The Arabs have nobody to blame for their predicament but themselves. If they wanted to build a state they would have a state by now. They don’t want a state. They just can’t accept living next to Jews. They just want to kill Jews. And it turns out that the Jews are now better at war than the Arabs. So the Islamists are losing another war that they started and most likely are going to be kicked out of Gaza, which is actually better for everybody, even if the Gazans don’t like it. If they prefer to stay and die, that’s their choice and that’s exactly what will happen. People everywhere are tired of this shit. You’re seeing the embryonic stages of a massive backlash against Islamists across the West. It turns out people don’t like being randomly murdered for not being Muslims and not knuckling under. Everybody has had enough.
The worst thing that happened to multiculturalism was seeing what impact the conflict in Gaza had on local conditions. Who wants to live like that?
Like, Israel-Palestine as an intellectual topic for coffee shops or university campuses? Fine. Having to deal with emboldened Islamists in the street or battles with hooligans? Nope. People have their own problems.
Hey Yassine, thanks for this, definitely can identify with some of the emotional tenor of this. I'm curious though: at this point do you still try to talk to people who take an emphatically anti-Israel/genocide/colonialism etc line on the conflict? Have you found any particular approach effective, if not for changing either your mind or the other person's, at least for it not descending into the kind of acrimony you're marking here?
Yes, I had an extended conversation about a month ago that I'm very late in editing, and I'm absolutely always open to further dialogue but willing participants are very rare. The perennial issues I keep encountering are deflection and perpetual excuse-making. Bringing up child suicide bombers for example is met with "well there weren't _that_ many" or the like.
If I make an affirmative statement like "Palestinian resistance is primarily motivated by religious inquisition and nationalistic pride, and here's why" I would ideally like for someone to show me how I'm _wrong_, not just pivot to a more palatable narrative. I don't know if it's ultimately going to be an effective approach, but hopefully it can tamper down on the runaway deflection.
>The perennial issues I keep encountering are deflection and perpetual excuse-making
The most charitable view I can muster is that, as the losing party without the state, the Palestinians feel much less secure to grant criticisms the way some Israeli historians and figures do. Either way, Israel will continue to exist no matter what Benny Morris says about ethnic cleansing. Palestinians are a more precarious position.
This doesn't make it wise. At a certain point you hit your ceiling with the sorts of credulous people who'll believe that the ends justify these tactics, and others just see it as malicious mendacity.
An important part of the debate over peace is whether Palestinians can be trusted. This behavior doesn't help anyone but true believers.
Pointing out fallacious reasoning isn’t a denial of your observations, it’s a rejection of the conclusions you draw from them. When you assert that a handful of child suicide bombers that happened decades ago is some profound evidence for the non-materiality of the conflict, why should anybody take it seriously? The fact that political arrangements such as the one in the West Bank and Gaza (a population living under the authority of a sovereign who doesn’t give them political rights and diminishes their quality of life) will result in conflict between the subject population and the sovereign isn’t that surprising. You can look at Syria next door for an illustration of what a similar political arrangement leads to over time (by the way the Assad regime also explained away the entirety of the social unrest to pure menacing Islamist ideology).
You are making a wild claim: that unlike every other place on the planet where this arrangement has reliably resulted in conflict (each time dressed in local ideological garb and slightly varied expression), that in this exceptional case it is actually the ideological garb itself that underlies the conflict. This is an extraordinary claim and therefore requires extraordinary evidence. Pointing out that your evidence doesn’t rationally lead to the conclusions you draw from it and it also happens to be comically paltry shouldn’t be a shock. Supporters of the Assad regime found the head chopping predilections of a few of the people fighting against the dictatorship as sufficient evidence to negate the entire material basis for the deep animosity and civil unrest against that regime.
MY GOD! THEY’RE CHOPPING HEADS!!!! WHAT 50 YEAR DICTATORSHIP CAN EXPLAIN THAT?
By embracing what they believe to be most emotionally evocative, they can stop themselves and others from thinking too hard. CHOPPING HEADS! How dare anybody minimize that? How dare anybody dismiss it as not at the heart of everything going on here?!?!
If only the subjective intensity of emotion was a substitute of robustness of logic or the strength of evidence
Sure, my positive claim is that Palestinian resistance is overwhelming motivated by jihadi fundamentalism and revanchist nationalism, rather than legitimate secular humanist grievances. The evidence for the former is overwhelming: suicide bombing pizzerias, exploiting medical transport or family reconciliation border crossings to commit terrorism, charters about how awful the jews are, leadership that excoriates crowds for not stabbing enough jewish necks, mobs that celebrate the lynching of random concert-goers, etc etc etc.
I've gotten very familiar with the sanewashing on this issue, about how all this insane shit is actually a very Normal and Reasonable reaction to Oppression and it remains anti-persuasive. It reinforces the point of this essay: that Palestinian activists have been atrocious advocates and their causes' biggest saboteurs thanks to their avalanche of denialism.
How is any of that, in any shape way of form, evidence to your claim? Like honestly, how does it follow that the existence of specific kinds of sociopathic violence, that are subjectively unpalatable to you, make your ideological explanation more likely than a material one. Do you believe that absent the ideological, the political arrangement is stable and isn’t prone to reproducing violence?
What do you make of the claim formerly made by Assadists who said: “how could head chopping have anything to do with fighting dictatorship”? Do you think that question makes sense and is doing the work that they think it is - which is negating the materiality of the conflict between the Syrians and the Assad dictatorship? Do you think the insane sociopathy of head chopping is an irrefutable testament to the dominance of ideology as the driving force behind the Syrian civil war?
I cannot fathom of willful delusion it takes to ignore something so axiomatic. If I observe a group especially fixated on fulfilling their ideological goals at the expense of their material goals, I have to conclude they REALLY care about their ideological goals.
Every example I mentioned above fits. Bombing pizzerias actively sets back the material goals, but it sure fills ideological goals! Same with the rest. I'm baffled as to how else I'm supposed to interpret their priorities. Do you want to try and explain how random civilian stabbings gets them any closer to fulfilling their material needs? If not, then the only possible explanation for the violent militancy is either they're indeed homicidal jihadis, or just psychotic idiots (indistinguishable). Their violence has accomplished nothing except actively set them back on the material plane. Please tell me any other possible explanation.
Ooooooh, what you're saying is "axiomatic"? Surely that ends the debate. As a sanity check I went to ChatGPT and fed it our back and forth and asked it for analysis and evaluation. I thought its assessment for your use of the word axiomatic at the end was particularly insightful. https://chatgpt.com/share/67b78443-3b64-800f-8a7e-eef3b94b5a9c
>Gaza (a population living under the authority of a sovereign who doesn’t give them political rights and diminishes their quality of life
Aside from being untrue, this is also totally irrelevant to the point. You, and all of the other activists, are completely unwilling to acknowledge that the methods Hamas uses are both evil and unhelpful. This in turn makes everyone tune you out.
And again, it's not true. Gaza is not under Israeli rule in almost any way that matters. They aren't rebelling against an oppressive regime, but rather trying to take back their land. And unfortunately for them, it's not their land any more
>If only the subjective intensity of emotion was a substitute of robustness of logic or the strength of evidence
Yeah, this is sarcasm, but by god, what a Freudian slip. The rest of us are thankful it isn't lmao
Or you could objectively look at them as the malevolent malignant murderous force that they are
Brigitte Gabriel
@ACTBrigitte
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Lebanon was the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East.
