After nearly two years of relentless campaigning by activists, journalists, academics, and a host of “pro-Palestine” personalities to stop the war in Gaza that Hamas started on October 7, 2023, a credible plan to do just that is finally taking hold. You might think the proposal would be met with relief, if not enthusiasm, by those who seemed so desperate to end the most destructive chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.
Strangely, however, activists and organizations formerly insistent on an immediate ceasefire suddenly appear quite opposed to ending the war in Gaza if it is based on the U.S. proposal, which they have denounced as a colonial attempt to continue the genocide, even though the plan literally stops the actual war.
The plan proposed by President Donald Trump, agreed to last week by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is not a Gaza Riviera plan-non-plan. On the contrary, the deal Trump presented followed numerous conversations with Arab and Muslim countries and is meant to finally bring about a ceasefire and a hostage exchange deal, while setting in motion the core requirements to initiate political transformation in the Hamas-controlled coastal enclave.
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The plan took a big step forward on Wednesday with Trump’s announcement that Hamas will release all of the remaining hostages and Israel will withdraw its troops “to an agreed upon line.”
The lack of support from self-styled peace activists in the West is unsurprising. A lack of clarity, consistency, or levelheaded thinking has been a staple of Western-based activism that purports to care about the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Despite the loud marches, the disruption of numerous events, the encampments, and all the problematic displays of “pro-Palestine” sentiments online and in person, when it comes down to brass tacks, there is little understanding or interest in how dealmaking works.
Some of the loudest voices in many diaspora Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim communities have been troublingly unhelpful, too, unwilling to address the evil role of Hamas and what’s needed for political transformation, especially when they align with leftists and “social justice” types under the guise of “intersectionality.”
The first step to freeing Palestinians from the horrors of war is to free them from the “Free Palestine Movement” in the diaspora and Western world. The unholy alliance between the far left, far right, and Islamist hooligans who normalize Hamas’s narrative is harmful first and foremost to the Palestinian people.
Many of these voices have long called for a ceasefire that would merely freeze the conflict, as opposed to fundamentally altering the landscape in Gaza to effect real political transformation and deliver a lasting peace. As someone who has lived part of my life in Gaza, lost family members and my childhood homes in this war, and is dedicated to Gaza’s future rejuvenation and healing, I believe it is more urgent than ever to liberate Palestinians from the vicious cycles of violence brought on by Hamas’s 18-year rule of the territory. During that time, the Strip has experienced multiple periods of war, blockade, reconstruction, stalemate—rinse and repeat.
Worse, I have watched the devolution of the pro-Palestine narrative into widespread adoption of Hamas’s views and positions to such an extent that the Islamist fascist organization has become legitimized as an actual “resistance” movement. With that false belief comes the false corollary that October 7 was indeed a just, even rational, reaction to decades of failed efforts to free the Palestinian people. Years before October 7, this was not the dominant view. I say that as a Palestinian from Gaza who was once part of the pro-Palestine mainstream, and support for Hamas was indeed on the fringe.
Nowadays, however, you can’t go to a mainstream pro-Palestine event or conference without proud, overt support for jihadi terrorism and Hamas’s armed-resistance narrative. This was the case at the recent People’s Conference for Palestine, which featured a giant banner of the map of Palestine without Israel, and the slogan, in Arabic: “All spaces are theaters for revenge.” At last month’s ArabCon, things were not much different; the event, organized by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, featured speeches that supported Hamas, the resistance, and anti-Western narratives throughout the conference.
More broadly, the Hamas narrative has clearly been mainstreamed as the Palestinian narrative—thanks in large part to the unholy alliance of academia, social media influencers, and the rest of the woke-industrial complex, as well as foreign-influence peddlers like Qatar, Iran, Russia, and others.
