Do the people chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have any idea of the irreparable harm they’re doing to any hope of Palestinian sovereignty?
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Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967…
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According to this line of thinking, the way to peace rested on Arab diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of these so-called occupied territories. That’s what happened between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, and what might have happened at Camp David in 2000 if Yasir Arafat had only accepted the offer of full statehood made to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel.
Yet there has always been a second narrative, which dates “the occupation” not to 1967 but to 1948, when Israel came into being as a sovereign state. By this argument… Israel itself must end.
Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the rejectionist front. More recently, they have become the axis of resistance. Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a who’s who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.
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On Oct. 8, demonstrators around the world chose to embrace that axis. Sometimes they did so unwittingly, believing there was no contradiction between being pro-Palestinian and supporting Israel’s right to exist, or not understanding the implications of the slogans they were chanting.
But just as often they have done so wittingly.
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Such embraces have consequences.
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…they put a growing fraction of the progressive left objectively on the side of some of the worst people on earth — and in radical contradiction with their professed values.
“A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,”
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“A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”
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When the left embraces the zero-sum politics of Palestinian resistance, it merely encourages the zero-sum politics of hard-core Israeli settlers and their supporters.
A third consequence is that it abandons the Palestinian people to their worst leaders.
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The world, including Israel, has a common interest in an eventual Palestinian state that cares more about building itself up than tearing its neighbors down; that invests its energy in future prosperity, not past glory; that accepts compromise and rejects fanaticism. Since Oct. 7, the loudest professed champions of the Palestinian cause have advocated the precise opposite. It may be a recipe for smug self-satisfaction, but it’s also how to kill a Palestinian state.
View Read more in this November 30 The Washington Post report.