Sympathy for the Palestinians

by Dr. Michael Brown, New American Prophet, ©2023

(Dec. 8, 2023) — It is true that a recent poll indicated that 75 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank supported the actions of Hamas on October 7. It is true that the people of Gaza chose to elect Hamas as their leaders in 2006. And it is true that an alarming number of Palestinians have no desire to see a two-state solution. Instead, they want an Israel-free Middle East, “from the river to the sea.” Yet in many ways the Palestinians are victims, and my strong support for Israel does not stop me from grieving over the suffering of the Palestinian people.

They have been victims of decades of bad leadership. Victims of lifelong, anti-Israel propaganda. Victims of the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967.

Their leaders rejected a two-state solution under the Peel Commission in 1937, under the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and under subsequent arrangements through the decades. (For a powerful summary of the evidence, see Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed.)

Not only so, but rather than absorb the Arab refugees who fled Israel during the War of Independence in 1947, the surrounding Arab nations were complicit in creating a permanent refugee crisis. To this day, the Palestinians are the only multi-generational refugees on the planet, and every year that goes by, their anger and disappointment and disillusionment grows.

As stated by Prof. Alon Ben-Meir on the History News Network website, “No efforts have been made to resolve the tragic refugee problem on its own since 1948. Instead, it has been exploited at the expense of innocent men, women, and children, who have been misled, mistreated, marginalized, and used as sacrificial lambs only to feed the insatiable hunger for power of their misguided and self-absorbed leaders.

“In what was initially a disastrous event, the 1948 exodus turned into a Greek tragedy, festering over time and engulfing innocent souls. Since then, the refugees have multiplied nearly sevenfold, with many living under subhuman conditions which serve as incubators for militancy and violence, which Hamas in particular seeks to cultivate.”

Not only so, but Ben-Meir points out that the UN organization formed specifically to deal with the Palestinian refugee crisis, called UNRWA, “in particular is guilty of perpetuating the Palestinian refugee crisis.”

No wonder that, despite world protests supporting Hamas and chanting “Free Palestine,” the Palestinians feel lonely and isolated.

As reported in a November 2023 article in Haaretz, “other studies show that Palestinians feel profoundly, existentially, alone. The second post-October 7 West Bank survey, commissioned by a new policy outfit called the Institute for Social and Economic Progress, asked which international actor is Palestine’s most important strategic ally: 56 percent said ‘none.’ The top ally was Russia, then Turkey (18 and 11 percent, respectively); just 8 percent chose ‘the Arab world.’ Palestinians have no homegrown heroes either. In focus groups, the institute quoted a participant saying ‘I feel that the Palestinian population is orphaned, there is no one to lead them.’”

As for the people of Gaza electing Hamas in 2005, their other alternative, the Palestine Authority, was not dramatically better. And certainly, the general population could not expect that their senior leaders would become billionaires while they lived in poverty or that hundreds of millions of dollars of international funding would go to acquire weapons and build terror tunnels rather than benefit the people themselves.

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