It's where I was born.
We prided ourselves on inclusivity. Always welcoming Arab Muslim refugees from all over the Middle East.
We had the best economy despite having no natural oil. The best universities.
They called Beirut the "Paris of the Middle East" and the Mountains of Lebanon was a tourist destination.
My early childhood was idyllic, my father was a prosperous businessman in town and my mother was at home with me, an only child.
Slowly, the Arab Muslims began to become the majority in Lebanon and our rights began to wither away.
Soon, we would find ourselves unable to leave our small Christian town without fear of being stopped and killed by Arabs. In Lebanon your religion is on your government issued ID.
As the war intensified and the radical Islamists made their way south, my home was hit by an errant rocket and my life was forever changed.
We spent the next almost decade in a bomb shelter, scraping together pennies and eating dandelions and roots just to survive.
If it was not for Israel coming in and surrounding our town, I do not know If I would be here today.
Lebanon is now a country 100% controlled and run by Hezbollah. I lost my country of birth.
I thank God every single day I was able to immigrate to America and live out the dream that BILLIONS of people only dream of having.
Now here in America, my adopted country that I have come to love so much, I see the same threats and warning signs happening now that took place in Lebanon when I was a child.
This is my warning to you, America, reverse course now while you still can.
It's not too late to save our freedom and preserve it for the next generation.
> Rare breed, but there are unimpeachably pro-Palestinian activists who have made anti-Hamas a central plank of their advocacy, such as Samer Sinijlawi [...] Or Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
I was reminded by Karen Frank here on sub stack who did analysis on a Jordanian Palestinian who wants to be the president of Palestine after I had posted a interview with him. His representations of following and history were not what he claimed.
Memri translates Arab speakers speaking to Arabs telling truth as opposed to English where Arab speak with forked tongue is the rule.
Be judicious and use discernment in allowing hopium to flow in regards to those who speak for peaceful relations.
The only objective Arabs I can point to are several from the UAE and within Israel.
Several x Muslims speak truth but the threat from within is deadly as the recent assassination of the gay imam displays
Because the bar is so low, I'm happy to reward and affirm anyone who contributes to shifting the movement in a positive direction, no matter how tepid.
The pro-Palestine movement has been an epic march of folly. It exploited every aspect of the progressive movement, demanded perfect solidarity, and then betrayed all of its allies by voting for the person that promised to make things worse for them and everyone else.
Worse still, they exposed the progressive community’s hypocrisy around antisemitism, which destroyed the movement’s claim to moral authority. They also alienating the Jewish community which has been stalwart progressives since FDR. (Can you find a progressive leader that’s even acknowledged the existence of Muslim antisemitism — let alone fight it?)
Finally, the super vast majority of Jews that want peaceful coexistence, but the pro-Palestine folks turned them into their enemies because they believed that the destruction of Hamas would be a blessing for Israel and Palestine.
Once the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Palestinians didn't have the time, slack, and intelligentsia to develop a fully mature national identity on their own, so they ended up using whatever frameworks were ready at hand. Their attempts to resist the Israeli state took four main forms:
* Disorganized gangs that used opposition to Israel as a reason to extract protection money from other locals. These were pretty much destroyed in 1948.
* The PLO, which held on as an independent army-in-exile with a secular Palestinian identity, appealing simultaneously to Arab nationalists as a legitimate anti-Israel pawn, and to Westerners as freedom fighters. Israel fought them for quite a while, and occasionally the Arab powers did too since they didn't always get along with their hosts, but ultimately Israel seems to have bought them off with patronage in the West Bank by co-opting the PLO into governance through the Oslo process, trading symbolic authority for security collaboration, which eroded its credibility as a resistance movement. They don't seem like freedom fighters anymore and Palestinians who feel oppressed by Israel don't see them as a way to fight back.
* Islamist groups: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Hamas has been more consistently aligned with Sunni Islam, PIJ has been more consistently aligned with Shia Iran, and this has been a bigger or smaller deal over time as the relative salience of opposition to Israel vs conflict between Sunnis and Iran has changed. It seems like Hamas became a bigger deal in Gaza and the West Bank because their Sunni supporters were right next to Israel, and Palestinian Arabs are largely Sunni, so Iran preferred to support PIJ but ended up heavily backing Hamas as "the enemy of my enemy" out of strategic necessity. What started as reluctant support became substantial enough that Iran is now Hamas’s main remaining patron.
Hamas had to choose between the Sunni powers (who were moving closer to Israel) and Iran, which was still committed to armed resistance. They chose Iran—partly because Fatah’s reliance on Israel-linked patronage had already cost it credibility among Palestinians, allowing Hamas to dominate Gaza. And since the PLO all got to go home (or at least to somewhere in Palestine), there's no big community of Palestinians in exile to formulate an alternative to Hamas.
This "no time to prepare" theory is bizarre, as proto-Zionist "Hovevei Zion" groups (Zionism being deeply rooted in the Jewish ethnoreligion) were buying land in the Ottoman empire's desolate armpit ("the New Jersey of the empire" if you may. JK, I love NJ) that is the ancestral Land of Israel since 1881, back when only 300K people lived there (10% Jews). Pay attention to that number Ben, we'll get back to it. That gave the local Arabs roughly 37 years to prepare for the end of the Ottoman empire - hardly an immediate collapse. That empire had been collapsing for over a hundred years by that point. There simply wasn't a Palestinian national identity.
I'm not sure why you're using the word "resistance" - gotta be the outcome of hanging too often with Free Palestine cult members. That word is their transparent substitution for the plain English words "terrorism", "support for terrorism", "ethnic cleansing of Jews" and "war-mongering".
There never was a "no room for Jewish settlement in Israel" problem. As I mentioned, 300K in a land that later had 2 million Jews (33%) and Arabs in 1947, that now has 15 million Jews and Arabs (with room to grow). The land of Israel had plenty of room for Jewish refugees from the violent antisemitism of Europe and the Arab World (among the first in 1881 were Yemeni Jews escaping some of the worst antisemitism in history). Before you reach for something like "in 1880-1946 they didn't have the water resources and ability to build dense urban cities to support that population!!!", let me remind you that Israel had 3 million Jews living in it during the first century AD. It had a million people living in it before the Arab conquest, and half a million people in it when the crusaders destroyed the only Arab kingdom to ever own that land (for 460 years) in 1099. Since then, BTW, the land was neither Palestine (never was such a state or kingdom) nor Arab owned. Zionists built new cities, figured out water conservation, cleared malarial swamps (which increased the number of Arabs too thanks to the subsequent lower child mortality), massively developed the economy relative to the Ottoman period. Israel is the freest country in the Middle East and has a GDP per-capita higher than France and the UK - you can thank the Jews for why the lives of 2 million Israeli Arabs is better than in pretty much any other Arab country.
