It might seem absurd to those that do not see what is going on, but the pro-Palestinian movement probably cannot believe its good fortune. They can steal any idea, make any accusation, and global antisemitism will do the rest of the work for them. Because their fight is against the Jews, their empty smears all go viral. What we see in the anti-Israel movement today is the result of decades of co-opting causes, historical revisionism and piggybacking on the very real suffering of others. Basically – if there is a bad thing happening in the world – the pro-Palestinian movement stole the idea to use it against the Jews.
Here are some of the key examples:
The theft of Apartheid
Apartheid was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa. White South Africans inflicted a brutal racist system upon over 80% of the population – tens of millions of people – just because of the colour of their skin:
The international boycott against the Apartheid policies was seen as successful and so for this reason, the pro-Palestinian camp simply co-opted it as their strategy. They reasoned that if people can be conned into believing that Israel is an Apartheid state – then the international community will realise that it must go the same way as Apartheid South Africa did.
Except of course there is no Apartheid in Israel. Arabs form 20% of the population of Israel and they are the only free voting Arabs in the MENA region. The entire Palestinian argument is flawed. South Africans lived under Apartheid rule – Israeli Arabs are free – Palestinian Arabs can negotiate a peace deal, to finally end a conflict their leaders chose – started – and lost. There is a lot of Apartheid in the MENA region – in places such as Lebanon, but none in democratic Israel.
When the pro-Palestinian camp smears Israel with the vile lie about Apartheid, they degrade and insult the suffering of non-white South Africans and ridicule the long battle which those trapped in that system had to endure. They have stolen the pain of others.
The theft of the Holocaust
This is one of the most insidious appropriations of suffering that has ever been undertaken. The pro-Palestinian movement has stolen the systematic destruction of the Jewish people. There are two strands to the way this was done.
The first was the rewriting of history. The ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’ that Arabs in the British mandate experienced was the result of the failure of their violent attempt to destroy Israel. The Arabs started a civil conflict against the Jews and then followed that with a regional war. They lost. People do not sympathise much with this type of aggression – so the pro-Palestinian movement simply rewrote history. They airbrushed out the civil conflict – removed the Arab irregular army from history – and turned a tiny Jewish enclave fighting for survival, into a powerful and brutal force intent on carrying out an evil plan. Because the Jews were so strong and mean – local Arab armies came in to try to stop them. The Jews had their Holocaust – but it could now be menitioned alongside the Palestinian ‘Nakba’:
The second strand is the ‘Zionists are the new Nazis’ trope. The poor Palestinians – in this new history – became Europe’s Jews – and Israel became the new Nazi empire. In this fairytale – the invading Arab Armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt are transformed into Churchill’s Britain – bravely standing up against the evil force. It is why the perverse lie about a historical Zionist / Nazi ideological alliance runs so strongly in their camp, they want people to actually believe that Jews fighting to survive and Nazis intent on global domination are morally equivalent. So, anything that occurs today – is used to reinforce an image of Jews as the new Nazis and Palestinians as the new Jews.
Inside this horrific twist, if you seek to sympathise with what the Nazis did to the Jews – then all you must do today is join the pro-Palestinian camp and fight against Israel. They have actually stolen the Holocaust. This is one of the key reasons that the pro-Palestinian camp oppose the IHRA definition of antisemitism so vigorously, because the Zionist as ‘new Nazi’ strategy is covered by the IHRA examples.
They even promote the term ‘Nakba denial’ for those who question their false narrative. We can see the result of this throughout the pro-Palestinian movement. Take this unforgivable leaflet printed by the youth group Na’amod to protest against the Israeli ambassador in the UK. They accuse the Ambassador of being racist because she denies the Nakba narrative:
Hotovely is right. The Nakba – as it is described by the pro-Palestinian movement – is a blatant lie. But Na’amod draw on these elements to nail down the lie by further claiming that to deny the ‘Nakba’ is actually racist. A clear copy of ‘Holocaust denial’.
This is Holocaust revisionism: The trope that draws on equating the Holocaust (which happened just as we say) with the Nakba (which didn’t happen in the way the pro-Palestinian camp claim). Tragically this example comes from a bunch of young Jewish extremists who are helping to downgrade the Holocaust. This strategy is an insult to every victim. No Jewish person – or anybody with a moral compass for that matter – should have anything to do with it.
