history will eventually erase Israel.
It will not.
The terrible irony is this: Many people marching beneath Palestinian flags may sincerely believe they are expressing solidarity. Perhaps they are.
But solidarity without honesty is cruelty. Real friends tell one another difficult truths. Real allies do not encourage fantasies that lead only to more funerals.
Real comrades do not applaud deadly strategies that have failed for generations.
Real supporters do not promise victories they know cannot be won.
The most compassionate words anyone could say to Palestinians today are also the hardest: Israel is not going away.
The sooner that truth is accepted — you don’t need to celebrate it, just accept it — the sooner the real work of building a Palestinian future can begin.
Because every year spent chasing the impossible is another year not spent building the possible.
Every child raised to believe that liberation requires Israel’s disappearance is another child denied the opportunity to imagine a future beside Israel rather than instead of it.
If your movement truly wants to free Palestine, then stop asking Palestinians to sacrifice another generation for a dream that has failed every generation before it.
History has already delivered its verdict on the fantasy of eliminating Israel.
The only question remaining is how many more Palestinians will you willingly watch die before you — their supposed friends — finally admit the failure of your strategy?
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