The real driver for the (as you call it) "resistance" came down to two things - Islamist religious zealotry, and later nationalism. I'm saying later, because we both know that the Palestinian national entity coalesced after the 1947-1948 war, much of it in the "diaspora" (meaning in the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where for 19 years a Palestinian state wasn't created, and the Gaza Strip where ditto). It's fine to jump on the nationalism bandwagon late, many still do now, but from the moment the local Arabs chose lynchings and pogroms against the then Jewish minority (1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-1939, 1946-the war of independence) it was religious violence (like in European pogroms) whipped up by Islamist leaders such as the Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husseini (subsequent big friend of Hitler and Nazism). Most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine saw themselves as part of "Greater Syria". It is still THE main motivation for Palestinian terrorism and Arab support for it. The very idea that a subjugated people in the Muslim world (Jews), second class dhimmi, would recreate a sovereign political entity in their indigenous homeland, in the House of Islam no less, and win battles and wars against the genocidal forces of various Arab armies - that drives people crazy over there. Outside of the Middle East, it morphed into ridiculous post-colonial excuses by the antisemitic far-left.
Mind you, Israel is exactly like the majority of the countries in the UN, most of which were created AFTER Israel, most of which were carved by imperial powers (Ottomans, Persian, French, British) just as arbitrarily and emerged from the carcass of those empires. Plenty of countries had massive fighting between local peoples about territory (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh anyone? Myanmar? Sri Lanka?) along with violence and population transfers. For some weird reason (Jews), Israel is the only country the far-left is really obsessed with destroying (probably because of Jews).
A Palestine would have been confirmed by the UN in 1947, just like Israel was, had the Palestinian elite not rejected that option. They chose to initiated a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews and lost. Partition was also offered to them in 1937 by the British - remember, partition has successfully split British India into multiple independent countries too. The Palestinians also were offered a state _by Israel_ in 2000, 2000, 2007, and rejected all of those opportunities. They still cling to a dream of the destruction of Israel, as do the Free Palestine cult. That's childish war-mongering, not a movement.
It seems like you’re arguing against claims I haven’t made and don’t believe.
I agree that the Palestinian national identity was formed largely in opposition to Zionism, that the native non-Jewish population were relatively poorly organized for reasons that have more to do with culture and political economy than material constraints, and that Zionist material, economic, and political success have to do with their participation in a less corrupt and more creative culture capable of better political, economic, and military coordination at scale.
I used a relatively emotionally neutral term like “resistance” to describe the relatively sympathetic motives of many residents of British Mandatory Palestine, which were exploited by various patrons for various purposes.
I agree that the BDS movement & similar singling out of Israel are transparently anti-Semitic, and have to do with the problematic status of Jews in the successors to the Roman empire, rather than with any unusually bad behavior on Israel’s part.
Insofar as we disagree, it seems to me that while I believe it’s in the interest of rational people to investigate and try to understand the causes of bad behavior, you seem to feel that this amounts to siding with the people acting badly.
I absolutely believe in investigating and understanding the other side - “know thy enemy” is essential, especially when they’re genocide and terrorism supporters with quite a track record of attacking and murdering Jews.
Maybe “resistance” is emotionally neutral to you. As someone who has lost family members to it, it’s not neutral at all, and it’s a bit bullshit to claim that it’s neutral for the violent far-leftist useful idiots of Islamist terrorism. There’s also nothing “problematic” about the status of Jews in Israel. The country is on indigenous Jewish land, and is a success story after 77 years of democracy and development. It’s only “problematic” to antizionists who are obsessed with its destruction and the dimwitted progressives who listen to the Free Palestine cult’s propaganda. The choice of “resistance” and “problematic” are both, shall we say, problematic.
Get to know those you advocate for better, from a neighborly perspective
Brigitte Gabriel
@ACTBrigitte
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Lebanon was the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East.
It's where I was born.
We prided ourselves on inclusivity. Always welcoming Arab Muslim refugees from all over the Middle East.
We had the best economy despite having no natural oil. The best universities.
They called Beirut the "Paris of the Middle East" and the Mountains of Lebanon was a tourist destination.
My early childhood was idyllic, my father was a prosperous businessman in town and my mother was at home with me, an only child.
Slowly, the Arab Muslims began to become the majority in Lebanon and our rights began to wither away.
Soon, we would find ourselves unable to leave our small Christian town without fear of being stopped and killed by Arabs. In Lebanon your religion is on your government issued ID.
As the war intensified and the radical Islamists made their way south, my home was hit by an errant rocket and my life was forever changed.
We spent the next almost decade in a bomb shelter, scraping together pennies and eating dandelions and roots just to survive.
If it was not for Israel coming in and surrounding our town, I do not know If I would be here today.
Lebanon is now a country 100% controlled and run by Hezbollah. I lost my country of birth.
I thank God every single day I was able to immigrate to America and live out the dream that BILLIONS of people only dream of having.
Now here in America, my adopted country that I have come to love so much, I see the same threats and warning signs happening now that took place in Lebanon when I was a child.
This is my warning to you, America, reverse course now while you still can.
It's not too late to save our freedom and preserve it for the next generation.
You use the term Palestinians here, but the title didn’t come about until the 1960s, with Yasser Arafat. Around the time of the Ottoman Empire, all people living there (including Jews and Christians) were called Palestinian. A more accurate term you might be looking for would be “the Arab population of Palestine” maybe? The ones who today call themselves Palestinians are the children of the Arabs who took on Arafat’s designation. The word “Palestine” itself is a Roman term developed to mock Jews who were living there circa 60 BCE. Look it up.
I fully agree with giving the modern day Palestinian land of his own, but let’s stop falsifying history.
In 1936 (the British Mandate for Palestine lasted from 1920 to 1948) it was the Jews that called enthusiastically adopted the name Palestinian. They named their institutions, like banks and orchestras and newspapers, Palestinian. The Arabs were enraged by this. They complained to the Peel Commission of 1936 that the name Palestine was an offensively Jewish name! Specifically their spokesman said that "Palestine is alien to the Arabs."
Three decades later they became the Ancient Palestinian People. What rubbish!
The 1939 flag of Palestine had a Jewish star on it.
I don’t think 'mock' is quite right here—my understanding is that it was more an act of erasure, renaming the territory after the Peleset (AKA Philistines), who mostly lived in what’s now Gaza.
When I say 'Palestinians,' I mean the people who today identify as such—those who were incorporated into the contemporary Palestinian political identity. This doesn’t include, for example, Israelis from Arabic-speaking families, but does include the descendants of those who emigrated after 1948 while maintaining a Palestinian identity, like residents of PLO refugee camps or Palestinian-Americans. As I wrote in the linked article, 'Zionism created not only the nationality 'Israeli,' but also, schismogenically, the 'Palestinian.'
In this context, I don’t think there’s any relevant ambiguity about whom I mean to refer to with the much more compact but anachronistic term.
I appreciate that. I’m more thinking of those who will read a comment like yours and would easily think that the term Palestinian, as it is defined today, goes back to the Ottoman times, by reading your first paragraph. This kind of information is critical at this point, especially for those who lack knowledge of the history (aka. Many of whom are involved in the very movement that Yassine Meskhout is writing about).
In 1936 (the British Mandate for Palestine lasted from 1920 to 1948) it was the Jews that called enthusiastically adopted the name Palestinian. They named their institutions, like banks and orchestras and newspapers, Palestinian. The Arabs were enraged by this. They complained to the Peel Commission of 1936 that the name Palestine was an offensively Jewish name! Specifically their spokesman said that "Palestine is alien to the Arabs."
