The “pro-Palestinian” movement has made me anti-anti-Israeli

Speaking as a secular American half-Jew who once had enough sympathy for the Palestinians to visit East Jerusalem and endure a three-hour Shin Bet interrogation for my trouble, who has serious reservations about the IDF’s targeting and choice of weapons, and who firmly opposes Israeli settlements and extremist rhetoric about annexing and resettling Gaza, I’ve never been more anti-anti-Israeli or more anti-Hamas than I am today, and the “pro-Palestinian” movement is the reason for it. Its appeal is to those who hate. It cannot disguise its lack of reasonable or humane objectives. It has repelled me, and I suspect plenty of other reasonable people.

When I see accounts applying the term “genocide” to Gaza, I click to see whether those accounts have ever (1) condemned the horrors of 10/7, which if lacking is approval by implication, (2) acknowledge that like any other nation, Israel has a duty and an Article 51 right to protect its civilian population, or if by implication they believe Israel has only the right to passive destruction, (3) acknowledged Hamas’s militarization of protected and populated places, or its refusal to let civilians evacuate, and (4) said word one about the actual ongoing genocides in Xinjiang, Tibet, or Ukraine, which are undisguised efforts to destroy peoples, cultures and nations, or against or the crimes against humanity of Putin and Assad in Syria, which include the deliberate leveling of entire cities and the repeated use of chemical weapons against civilians.

The pro-Hamas movement—let’s describe it truthfully—misapplies the word “genocide,” yet does not recognize genocide. It cannot disguise that its own goals are genocidal. It is incapable of even applying the term to any object but Israel, and I can only think of two reasons for that singular focus. One is that it’s tribal, coming from Muslim dictatorships that find Israel to be an easy, consequence-free fetish object and distraction from the consequences of local misrule. The other, which has never been harder to deny, is simply anti-Semitism. Both of those forces are, ironically, partially responsible for Israel’s displacement of many Palestinians in post-war Israel. When, in the late 1940s, Muslim dictatorships drove out 600,000 Jews who had lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors for centuries, where were those Jews supposed to go—Poland?

I still feel empathy for the Palestinians for many reasons, none greater than the depravity of the “supporters” who chose them.