Paul E. Greenberg on Palestinian activism

To the Editor:

If activism is defined by the number of people who yell and scream really loud, the Palestinians have mastered the art of activism. But if it is defined as actually helping your own people thrive, it is hard to find a more woefully unsuccessful type of activism played out over as many years as that practiced seemingly in the name of the Palestinians. In fact, that there is no pro-Palestinian activism for that reason. Instead, there is only anti-Israel/anti-Jewish activism, which is very real and at times very scary. The main achievement of so-called pro-Palestinian activism is to shine the bright light on something that is hard to fully get one’s mind around: a three-sided war in which Israel fights Iranian proxies on the battlefield, and the world describes all of Israel’s actions in this regard as anti-Palestinian (when it is actually anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah, anti-Houthi). The core fallacy of so-called Palestinian activism is that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That mantra is a myth. When Hamas murders, burns, and rapes Jewish children and elderly this does absolutely nothing to promote the Palestinian cause. For progressives who hate binaries, they sure love the binary underlying their conception of this dynamic.