Three decades later they became the Ancient Palestinian People. What rubbish!
> "Please name me any other movement that comes close to being such a catastrophic failure, I'm waiting."
No contest, not much of a one in any case. 😉🙂
Arguably part of it may be a meme I think I'd first seen during the Clinton-Trump election, Queers for Palestine, featuring Muslins throwing gays off rooftops and Iran hanging them. Like arguing for putting Dracula in charge of the blood banks.
Unfortunately they have done a lot of damage to corporations like McD and Starbucks, without concern for the ordinary people losing their jobs in the process. Where I live, such jobs can easily elevate someone to middle class breadwinner.
I was very skeptical of this comment but damn it's true. I'm very surprised that protestors had any actually impact at all, but what a bizarre target. I still barely understand the venom against Starbucks.
When you use the Jew as a synecdoche for the contemporary world order, most of the time the symbolism just breaks down and you end up lashing out at McDonalds and Starbucks for being symbolic examples of the contemporary world order.
Which ties in to the three main derangement syndromes afflicting objectivity, Trump, Israel and Jews.
Automatic objectivity and trustworthyness disqualification once derangement syndromes are displayed.
synecdoche
/sɪˈnɛkdəki/
noun
(rhetoric) A figure or trope by which a part of a thing is put for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, the genus for the species, or the name of the material for the thing made, and similar.
I understand why Arab and Muslim voters choosing a Republican and even Trump over Harris and Biden. They tend to lean more Conservative, in fact IIRC this community voted for Bush at one point.
Choosing Trump for Gaza though is absurd. And the Palestinian movement has done a terrible job
Maybe they basically just care about their American interests now and don’t really care about Gaza but are “Shocked! Shocked!” to reduce social frictions with their extended network.
Maybe in their admiration for the bomb throwing, chaos machine that is Hamas, they decided to “globalize the intifada” and achieve similar loser outcomes as the 104 year Palestinian project to genocide and ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land of Israel.
If you're a fellow traveller of the cult, maybe you can explain why anyone would chant for ethnic cleansing ("From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Arab", sorry, "Free" in the translated version), or for domestic terrorism against the perceived diaspora Zionist Jewish enemy ("Globalize the Intifada!") or 'splain that terrorism is moral ("By Any Means Necessary", and "Glory to our Martyrs"). Now if those weren't the goals, why would those slogans be uttered in every protest, scrawled on school walls, all over Jewish property, and in social media of the Free Palestine cult members?
Not a fellow traveler, but as far as I can tell, the answer is, because it makes them feel strong when otherwise they feel powerless in an unjust world.
Sorry, Ben, the only people who keep promising ridiculous things and breaking promises to their people are the Palestinian elite, and along them all the Palestinian intellectuals safely goading violence from afar, and Islamist financial powers like Qatar. I've replied in a thread above to your fantastic yarn of the past, an amusing read but much detached from history.
In the present day, the violent leftists and Islamists assaulting the Jewish diaspora are merely finding excuses to be nihilistic violent morons. Calling for the destruction of a thriving OECD country, nearly 77 year-old (older than most countries in the world), with the longest democracy in the Middle East, where an indigenous people (Jews) live in roughly the same territory that's had 3000+ years of Jewish history (hilariously, Jews mainly lived in what the left calls "the West Bank" - Judea and Samaria) - that isn't about "justice" it's just pure antisemitic, war-mongering stupidity.
The Palestinians have been offered a state 5 times. The only people who ever gave them land for a state are the Israelis. Palestinians don't get to demand the destruction of an independent sovereign Jewish state. Sorry. They need to get over themselves and their religious zealot violence, get over that demand to destroy Israel as part of a "peace negotiation". Take the state, use the billions of aid money for development instead of hundreds of miles of warfare tunnels and rocket artillery manufacturing, and STFU about "unjust" already. The current status is a result of their choice. They aren't children, they chose war and terrorism and by so choosing fucked themselves over. Same goes for the Free Palestine cult, if they actually ever cared about the Palestinians (doubtful, it's mostly raw antisemitism).
"homeopathic levels of watered-down culpability" ... and with that, I take one more step closer to paid. The problem with a brilliant pun -- well, not a pun exactly but, y'know, it's just as effective (more!) if it's at x100 dilution than if there's actually a pun molecule within six galaxies of it -- followed by a paragraph with another brilliant pun (Schelling point, and this one has been determined by the FDA to be safe, potent, pure, and effective) is that it makes me wonder how many I *missed.* And that sends me scrolling backward looking for more hidden bon mots among the wreckage of Gaza and Dearborne. Finding nothing (no doubt the puns were destroyed by Israeli carpet bombing; FYI the only carpet bombers in my neighborhood are Armenian which is almost the same thing as Israeli except that nobody gives a shit about displaced Armenians as long as it's not Turks doing the displacing).
Where was I? (Takes another sip of Buffalo Trace...)
Ah yes! One stop closer to paid! But damn it Mr. Meskhout FreedomFest is in my neighborhood this year and I'm getting old so it's now or never! And it's a pretty penny too!
Anyway, Schelling Point. Something about game theory? Math? (Sips bourbon, eyes glaze ...) I mean, I see the connection: the anti-palestine genocide (or the pro-Israeli genocide, depending on one's POV) blew it. They didn't bother to study the game, or weren't playing to win, or didn't know what a Schelling Point was. Or is.
I’m glad they got noticed! Some were intentional, others accidental. For example the line about human shields came to me after I wrote “take cover behind” and got an Aha! moment.
Do we even know that the Palestine issue has been the leading cause of Arab Americans voting for Trump, as opposed to the gender woo coming from the Democrat aisle? Activists love chasing journalists and playing "random community member" to them, which journalists often happily play along with, but it shouldn't be too hard to poll the communities.
Note that in October of 2022 a Dearborn school board meeting was shut down by a near riot of hundreds of angry Muslim men - over LGBT books in school libraries. I can guarantee you some of those guys rejected the Democratic party before the 2024 election.
Larger episodes occurred in Canada too in response to the agenda infliction. They were threatening Street marches and had coordinated with churches and conservatives
And we could all lose social security, Medicare, Medicaid, airline safety, nuclear safety, food safety, pandemic response, national security, terrorism prevention, jobs and job safety, food for poor kids here and around the world, bank security and other retirement! GREAT JOB PROTEST VOTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Arabs have nobody to blame for their predicament but themselves. If they wanted to build a state they would have a state by now. They don’t want a state. They just can’t accept living next to Jews. They just want to kill Jews. And it turns out that the Jews are now better at war than the Arabs. So the Islamists are losing another war that they started and most likely are going to be kicked out of Gaza, which is actually better for everybody, even if the Gazans don’t like it. If they prefer to stay and die, that’s their choice and that’s exactly what will happen. People everywhere are tired of this shit. You’re seeing the embryonic stages of a massive backlash against Islamists across the West. It turns out people don’t like being randomly murdered for not being Muslims and not knuckling under. Everybody has had enough.
The worst thing that happened to multiculturalism was seeing what impact the conflict in Gaza had on local conditions. Who wants to live like that?