The theft of genocide
There is no end to the pro-Palestinian attempts to place themselves at the top of every discussion. Since September 2000, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, there have been about 10,000 Palestinian deaths. Most of those who died were engaged in violence at the time, and almost every single one inside an episode of violence that the Palestinian leaders chose to start. It is a disgraceful piece of historical revisionism for the word ‘genocide’ to be so twisted as to describe the death of terrorists.
The Jews know exactly what real genocide looks like, and while the Holocaust itself is unique, 10,000,000s of people have been deliberately slaughtered in other genocidal episodes. A total of 28 Palestinians were killed in 2020 – almost all of them engaged in violence. Meanwhile, as pro-Palestinian campaigners want attention for a non-existent genocide, over a million Uyghurs’ sit in camps and the Rohingya are a people that the world’s media appears to have forgotten.
The theft of refugee suffering
We often see the suffering that results from conflict or environmental disasters on our screens. There is also a lot we do not see – millions of people being forced to flee their homes that forever remain out of sight. Being stateless, homeless and facing a world in which refugees are viewed chiefly with suspicion, is a heart-breaking position to be in.
And the pro-Palestinian movement steals the suffering of these refugees. Look at this tweet – talking about seven million Palestinian refugees:
The seven million figure is not accidental. It is part of the Holocaust revision exercise – in which everything about the Palestinians is bigger, worse and involves more people – than anything the Jews have ever had to endure. Except of course, the author of the tweet, Jennine, isn’t a refugee at all – she is an Australian – born free – and living in Australia:
Whilst it is true that a few 10,000s of Arab refugees were placed in camps in Syria and Lebanon to be purposely used as political pawns, the vast majority of those affected by the 1948 conflict faced no such fate. In fact, they even needed to create a new definition of refugee in order to continue with this lie. Today someone in the US or UK or Australia – who holds citizenship – can still claim to be a Palestinian refugee. What an insult to the world’s real refugee population, who are risking their lives fleeing conflict. Jennine is stealing attention from them by co-opting their suffering. Millions of people can only dream of living where she does.
The theft of ethnic cleansing
You do not have to look far to see current victims of ethnic cleansing. The Tigrayans, Uyghurs, Rohingya, Kurds and Yazidis are just some of the world’s communities currently experiencing barbaric episodes. In the case of the Kurds, it is an ethnic cleansing in which they have been attacked by multiple states in conflicts spanning decades and have even suffered chemical weapon attacks.
But the pro-Palestinian movement has stolen all of this suffering too. They invented an ethnic cleansing of their own (the Nakba) and today you cannot mention ‘ethnic cleansing’ without placing the Palestinians at the top of the list.
The real twist in this deceptive strategy of course is that it was the Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab lands. Israel’s Arab population is around 20% – whilst of the million+ Jews who lived in the MENA region – almost none are left outside of Israel. The suffering of these Jewish victims has been stolen too.
The theft of victims of colonialism
Not every part of colonialism was for the worst, but some of the actions in places such as Algeria, India, Kenya, Peru and Mexico created inexcusable acts of horror.
Millions of lives were lost in the Congo horrors – 80% of the Herero were wiped out in Namibia -and if we seek to remember some of the ills of colonialism, there are few better examples than these two. But the pro-Palestinian movement doesn’t want you to learn about real episodes from history – and it belittles the suffering by co-opting it for themselves:
The true absurdity in this is that whilst the history of the Jewish people was born in the hills of Judea and Samaria, many Arab Palestinians were the children of immigrants – from Syria, Bosnia, Iraq, Egypt and so on. Many of them simply moving into a long-impoverished land as Zionist investment created jobs and opportunities. The large clans with surnames based on Masri (Egypt) Mughrabi (Morocco), Bushnak (Bosnia), Hijazi (Saudi), Baghdadi (Iraq) and Hourani (Syria)- are dead giveaways.
The ‘Palestinian’ terrorist hero from the 1930s ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam,’ after whom the military arm of Hamas is named – was actually born in Jableh – a town in Syria – arriving as an immigrant to British Palestine in about 1920. Today ‘human rights’ organisations such as Amnesty and HRW outrageously claim that his descendants have been living in ‘Palestine’ for ever. These people are all just remnants of an Islamic imperial empire that was built through violent colonial conquest.
That today they co-opt the suffering of the real victims of colonialism – all in order to attack the Jews – is nothing short of disgraceful.
