When the ceasefire came and the rebuilding began, the “pro-Palestinian” movement revealed what it was truly fighting for – and what it wasn’t.
Now that the hostages are home, the guns have gone silent, and the world will soon come together to rebuild Gaza, one might expect relief and gratitude — a collective exhale after unimaginable pain. Yet, instead of celebration, many in the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement are furious. The ceasefire, which Hamas itself accepted, has been met not with joy but outrage.
That reaction tells us everything we need to know: this movement was never truly about peace, nor even about Palestinians.
I. The Illusion of Advocacy
If this were truly a human-rights movement seeking safety, dignity, and prosperity for Palestinians, then peace and rebuilding would be its triumph. Families returning home, infrastructure restored, trade and education resumed — these should be the movement’s goals achieved.
Instead, many of the loudest voices recoil at the very idea of normalization. They rage not when Israel fights, but when Israel and Palestinians stop fighting. The spectacle of cooperation threatens the core narrative on which their moral authority depends; that Palestinians are forever victims and Jews forever oppressors.
This paradox lays bare the central truth: the modern pro-Palestinian movement is not a liberation movement. It is a grievance movement. Its fuel is not hope but hostility.
II. The Two Ideological Cores: Post-Colonial Dogma and Ancient Hatred
At its foundation lie two overlapping belief systems — one modern and academic, the other ancient and primal.
The Post-Colonial Dogma
Emerging from Western universities in the 1960s and 70s, post-colonial theory reinterpreted nearly all world conflicts through a single lens: the binary of oppressor and oppressed. Colonialism, imperialism, and whiteness became the universal explanation for injustice. In this framework, moral judgment depends not on behavior but on identity.
Israel – revived by Holocaust survivors and refugees from Arab lands – was conveniently cast as an imperialist implant. The extraordinary story of Jewish return to ancestral land, of reviving an ancient language and building a democratic state, was recoded as Western colonization. Facts that complicate the narrative, like Mizrahi Jews expelled from Baghdad or Yemen, or Palestinian leaders rejecting peace offers in 1947, 2000, and 2008, are dismissed as “Zionist talking points.”
Thus, Israel’s very existence becomes an offense against the post-colonial creed, a living contradiction that must be resolved not through coexistence but erasure.
The Persistence of Antisemitism
Layered atop this modern ideology is an ancient one. Antisemitism, the world’s oldest conspiracy theory. It has adapted to every age. In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning wells; in modern Europe, of poisoning economies. Today, they are accused of poisoning peace.
Whether the accusation is religious, racial, or political, the underlying logic remains: Jewish power, in any form, is illegitimate. A powerless Jew is tolerated (sometimes); a sovereign one is intolerable (always). That is why the Jewish state, particularly when it defends itself, evokes such disproportionate fury.
This fusion between post-colonial dogma and antisemitic myth creates a movement that sees Jewish survival not as miraculous but oppressive. It sees Jewish self-determination not as justice but crime. It is an ideological Venn diagram where progressive rhetoric and ancient hatred overlap.
III. The Moment of Truth
Now, as peace dawns and the world rallies to help Palestinians rebuild, the façade cracks. When activists condemn reconstruction, when they mourn ceasefire more than casualties, when they chant “resistance” after the killing has stopped, they expose the emptiness of their moral vocabulary.
If “liberation” means perpetual war, and “justice” means Jewish submission, then this is not solidarity, it is sabotage.
The tragedy is that Palestinians themselves remain its victims. For decades, external movements have rewarded maximalism over pragmatism, symbolism over substance. Leaders who spoke of compromise were shunned; those who promised destruction were lionized. The incentive structure favored the politics of purity over progress.
Now, in the aftermath of so much loss, the world can finally see that those who claimed to champion Palestine were often the ones ensuring its suffering continued.
IV. The Historical Pattern: When Ideologies Consume Their Own
History is replete with movements that began in moral outrage and ended in moral inversion. The French Revolution devoured its reformers. Communist revolutions slaughtered their peasants. Post-colonial movements across Africa and the Middle East replaced foreign oppressors with domestic tyrants.
So too here: what began as a call for liberation has metastasized into a religion of resentment. The goal is no longer* the creation of a Palestinian state, but the destruction of the Jewish one. [*In reality, for many the goal was never the creation of a Palestinian state, but the destruction of the Jewish one from the outset.]
V. What Real Solidarity Would Look Like
True solidarity with Palestinians means standing for life, not death. It means opposing Hamas (and all similarly aligned extremists) not because one loves Israel, but because one loves Palestinians. It means advocating for education, commerce, governance, and reconciliation – not martyrdom, militancy, and indoctrination.
It means rejecting the illusion that progress depends on Israel’s disappearance, and embracing the reality that it depends on coexistence.
There is a moral clarity available now that was obscured by the fog of war. The question is whether the world will see it or choose the comfort of old lies.
VI. A Call for Moral Courage
For too long, many in the West have outsourced their conscience to fashionable causes. “Pro-Palestinian” has become a moral badge requiring no knowledge of history, no empathy for Jews, and most significantly, no real concern for Palestinians. Now, as peace reveals the movement’s hollow and evil center, silence is complicity.
Those who genuinely care about human rights must speak honestly: supporting peace, coexistence, and reconstruction is pro-Palestinian. Opposing those things is anti-human.
We are entering a new era in which the false moral hierarchies of the past no longer hold. History will remember who chose truth over slogans — and who could not bear to see peace because it robbed them of their cause.