This excuse-making and even lionization of Hamas in the West has come as actual Palestinians in Gaza have grown more vocal in their opposition to Hamas, its terrorism, the hypocrisy of its “resistance,” and how foolish Western figures are for celebrating it. Journalists such as Piers Morgan have created an archetype of what a supposed “real Palestinian” or “real pro-Palestine voice” should look and sound like by inviting onto their shows Mehdi Hasan, Bassem Youssef, and bone-chilling antisemites like Dan Bilzerian, who are now supposedly the vanguards of this cause. The New York Times opinion page will feature Palestinians or non-Palestinians who fit the expected mold, but not someone who breaks out of an archetype created by non-Palestinian Westerners—the ultimate form of intellectual neocolonialism.
Once Hamas said yes to elements of Trump’s plan, some pro-Palestine experts seemed to warm to the deal. They were immediately lavishing praise on the terror organization for supposedly agreeing to relinquish control and governance of Gaza, without acknowledging a potential flaw: Hamas could reign but not directly rule—a disastrous prospect for Palestinians and Israelis alike.
Those who decided to spend the second anniversary of the attacks of October 7 “flooding the streets” should instead take a step back and think about how they can actually be helpful to the people of Gaza and beyond.
When deciding whether to accept parts of the plan, Hamas explicitly based its calculus on the amount of support it received from the Western world; this remains true today and has been the case for the past two years. When I spoke out against the unhelpful narratives promoted by the encampments, which refused to entertain solutions that allowed a future for Palestinians alongside Israelis, I received direct threatening messages from Gaza-based members of Hamas. They made it clear that they were relying on these protests to push for an end to the war.
I have long maintained that the pro-Palestine voices should insist on Hamas ending the war it began, and that the group should release the hostages and adopt an entirely different pragmatic course. Many Western pro-Palestine activists and personalities argue the exact opposite, insisting that responsibility lay squarely with Israel and, therefore, there was no need to call out the Islamist terrorist organization. This belief was bolstered by the idea that because the U.S. does not provide Hamas with financial support or foreign aid, there was no relevance or need to condemn, critique, criticize, and decry the terrorist group.
After last week’s terror attack outside a Manchester, United Kingdom, synagogue that led to the death of two Jews on the holiest day of the Jewish year, these same voices claiming to care about Palestinians and “peace” made their approval of this criminal act clear because it happened at a “Zionist” establishment. In other words, a synagogue that supports the state of Israel effectively makes Jews legitimate targets, which they see as retribution for what they call the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Things are not much better in France, or in Germany, where police just arrested three Hamas operatives allegedly planning attacks against Jewish targets. This is dreadful and unsurprising confirmation of the devolution of large segments of the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement. Having supported Hamas’s terrorism in Israel, it is only a matter of time before they consider transnational terrorism legitimate “resistance” as well.
Those who decided to spend the second anniversary of the attacks of October 7 “flooding the streets” should instead take a step back and think about how they can actually be helpful to the people of Gaza and beyond. Hamas is neither a resistance organization nor an Islamic one, for resistance is supposed to protect, not destroy and annihilate in the name of Islam, which has strict codes of conduct on how war is supposed to be waged and prohibits crimes against civilian populations like Hamas perpetrated on October 7. I ask all who actually want to see change and transformation to consider ways in which the current 20-point plan can be a launch pad for Gaza’s stabilization and recovery, and how peace with a Jewish Israel is a necessity requiring courage to recognize its inevitability.
One of the first steps to freeing Palestinians from the horrors of war is to free them from the “Free Palestine Movement” in the diaspora and Western world. The unholy alliance between the far left, far right, and Islamist hooligans who normalize Hamas’s narrative is harmful first and foremost to the Palestinian people. Legitimate critique of Israeli policies is not the same as calls for jihadi violence and antisemitic rhetoric, which have become the norm in the toxic Israel and Palestine discourse that desperately requires level heads to prevail and radical pragmatism to be adopted across the board.
Indeed, I am encouraged by the large number of Palestinians in Gaza, with whom I am in regular contact, who denounce Hamas. They understand the need for lasting peace with Israel as positive and necessary. They are desperate to move away from the “resistance” narrative and embrace the coexistence and nation-building agendas in which a prosperous state of Palestine is a positive reality, not merely a set of hateful slogans.