Like, Israel-Palestine as an intellectual topic for coffee shops or university campuses? Fine. Having to deal with emboldened Islamists in the street or battles with hooligans? Nope. People have their own problems.
preach!
Hey Yassine, thanks for this, definitely can identify with some of the emotional tenor of this. I'm curious though: at this point do you still try to talk to people who take an emphatically anti-Israel/genocide/colonialism etc line on the conflict? Have you found any particular approach effective, if not for changing either your mind or the other person's, at least for it not descending into the kind of acrimony you're marking here?
Yes, I had an extended conversation about a month ago that I'm very late in editing, and I'm absolutely always open to further dialogue but willing participants are very rare. The perennial issues I keep encountering are deflection and perpetual excuse-making. Bringing up child suicide bombers for example is met with "well there weren't _that_ many" or the like.
If I make an affirmative statement like "Palestinian resistance is primarily motivated by religious inquisition and nationalistic pride, and here's why" I would ideally like for someone to show me how I'm _wrong_, not just pivot to a more palatable narrative. I don't know if it's ultimately going to be an effective approach, but hopefully it can tamper down on the runaway deflection.
>The perennial issues I keep encountering are deflection and perpetual excuse-making
The most charitable view I can muster is that, as the losing party without the state, the Palestinians feel much less secure to grant criticisms the way some Israeli historians and figures do. Either way, Israel will continue to exist no matter what Benny Morris says about ethnic cleansing. Palestinians are a more precarious position.
This doesn't make it wise. At a certain point you hit your ceiling with the sorts of credulous people who'll believe that the ends justify these tactics, and others just see it as malicious mendacity.
An important part of the debate over peace is whether Palestinians can be trusted. This behavior doesn't help anyone but true believers.
Pointing out fallacious reasoning isn’t a denial of your observations, it’s a rejection of the conclusions you draw from them. When you assert that a handful of child suicide bombers that happened decades ago is some profound evidence for the non-materiality of the conflict, why should anybody take it seriously? The fact that political arrangements such as the one in the West Bank and Gaza (a population living under the authority of a sovereign who doesn’t give them political rights and diminishes their quality of life) will result in conflict between the subject population and the sovereign isn’t that surprising. You can look at Syria next door for an illustration of what a similar political arrangement leads to over time (by the way the Assad regime also explained away the entirety of the social unrest to pure menacing Islamist ideology).
You are making a wild claim: that unlike every other place on the planet where this arrangement has reliably resulted in conflict (each time dressed in local ideological garb and slightly varied expression), that in this exceptional case it is actually the ideological garb itself that underlies the conflict. This is an extraordinary claim and therefore requires extraordinary evidence. Pointing out that your evidence doesn’t rationally lead to the conclusions you draw from it and it also happens to be comically paltry shouldn’t be a shock. Supporters of the Assad regime found the head chopping predilections of a few of the people fighting against the dictatorship as sufficient evidence to negate the entire material basis for the deep animosity and civil unrest against that regime.
MY GOD! THEY’RE CHOPPING HEADS!!!! WHAT 50 YEAR DICTATORSHIP CAN EXPLAIN THAT?
By embracing what they believe to be most emotionally evocative, they can stop themselves and others from thinking too hard. CHOPPING HEADS! How dare anybody minimize that? How dare anybody dismiss it as not at the heart of everything going on here?!?!
If only the subjective intensity of emotion was a substitute of robustness of logic or the strength of evidence
Sure, my positive claim is that Palestinian resistance is overwhelming motivated by jihadi fundamentalism and revanchist nationalism, rather than legitimate secular humanist grievances. The evidence for the former is overwhelming: suicide bombing pizzerias, exploiting medical transport or family reconciliation border crossings to commit terrorism, charters about how awful the jews are, leadership that excoriates crowds for not stabbing enough jewish necks, mobs that celebrate the lynching of random concert-goers, etc etc etc.
I've gotten very familiar with the sanewashing on this issue, about how all this insane shit is actually a very Normal and Reasonable reaction to Oppression and it remains anti-persuasive. It reinforces the point of this essay: that Palestinian activists have been atrocious advocates and their causes' biggest saboteurs thanks to their avalanche of denialism.
How is any of that, in any shape way of form, evidence to your claim? Like honestly, how does it follow that the existence of specific kinds of sociopathic violence, that are subjectively unpalatable to you, make your ideological explanation more likely than a material one. Do you believe that absent the ideological, the political arrangement is stable and isn’t prone to reproducing violence?
What do you make of the claim formerly made by Assadists who said: “how could head chopping have anything to do with fighting dictatorship”? Do you think that question makes sense and is doing the work that they think it is - which is negating the materiality of the conflict between the Syrians and the Assad dictatorship? Do you think the insane sociopathy of head chopping is an irrefutable testament to the dominance of ideology as the driving force behind the Syrian civil war?
I cannot fathom of willful delusion it takes to ignore something so axiomatic. If I observe a group especially fixated on fulfilling their ideological goals at the expense of their material goals, I have to conclude they REALLY care about their ideological goals.
Every example I mentioned above fits. Bombing pizzerias actively sets back the material goals, but it sure fills ideological goals! Same with the rest. I'm baffled as to how else I'm supposed to interpret their priorities. Do you want to try and explain how random civilian stabbings gets them any closer to fulfilling their material needs? If not, then the only possible explanation for the violent militancy is either they're indeed homicidal jihadis, or just psychotic idiots (indistinguishable). Their violence has accomplished nothing except actively set them back on the material plane. Please tell me any other possible explanation.
Ooooooh, what you're saying is "axiomatic"? Surely that ends the debate. As a sanity check I went to ChatGPT and fed it our back and forth and asked it for analysis and evaluation. I thought its assessment for your use of the word axiomatic at the end was particularly insightful. https://chatgpt.com/share/67b78443-3b64-800f-8a7e-eef3b94b5a9c
>Gaza (a population living under the authority of a sovereign who doesn’t give them political rights and diminishes their quality of life
Aside from being untrue, this is also totally irrelevant to the point. You, and all of the other activists, are completely unwilling to acknowledge that the methods Hamas uses are both evil and unhelpful. This in turn makes everyone tune you out.
And again, it's not true. Gaza is not under Israeli rule in almost any way that matters. They aren't rebelling against an oppressive regime, but rather trying to take back their land. And unfortunately for them, it's not their land any more
>If only the subjective intensity of emotion was a substitute of robustness of logic or the strength of evidence
Yeah, this is sarcasm, but by god, what a Freudian slip. The rest of us are thankful it isn't lmao
Or you could objectively look at them as the malevolent malignant murderous force that they are
Brigitte Gabriel
@ACTBrigitte
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Lebanon was the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East.
It's where I was born.
We prided ourselves on inclusivity. Always welcoming Arab Muslim refugees from all over the Middle East.
We had the best economy despite having no natural oil. The best universities.
They called Beirut the "Paris of the Middle East" and the Mountains of Lebanon was a tourist destination.
My early childhood was idyllic, my father was a prosperous businessman in town and my mother was at home with me, an only child.
Slowly, the Arab Muslims began to become the majority in Lebanon and our rights began to wither away.
