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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The Palestinians have suffered from many things over the past century: bad leaders, disastrous strategic choices, regional manipulation, corruption, fanaticism, war, displacement, and history’s stubborn refusal to deliver everything they believe they are owed.
They have also suffered from something rarely talked about: too many friends. This sounds perverse. Small, stateless, and vulnerable peoples presumably need them even more. Yet political friendships can be dangerous when they cease to mean helping someone build a better future and start meaning protecting them from the consequences of their own poor decisions.
That is increasingly the Palestinian predicament.
No national movement possesses such an extraordinary international support structure. Governments recognize “Palestine,” universities organize for it, NGOs campaign for it, United Nations agencies corrupt themselves for it, celebrities speak for it, and so on.
Academics make entire careers out of the Palestinians, in which they present their fictitious history as truth. Journalists fly across continents to misreport on the Palestinians and their so-called “plight.” European diplomats spend their professional lives discussing the dispute without ever contributing to solving it.
“Palestine” is not just a place anymore. It is an international “cause,” an academic “discipline,” a moral “identity,” a diplomatic industry and, for some Westerners, something approaching a quasi-religion and source of purpose.
That should give the Palestinians an enormous advantage, but instead it has become a liability. This is because many of the Palestinians’ supposed friends have made Palestinian failure remarkably sustainable.
Consider what friendship normally requires. If your friend repeatedly destroys his life, you do not demonstrate loyalty by assuring him that every catastrophe is somebody else’s fault. If he wrecks his marriage, loses his job, alienates his children, and bankrupts himself, eventually compassion and honesty require telling some hard truths: You are doing this to yourself.
Anything less soon descends into enablement, something in which the international community has acquired a speciality. Every Palestinian disaster produces roughly the same response: more aid, conferences, resolutions, diplomatic pressure on Israel, and explanations of Palestinian rage. More insistence that the underlying problem is occupation, colonialism, settlements, borders, checkpoints, or whatever word this week occupies the international community’s approved moral vocabulary.
What the Palestinians are constantly sheltered from is the thing they need the most: accepting the consequences of their bad decisions. Consequences are the universe’s great teacher. Stick your hand in the fire and suffer third-degree burns and you will not be doing that again any time soon.
Germany learned from 1945 because defeat was total, undeniable, and politically transformative. Imperial Japan learned something similar as it dealt with the horror of two atomic bombs. Other societies have learned through less dramatic failures: elections lost, economies ruined, alliances squandered, and ideologies discredited.
History may be brutal, but it does have pedagogical value. A disastrous idea pursued long enough eventually collides with reality unless somebody keeps cushioning the collision and stops the lesson being learned. The Palestinian national movement has repeatedly collided with reality only to discover the international community waiting underneath with a thick mattress and a cup of hot chocolate.
Reject partition; war follows. Refuse compromise; another diplomatic initiative appears. Launch an intifada; international pressure intensifies on Israel. Allow corruption to hollow out institutions; foreign donors refill the accounts. Build a political culture around grievance and martyrdom; Western academics explain why this is understandable. Allow Hamas to turn Gaza into a fortress and launch the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust; before Israel has even finished counting its dead, demonstrations around the world demand Israeli restraint.
This is not friendship. It is the geopolitical equivalent of handing another bottle of medicinal-grade alcohol and nail-polish remover to an alcoholic because withdrawal looks unpleasant.
The international community has removed an essential mechanism by which political movements mature: learning not to repeat strategies that fail.
Palestinian politics has spent generations pursuing variations of the same proposition — that enough resistance, international pressure, demographic endurance, or Israeli exhaustion will eventually produce something dramatically better than the compromises previously available. It has been failing for a century because it is a losing strategy.
Yet why would the Palestinians abandon it when the international community continually signals that patience and this approach will eventually be rewarded?
This is where Western activism enters the story. For many activists, “Palestine” performs a function that has little to do with Palestinians. It supplies a facsimile of moral clarity. Palestinians are weak; Israel is strong. Palestinians have been colonized; Israel is imperialist. Palestinians are indigenous; Israel is settler. The Palestinian possesses grievances; Israel has an army.
Once those categories are assigned, moral reasoning becomes almost recreational.
There is no need to ask whether Palestinian leaders made terrible decisions, whether rejectionism contributed to Palestinian suffering, whether terrorism hardened Israeli society, whether Hamas destroyed Gaza’s possibilities, whether Palestinian political culture has cultivated fantasies incompatible with peace, or whether Israelis might have legitimate historical fears of territorial withdrawal.
Those questions complicate the picture, and complexity is something that ideological activists cannot tolerate. The Palestinian must remain innocent because his innocence validates the activist’s worldview, producing a strange form of dehumanization masquerading as solidarity.
Adults possess agency; children have things happen to them.
Yet much Western discourse about Palestinians treats an entire people as though they exist outside ordinary moral causation. Palestinians do not make decisions; they respond to conditions. They do not embrace destructive ideologies; they experience radicalization. They do not elect extremists; desperation produces political outcomes. They do not commit atrocities because they believe monstrous things; their atrocities become expressions of accumulated trauma.
Every action becomes reaction, every choice becomes context, and responsibility always migrates elsewhere.
