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OPINION
BRET STEPHENS
The Appalling Tactics of the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement
April 2, 2024
Red and white posters bearing images of Israeli hostages are ripped up.
Credit...Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis, via Getty Images
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Bret Stephens
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
Last week, Susanne DeWitt, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who later
became a molecular biologist, spoke before the Berkeley, Calif., City
Council to request a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. After
taking note of a “horrendous surge in antisemitism,” she was then
heckled and shouted down by protesters at the meeting when she mentioned
the massacre and rapes in Israel of Oct. 7.
At the same meeting, a woman testified that her 7-year-old Jewish son
heard “a group of kids at his school say, ‘Jews are stupid.’” She, too,
was heckled: “Zionists are stupider,” a protester said. Others yelled,
“cowards, go chase the money, you money suckers” and “you are traitors
to this country, you are spies for Israel.”
Protest movements have an honorable place in American history. But not
all of them. Not the neo-Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978. Not the
white supremacists who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at their Unite
the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
And not too much of what passes for a pro-Palestinian movement but is
really pro-Hamas, with its calls to get rid of the Jewish state in its
entirety (“from the river to the sea …”), its open celebration of the
murder of its people (“resistance is justified …”) and its efforts to
mock, minimize or deny the suffering of Israelis, which so quickly
descend into the antisemitism on naked display in Berkeley.
How did this happen?
It wasn’t a response to the human suffering in Gaza in recent months. A
coalition of Harvard student groups issued a statement on Oct. 7 holding
“the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Pro-Hamas demonstrations broke out worldwide on Oct. 8. A Black Lives
Matter chapter posted a graphic on Instagram of the Hamas paragliders
who murdered hundreds of young Israelis at the Nova music festival. A
Cornell professor said he found the massacre “exhilarating,” and
demonstrators rallied in his support.
Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the
conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.
Nor is it a matter of seeking a Palestinian state — another fact the
demonstrators openly avow. Among the popular chants at many protests is
“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” — all of what had
been Mandatory Palestine before the creation of Israel. Israeli soldiers
and settlers vacated Gaza almost 20 years ago. The towns and kibbutzim
that Hamas invaded on Oct. 7 are only “occupied” if one believes that
all of Israel, in any kind of border, is a form of occupation.
In other words, the central, animating sentiment behind much of the
protest movement is neither humanitarian nor liberationist. It’s
eliminationist. And it expresses itself routinely in the tactics adopted
by so many of its leading activists and followers.
Tactics like the grotesque and routine removal or defacement of posters
of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza. Or holding a loud and aggressive
demonstration outside of New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer
hospital (“Make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows,” said one of
the protest leaders), apparently because the hospital has collaborated
with Israeli medical institutions. Or forcing a Jewish teacher at a
public school in Queens to flee her classroom for safety as hundreds of
teenagers rioted through the school, some waving Palestinian flags. Or
shouting down Representative Jamie Raskin at the University of Maryland
for being “complicit in genocide” when he came to the campus to give a
talk on democracy and “the threat to reason in the 21st century.” Or
surrounding a theater at the University of California at Berkeley that
was supposed to host a talk by an Israeli lawyer, smashing windows,
breaking through locked doors, spitting on and grabbing at least one
student by the neck and forcing Jewish students to flee through an
underground exit.
This is only a partial list. But it reveals the bullying mentality at
the heart of the pro-Hamas movement. It isn’t enough for them to speak
out; they must shut other voices down. It isn’t enough for them to make
a strong or clear argument; they also aim to instill a palpable sense of
fear in their opponents. American civil libertarians of the past once
understood that inherent in the right to protest was the obligation to
respect the right of people with differing views to protest as well.
That understanding seems to be wholly absent from the people who think
that, say, heckling Raskin into silence is also a form of democracy.
In this sense, critics of Israel who claim that American Jews must
choose between Zionism and liberalism have it backward. The illiberals
aren’t the people defending the right of an imperfect but embattled
democracy to defend its territory and save its hostages. They are the
people who, like the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, want
Israel wiped off the map and aren’t ashamed to say so. Not surprisingly,
they also seem to share Ahmadinejad’s attitudes toward dealing with dissent.
It’s true that in nearly every political cause, including the most
justified, there are ugly elements — the Meir Kahanes or the Louis
Farrakhans of the world. But the mark of a morally serious movement lies
in its determination to weed out its worst members and stamp out its
worst ideas. What we’ve too often seen from the “Free Palestine” crowd
is precisely the opposite.
More on Israel and Palestine
Opinion | Bret Stephens
The Left Is Dooming Any Hope for a Palestinian State
Nov. 28, 2023
Opinion | Bret Stephens
The New Rape Denialism
March 5, 2024
Opinion | Bret Stephens
An Arab Mandate for Palestine
March 19, 2024
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about
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A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 2024, Section A,
Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Pro-Palestine
Movement’s Appalling Tactics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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