Dear world, it is not your job to be the Palestinians' caregiver.
Trying to do so enables their destructive behaviors and make-believe narratives, which only pushes plausible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict further away.
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I am currently in Los Angeles visiting my family.
A few days ago, I was walking down one of the main street with my parents in Venice, California — when some random, lonesome guy standing on the sidewalk with an iPad suddenly interrupted us and asked, “Will you help raise money for the children in Gaza?”
As we kept walking, my parents did not even acknowledge him, but I looked up and said in his direction, “I’m from Israel.”
What I really wanted to say to him is: How bored can you possibly be that, of all the things you could be doing on this sunny California Sunday afternoon, you prefer to be out here alone fundraising for “the children” — not across the world, but specifically and only in a rather uninteresting tiny strip of land 7,500 miles away from this sidewalk, no less while millions of other children across the world are and have been suffering for far longer.
And don’t even get me started about the incredibly well-documented facts that much of the so-called “humanitarian” funds raised for “the Palestinians” and “Palestinian children” end up in the hands of terrorist organizations Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other nefarious actors.
The other option is that this guy was not volunteering but is instead being paid by some organization ultimately financed by the Islamist Qatari and/or Iranian regimes, their Muslim Brotherhood friends, or the like (which has also been incredibly well-documented).
Regardless of whatever reasons this guy — and thousands of other folks across North America, Europe, and other parts of the Western world — decide to dedicate inordinate parts of their lives to the “Palestinian cause,” it is about time someone looks them in the eyes and tells them: It is not the world’s responsibility to take care of the Palestinians.
I am all for nonprofit organizations and NGOs asking for our signatures, donations, and other requests when it comes to actual, real-world causes like climate change, education, the disabled, and other types of legitimate social justice movements.
But the Palestinians are not a “social justice” movement. They are barely even a people in the nation sense of the word. The communist Soviets manufactured the Palestinians into a “people” and a “cause” characterized by “liberation” (a word that sounds good to naive, gullible Western ears) starting in the 1960s as a proxy to fight the United States via democratic Israel.
All the folks who claim “Palestine is older than your grandmother!” are spewing profuse propaganda that is completely disconnected from any semblance of reality. There was never a sovereign “Palestine” and never a “Palestinian people” before the Soviets manipulated these terms for their own self-interested benefits.
Therefore, if there were never (historically) a “Palestine” and a “Palestinian people,” there can be no “Palestinian cause” — no less a “social justice” movement in its name.
To be a social justice cause, there has to be a significant sample size of objective data to suggest that changes would be beneficial for the overall betterment of society, or at least large portions of it. Yet the narratives of “the Palestinians” and “Palestine” have been constructed not based on a significant sample size of objective data, but instead based on hear-say, semi-true accusations that largely lack nuance and context, feelings instead of facts, deliberate misinformation, and outright lies.
However, you don’t have to take it from me, a Jewish Israeli-American who some could argue is heavily biased. Take it from Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of the founders of Hamas, who recently said:
“‘Palestine’ is the lie itself. If Palestine was never a country nor a nation, then all the theories built on this lie are invalid.”1
This does not mean that those who live in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip shouldn’t be afforded the same human rights that most of us want and appreciate. Of course they should (assuming that is what they want). But the Palestinians have agency — there are adults in their societies, after all — and they can decide for themselves what they think is best for them.
Some would argue that, because the Palestinians live under two dictatorships (the Palestinian Authority in the Palestinian West Bank and Hamas in Gaza), they do not have the same amount of agency as Westerners do. And that is probably true.
Yet that is precisely the hypocrisy of so many Westerners who are overly sympathetic to “the Palestinians.” On one hand, these Westerners dictate that we must adopt “cultural relativism” — the notion that there is no universal standard to measure cultures by, and that all cultural values and beliefs must be understood relative to their cultural context, and not judged based on outside norms and values.
On the other hand, these Westerners pathetically judge Israel according to “Western” cultural standards, values, beliefs, and norms. And they parade around Western streets, campuses, and other public venues advocating “social justice” for “the Palestinians” as if their definition of “social justice” is in every way, shape, and form what “the Palestinians” want for themselves. (Spoiler: It is not.)
Maybe, just maybe, many (the majority of?) Palestinians think that “social justice” is exactly what Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists did on October 7th. You know: gang-rape Jewish girls and women, pillage Jewish communities, behead Jewish babies, burn whole Jewish families alive, mutilate Jewish bodies, and take Jewish children and elderly people hostage.
Indeed, many post-October 7th polls of Palestinians explicitly indicate that the majority of them support what Hamas perpetrated on that fateful day. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen too many Palestinian-led public demonstrations across the world denouncing Hamas during the last several months.
Quite the contrary. We keep seeing and hearing “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators saying that “we” are not allowed to decide how they “resist” — and more of us should take them for their words. Because what they are really saying is: They view gang-raping girls and women, pillaging communities, beheading babies, burning whole families alive, mutilation, and kidnapping as perfectly acceptable and justifiable “acts of resistance.”
