On “Pro-Palestine” Hypocrisy

Editor's Note: On October 7, 2023, the Israeli settler-colonial state launched a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip — a tiny enclave described as the world's largest outdoor concentration camp — whose population has been living under a brutal and suffocating Israeli siege for 16 years. In solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle for liberation and self-determination, The Public Source is opening its pages to unedited interventions by Palestinians in historic Palestine and in the ​​shatat.

To begin with, this might not look like a typical article, but rather a political rant targeted towards a specific group of “activists,” who force themselves into our daily feed by claiming to be “pro-Palestine.” Despite the gleaming title, claiming such a label can be challenging, especially for Western activists, and that is nowhere near a compliment.

Before delving into the topic, I would like to start with a brief statement on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. For us, “Israel” is a colonial entity that was imposed on our land by force to sustain Western hegemony over the Arab world. Zionism was the tool used to gather millions of settlers from around the world to invade our land, slaughter our people, steal our homes, and establish an advanced military base for securing Western interests in oil, gas, and trade routes. 

Our struggle for freedom is not a border dispute.

Therefore, our struggle for freedom is not a border dispute, nor is it a religious battle, but rather a struggle for liberation from a colonial entity serving a wider hegemonic scheme controlled by the US and its European puppets. 

THIS is our cause.

Activism supporting Palestine in the West has gone through a lot of stages, but ever since the rise of the “peace process,” a new layer of Western pro-Palestine activism rose with the new configuration serving the same political purpose of the on-going genocidal war. On the political level, most institutions and activists claiming to be pro-Palestine either supported the “two-state solution,” and later developed the “anti-apartheid” speech as a maximum extension of political support for Palestinians. Throughout the years, and within all forms of “solidarity” and “activism,” most of these groups and individuals refrained from addressing the reality of the situation. It could be ignorance, or intentional dodging. 

The problem arises when this speech is set as a standard for solidarity with Palestinians, and even expanding towards becoming a mindset that Palestinians themselves should follow to ensure “acceptance” and “support” from the so-called solidarity movements and individuals. You may wonder why none of these groups ever supported our armed resistance. You may wonder why they feel entitled to justify their stance on today’s events by starting with a disclaimer regarding “condemning ALL violence,” and then moving on towards crying over our dead bodies and asking for “international law” to be applied. The same “law” that fortified our genocide and accepted our murderers as a “nation.”

The real answer to this phenomenon lies in the core of the solidarity adopted by these groups and individuals. For them, being pro-Palestine is a moral exercise, where they can vent the excess luxury derived from their superior human system of values on an endangered species called the “Palestinians.”

This whole idea of democratic, liberal, human-rights based scheme was only set out of material luxury, including the luxury of time, safety, and political correctness.

For this reason, we HAVE to be victims so that their moral scheme can be applied. But if we fight back; if we kill our oppressors; if we develop a miraculous armed resistance from within an international and regional siege, their whole moral world collapses. Instantaneously, we transform into inhumane fanatical terrorists who impose an equal violence to settler colonialism. One can ask: but how can this shift in mindset occur so quickly? Easy. Because the moment we disturb the status quo of hegemony, we target the main source of identity for those identifying within the Western scheme of values. 

See, this whole idea of democratic, liberal, human-rights based scheme was only set out of material luxury, including the luxury of time, safety, and political correctness. But materially-speaking, this scheme of values can never oppose the material conditions that brought it into existence, i.e., Western hegemony over the world, including our region. And how does that hegemony persist?  Through an advanced military basis run by Zionist maniacs who have a free pass to execute genocides as much as necessary.

So, hypocrisy is not Biden’s support for Ukraine and “Israel,” or CNN’s coverage of fake Zionist Islamophobic propaganda. In fact, such actions are at the core of our struggle, and for us they make total sense in terms of power dynamics. But the real hypocrisy lies somewhere else, in this idea of identifying as pro-Palestine, while abiding by the Western scheme of liberal values. THAT is utter hypocrisy stemming from a sense of moral superiority.

If you claim to support Palestine while re-defining the political context of the struggle to fit the narrative that suits your Western “values,” you are contributing to the hijacking of Palestinian voices, narratives, and the real meaning of solidarity.

If you claim to support Palestine while re-defining the political context of the struggle to fit the narrative that suits your Western “values,” you are contributing to the hijacking of Palestinian voices, narratives, and the real meaning of solidarity. If you claim to support Palestinians, while shying away from supporting our resistance groups, then you are another manifestation of Western hegemony. A hegemony that extends beyond military occupation and economic war, towards moral subjection (domination). This moral subjection is a cruel aspect of colonial violence, one where the oppressed is forced to re-identify themselves from the moral compass of the oppressor.

In short, if you support us as corpses, but not as freedom fighters…*

*I prefer to leave the if statement to the imagination of the readers.