Hating Israel will not free Palestine
An important milestone in the Israel-Hamas war was reached last week, with both parties agreeing to a hostage-for-prisoner swap and a humanitarian pause in fighting.
This may be a glimmer of hope in the physical warfare of the Middle East but there has been no such let up on the post-truth Western front, where hyperbole and lies are sowing the seeds of hatred at the expense of peace.
This is because what the Free Palestine movement really wants is not for Israel to cease its military action but to cease to exist at all.
Let us not forget that pro-Palestine celebrations erupted around the world on October 7 before Israel had responded forcefully to Hamas’ grotesque attacks. Let us not ignore that they marched again this weekend under the guise of demanding an Israeli ceasefire, even though there already is one.
The joy and peacefulness of Sunday’s 100,000-strong march against anti-Semitism compared to the violence and hostility of the Free Palestine protests is further proof that the latter are not pro-anything as much as they are anti-Israel.
The widespread, blind hatred of Israel is so severe that some Palestine supporters cannot muster up an ounce of sympathy for kidnapped Israeli children, ripping down posters of hostages. Feminists cannot bring themselves to denounce Hamas’ mass rape of women, with UN Women taking seven weeks to publish an Instagram post condemning Hamas’ barbarity – and then deleting it within moments, replaced with a toned down version calling for an investigation into “reports of gender-based violence”. Palestinian-American model Gigi Hadid recently shared a video on Instagram accusing Israelis of harvesting dead Palestinians’ organs, posting it to her 79 million followers – five times the number of Jews in the world. Amnesty International, while demanding the release of all hostages, appeared to draw specific attention only to those from Thailand.
The truth is, there is plenty to criticise Israel for – and many Jews and Israelis do. Its expansion of settlements and treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, for one. Israelis were protesting against Benjamin Netanyahu this very weekend, as they were all year before October 7 had the unintended effect of uniting a factious country.
It is the leap from “Israel must change” to “Israel must die” that reveals the toxicity at the heart of the Free Palestine movement. As a non-Jewish friend said to me this week: “When I criticise Indian policy in Kashmir, no one seriously thinks that India shouldn’t exist or should be destroyed.”
Criticising Israeli policies and politicians is not antisemitic. Denying Jewish indigeneity to the land and considering the entire country an occupation is.
Lamenting that too many people have been killed in Gaza is not antisemitic. Falsely accusing Israel of committing “genocide” when Hamas has explicitly said it will not stop until Israel is annihilated is.
Refuting hard evidence – such as the record of brutalities on October 7 or the existence of Hamas tunnels under hospitals – in favour of nonsensical conspiracy theories is antisemitic. Singling out the world’s only Jewish state as a bad actor and turning a blind eye to true horrors happening elsewhere is antisemitic. Seeing Israel as pure evil while describing the grotesque crimes of its terrorist enemy as “justified resistance” is not only antisemitic but perverse.
Taking these extreme positions does nothing but fan the flames of hate and obscure any chance of either side achieving a positive outcome. Until this vitriol subsides, there will be no progress towards peace. Those determined to see the issue in only black and white ignore the vast grey area where valid criticism and reasonable debate could force change on both sides.
The blinkered Free Palestine movement must ask itself honestly: what is the actual goal here? They chant “from the river to the sea” and brazenly call for intifada – the word used for the years of Palestinian suicide bombs at Israeli bus stops and cafes – but what would these look like in reality?
Assuming they do not actually intend to massacre Jews, do they expect seven million Israeli Jews to up sticks and leave? Where does it expect them to go? The majority of Israeli Jews are either from this very strip of land or from other Middle Eastern and North African countries that have killed or expelled their entire Jewish populations in the last century and would not welcome them back now.
Do they expect two million Arab Israelis used to living with equal rights in a modern democracy and thriving economy to accept autocratic, tyrannical leaders who subjugate women and quash freedom of expression? Do they expect 800,000 or so LGBT people to happily give up their rights? Will the high tech start-ups pack up their offices so Hamas can move its HQ to Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers?
A better use of Free Palestine’s time would be to help build a future nation, not try to tear one down.
It is true that in 1948, around 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes.
It is also true that, from 1948 onwards, 900,000 Jews were forced to flee their homes in Arab countries. This came just a few years after millions of Jews were killed or displaced in eastern Europe. My maternal grandparents, for example, moved to Middlesbrough from Leipzig and to Buenos Aires from Vienna in the late 1930s; my paternal ancestors had fled Russia a generation earlier, settling in London’s East End and Edinburgh. There’s barely a Jew in the world who doesn’t have a story like this in their recent history. Yet we do not consider ourselves refugees. We do not hold the current inhabitants of those countries responsible or call for their destruction.
Palestinians, on the other hand, have been trapped in refugee status for 75 years. They are the only people with a United Nations agency dedicated solely to their refugeehood (UNRWA); all other refugees in the world fall under another body, UNHCR. UNRWA, which is the UN’s largest agency, does not share UNHCR’s mission to repatriate or resettle people so they are no longer refugees. Instead it has redefined the status of refugee, applicable only to Palestinians, so that their descendants for unlimited generations – including adopted children – can also register as refugees. That is why 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948 but there are six million Palestinian refugees today.
The Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari said the curse of history is that people try to save the past instead of saving the future.
Palestinians yearning for pre-1948 life is neither realistic nor particularly ambitious, given the land actually was governed then by white colonialists. There was never a sovereign state of Palestine before 1948, but there can be one today. For this to happen, supporters of both sides must bury their venomous hatred, eschew extremist positions and accept the legitimate existence of their neighbour.
A free Palestine predicated on the destruction of Israel is an empty dream. The only workable outcome is a two-state solution where Palestine has sovereignty and Israel has security. Anyone not working towards that goal has no intention of making peace at all.
