A World of Difference Between 'Anti-Israel' and 'Pro-Palestinian'
The array of anti-Israel demonstrations and encampments that recently infected college campuses across the country displayed alarming and appalling elements, but also produced minor annoyances with their abuse of language. The widespread tendency to describe these assemblies as “pro-Palestinian” involves an irresponsible distortion of the very nature of the movement behind them.
If campus rallies actually qualified as “pro-Palestinian”, then shouldn’t the demonstrators be able to point to some identifiable assistance that they have provided to the beleaguered civilians of the Gaza Strip?
How much money—if any—have the indignant protesters been able to raise to fund relief to the long-suffering masses they pretend to represent? But while the United States and the United Nations, along with some wealthy Arab nations, have delivered sustenance and medical supplies, and while Israel risks the lives of its soldiers to try to see that such contributions are safely delivered, leftist activists provide only Palestinian flags and “Divest Now!” banners.
This contrast raises an unavoidable question: even if every major University stopped investing endowment dollars in Israeli companies, how would this step benefit Gaza or West Bank Palestinians in any way?
Yes, it may be possible to damage the Israeli economy through sudden divestiture, but how do setbacks to the largest businesses in the region serve the long or short-term interests of the hundreds of thousands of residents of the Palestinian Authority and even Gaza who toil at Israeli jobs? It makes no sense to suggest that damaging the Jewish state would help to build up a Palestinian replacement. Nor can it be argued that more than 3 million Arab citizens of Israel and those living under the Palestinian Authority, would benefit from economic hardships to their Jewish neighbors. That notion makes as much sense as the instinctive leftist faith that the best way to help the poor is to punish the rich, when it’s precisely the most successful people who provide the work and economic energy that most immediately benefits their less fortunate fellow citizens.
The other factor that makes the demonstrators’ claim to be called “pro-Palestinian” so misleadingly ridiculous is the lack of any protest during 17 long years of uncontested misrule of Gaza by the terrorist warlords of Hamas. Yes, the Gaza Strip has counted as one of the less fortunate corners of the Middle East for many years, but since Israel’s controversial 2005 “disengagement”, with the unilateral removal of all settlers and security forces, the Jewish state has made no attempt to occupy or administer Gaza. Two years after the Israeli departure, Hamas won its brutal, brief civil war against the Palestinian Authority, increasing the misery of the inhabitants with a style of governance that combined authoritarianism, terrorism, and Islamic fanaticism. If American sympathizers cared sincerely about the welfare of Gaza’s inhabitants, it would be impossible to justify their complete silence in the face of a full generation of Hamas tyranny.
Were self-righteous American protestors to drop the designation “pro-Palestinian” and replace it with the more accurate “pro-Hamas”, that switch would at least show a modicum of integrity. But it would also appropriately align our domestic anti-Israel activists with a murderous, terrorist ideology emphatically and rightly rejected by the bulk of civilized society.