Don't Make Palestinians Your Fetish

It's weird and unproductive

I want to quickly respond to this bizarre X post by Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian writer most widely known for denying that Vladimir Putin was about to invade Ukraine back in March and April 2022, just before he did:

She envies Palestinians. She thinks “white culture” is vapid and empty.

I had a relatively popular response to this post, before she blocked me:

One of the things that I’ve tried hard to get across in the various blog posts, articles, and tweets that I’ve written is that Palestinians are really just people like anyone else, albeit in a horrible circumstance.

I’ve met thousands of other Palestinians throughout my life, and they are just people. They read, and write, play guitar, socialise, cook, doomscroll, go for a walk, go to the beach, watch Netflix. Much of the same stuff that white people, black people, and Israelis, and everybody else in the modern world is doing. Our political views, hobbies, interests, and personalities as individuals are all over the map.

Most of us have the same personal hopes and dreams that everyone else does. Comfort, safety, and a better life for our children. So what’s different? Well, we are trapped in a horrifying conflict that continues to be stoked by many forces outside of our own society, and in tandem with this large parts of our political leadership have been captured by predatory jihadist ideologues like Yahya Sinwar, and Ismail Haniyeh.

The reality is that these predatory jihadist ideologues are taking advantage of well-meaning people outside Palestine who like Caitlin might see the Palestinians as an exotic species, some kind of rare bird, ancient, refined, dignified, honourable, and untouched by modernity, a noble savage of sorts living in harmony with nature. Unlike those horrible, nasty, artificial, fake, colonial Israelis. Johnstone continues:

Here is another post in this vein that I remember seeing from a pseudonymous user on X:

These narratives ultimately boil down to being uncompromising, and anti-Israeli. In their reckoning, Israelis are not indigenous to the land, or valid in any way. To them, Israel is a fake, disgusting, colonial, genocidal attempt to stamp out the authentic Palestinians, and their deep and rich culture.

Personally, I think both Jews and Palestinians have long and deep-rooted national cultures, and complex relationships with ancestry, and modernity. The fact is that we are actually both related genetically to the same people, and their culture—the ancient Israelite and Canaanite cultures that inhabited the land before the days of Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Turkish, and British colonisation.

The reality of the Jewish experience, though, especially the Ashkenazi Jewish experience is that they were displaced in large part by the Romans, and their culture was filtered through centuries of slavery, subjugation and life in exile. After more than a thousand years of mistreatment and pogroms they chose—quite rationally—to return to the land of their forefathers and live, rather than be burned to death by antisemitic mobs in Europe, and the wider Middle East. I cannot begrudge them wanting to live, just as I cannot begrudge any Palestinian who wants to live, and who wants a normal life. Wanting to live, and wanting to feel connected to your ancestors is the most normal thing for any of us, whether Palestinian, Israeli, or any other group.

That’s why I have chosen to focus on de-escalation, peace, and reconciliation. But for the fetishists who envy Palestinians—and their jihadist allies—they seem to have no problem allowing Palestinians to fight and die either until victory or death. Our noble savagery, in their eyes, seems to only be sustained when we choose to fight and die, fight in the name of Allah, fight for the sake of jihad, fight to hoist the flag of Islam above Jerusalem.

When Palestinians choose modernity, peace, or coexistence, we are no longer useful to their fantasy. When we choose to have real dialogue with Israelis and Zionist Jews, and start to build normal relationships with them, we become falsely labelled as traitors, sellouts, Hasbarists, supporters of oppression, subjugation and occupation. What utter, patent nonsense, of course.

The real dignity is in building mutual relationships to improve our situation and help to get Palestinians out of the mess that we find ourselves in. Above 90% of Gazans are now living in a tent. This is where Hamas’ approach to Palestinian politics has led us. They are not “noble savages” fighting for their authentic culture. They are above all else a failure, and their failure would be judged a failure regardless of which country they were from. If they were Israelis who led Israelis to ruin, they deserve to be judged a failure. The same as if they were Japanese, or English, or Australian, or American.

Political leadership and political success should be judged by the same criteria regardless of which country we are talking about. Are you building wealth, prosperity, and modernity for your citizens? Are your citizens free? Are they able to pursue their lives, passions, and desires as they see fit? No? Then you are a failure. Move over. Move on.

If Hamas and their fellow jihadists loved Palestine, or cared about Palestinians even in the slightest way, they would have moved on, and allowed competent Palestinian leadership to take over, whether that is a Palestinian Gandhi, a Palestinian Lee Kuan Yew, or at least a Palestinian Anwar Sadat. But they don’t. That is the point. Their ideology is not about creating a good life here on Earth. They choose deen (religion), over dunya (our world). They are here for a holy war. They are fighting because they aspire to die and go to paradise. Palestine—like plenty of other countries, also including Israel—is not immune to theological fundamentalism. And these people are our theological fundamentalists.

This is a tangent, but I fear that what we need is less a Palestinian Gandhi, and more a Palestinian Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris.

These are the problems that I was talking about in my reply to Caitlin Johnstone. Palestinians have big problems, and we won’t fix these by indulging Western fetishists. Nor will we fix our problems by blaming Israel for everything. The war in Gaza today started on October 7th as a result of the attack on Israel. That wasn’t Israel’s fault. It was Hamas’ choice. I’m not saying we should never criticise Israel, of course. I disagree with the Israeli government on a vast majority of issues and policies.

But the only way to improve Palestinian society is by focusing on improving Palestinian society. We will fix the problems by tackling them head on, and working on solutions.

The anti-Hamas protests we have seen this week in Gaza are a step in the right direction.