But what are they resisting exactly? The “blockade” of Gaza? Turns out, there are two countries (Israel and Egypt) that have, over the years, tightened their grip on the Strip because it has become an Islamist terrorist cesspool that destabilizes the region. If you are not holding Egypt to the same expectations to which you hold the Jewish state in this regard, that is an antisemitic double standard.
Or are they resisting “the occupation”? Gaza has been fully free of any Jewish and Israeli presence since 2005. We are now in 2024. I know that some folks these days think math is “racist” — but for the rest of us, we are talking about nearly two decades of Gaza being a wholly independent territory.
Oh wait, they must be resisting “the White settler colonialist imperialist Zionist project,” right? Forget the fact that Israel is neither White, nor settler colonialist, nor imperialist, nor a project.
The ridiculous irony is that all the Westerners who use this argument — “The White settler colonialist imperialist West, including Israel, needs to get out of the Middle East!” — are the same people who, crying wolf from their homes in the West, have been trying to insert themselves into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps it is these people who should stay in their lane.
I am of the belief that the world is too big and too complex for each of us to have an opinion or viewpoint about every possible current event. At a time where so many people feel the need to stroke their ego by having a superficial, unsophisticated opinion, it should be socially acceptable (and applauded) to say, “I don’t know” or “This is not my domain.”
But, if you feel oh so compelled to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from thousands of miles away, there is only one reasonable opinion to have: Palestinian terrorist organizations (starting with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and now with Hamas) are the ones predominantly inflicting pain and suffering on “the Palestinians.”
Thus, if you want a better future for “the Palestinians,” you ought to work toward holding accountable their murderous, kleptocratic quasi-leaders, starting with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
If you are “all about love and peace” then channel these worldviews to the side that started this war, which just so happens to be the same side (Hamas, in case you forgot) that could end it immediately — by surrendering and releasing the remaining hostages.
And if you wail and scream “But what about the children!” recall that the vast majority of these children have parents who have to make the same hard decisions as most other parents across the world about, for instance, how and where to raise their children.
It is true that raising children under a dictatorship like Hamas is different and more challenging than in a freer society, but if you really cared about “the children” in Gaza, you would sponsor them to leave the Strip via tunnels leading into Egypt. I heard there are thousands of Palestinians on websites like GoFundMe who are trying to raise money for this purpose.
The other option is to simply go about your day and not pick a side — Israeli or Palestinian. Come to think of it, that would probably do more for the benefit of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than anything else (and I am not being facetious).
Mosab Hassan Yousef on X
I do volunteer work for a Jewish NGO that supports Israel through word, deed, and donations. Our particular group has spent time and money helping the people, of what I now call the “Eshkol Envelope” (formerly the “Gaza envelope”), develop their infrastructure and communities. Two weeks ago, I returned from a solo trip to the area. It was a sobering visit. A number of kibbutzim (small villages) were devastated, losing up to 30% of their population and up to 50% of the buildings and infrastructure destroyed. Others, better prepared, more alert to the danger, or just plain lucky, defended themselves well. Even the large city of Sderot was brazenly attacked and people murdered. However, the worst was the site of the Nova Music Festival massacre.
I first witnessed (I will not say “visited”; this was not a vacation) the automobile storage “graveyard” of all of the cars recovered from the site. The storage area is at least two American football fields long, twice the width wide, and it is full of burned out and destroyed vehicles. From the bullet holes that can be seen through the sides and the windshields, Hamas had no shortage of ammunition. I then continued to the actual site of the massacre. A large billboard shows pictures of each of the 360 men and women who were assaulted, raped, mutilated and abused while yet alive, killed, and burned in the most horrendous manners unimaginable. At random, I took the picture of a young, beautiful, human being who is typical of all who are no longer with us. It pains me to think of the terror inflicted on her and the others simply because they were Jews. I cannot even bring myself to describe the atrocities. The worst was the fact that the atrocities were recorded on the victims’ cell phones and then sent to the victims' contact lists. Not only was terror inflicted on the victims, terror was inflicted on those who knew them and loved them the most. Even the furthest depth of hell has no place for these monsters.
I write this not for pity or sympathy; Israel needs neither from us. I write this as an object lesson and a warning. Screams of "Death to Israel, death to the Jews, and especially death to America" are not protest slogans. They are an action plan. What starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews. Those of us here in the U.S., who think that we are immune from this type of terror, are deluding ourselves. If given the chance, our enemies will inflict upon us the same terror with the same intensity and lack of remorse as at Nova. And who will protect us in our blissful ignorance? Our conflicted government? Our lazy leaders? Our defunded police? Look around. I’m not sure so anymore. The people living along the Gaza border certainly thought that they were protected by their government and army. Now look at them. It is long past the time that we remove our collective heads from our posteriors and demand from our leaders a stop to the hate and madness. If they cannot or are unwilling, then it is time to change leaders.
Very spot on, Joshua. We see the blatant hypocrisy all too well. The man who was asking you and your parents for donations for the children, most likely thinks Israel is committing genocide. As you said, where were these people with all of the starving and abused children suffering in this world? Where were the cries of people when genocide was committed in Syria, Turkey, Sudan, China, Iraq, and on and on? Where were the so-called women's groups crying "believe them when they say they've been raped?" All missing in action and so quiet the silence was breathtaking.