The Global Empire of Palestine

In New York City, large crowds of demonstrators waving Palestinian flags besieged the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, fought with police, and harassed tourists, then moved down Fifth Avenue and defaced stores with pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and antisemitic graffiti. At Grand Central station, commuters and tourists are greeted regularly by large mobs masked in black-and-white keffiyehs and draped in other resistance styles enacting their version of “intifada.” Thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and hoisted Palestinian flags a stone’s throw from a mass grave holding the remains of 2,753 people killed by terrorists who claimed the Palestinian cause as their motive for murdering Americans.

With the intifada globalized, and millions from West to East—from the dispossessed of the Southern Hemisphere to privileged Scandinavians—stirred by similar furies, it’s like an end-of-times World Cup parade every day. Supporters cheer their champions, the world’s team, the Goliath that kidnapped, raped, executed, and beheaded children.

The protesters’ goal is hardly a two-state solution or any other dispensation likely to bring peace to both peoples. Rather, the cease-fire they’re calling for is a tactic to strangle Israel’s war effort and thereby empty the Jewish state of Jews. If the Israeli government can’t establish a buffer zone between Gaza and the southern areas attacked on Oct. 7, as well as the northern towns and kibbutzes within Hezbollah’s range, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have relocated to the center of the country cannot return home. With Iran-backed terrorists using Oct. 7 as a precedent to redraw Israel’s borders in cooperation with U.S., EU, and U.N. bureaucrats, the country will be shaved at the edges until all of it becomes uninhabitable.

The Biden administration’s post-Hamas reconstruction plans imagine that, as Vice President Kamala Harris told Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, a “revitalized” PA will take over Gaza. But that will hardly pacify the Palestinians or their impassioned supporters around the globe. In fact, Abbas’ men, manifestly unpopular in Gaza and especially the West Bank, will have to meet the expectations created by their rivals’ Oct. 7 assault if they hope to survive the intra-Palestinian contest for power that is sure to ensue.

The salient fact is that the crushing military defeat suffered by the Palestinians will hardly matter, as long as the world’s one superpower—alongside Europe and the Gulf Arab states—stand ready to rebuild whatever Israel destroys. By continually revitalizing the Palestinians, by giving them new life, the stewards of global affairs have engendered something that by definition cannot survive in nature on its own: a society that celebrates death as its highest value. The Palestinians claim that it is their perseverance and faith, their willingness to suffer great losses, that ensures their ultimate victory. But the source of their steadfastness—their ability to replenish their arsenal and refurnish their tunnels and other military infrastructure—is, in fact, a luxury repeatedly afforded them by the U.S. and its European partners. Had world powers simply allowed Israelis and Palestinians to make war, the party of permanent resistance would have had two choices—change radically or perish entirely.

Instead, having immolated themselves and their children many dozens of times in their efforts to burn down Israel, the Palestinians have again been led back across the river of death. Their escorts past and present—from the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies to Europe and the United States as well as the Gulf States and Iran—have employed them in the way minor actors have typically been used throughout the history of the Levant: as assets in the great game of nations.

But no power had ever thought before to preserve a culture so devoted to death that its highest purpose is to extinguish itself in the service of killing others. No one before had means or the motive to do so.

Now, however, something new has been brought into the world, something monstrous.

All the wretched of the earth have attached their hopes and grievances to the Palestinians not because Hamas and the PA, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and others are indigenous underdogs resisting the colonialist war machine, or stalwart subalterns on a campaign for universal liberty. Rather: Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause because the most basic laws of nature have been revised to accommodate it. The Palestinian cause gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favor as well. And they have.

Under the rules set by great powers to govern the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anything is possible. Losing is winning. Crime is justice. Rape is love. Death is life. These are the slogans of the new spirit of the age, the dawning of the Empire of Palestine.