News from the Gaza Strip: A U.N. report documents a 123% increase in illegal child marriages and forced marriages in Gaza due to poverty. Unemployment in Gaza is now about 85%. Gaza’s war-torn infrastructure is devastated. Yet reconstruction in the Strip is being withheld by the Board of Peace until Hamas disarms, which it refuses to do, forcing increased hardship on Gaza’s already impoverished people.
Surprising to some, no pro-Palestinian celebrities or groups have expressed sympathy, let alone condemned or protested against Hamas’s cruel obstinacy.
While the so-called pro-Palestinian movement is based almost entirely on lies, its greatest lie is that Palestinian activists care about the Palestinian people. In fact, they refuse to lift a finger to actually help the Palestinians. Rather, the movement is focused entirely on anti-Jewish and anti-Israel animus.
What matters to “pro-Palestinian” advocates are false accusations against Israel—genocide, apartheid and starvation of Palestinians, as well as occupying (and stealing) Palestinian land—all easily disproven by publicly documented facts. Sadly, these are not the true problems most afflicting Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East.
For starters, the Palestinians have for decades faced ethnic cleansing and apartheid at the hands of their fellow Arabs. Indeed, Palestinians are banned from most professions in Lebanon; hundreds of thousands of them were expelled—ethnically cleansed—from Kuwait. And during the recent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, not one Arab country offered the Palestinians refuge.
Nor do pro-Palestinian activists concern themselves with helping Palestinians resolve their own internal social and political plight. Palestinians suffer from economic bankruptcy, massive unemployment, oppression of women, rampant corruption and violent oppression by two brutal dictatorships: Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”).
Neither do those who chant “Free Palestine” show a modicum of interest in assisting Palestinians mobilize toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Instead, their prime objective is the destruction of the Jewish state. Fun fact: Palestinianism is the only nationalist movement predicated on the destruction of another country.
Those who claim to support Palestinians spend 99% of their energy, money and message focusing on slandering and boycotting Israel and Jews. While Palestinian supporters nurture their consciences with false comfort that they are fighting oppression, in actuality, they are ignoring every opportunity to advance the liberation and prosperity of the Palestinian people.
In truth, activists who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” aren’t pro-Palestinian at all. They do nothing to help average Palestinians; rather, they simply defame Jews and Israel.
“Pro-Palestinian” activists ignore persecution of Palestinians by other Arabs. Indeed, the proclamations of pro-Palestinian movements focus exclusively on supposed oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, no one else. Thus, pro-Palestinian in the West ignore that Palestinians in Lebanon are barred from working in more than 30 professions and denied citizenship, which is undeniable apartheid and unheard of in Israel. They ignore that following the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwait expelled the vast majority of its large Palestinian community—more than 200,000 people. That is pure ethnic cleansing, which Israel has never practiced.
Most recently, these activists were silent when no Arab country offered Palestinians in the Gaza Strip refuge during the war. Egypt and Jordan refused because accepting refugees from Gaza could undermine the “right of return”—permitting some 5 million descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to flood Israel, eliminating its Jewish majority and effectively the Jewish state itself. Indeed, Palestinian-American writer and commentator Abdallah Fayyad posted on X, “Stop calling on Egypt to accept Gazan refugees,” arguing instead that millions of Arabs who have never set foot in Israel should be allowed to “return” there.
“Pro-Palestinians” fail to protest the oppression of Palestinians by Hamas and the P.A. Activists ignore the fact that some 95% of Palestinians in the “West Bank” and Gaza are fully governed by Palestinian dictators who oppress them under iron rule. In both P.A.-ruled territory in Judea and Samaria, and Hamas-ruled Gaza, Palestinians have few to no basic liberties. There are no free elections, no free press, no fundamental civil rights or women’s rights. Torture and arbitrary arrest are commonplace. Corruption is rampant.
But when Palestinians rise up to protest these horrid conditions, “pro-Palestinian” activists never rise up in support. They were silent when Palestinians in Gaza launched the “We want to live” protests against their Hamas rulers in 2019, and again in 2026. In fact, some Palestinians explicitly called out the Western movement for refusing to back their struggle against Hamas.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian activist originally from Gaza, remarked, “I haven’t seen a single Western “pro-Palestine” protester show the slightest interest, empathy, compassion or support for tens of thousands of Gazans protesting … against Hamas; maybe they don’t want their beloved ‘resistance’ group to fall.”
Indeed, Solidarity for Justice in Palestine celebrated the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” They would seem to prefer that Hamas succeed in destroying Israel over Palestinians building a prosperous democracy.
“Pro-Palestinians” do nothing to help Palestinians establish a state. In fact, hardened activists oppose a two-state solution altogether, which explains their chant, “We don’t want no two states, we want ’48,” referring to 1948 borders before Israel’s birth. They also scream, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” thus rejecting a Jewish state in any part of “Palestine.” In short, rather than helping to create a viable Palestinian state living peacefully side-by-side with a Jewish state, activists advocate Israel’s destruction.
“Pro-Palestinians” prevent a free Palestine. The more time, funds and political capital that activists invest in trying to delegitimize and destroy Israel, the more they delay Palestinian liberation—from oppressive rulers, from corruption, from poverty and from political stagnation. Until these fundamental problems are solved, Palestinians will know no peace at home or with their neighbor, Israel.
Most importantly, when pro-Palestinian activists blame Israel exclusively for the Palestinians’ plight, they only reinforce a victim mentality and deprive Palestinians of a sense of agency to build a better society. For decades, Israel has welcomed peace with the Palestinians and would do so tomorrow. Palestinians don’t need terrorist resistance. They need uplifting hope.
Originally published on Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME).
