Theatre of the Absurd: A Conversation With Pro-Palestinians
"I am not antisemitic. I like Jewish people. I just don't like Zionists."
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Pro-Palestinian: Ceasefire now!
Me: Actually, there was a ceasefire in place on October 6th, 2023. Then Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and armed Gazan civilians broke it the very next day.
Or do you mean that the Israelis should cease so the Palestinians can fire?
Pro-Palestinian: They were just trying to liberate their people!
Me: It seems to me that only among the Palestinian cause does liberation of “their people” include the profuse use of “their people” as human shields.
Both in words and more importantly in actions, Israel wants minimal civilian casualties on the other side and on its own side. Hamas wants maximum civilian casualties on the other side and on its own side. Look closely. One of these things is not like the other.1
Pro-Palestinian: But Israel is killing so many Palestinians! Free Palestine!
Me: Do you not understand that Hamas is an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship which took Gaza by force, and purposely attacks from inside densely populated areas, knowing that there will be a retaliation, while they cowardly hide in tunnels and behind civilian infrastructure?
And do you not realize that no matter what happens, even if Hamas slaughters thousands of Jews, so many people, so many “good” people like yourself, do not care. At the end of the day, we cannot see it as anything other than antisemitism. It is pure antisemitism.
Pro-Palestinian: I am not antisemitic. I like Jewish people. I just don’t like Zionists.
Me: And yet Zionism is a self-determination movement for the Jewish People.
Pro-Palestinian: But the Zionists stole the land from Palestine!
Me: Which Palestine? Ancient Egyptian-era Palestine? Canaanite-era Palestine? Israelite-era Palestine? Assyrian-era Palestine? Babylonian-era Palestine? Achaemenid-era Palestine? Ancient Greek-era Palestine? Roman-era Palestine? Parthian-era Palestine? Sasania-era Palestine? Byzantine-era Palestine? Arab Rashidun-era Palestine? Umayyad-era Palestine? Abbasid-era Palestine? Fatimid-era Palestine? Crusaders-era Palestine? Ayyubid-era Palestine? Mamluk-era Palestine? Mongol-era Palestine? Ottoman-era Palestine? Or British-era Palestine?
“Palestine” is the only country in the world that never existed before its so-called existence. Therefore, the Palestinians have the weakest case among all the world’s conflicts. Yet, because their opponents are the world’s villains — the Jews — the Palestinians have a distinct advantage over every other conflict in the world.
Pro-Palestinian: I am pretty sure — no, very sure — that Zionists stole the land from Gaza and have been occupying it. Or they will occupy it. Never mind, you get the point.
Me: I am aware that people of your persuasion prefer feelings over facts, but we Jews do not have such a luxury. So let me set the record straight: We gave the Palestinians all of Gaza in 2005, and Hamas promptly turned it into an Islamic jihad fortress, from which they have attacked the Jewish state for years, eventually culminating in the unthinkable terror attacks on October 7th.
Imagine a religion whose followers admit that they want to kill you, and if you don’t want to be killed, they say you have a phobia.
Pro-Palestinian: They just want to take back their land from the Zionist colonialist ethnic cleansing settler occupiers! Don’t you get it?!
Me: If you’re going to generalize that all Israelis are “occupiers” then I am going to generalize that no Palestinians are “innocent” and “uninvolved.”
Pro-Palestinian: You don’t get to decide how the Palestinians resist!
Me: No problem, then you don’t get to decide how we Israelis respond.
Pro-Palestinian: So you’re okay with committing genocide?
Me: You don’t think it’s kind of weird for a country that is accused of committing genocide to explicitly tell people to evacuate, give them written instructions, and create humanitarian corridors for them to do so, while guarding the corridors with tanks and soldiers to prevent Hamas from firing on their own people trying to escape from combat zones?
Wouldn’t this defeat the purpose of Israel’s alleged genocidal aim?
Pro-Palestinian: But the Palestinians in Gaza are running out of everything! Food, water, medicine, fuel, rockets — everything!
Me: It has been 133 days of Gaza running out of food, water, medicine, and fuel by tomorrow.
Pro-Palestinian: What do you mean? There are millions of refugees in Gaza!
Me: According to who? UNRWA? The organization that changed the definition of a refugee to include anyone who has any Palestinian heritage, from any and all generations, despite no other refugee group in the world receiving this status?
Pro-Palestinian: UNRWA does vital, life-saving work!
Me: Ah, yes, please tell me more about the organization that employs more than a thousand terrorists, including at least a dozen who participated in the October 7th terror attacks.
Pro-Palestinian: They are not terrorists! They are freedom fighters!
Me: Since Jewish lives obviously don’t matter so much to you and your comrades, let’s talk about the Palestinian “freedom fighter” who assassinated Jordanian King Abdullah I in 1951.
Pro-Palestinian: The Palestinians just want their own country!
Me: If Jordan was a democracy, rather than an autocracy, it would be a Palestinian country.
Pro-Palestinian: So you want to forcefully displace the Palestinians?
Me: Of course not. There are approximately three million Palestinians already living in Jordan.
Pro-Palestinian: Yeah, because they fled “the Nakba” when the Zionists expelled them from their own land!
Me: In the 20th century, as empires collapsed and new states and borders were established, tens of millions of people fled or were expelled during the course of war. Muslims and Hindus, Greeks and Turks, Poles and Ukrainians, Germans and Jews moved on to build new lives, some aided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
None of them, nor their hundreds of millions of descendants, claim to be refugees today — except the Palestinians. Why? Because the Palestinians, propped up by the Arab world and the former Soviet Union, violently rejected the two-state solution already in 1948, and were determined (despite losing war after war) to continue trying to prevent the Jewish People from maintaining self-determination in our indigenous homeland.
Having failed to do so by warfare, terrorism, and economic boycotts, Palestinians have hijacked the United Nations to create and sustain a fictitious narrative that they are still somehow all refugees, generation after generation, and all of them possess a right (which does not exist in international law) to settle in a sovereign country (Israel), even though they never lived in and they were never citizens of Israel, so as to ensure that Israel no longer exists as a state for the Jewish People.2
Pro-Palestinian: Sounds like apartheid to me!
Me: Funny you mention that, because we Israelis are even worse at apartheid than we are at genocide.
Pro-Palestinian: Whatever, just get the Israelis out of Gaza immediately!
Me: Alas, we agree on something. Get the Israeli abductees out of Gaza, immediately.
Michael Dickson on X
Einat Wilf on Instagram
You can take the Jew out of Israel but you can't take Israel out of the Jew. The two go hand in hand, are inseparable and indistinguishable, no matter who, however hard, tries to do so. Am Yisrael Chai!
Seems so logical and simple. Unfortunately, this argument is falling and has always fallen on deaf ears…