Unfortunately, many “pro-Palestinians” are disingenuous, spiteful, Jew-loathing hypocrites who pretend to give a damn about “the people of Palestine.” It’s about time they get exposed.
By Joshua Hoffman, FUTURE OF JEWISH 10 April 2024
So-called “pro-Palestinians” doing “pro-Palestinian” things
A few weeks ago, during a monologue on the popular U.S. sketch-comedy show “Saturday Night Live,” American comedian Ramy Youssef said he is praying for God to “free the people of Palestine.”
Youssef, who is a practicing Muslim and whose parents are Egyptian, recounted being asked recently by his friend to pray for his family in Gaza.
“That night I go to pray and my prayers are … complicated, I’ve got a lot to fit in. I’m like ‘God, please, please help Ahmed’s family, please stop the suffering, stop the violence. Please free the people of Palestine, please,” Youssef said to cheers and applause.
The comedian has habitually called for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, and wore an “Artists for Ceasefire” pin at the Oscars award show in March.
Just so you understand how much Youssef is all about love and peace, the “Artists for Ceasefire” pin was a recreation of a Palestinian man’s bloodied hands after lynching two Israelis in 2000.
At the Oscars ceremony, Youssef told Variety magazine that the call for an “immediate, permanent ceasefire” was a “universal message of, ‘let’s stop killing kids, let’s not be part of more war.”
Youssef wants us to think that he is “pro-Palestinian” — mainly because it is beneficial for his personal brand and raises his level of popularity in the hallowed cliché of “universal love and peace” also known as Hollywood.
But if Youssef was a true “pro-Palestinian” (like I am), he would not be advocating for an “immediate, permanent ceasefire.” He would be calling for Hamas to urgently and unconditionally surrender, as well as the total deconstruction of the Palestinian Authority in the Palestinian West Bank — because both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority completely contradict an “immediate, permanent ceasefire.”
Anyone who suggests or attempts to explain otherwise is a fraudulent “pro-Palestinian.”
Unfortunately for Israel, Jews, and many Palestinians, the reality is that Youssef is manipulating the guise of charm and comedy, and others the belligerently fallacious masks of “human rights” and “liberation,” to implicitly defame the Jewish state of Israel and incite bigotry, bullying, harassment, and violence against Israelis and Jews across the world.
The “universal message” Youssef mentioned is not one of “let’s stop killing kids, let’s not be part of more war” — but rather, “Let’s help the terrorists win.” Because the only people who have been purposely “killing kids” belong to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority.
As one social media user noted, “Dead Israeli — Israeli loss, Hamas win. Dead Palestinian — Israeli loss, Hamas win.”1
John Spencer (an urban warfare expert) and Arsen Ostrovsky (a human rights lawyer) had another take on it:
“Ultimate responsibility, both legal and moral, for every innocent life lost lies at the feet of the Hamas terrorists. If the international community truly seeks to avoid future tragedies and the loss of civilian life, it would be well advised to call on Hamas to immediately surrender and release all the hostages.”2
To imply that Israel is “killing kids” is nothing short of an absurd blood libel against the Jews. Excuse my French, Ramy and the “Saturday Night Live” producers who approved of his monologue, but please take your Jewish blood libel and shove it up your ass.
credit: Elder of Ziyon/X
As a Muslim, you would think that Youssef appreciates that every Israeli Muslim (and there are millions of them) has more rights than Muslims in any other Muslim-majority country in the Middle East.
But for many Muslims, presumably Youssef included, their deep-seated antisemitic hatred of (the Jewish state of) Israel overrides their appreciation of Western rights — rights that people like Youssef tremendously profit from, hence his appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”
Here’s another fact: There was not a single Israeli in Gaza until Palestinians decided to kidnap a couple hundred of them on October 7th. Additionally, there were tens of thousands of Gazans legally working in Israel, earning significantly better wages than they would have in the Strip.
But Youssef and so many others do not care about facts. They speak as if they are intelligent and educated, enchanting and eloquent, choosing all the “right” words to sound as such, but these people are some of the most ignorant, morally confused, Jew-hating people on this planet.
How do we know this to be true? Imagine Israel without the Iron Dome; millions of innocent children and women lying dead in the streets; rockets from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah (all Iranian proxies) falling indiscriminately on Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze alike, striking mosques, churches, and synagogues; a scene of utter genocide.
