The anti-Israel movement may be the single most irrational strand in current Western politics. Ideology generally has a way of making people unreasonable, but the Israel haters we see on college campuses and elsewhere take this tendency to an extreme. Rarely has there ever been a political faction more hostile to reality.
Consider the slogan “Free Palestine.” It is not entirely clear what “freedom” means to those who repeat this phrase. A 2017 United Nations report concluded that, in Hamas-controlled Gaza, “[s]ubstantial human rights violations” were “a feature of daily life.” Among other injustices, the terrorist group had sought to solidify its power through “a campaign of arbitrary arrests, harassment, [and] torture.” As Freedom House’s 2023 profile shows, conditions in the Gaza Strip are still just as dictatorial, and Hamas has not held elections since 2006. We have to conclude that freedom in Gaza will only be possible if Hamas is vanquished.
So what do the people chanting “Free Palestine” mean when they say they want Palestine to be “free”? Apparently, they are not thinking of liberty in the conventional sense. The alternative motto “Free Palestine from Hamas” makes far more sense.
Another absurdity is the talk of Israel’s “colonialist” origins. Firstly, this narrative is false. The Jewish migrations that paved the way for the creation of Israel consisted of legal and peaceful immigrants, not violent colonists. Indeed, most of them could be classed as refugees.
But let us take a step back. This talking point assumes that a country’s legitimacy is determined not only by the will of the people currently living there, but also by how the population came to reside there in the first place. But by that standard, any Arab claim to the land must be even less legitimate than Israel’s. After all, unlike the Jews who arrived there in modern times, the Arabs who originally settled in Palestine did so by violent means. Thus, it was not until the seventh-century Muslim conquests that substantial populations of Arabs moved into modern-day Israel and Palestine. As historian Alex Joffe argues, the accusation of “settler colonialism” is often leveled at Israel, but in fact, “[t]he Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine […] is a textbook example of settler-colonialism, as is subsequent immigration, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries under the Ottoman and British Empires.” Moreover, Yechiel Shabiy notes that numerous surnames common among the Palestinian Arabs specifically refer to origins outside of Palestine – places like Arabia, Bosnia, Syria, and Yemen.
In fact, Hamas proactively acknowledges the history of Arab colonialism in its 1988 charter. The text asserts that “during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.” Furthermore, the document adds, “the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force.”
So even Hamas admits that it considers Palestine its territory, not because Arabs peacefully settled there, but because they violently captured it. Moreover, if Hamas enjoys majority support in Gaza, as polls have periodically shown, doesn’t that imply that the local population agrees with the group’s ideology? And if Gazans believe that armed conquest is what grants legitimate ownership of a territory, shouldn’t Israel’s supposed “colonialist” beginnings make its sovereignty over Israeli territory more legitimate rather than less? Well, this would follow if Hamas and its supporters were morally consistent, but of course they hold non-Muslims to a different standard than Muslims. Or, if you prefer, they hold non-Westerners to a lower standard than Westerners.
Still, perhaps the radicals’ most absurd belief is the assumption that this conflict is confined to a tiny sliver of the Middle East. It’s a fantasy to think that the Islamists in Palestine would be satisfied with any settlement, even the elimination of Israel. No, these fanatics have worldwide aspirations which could only by fulfilled by uniting all mankind under the banner of their religion. It could hardly be otherwise given that Hamas began as a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which aims for universal Islamic rule.
The evidence that Hamas shares this goal is as overwhelming as it is underreported. Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the group’s founders, asserted in 2022 that not only “our land,” but all “510 million square kilometers of Planet Earth,” would be made to submit to Islam. Likewise, the group’s then leader, Khaled Meshaal, once proclaimed: “The day will come, within several years, when this world will change, submitting to the Arab Islamic will, Allah willing.” Since the massacre of October 7, Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of another Hamas co-founder, has been warning with renewed vigor that the organization’s ultimate goal is to create “a global Islamic state.”
Leftists love to see themselves as defenders of the oppressed, and this obsession is among the reasons for the sympathy many of them show for Arab militants. Yet in their support for Hamas, in their desperate attempts to keep the IDF from wiping this terror group out, leftist radicals in the Free World are taking a stand against all those who do not wish to live in a brutal theocracy. In this and other ways, the anti-Israel campaign is fundamentally irrational.