Soon, we would find ourselves unable to leave our small Christian town without fear of being stopped and killed by Arabs. In Lebanon your religion is on your government issued ID.
As the war intensified and the radical Islamists made their way south, my home was hit by an errant rocket and my life was forever changed.
We spent the next almost decade in a bomb shelter, scraping together pennies and eating dandelions and roots just to survive.
If it was not for Israel coming in and surrounding our town, I do not know If I would be here today.
Lebanon is now a country 100% controlled and run by Hezbollah. I lost my country of birth.
I thank God every single day I was able to immigrate to America and live out the dream that BILLIONS of people only dream of having.
Now here in America, my adopted country that I have come to love so much, I see the same threats and warning signs happening now that took place in Lebanon when I was a child.
This is my warning to you, America, reverse course now while you still can.
It's not too late to save our freedom and preserve it for the next generation.
Oh we’re on it hard. I don’t know about peaceful though.
> Rare breed, but there are unimpeachably pro-Palestinian activists who have made anti-Hamas a central plank of their advocacy, such as Samer Sinijlawi [...] Or Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
At the very least, it seems he's reading them.
I think it's very important when criticizing anyone to showcase how they can do it correctly.
I was reminded by Karen Frank here on sub stack who did analysis on a Jordanian Palestinian who wants to be the president of Palestine after I had posted a interview with him. His representations of following and history were not what he claimed.
Memri translates Arab speakers speaking to Arabs telling truth as opposed to English where Arab speak with forked tongue is the rule.
Be judicious and use discernment in allowing hopium to flow in regards to those who speak for peaceful relations.
The only objective Arabs I can point to are several from the UAE and within Israel.
Several x Muslims speak truth but the threat from within is deadly as the recent assassination of the gay imam displays
Finally. I have been shouting for 16 months that you can't be pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas too. Impossible.
I’m glad Yassine is boosting the voice of Samer Sinijlawi here, I really like that guy. Alkhatib is okay.
Because the bar is so low, I'm happy to reward and affirm anyone who contributes to shifting the movement in a positive direction, no matter how tepid.
Great article.
The pro-Palestine movement has been an epic march of folly. It exploited every aspect of the progressive movement, demanded perfect solidarity, and then betrayed all of its allies by voting for the person that promised to make things worse for them and everyone else.
Worse still, they exposed the progressive community’s hypocrisy around antisemitism, which destroyed the movement’s claim to moral authority. They also alienating the Jewish community which has been stalwart progressives since FDR. (Can you find a progressive leader that’s even acknowledged the existence of Muslim antisemitism — let alone fight it?)
Finally, the super vast majority of Jews that want peaceful coexistence, but the pro-Palestine folks turned them into their enemies because they believed that the destruction of Hamas would be a blessing for Israel and Palestine.
I tried to make sense of this a little while back: https://substack.com/home/post/p-157322476
Once the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Palestinians didn't have the time, slack, and intelligentsia to develop a fully mature national identity on their own, so they ended up using whatever frameworks were ready at hand. Their attempts to resist the Israeli state took four main forms:
* Disorganized gangs that used opposition to Israel as a reason to extract protection money from other locals. These were pretty much destroyed in 1948.
* The PLO, which held on as an independent army-in-exile with a secular Palestinian identity, appealing simultaneously to Arab nationalists as a legitimate anti-Israel pawn, and to Westerners as freedom fighters. Israel fought them for quite a while, and occasionally the Arab powers did too since they didn't always get along with their hosts, but ultimately Israel seems to have bought them off with patronage in the West Bank by co-opting the PLO into governance through the Oslo process, trading symbolic authority for security collaboration, which eroded its credibility as a resistance movement. They don't seem like freedom fighters anymore and Palestinians who feel oppressed by Israel don't see them as a way to fight back.
* Islamist groups: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Hamas has been more consistently aligned with Sunni Islam, PIJ has been more consistently aligned with Shia Iran, and this has been a bigger or smaller deal over time as the relative salience of opposition to Israel vs conflict between Sunnis and Iran has changed. It seems like Hamas became a bigger deal in Gaza and the West Bank because their Sunni supporters were right next to Israel, and Palestinian Arabs are largely Sunni, so Iran preferred to support PIJ but ended up heavily backing Hamas as "the enemy of my enemy" out of strategic necessity. What started as reluctant support became substantial enough that Iran is now Hamas’s main remaining patron.
Hamas had to choose between the Sunni powers (who were moving closer to Israel) and Iran, which was still committed to armed resistance. They chose Iran—partly because Fatah’s reliance on Israel-linked patronage had already cost it credibility among Palestinians, allowing Hamas to dominate Gaza. And since the PLO all got to go home (or at least to somewhere in Palestine), there's no big community of Palestinians in exile to formulate an alternative to Hamas.
This "no time to prepare" theory is bizarre, as proto-Zionist "Hovevei Zion" groups (Zionism being deeply rooted in the Jewish ethnoreligion) were buying land in the Ottoman empire's desolate armpit ("the New Jersey of the empire" if you may. JK, I love NJ) that is the ancestral Land of Israel since 1881, back when only 300K people lived there (10% Jews). Pay attention to that number Ben, we'll get back to it. That gave the local Arabs roughly 37 years to prepare for the end of the Ottoman empire - hardly an immediate collapse. That empire had been collapsing for over a hundred years by that point. There simply wasn't a Palestinian national identity.
I'm not sure why you're using the word "resistance" - gotta be the outcome of hanging too often with Free Palestine cult members. That word is their transparent substitution for the plain English words "terrorism", "support for terrorism", "ethnic cleansing of Jews" and "war-mongering".
There never was a "no room for Jewish settlement in Israel" problem. As I mentioned, 300K in a land that later had 2 million Jews (33%) and Arabs in 1947, that now has 15 million Jews and Arabs (with room to grow). The land of Israel had plenty of room for Jewish refugees from the violent antisemitism of Europe and the Arab World (among the first in 1881 were Yemeni Jews escaping some of the worst antisemitism in history). Before you reach for something like "in 1880-1946 they didn't have the water resources and ability to build dense urban cities to support that population!!!", let me remind you that Israel had 3 million Jews living in it during the first century AD. It had a million people living in it before the Arab conquest, and half a million people in it when the crusaders destroyed the only Arab kingdom to ever own that land (for 460 years) in 1099. Since then, BTW, the land was neither Palestine (never was such a state or kingdom) nor Arab owned. Zionists built new cities, figured out water conservation, cleared malarial swamps (which increased the number of Arabs too thanks to the subsequent lower child mortality), massively developed the economy relative to the Ottoman period. Israel is the freest country in the Middle East and has a GDP per-capita higher than France and the UK - you can thank the Jews for why the lives of 2 million Israeli Arabs is better than in pretty much any other Arab country.