And you can bet your greatest asset that Youssef and so many others would not dare to say a thing. What’s more, they would quietly be celebrating these attacks on Israel, at least in part about of this recurring theme: The world infantilizes Palestinians — and then calls Israelis racist for treating Palestinians like adults who are responsible for their own actions.
Hence why Youssef and so many others do not genuinely care about “the people of Palestine.” For if they did, they would properly ponder questions like:
- Why did the Jordanians never offer “the people of Palestine” a Palestinian state when Jordan reigned over the West Bank and Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967?
- Why did the Egyptians (including Youssef’s parents) never do the same when they occupied the Gaza Strip during this same timeframe?
- And before the Jordanians and the Egyptians, why did the Ottomans never provide “the people of Palestine” with a Palestinian state?
As a matter of fact, it was the Jews — and only the Jews — who have ever made that offer to the Palestinians, multiple times. In all this noise, that irony gets lost. Even the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, once publicly spoke about the strange Arab failure to establish a Palestinian state between 1948 and 1967, saying:
“Whatever happened to the Palestinian cause we had before 1967? Were we lying to ourselves or to the world? Thousands of martyrs fell before 1967. What for? How can you say that Palestine was occupied only in 1967, and that Israel must return to the pre-1967 borders? Does Palestine consist of only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?”
“If so, it means that the Israelis did not occupy it in 1948. They left it to you for 20 years, so why didn’t you establish a Palestinian state? Wasn’t the Gaza Strip part of Egypt and the West Ban part of Jordan? The Jews left them to you for 20 years — from 1948 to 1967.
“If that is Palestine, why didn’t you establish a state there? What is the justification for all the wars, the sacrifices, and the economic embargo on Israel before 1967?
“The Israelis can sue the Arabs now and demand billions or even trillions in compensation for the damage caused to them between 1948 and 1967. You Arabs admitted that the Palestinian cause began after 1967, so the Israelis can ask: ‘Why did you fight us before that?’”
“Now the Arabs themselves have admitted that Palestine was occupied in 1967. Now they demand that Israel will return to the pre-1967 borders, saying this will resolve the problem, and they will recognize Israel. Why didn’t you recognize Israel before 1967?”
“By Allah, this is unacceptable. It doesn’t make sense.”
These days, it is the homeland of Ramy Youssef’s parents (Egypt) that has built one of the world’s strongest border defenses on its border with Gaza. Row after row of walls and fences. What are they afraid of? The answer is Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which many people in the West seem to know nothing about.
0.03 precent of all 11 million Muslims who have been killed in the Middle East since 1948, have been killed by Israel, mostly in wars not started by Israel.
Recently, a Harvard Law student, after she passed a divestment resolution, said:
“This is our story and we are co-authoring it with the resisting people of Palestine. Our student movement, our demand for divestment, is one thread in the ties of resistance of oppressed people all around the world. When we fight, we win!”
“This is our story,” say some of the most privileged people who ever lived, of the suffering Palestinians, even though she does not give two shits about “the resisting people of Palestine.”
How do we know? One word: Myanmar. It has been locked in a brutal civil war for more than three years. Twenty million people desperately need humanitarian aid, 15 million face acute food insecurity, 1.6 million have been displaced from their homes, and 55,000 civilians buildings have been destroyed. By 2022, more than 13,000 children were reported to have been killed.
And stunning numbers of war crimes have been documented, including massacres of civilians followed by the burning of their bodies, as well as constant military strikes targeting civilians and children. This includes a military strike on a church just three months ago, in which 17 civilians were killed, nine of whom were children.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar said, “Many in Myanmar have come to the conclusion that the world has forgotten them, or simply doesn’t care.”
Truth be told, there is no global movement to boycott Myanmar. There are no protests in Western cities. There are no sit-ins or rallies to be found on college campuses. And Myanmar is just one example of the many terrible and horrifying things going on in the world today.
The point is not that these “pro-Palestinians” don’t care about innocent people. Many of them do (or think they do). But they have let themselves be co-opted by a vicious movement that seeks the destruction of Israel to the exclusion of all else. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism when Israel is the world’s only country that is targeted, harassed, and condemned for every move it makes.
Once you understand that the constant outrage against Israel is manufactured by Islamic fundamentalist propagandists funded by Iran, Qatar, and Russia — and given a platform by the global media — you will realize that there may just be another side to the story, a side that takes advantage of many progressives’ desperate boredom and lethargy, prompting them to get into bed with Islamic jihadists because it feels good to imagine themselves securing pride of place on the “mantle of liberation,” and ensuring that their “coward” enemies will have no place in that new world order.