The result is a curious racism of diminished expectations in which Palestinians are simultaneously heroic enough to resist one of the Middle East’s strongest militaries and psychologically too fragile to be expected to exercise ordinary political judgment. Israelis, meanwhile, are deemed to possess almost infinite agency. An Israeli checkpoint has consequences; a Palestinian suicide bombing mostly has causes.
Bizarrely, this moral asymmetry is usually presented as compassion when, in truth, it is profoundly condescending. Worse, it may partially explain why the Palestinian national movement could never make the transformation every successful national movement must eventually make: moving from mythology to governance.
Revolutionary movements adore abstraction but states cannot afford it. States need tax collection, sewage systems, commercial law, functioning courts, electricity grids, competent bureaucracies, and leaders who understand that feeding children matters more than producing martyrs. Successful nationalism eventually becomes boring. That is the point.
Zionism, for all its romantic mythology, ultimately succeeded because it became relentlessly practical. It built institutions, farms, universities, labor organizations, hospitals, political parties, military structures, tax systems, and industries. The Jews argued ferociously among themselves, frequently infuriated each other, and occasionally made disastrous decisions. Yet the movement gradually converted longing into administration.
Our homeland became a state because poetry eventually had to share a desk with accounting. The Palestinians have rarely been permitted that same political adulthood or had it demanded of them — not by their leaders or their admirers.
The world romanticizes Palestinian resistance far more enthusiastically than it does Palestinian responsibility. A Palestinian throwing a stone photographs better than a Palestinian reforming a pension system. A masked fighter carrying a rifle fits the iconography of liberation; a municipal official fixing infrastructure does not.
So the Palestinians remain suspended in the most politically seductive moment of nationalism: perpetual struggle. There is always another march, resolution, flotilla, faculty encampment, or declaration of solidarity. The revolution must continue because so many people have constructed identities around its continuation.
That creates a disturbing incentive. What happens to the “Free Palestine” movement if “Palestine” becomes free, peaceful, compromised, and dull? What happens if Palestinians accept borders that activists dislike? What about if refugees abandon a maximalist conception of return? Or if Palestinian leaders recognize that Israel will remain, and has a right to remain, a Jewish state?
A successful Palestinian future would require destroying the mythology upon which much international Palestinian solidarity depends. The Palestinians would gain a country but lose a cause. This is why many of those who see themselves as great Palestinian friends are strangely hostile to the compromises that might produce a Palestinian state or at least better outcomes for Palestinians.
A Palestinian state beside Israel is less emotionally satisfying than justice “from the river to the sea.” Compromise requires accepting tragedy, while activism prefers purity. Peace requires acknowledging that two peoples may possess legitimate rights. Ideology prefers an oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative. Nation-building requires accepting imperfect borders and outcomes, as well as historical wounds that could take generations to heal. Revolution promises everything.
The cruel irony is that Israel’s supposed friends often demand far more realism from Israel than the Palestinians’ friends demand from them. Pro-Israel governments tell Israeli leaders “no,” even when it is demonstrably terrible advice. Washington pressures Jerusalem. Allies criticize settlements, military tactics, and political decisions.
Palestinian solidarity frequently operates differently. Criticism is seen as betrayal, context becomes exoneration, failure becomes victimhood, defeat becomes evidence of injustice, and the nightmare dream survives another generation.
Genuine solidarity would look radically different. Perhaps it would mean telling Palestinians that October 7th was not resistance but an act of grotesque barbarism. And that far from advancing so-called “Palestinian liberation,” it devastated Gaza to the point that it will take at least a decade to rebuild. And that the Palestinians’ eternal refugee status cannot remain a hereditary political theology forever. And that the UN did them a gross disservice by spreading the lie that it can.
They also need to do away with the fantasy that some international court, student encampment, celebrity statement, or UN resolution is going to repeal geographic reality and that, if the Palestinians want sovereignty, compromise will be required.
That peace means mourning some dreams rather than passing them intact to your children. These truths might be difficult for the Palestinians to swallow, but in the long term they would come to be seen as acts of courage and kindness. It is far less cruel than telling them that their failed and destined-to-fail strategy has a chance of succeeding and encouraging them to repeat it with the same disastrous results.
The Palestinians have hundreds of millions of people chanting for them; they do not need more. Nor do they need more unkempt Western students wearing keffiyehs. They also do not need another generation of diplomats issuing solemn statements about an eventual political settlement while carefully avoiding the beliefs that make such a settlement impossible.
They need what every people ultimately needs: friends willing to distinguish solidarity from indulgence and courageous enough to speak the truth, who care more about Palestinian children having ordinary lives than Palestinian revolutionaries having extraordinary deaths, and who say that agency is not an insult but a form of dignity.
The great tragedy is not that the world abandoned the Palestinians, but that it embraced them so tightly that it never allowed them to grow up.
I agree. The whole thing is a giant con, and it’s spreading like the plague
Every time I see 'Free Palestine', I offer a guaranteed solution to doing exactly that. I say that all that needs to be done is to remove the malevolent Islam driven murdering tyrants who run that portion of Palestine not controlled by Israel and replace them with those who love freedom and individual rights. Strangely, no one seems interested in implementing my solution.