The real driver for the (as you call it) "resistance" came down to two things - Islamist religious zealotry, and later nationalism. I'm saying later, because we both know that the Palestinian national entity coalesced after the 1947-1948 war, much of it in the "diaspora" (meaning in the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where for 19 years a Palestinian state wasn't created, and the Gaza Strip where ditto). It's fine to jump on the nationalism bandwagon late, many still do now, but from the moment the local Arabs chose lynchings and pogroms against the then Jewish minority (1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-1939, 1946-the war of independence) it was religious violence (like in European pogroms) whipped up by Islamist leaders such as the Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husseini (subsequent big friend of Hitler and Nazism). Most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine saw themselves as part of "Greater Syria". It is still THE main motivation for Palestinian terrorism and Arab support for it. The very idea that a subjugated people in the Muslim world (Jews), second class dhimmi, would recreate a sovereign political entity in their indigenous homeland, in the House of Islam no less, and win battles and wars against the genocidal forces of various Arab armies - that drives people crazy over there. Outside of the Middle East, it morphed into ridiculous post-colonial excuses by the antisemitic far-left.
Mind you, Israel is exactly like the majority of the countries in the UN, most of which were created AFTER Israel, most of which were carved by imperial powers (Ottomans, Persian, French, British) just as arbitrarily and emerged from the carcass of those empires. Plenty of countries had massive fighting between local peoples about territory (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh anyone? Myanmar? Sri Lanka?) along with violence and population transfers. For some weird reason (Jews), Israel is the only country the far-left is really obsessed with destroying (probably because of Jews).
A Palestine would have been confirmed by the UN in 1947, just like Israel was, had the Palestinian elite not rejected that option. They chose to initiated a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews and lost. Partition was also offered to them in 1937 by the British - remember, partition has successfully split British India into multiple independent countries too. The Palestinians also were offered a state _by Israel_ in 2000, 2000, 2007, and rejected all of those opportunities. They still cling to a dream of the destruction of Israel, as do the Free Palestine cult. That's childish war-mongering, not a movement.
It seems like you’re arguing against claims I haven’t made and don’t believe.
I agree that the Palestinian national identity was formed largely in opposition to Zionism, that the native non-Jewish population were relatively poorly organized for reasons that have more to do with culture and political economy than material constraints, and that Zionist material, economic, and political success have to do with their participation in a less corrupt and more creative culture capable of better political, economic, and military coordination at scale.
I used a relatively emotionally neutral term like “resistance” to describe the relatively sympathetic motives of many residents of British Mandatory Palestine, which were exploited by various patrons for various purposes.
I agree that the BDS movement & similar singling out of Israel are transparently anti-Semitic, and have to do with the problematic status of Jews in the successors to the Roman empire, rather than with any unusually bad behavior on Israel’s part.
Insofar as we disagree, it seems to me that while I believe it’s in the interest of rational people to investigate and try to understand the causes of bad behavior, you seem to feel that this amounts to siding with the people acting badly.
I absolutely believe in investigating and understanding the other side - “know thy enemy” is essential, especially when they’re genocide and terrorism supporters with quite a track record of attacking and murdering Jews.
Maybe “resistance” is emotionally neutral to you. As someone who has lost family members to it, it’s not neutral at all, and it’s a bit bullshit to claim that it’s neutral for the violent far-leftist useful idiots of Islamist terrorism. There’s also nothing “problematic” about the status of Jews in Israel. The country is on indigenous Jewish land, and is a success story after 77 years of democracy and development. It’s only “problematic” to antizionists who are obsessed with its destruction and the dimwitted progressives who listen to the Free Palestine cult’s propaganda. The choice of “resistance” and “problematic” are both, shall we say, problematic.
BTW, We Should All Be Zionists. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2221234
Get to know those you advocate for better, from a neighborly perspective
Brigitte Gabriel
@ACTBrigitte
Subscribe
Lebanon was the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East.
It's where I was born.
We prided ourselves on inclusivity. Always welcoming Arab Muslim refugees from all over the Middle East.
We had the best economy despite having no natural oil. The best universities.
They called Beirut the "Paris of the Middle East" and the Mountains of Lebanon was a tourist destination.
My early childhood was idyllic, my father was a prosperous businessman in town and my mother was at home with me, an only child.
Slowly, the Arab Muslims began to become the majority in Lebanon and our rights began to wither away.
Soon, we would find ourselves unable to leave our small Christian town without fear of being stopped and killed by Arabs. In Lebanon your religion is on your government issued ID.
As the war intensified and the radical Islamists made their way south, my home was hit by an errant rocket and my life was forever changed.
We spent the next almost decade in a bomb shelter, scraping together pennies and eating dandelions and roots just to survive.
If it was not for Israel coming in and surrounding our town, I do not know If I would be here today.
Lebanon is now a country 100% controlled and run by Hezbollah. I lost my country of birth.
I thank God every single day I was able to immigrate to America and live out the dream that BILLIONS of people only dream of having.
Now here in America, my adopted country that I have come to love so much, I see the same threats and warning signs happening now that took place in Lebanon when I was a child.
This is my warning to you, America, reverse course now while you still can.
It's not too late to save our freedom and preserve it for the next generation.
You use the term Palestinians here, but the title didn’t come about until the 1960s, with Yasser Arafat. Around the time of the Ottoman Empire, all people living there (including Jews and Christians) were called Palestinian. A more accurate term you might be looking for would be “the Arab population of Palestine” maybe? The ones who today call themselves Palestinians are the children of the Arabs who took on Arafat’s designation. The word “Palestine” itself is a Roman term developed to mock Jews who were living there circa 60 BCE. Look it up.
I fully agree with giving the modern day Palestinian land of his own, but let’s stop falsifying history.
In 1936 (the British Mandate for Palestine lasted from 1920 to 1948) it was the Jews that called enthusiastically adopted the name Palestinian. They named their institutions, like banks and orchestras and newspapers, Palestinian. The Arabs were enraged by this. They complained to the Peel Commission of 1936 that the name Palestine was an offensively Jewish name! Specifically their spokesman said that "Palestine is alien to the Arabs."
Three decades later they became the Ancient Palestinian People. What rubbish!
The 1939 flag of Palestine had a Jewish star on it.
The flag of hijaz flies where?
I don’t think 'mock' is quite right here—my understanding is that it was more an act of erasure, renaming the territory after the Peleset (AKA Philistines), who mostly lived in what’s now Gaza.
When I say 'Palestinians,' I mean the people who today identify as such—those who were incorporated into the contemporary Palestinian political identity. This doesn’t include, for example, Israelis from Arabic-speaking families, but does include the descendants of those who emigrated after 1948 while maintaining a Palestinian identity, like residents of PLO refugee camps or Palestinian-Americans. As I wrote in the linked article, 'Zionism created not only the nationality 'Israeli,' but also, schismogenically, the 'Palestinian.'
In this context, I don’t think there’s any relevant ambiguity about whom I mean to refer to with the much more compact but anachronistic term.
I appreciate that. I’m more thinking of those who will read a comment like yours and would easily think that the term Palestinian, as it is defined today, goes back to the Ottoman times, by reading your first paragraph. This kind of information is critical at this point, especially for those who lack knowledge of the history (aka. Many of whom are involved in the very movement that Yassine Meskhout is writing about).
In 1936 (the British Mandate for Palestine lasted from 1920 to 1948) it was the Jews that called enthusiastically adopted the name Palestinian. They named their institutions, like banks and orchestras and newspapers, Palestinian. The Arabs were enraged by this. They complained to the Peel Commission of 1936 that the name Palestine was an offensively Jewish name! Specifically their spokesman said that "Palestine is alien to the Arabs."
