Is the Pro-Palestine Movement Israel’s Unlikely Ally?

There is plenty to criticise about the pro-Palestine movement: its ahistorical myths, its abuse of definitions, its clownish purity tests, and its myopic Western lens on a layered and difficult Middle Eastern conflict.

But its most glaring flaw is a lack of strategic self-awareness so complete that it is no longer clear whom the movement’s rhetoric helps and whom it harms.

One of the great ironies of the period since 7 October is that the loudest voices claiming to advocate for Palestinian liberation have embraced arguments and tactics that make that liberation harder—perhaps impossible—to achieve.

After 1948, it was the Arab states that played on Palestinian grievance to cajole the Palestinians into violent resistance against the Zionist project. As those states have come around, in treaties and accords, to a Jewish state in their midst, the baton of Palestinian-goading has passed to the Western Left and to an international community that never tires of assembling justifications, an ever-illuminated green light, for the Palestinians to keep fighting.

If the nakba was the initiating catastrophe that wrested a state from the Palestinians, the idea laundered by the Left—that statehood is just around the corner so long as the Palestinians commit to more terrorism—is the perennial catastrophe that will ensure they never get one.

Israeli hasbara has long been lacklustre. But Israel’s failure to explain itself may ultimately matter far less than what a deeply unserious pro-Palestine movement has done for the argument made by Israel’s hardest-line voices: that there is no reliable partner for peace, and that territorial concessions would only invite further violence.

History repeatedly shows that successful political movements are not those that beat the public over the head with the righteousness of their cause. Nor are they those that treat terrorism as a legitimate means to an end. They are those that understand the fears of the people they need to persuade. So why does the pro-Palestine movement not understand this? Why does it so rarely promote strategies that produce the political outcomes it claims to want?

The American civil rights movement succeeded not only because it exposed injustice but because it built a coalition capable of altering the status quo. In South Africa, the ANC’s armed wing directed itself principally at government installations and infrastructure rather than at mass-casualty attacks on civilians—and where it strayed from that doctrine, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found the ANC responsible for gross violations of human rights. In the arena of civil rights, there are clear reasons why non-violence succeeded and violence generally failed.