“Honestly, if in practical terms this didn’t mostly just involve harassing any Jewish students within reach, these campus mujaheddin (people who engage in jihad) would be adorable,” wrote Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. “America, your future leaders wish they were failed third-world revolutionaries. They want to be anything other than the first-world capitalist overclass that they are.”3
But we do not have to look to the future to see that the West’s leaders are already contributing to its self-inflicted demise, which could easily lead to destruction. (Just look at South Africa to see where much of the West is quickly heading.)
For instance, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (who once upon a time was a presidential candidate) said last week that, “as an application of law,” she believes that international courts will find that Israel is committing “genocide,” adding that “they have ample evidence to do so.”
As one social media user pointed out, if Israel’s war on Hamas is considered a genocide, it will be the first genocide in which a victim party:
- Turns down multiple ceasefire offers
- Receives hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies from the culprit
- Experiences a historic low in civilian casualties4
And yet, Hamas is only half of the problem. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, run by 88-year-old kleptocrat Mahmoud Abbas, is also a pitiful contributor to incessant misery among the Palestinian people, hence why so many of them detest Abbas’ authoritarian reign.
But don’t just take it from me. Here is what Bassam Eid, a Palestinian peace activist, recently said:
“The Palestinian Authority, as you might know, became a rehabilitation center for handicapped people. I believe, if elections will take place tomorrow in the West Bank, Abbas probably will be elected by his two sons and his wife. And I am in doubt about the wife.”5
And then there is the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” policy, which has resulted in thousands of innocent Israeli and Jewish deaths, including 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass who was shot in the head by a Palestinian terrorist. The Palestinian Authority paid her murderer 300,000 U.S. dollars accordingly. But you won’t hear Ramy Youssef and other “human rights” activists talking about these tragedies, now will you?
The bottom line is: The Palestinians and their “supporters” have faced a fundamental choice for nearly a century now: to strategically accept independent Jewish nationhood on Jewish indigenous land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or to keep rejecting it.
The day they accept it — strategically, not tactically — there will be peace. Actual peace, lasting peace, believable peace, exciting peace, collaborative peace. Not a temporary, disingenuous, spiteful peace. We Israelis have had more than enough of that. And conditions for Palestinians will improve greatly, including the achievement of many positive national aspirations.
If they continue to reject it, there are two possibilities:
- The ongoing status quo of Palestinian suffering and societal malaise, while they pathologically pine for the “imminent” destruction of Israel
- The actual destruction of Israel, mostly likely by the international community prohibiting Israel from adequately defending itself (including imposing much-needed deterrence)
Israel’s enemies (including Ramy Youssef and many others in the “progressive” camp) reject independent Jewish nationhood. And since 1948, they have sought the latter possibility — the actual destruction of Israel — only to get the former again and again. Continued demonization of Israel feeds the persistent fantasy that the latter is achievable. As does the ever-kindled rage borne of humiliation and defeat.
The destruction of Israel is not possible, and the sample size of repeated attempts is great — notwithstanding geopolitical trends, as well as Western foreign policy incompetence, impotence, and anti-Israel (really, anti-Jewish) double standards. And even in the face of an ascendant Iran.
I will not even address here whether it is “right” or “wrong.” It is not possible. Israel is not a spider web, but a web of iron. And it will remain so, especially after October 7th.
“To bet otherwise is to perpetuate one of the gravest series of strategic errors of the last century,” wrote one social media user. “The cost of this error is generations of broken dreams, misdirected efforts, and rivers of blood. Again and again, the bet is concentrated on a single black tile. And yet the entire roulette wheel runs red.”6
Palestinian-British activist John Aziz had a similar slant on it, writing:
“The biggest mistake Palestinians made is basing very large parts of our national identity around waiting for Israel to collapse, and trying to push it to collapse. This, objectively, did not work. Hate me all you want, but what you really hate is the truth.”7
Look at Israel in 1948, and look at Israel today. Look at what it has achieved, against the backdrop of war after war after war, decade after decade after decade. Then, look at the condition of the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank from 1948 to today, and look at the condition of the Arabs in, for example, Haifa from 1948 to today. The differences are more pronounced than day and night!
For “friends” of “the people of Palestine” to encourage not a strategic pivot, but a strategic doubling down — and a stoking of hatreds — is not the act of a friend. It is to consign Palestinians to persistent suffering without end.
If you are a true “pro-Palestinian,” you know and feel this in your bones.
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