Three decades later they became the Ancient Palestinian People. What rubbish!
> "Please name me any other movement that comes close to being such a catastrophic failure, I'm waiting."
No contest, not much of a one in any case. 😉🙂
Arguably part of it may be a meme I think I'd first seen during the Clinton-Trump election, Queers for Palestine, featuring Muslins throwing gays off rooftops and Iran hanging them. Like arguing for putting Dracula in charge of the blood banks.
Breath of fresh air.
I don’t even agree with everything, but the writing style is so funny, and intellectually honest.
I feel in today’s partisan world there is zero intellectual honesty.
Glad I found this page!
Unfortunately they have done a lot of damage to corporations like McD and Starbucks, without concern for the ordinary people losing their jobs in the process. Where I live, such jobs can easily elevate someone to middle class breadwinner.
I was very skeptical of this comment but damn it's true. I'm very surprised that protestors had any actually impact at all, but what a bizarre target. I still barely understand the venom against Starbucks.
When you use the Jew as a synecdoche for the contemporary world order, most of the time the symbolism just breaks down and you end up lashing out at McDonalds and Starbucks for being symbolic examples of the contemporary world order.
Hadn't heard that word yet
I've been calling it The Omnicause
Which enables
Islamic deflectionism
Which ties in to the three main derangement syndromes afflicting objectivity, Trump, Israel and Jews.
Automatic objectivity and trustworthyness disqualification once derangement syndromes are displayed.
synecdoche
/sɪˈnɛkdəki/
noun
(rhetoric) A figure or trope by which a part of a thing is put for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, the genus for the species, or the name of the material for the thing made, and similar.
(rhetoric) The use of synecdoche; synecdochy.
... they have? What's been the impact of their McDonalds and Starbucks boycotts?
The impact has largely been in middle eastern markets https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/sharp-dip-in-starbucks-and-mcdonalds-sales-amid-anti-israel-boycott-18190738
I’m going to restock this entire article
Brilliant and hilarious- thank you.
I understand why Arab and Muslim voters choosing a Republican and even Trump over Harris and Biden. They tend to lean more Conservative, in fact IIRC this community voted for Bush at one point.
Choosing Trump for Gaza though is absurd. And the Palestinian movement has done a terrible job
Maybe they basically just care about their American interests now and don’t really care about Gaza but are “Shocked! Shocked!” to reduce social frictions with their extended network.
Maybe in their admiration for the bomb throwing, chaos machine that is Hamas, they decided to “globalize the intifada” and achieve similar loser outcomes as the 104 year Palestinian project to genocide and ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land of Israel.
That doesn't seem like an explanation. Why would someone decide to do that?
If you're a fellow traveller of the cult, maybe you can explain why anyone would chant for ethnic cleansing ("From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Arab", sorry, "Free" in the translated version), or for domestic terrorism against the perceived diaspora Zionist Jewish enemy ("Globalize the Intifada!") or 'splain that terrorism is moral ("By Any Means Necessary", and "Glory to our Martyrs"). Now if those weren't the goals, why would those slogans be uttered in every protest, scrawled on school walls, all over Jewish property, and in social media of the Free Palestine cult members?
Not a fellow traveler, but as far as I can tell, the answer is, because it makes them feel strong when otherwise they feel powerless in an unjust world.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157338753
Sorry, Ben, the only people who keep promising ridiculous things and breaking promises to their people are the Palestinian elite, and along them all the Palestinian intellectuals safely goading violence from afar, and Islamist financial powers like Qatar. I've replied in a thread above to your fantastic yarn of the past, an amusing read but much detached from history.
In the present day, the violent leftists and Islamists assaulting the Jewish diaspora are merely finding excuses to be nihilistic violent morons. Calling for the destruction of a thriving OECD country, nearly 77 year-old (older than most countries in the world), with the longest democracy in the Middle East, where an indigenous people (Jews) live in roughly the same territory that's had 3000+ years of Jewish history (hilariously, Jews mainly lived in what the left calls "the West Bank" - Judea and Samaria) - that isn't about "justice" it's just pure antisemitic, war-mongering stupidity.
The Palestinians have been offered a state 5 times. The only people who ever gave them land for a state are the Israelis. Palestinians don't get to demand the destruction of an independent sovereign Jewish state. Sorry. They need to get over themselves and their religious zealot violence, get over that demand to destroy Israel as part of a "peace negotiation". Take the state, use the billions of aid money for development instead of hundreds of miles of warfare tunnels and rocket artillery manufacturing, and STFU about "unjust" already. The current status is a result of their choice. They aren't children, they chose war and terrorism and by so choosing fucked themselves over. Same goes for the Free Palestine cult, if they actually ever cared about the Palestinians (doubtful, it's mostly raw antisemitism).
It’s entirely possible
"homeopathic levels of watered-down culpability" ... and with that, I take one more step closer to paid. The problem with a brilliant pun -- well, not a pun exactly but, y'know, it's just as effective (more!) if it's at x100 dilution than if there's actually a pun molecule within six galaxies of it -- followed by a paragraph with another brilliant pun (Schelling point, and this one has been determined by the FDA to be safe, potent, pure, and effective) is that it makes me wonder how many I *missed.* And that sends me scrolling backward looking for more hidden bon mots among the wreckage of Gaza and Dearborne. Finding nothing (no doubt the puns were destroyed by Israeli carpet bombing; FYI the only carpet bombers in my neighborhood are Armenian which is almost the same thing as Israeli except that nobody gives a shit about displaced Armenians as long as it's not Turks doing the displacing).
Where was I? (Takes another sip of Buffalo Trace...)
Ah yes! One stop closer to paid! But damn it Mr. Meskhout FreedomFest is in my neighborhood this year and I'm getting old so it's now or never! And it's a pretty penny too!
Anyway, Schelling Point. Something about game theory? Math? (Sips bourbon, eyes glaze ...) I mean, I see the connection: the anti-palestine genocide (or the pro-Israeli genocide, depending on one's POV) blew it. They didn't bother to study the game, or weren't playing to win, or didn't know what a Schelling Point was. Or is.
For anyone who has read this far, I apologize.
I’m glad they got noticed! Some were intentional, others accidental. For example the line about human shields came to me after I wrote “take cover behind” and got an Aha! moment.
Lol lol lol this was amazing - thank you! What wil these geniuses come up with next?
Maybe ripping down some hostage posters or attacking a Greek café. Lol
Do we even know that the Palestine issue has been the leading cause of Arab Americans voting for Trump, as opposed to the gender woo coming from the Democrat aisle? Activists love chasing journalists and playing "random community member" to them, which journalists often happily play along with, but it shouldn't be too hard to poll the communities.
Note that in October of 2022 a Dearborn school board meeting was shut down by a near riot of hundreds of angry Muslim men - over LGBT books in school libraries. I can guarantee you some of those guys rejected the Democratic party before the 2024 election.
Larger episodes occurred in Canada too in response to the agenda infliction. They were threatening Street marches and had coordinated with churches and conservatives
twas surreal
And we could all lose social security, Medicare, Medicaid, airline safety, nuclear safety, food safety, pandemic response, national security, terrorism prevention, jobs and job safety, food for poor kids here and around the world, bank security and other retirement! GREAT JOB PROTEST VOTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!