If you really cared about the Palestinians as people rather than a personification of your hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, your support would be consistent. It would not reach a fever pitch only in concert with Hamas’s attacks on Israel. You would recognize that those screaming the loudest on college campuses, ostensibly in support of Palestinian rights, do Palestinians the biggest disservice by diverting attention from Hamas, their true oppressor.
Hamas rapes, tortures, murders and carries out unspeakable brutalities against its own people and persecutes journalists. If you really cared about the Palestinians, you wouldn’t distract people from holding the perpetrators fully accountable. You would be vigorously protesting against Hamas at least as much as Israelis and Jews are.
You would also protest the many Arab regimes that have claimed solidarity with the Palestinians but refuse to accept a single refugee. You would especially denounce Egypt, whose prime minister said he would be willing to sacrifice millions of lives to avoid accepting Palestinian refugees.
You would see right through the ruse of the Arab countries’ refusal to grant Palestinians citizenship, which supposedly is “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” You would know that the real reason is that Arab countries and other enemies of Israel want to use millions of human beings to scapegoat Israel for their own failures.
You would be horrified by Hamas’s use of human shields. You would want the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA held accountable after missiles were found under its schools and then returned to Hamas. You would be appalled by Hamas’s refusal of fuel to power hospital generators. You would have been outraged by its refusal of Israeli medical aid in 2018. You would also recognize Hamas’s responsibility for the very low standard of living from which Palestinians suffer.
You would be livid about Hamas’s well-documented use of child soldiers. You would know that Hamas protested UNRWA textbooks because they were “too peaceful” and didn’t promote “armed resistance.” You would know that Hamas forces children to attend summer camps where the hatred with which they are indoctrinated during the school year is augmented by lessons in how to kill, kidnap and use weapons, destroying any hope of a peaceful future. You would be deeply disheartened by this systemic child abuse.
You would acknowledge that the Palestinians are the only stateless people who have ever been offered a state and refused it. You would recognize that their leaders’ original sin was in 1947 when the U.N. offered them much more land than they have been offered since, only for those leaders to reject it because of their all-or-nothing mindset. You would blame Palestinian leaders for further rejections of statehood. You would acknowledge that the genocidal desire for an Arab supremacist state “from the river to the sea” is an impossibility.
Above all, if you really cared about Palestinians, you would be doing everything in your power to defeat Hamas—the Palestinians’ greatest enemy—and support Israel’s determination to do so.