The theft of the concentration camps
In Xinjiang, in China’s far-west, 100,000s, if not millions of people, have been herded into concentration camps as part of a ‘re-education drive’. It is a place in which Muslims are deprived of their freedom, pushed through sterilisation programs and forced to eat pork. But leftist human rights activists do not want to focus on the suffering of these people – instead they claim that Hamas run Gaza is the largest and most famous ‘concentration camp’ in the world today.
In fact, in the fields of those kibbutzim which Hamas regularly target with their rockets, Jews from Israel and Arabs from Gaza regularly worked side by side. What changed? In the first Intifada, Arabs began to target their Israeli co-workers. In the Second Intifada the violence escalated and eventually, when Israel dismantled all the settlements there in 2005, the Gazans voted for Hamas to rule them. Since then – as the radical Islamic terror group reneged on all the agreements signed during Oslo and started firing rockets at Israel – a state of blockade has been maintained.
It would be over tomorrow if Hamas recognised Israel’s right to exist and stopped firing rockets. To claim that a situation of their own making is somehow comparable to the suffering of those pushed by brutal state regimes into camps, degrades and insults the victims of those atrocities.
The theft of the suffering freedom fighters
Jimmy Lai is sitting in prison because he dared to speak out over China’s growing suppression in Hong Kong. In Burma, Iran, Saudi, Syria, Pakistan, and in fact everywhere that freedoms are suppressed by brutal regimes – there are brave people who are willing to sacrifice everything in the fight from freedom.
The Palestinians – all of them – could win freedom tomorrow, if their leaders would just choose peace. Instead, the Palestinians are led by terrorists who seek to cause death and perpetuate conflict. Like members of the Tamimi clan.
Or Leila Khaled, who was an airplane hijacker and active member of the terrorist group the PFLP:
Rather than freedom fighters, pro-Palestinian activism honours the very people who kill and perpetuate conflict – and in doing so abuses and steals the memory and bravery of those around the world who are truly fighting for justice.
Theft of LGBTQ suffering
The LGBT community in much of the Middle East, Africa and large swathes of Asia suffers from heavy persecution. The death penalty for homosexual behaviour still exists in some states – and in the PA and Hamas controlled areas- this persecution is so rife, that gay Palestinians often end up fleeing to Israel for safety. The pro-Palestinian movement actually uses Israel’s gay friendly environment as a means of attacking it with accusations of ‘pink-washing’:
This is an insult to the persecuted gay communities everywhere.
The theft of racism
Racism is a perpetual scourge of society that is responsible for untold suffering and countless deaths. The anti-racist struggle was another area the pro-Palestinian movement chose to overrun:
The Jews did not just have a right to self-determination in a state of their own – they had an obvious ethical need. Wherever they had been – antisemitism, anti-Jewish racism had slaughtered them or chased them out. The British mandate did not even set out to divide anyone, but the violent antisemitic response of the local Arabs, led to the inevitability of partition. To state that Israel is a racist state is as twisted as suggesting that a refuge for women is sexist. Both are places where the inhabitants are shielded from the outside violence that seeks to harm them.
Yet again we find pro-Palestinian activism co-opting the suffering of a worthy cause to twist it beyond all recognition. In doing so they do serious damage to the true anti-racist struggle.
The theft of the suffering of victims of fascism
The Jews know all about the horrors of fascism. But no – instead of remembering the victims of actual fascism, the pro-Palestinian camp steals their thunder too by trying to label the only free society in the Middle East – a fascist state. Thus ridiculing the term and demeaning the millions who suffered through Europe’s darkest hours:
Cultural Appropriation
Through the eyes of its detractors, Israel is seen as a state of demons. Everything it does is sinister. Cultural appropriation is seen as a by-product of imperialism, capitalism, and oppression, so of course the haters all point their fingers at Israel when discussing the subject. This accusation is normally seen when discussing Israeli food:
It is based on the smear that Jews are invading Europeans – strangers to the region – who are oppressing and stealing the culture of the indigenous. Yet Jews would have been eating chickpea puree (Hummus) in Jerusalem long before Islam was even a thing in these lands – but that is not the real point here. Over half of Israel’s Jewish families are native to the region – having been oppressed and evicted from Syria, Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran and Egypt. The pro-Palestinian campaigners are not just stealing the identity of these people when they accuse them of cultural appropriation, they are diminishing victims in places where such activity actually does exist.
