Another Way of Looking At the Pro-Palestinian Protests

Bret Stephens suggests a different way of looking at the pro-Palestinian protests going on in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe in his New York Times column—it’s dooming any prospects the two-state solution may have had. He opens by distinguishing between 1967 opposition and 1948 opposition:

For decades, the question of a Palestinian state has come down to two dates: 1948 and 1967. Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel, faced with open threats of annihilation, took possession of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.

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, it isn’t just East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights that are occupied by Israel: It’s Haifa, Tel Aviv, Eilat and West Jerusalem, too. For Palestine to be “liberated,” Israel itself must end.

The slogan “from the river to the sea, etc.” is an endorsement of the 1948 “rejectionist” front. Mr. Stephens continues:

For one, 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,” Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “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.”

For another, they reinforce the central convictions and deepest fears of the Israeli right: that Palestinians have never reconciled themselves to the existence of Israel in any borders, that every Israeli territorial or diplomatic concession is seen by Palestinians as evidence of weakness, that a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank would only serve as a launchpad for an intensified assault on Israel, that every criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories veils a deep-seated hatred of the Jewish state.

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. It’s bad enough that the West has long accepted, and funded, Mahmoud Abbas’s repressive kleptocracy based in Ramallah. But what Hamas has given the people over whom it rules is infinitely worse: theocratic despotism, soaked in the blood of Palestinian “martyrs,” most of whom never signed themselves or their families up to serve as human shields in an endless — and, in the long run, hopeless — battle with Israel.

Said another way it’s a variant of Conquest’s Third Law: the behavior of the Palestinians’ supporters in the West can best be understood by assuming that they’re controlled by a cabal of their worst enemies. I don’t think that they are but they’re sure acting like it.