No, Peace Advocates Are Not "Collaborators"

Don't allow pro-peace Palestinians to be silenced

One of the most charged and dangerous allegations in Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics is when a Palestinian is accused of being collaborator with Israel and the Israeli government, or more specifically with the IDF and the Israeli intelligence services.

During the First and Second Intifadas (1987–1993, and 2000–2005), accusations of collaboration led to beatings, torture, and executions, often without formal trials. Militant groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Fatah’s Tanzim wing carried out these reprisals, and this of course continues today in Gaza where jihadist militants are murdering Palestinians who are labelled as having collaborated with the Israeli government, with one particularly gruesome example being that of Uday al-Rabay who was tortured to death by Hamas this week after participating in anti-Hamas protests calling for the end of Hamas rule in Gaza.

It’s very difficult as a society to go against the diktats of an authoritarian regime and grow when the regime label dissidents as essentially the enemy within, and a target for arbitrary killing. Who wants to be falsely labelled in such a way? At best it is a terrible risk—both personally, and in a wider communal sense—and at worst it is a death sentence. And for what? A very large amount of the time the person is just an inconvenient critic or someone who wanted to have conversations with Israelis in order to try and disentangle the conflict, and find a pathway to peace, de-escalation, and reconciliation.

Of course, for Western Palestinians living in places like Britain and America, although we are not living under Hamas rule, we still experience having this allegation thrown at us if we step out of line against the authoritarian ideology of Hamas. That’s what I’ve experienced over and over again. You talk about peace with Israel, and the possibility of reconciliation and a normal and prosperous life for the Palestinian people, and suddenly you find yourself being branded as a collaborator, or a Likud supporter, or a Kahanist, or a Mossad agent. There’s something quite surreal and otherworldly about it.

One particularly strange example I’ve seen recently is this Irish-American man who falsely labelled the Palestinian-American peace advocate Ahmed Fouad Al-Khatib as a “collaborator” after Ahmed pointed out the tragic failure to create a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders during the period in which Egypt and Jordan controlled those lands between 1948 and 1967:

Ahmed and the Irish-American man were participating in a discussion forum with Montana Tucker, a Jewish-American influencer, talking about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of course how to resolve it.

Now, I don’t know if this man understood the danger and the weight that the allegation carries, or if he was simply repeating language he had heard Hamas supporters use to attack other Palestinians. The fact that he later went on to invert the Holocaust by falsely accusing Zionists of being Nazis suggests that he is already climbing up the Hamas radicalisation spectrum himself.

One person who surely knows the implications is Abubaker Abed, the Palestinian sports journalist from Gaza who repeated and endorsed the man’s allegation.

But I still find it surprising to see it in the wild in the United States. It seems so strange to me to see an American man, living in America, echoing the threatening and menacing language that Hamas has used for many years to subjugate their critics and enforce a theocratic and brutal dictatorship in Gaza. This Irish-American man who lives in America and enjoys all of the protections of the American constitution including the First Amendment is effectively trying to intimidate and silence pro-peace Palestinians in the same language that we see from the regime in Gaza.

At the end of the day, how can we resolve the conflict if Palestinians are unable to talk to Israelis and discuss the grievances that are sustaining and perpetuating the conflict? How can we hope to live in peace if we are prevented from even discussing peace?

These are futile questions to ask, because the actual answer here is that Hamas and their fellow travellers—including the radicalised Westerners—don’t actually want peace. Hamas want to fight Israel until either Israel is destroyed or until they themselves are killed in the war against Israel, at which point they will go to paradise and be rewarded by God with the opportunity to deflower 72 virgins.

The radicalised Westerners, on the other hand, want a similar thing, but they are of course less concerned about any kind of theological implications, and more about a kind of post-modern self-righteousness that sees the conflict in Manichaean terms and paints Israel—and quite bizarrely, oftentimes it is only Israel who they accuse of this—as a continuation of Western colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide.

They refuse to see the complexity of the conflict, and that both Palestinians and Israelis have a right to exist and to coexist.

Nonetheless, for Palestinians like Ahmed and I who do not believe in Hamas’ version of theology we know that peace is the only way forward. Israel is not going to disappear. Jewish people have ancient roots in the land that we should not try to erase. They are, in fact, our cousins.

This means that the pro-peace movement will continue onwards as much as we possibly can, regardless of the jihadists and their peculiar Western allies. We are not seeking to collaborate with oppression. We are seeking to absolve ourselves of a system of conflict that guarantees oppression and suffering. We are seeking to free ourselves from the cycle of revenge. We are seeking to make peace. We will continue.