Land grabbers
Turkey occupies parts of Cyprus and Syria. Morocco occupies Western Sahara and land grabbing Russia occupies parts of Ukraine and Georgia. None of these count for anything. China occupied and annexed Tibet – and has since slaughtered over 20% of the population. In Tibet today there is no freedom at all – but nobody cares. The only ‘land grabbing’ anyone is allowed to talk about is when the accusation is directed towards Israel:
The truth is very different. Israel handed back the whole of the Sinai for a peace treaty. It also withdrew troops from Southern Lebanon, Gaza, and handed an area of land to Jordan. Israel today is a fraction of the size it was in 1976. In addition, all the negotiations with the Palestinians have involved the notion of a land swap – on a 1:1 basis. Which means in sq. km, Israel will still be the same size it was in 1949. Once again this is an empty smear that belittles and insults victims of actual ‘land-grabbing’ regimes.
The theft of Christian suffering
Sinister does not even begin to cover this one. Christians are suffering persecution throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Much of it from Islamist suffocation. The only nation in the MENA region in which Christians are free is Israel. But these facts do not stop the pro-Palestinians piggybacking on the persecution of Christians:
The post above actually blames the Jews for the fact that Christians are disappearing from PA areas and Gaza. But the ethnic cleansing of these Christians started long before modern Zionism – and it is mirrored in Muslim majority areas throughout the region. There are just a few 1000 Christians left in Gaza, and Bethlehem, which was 85% Christian just seventy years ago, has a population that is just 12% Christian today.
To blame Israel – which has a thriving Christian population – for Islamists suffocating Christianity out of the Holy Land – insults persecuted Christians everywhere.
The theft of the victims of Child Killers
During the most recent conflict with Hamas, the New York Times even ran a front page that promoted this myth. This popular smear about Zionist child killers, rests on the classic antisemitic blood libel.
All conflicts carry unwanted deaths – and the NYT never carried a front page with images of the 10000s of children who died as a result of American military action far from US shores. But whilst the armies of the west all take enormous care to make sure that as few civilians as possible are caught up in the fighting – none go as far as Israel. Islamic terror groups such as Hamas deliberately involve their civilian population by digging tunnels underneath homes, hospitals and schools. They launch rockets from densely populated neighbourhoods and encourage children to violently confront heavily armed soldiers.
In many places in the world, children are not allowed to be children. In conflict zones, armed terrorists rampage through towns and slaughter whole families, and Palestinian terrorists have deliberately targeted sites so children would be slaughtered.
Pointing the finger at Israel over child killing – is a grave injustice and one that insults the many children who have been deliberately targeted by monsters that seek to harm them.
The theft of the evicted people
In Isingwu, members of the Enugu community have just had their homes burnt. Nigerian soldiers simply swept through the town and evicted them. The minority Hazaras in Afghanistan are being forcibly evicted by the Taliban in order to hand their land over to Taliban supporters. In many nations, which are ruled by force and oppression – people have few, if any, property rights at all.
Yet search for stories about forcible evictions online and the viral results invariably talk only about Israel:
The Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah are squatters, who refuse to even pay rent on the property in which they live. And yet still they have not be evicted. Instead Israeli law has protected them for decades. Billions of people throughout the world can only dream of such legal protections. Yet the ‘human rights’ groups only take to the streets in order to display their outrage against Israel. Newspaper headlines follow suit. The world’s evicted and brutalised people are swept aside and ignored in order for Palestinians to take centre stage with their lies.
The theft of the world’s soul
It really does not matter what suffering is being spoken about. The pro-Palestinian camp also jumps on rampant misogyny, crime, drugs – in fact they accuse Israel of anything they can. Israel is portrayed as the demon state, and nothing is beyond it. Which is why stories about dams flooding, vaccinations, the uprooting of villages or the destruction of holy sites all spread so quickly.
But the truth is that Israel is a society that does it best to both defend itself and uphold the sanctity of life. And the pro-Palestinian movement has invaded global human rights movements and corrupted them from within. Until all they can see is Israel as a demon state – and they are unable to talk about anything else happening in the world, without first placing a smear against Israel in the opening paragraph.
The irony is that Palestinians could be free tomorrow – if only their leaders had the courage to choose peace. This luxury of choice is not afforded to any of the world’s truly innocent victims – all those voices that the suffocating Palestinian activism has silenced.
The pro-Palestinian movement has stolen the world’s moral compass – and with it the world’s soul.
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The post How the Palestinians stole the suffering, of well – just about everyone appeared first on The David Collier blog.
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