By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel — I have never met anyone, apart from Arabs who describe themselves as Palestinians, who really give a genuine damn about the Palestinians unless it is linked by an umbilical cord to the hatred of Israel.
Somehow the two things are welded together to the extent that you have to think what comes first – the Palestinian chicken or the Israeli egg.
Those that adopt the Palestinian cause use it as a club to beat Israel. Show me anyone who loves the Palestinians without hating Israel.
Their professed love of Palestinians is selective. They only love them if Israel is lurking there somewhere in their narrative.
They don’t actively love them if Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and other Palestinian abusers are in the picture. Then they go silent. I wonder why.
No BDS campaigns against Egypt for their blockade on Gaza. No pro-Palestinian protests outside Syrian embassies for their wholesale slaughter of Syrian-based Palestinians. BDS has nothing to say about Apartheid-Jordan that has kept Palestinian Arabs stateless, actually in refugee status, since 1948. No peep even against the Palestinian Authority that maintains refugee camps in the territories that they control and administer. How can you be a Palestinian refugee when you live under the control of the Palestinian Authority? Go figure, because I don’t have the answer. Perhaps BDS does.
People who don’t care about the Kurds, Yazidis or Druze yell and scream about the Palestinian condition. Those who do nothing to help Tibetans overcome Chinese oppression, those who merely cluck about Rwanda, Sudan, and Darfur, suddenly discover the Palestinian cause.
If occupation is their schtick how come they do nothing to protest Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus or Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara? Why no boycott campaigns against the two hundred countries that have an occupation issue? How come it’s only Israel that makes them mad?
This professed love for the Palestinians goes hand in hand with a professed hatred of Israel.
The deep hatred that festers against Israel, and I talk about deep hatred not criticism, is all about Israel being the nation state of the Jewish people.
It is an exclusive despicere that goes against all reason and logic, and it shows itself in the falsehoods, the perversion of facts, history and the blood libels that we Jews are so familiar after centuries of similar defamation.
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Shaw is Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He may be contacted via barry.shaw@sdjewishworld.com. Any comments in the space below should include the writer’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for non-U.S. residents.