Why the Pro-Palestinian Movement Needs To Be Pro-Peace
Opposing peace means opposing resolution of the conflict
At a pro-Palestinian demonstration today in London, one marcher carried a homemade cardboard sign bearing the words:
“NO PEACE BITCHES!!”
One sign obviously does not represent an entire protest.
But still, it captures a real suspicion of the word peace among parts of the movement.
For some pro-Palestinian activists, peace gets treated like another word for surrender. It means asking Palestinians to accept the loss of land or a future without genuine political rights.
But endless war cannot be the answer. A movement that wants to prevent Palestinian suffering should also be committed to finding a political solution that prevents the next round of suffering.
This is why the pro-Palestinian movement needs to also be pro-peace.
So what does being pro-peace mean to me?
1. It means ending the bloodshed
The first purpose of peace is to stop people being killed, maimed, displaced and traumatised.
That may sound obvious. But every new round of fighting produces more bereaved families, more destroyed communities, and more people with powerful reasons to hate the other side. We can’t ignore this. It needs to end—now.
2. It does not mean total surrender
Palestinians should not be expected to abandon their national aspirations or accept a life without dignity and political rights. Israelis should not be expected to accept permanent insecurity or the possibility of their country’s destruction.
3. It requires a genuine willingness to compromise
It’s easier to favour compromise when it means the other side giving something up.
But real compromise means accepting that neither side will receive everything it wants.
Any vision that requires millions of people to leave, submit or live permanently without rights cannot be treated as a serious peace proposal.
We need compromise. But that compromise needs to be fair, and on both sides.
4. It means recognising the humanity of the other side
Not every Palestinian is responsible for the actions of Hamas. Not every Israeli is responsible for every decision or action of the Israeli government or IDF, either.
An entire population cannot be treated as collectively guilty for harm inflicted on the other side.
Peace requires maintaining that distinction. Even when anger makes collective blame popular.
5. It means rejecting revenge as a political programme
The desire for revenge is sometimes understandable in the context of great suffering or atrocities.
But revenge won’t produce a stable future.
One atrocity does not reverse another. One grieving family is not healed by creating another grieving family.
6. It means accepting that peace is made with enemies
Peace is rarely made between parties that like or trust each other. It is made between adversaries who conclude that coexistence, however imperfect, is preferable to endless destruction.
7. It means choosing the future over the past
History cannot be used as a permanent veto over the future.
At some point, both peoples must decide whether their children will inherit an obligation to continue the conflict—or an opportunity to escape it.
“No peace” may sound defiant. But there is nothing particularly courageous about condemning another generation to fear, hatred and funerals.
Not to oversimplify, but the purpose of any movement is what it does, and the "Pro Palestine" movement has done one and the same thing now for decades: pile crime upon crime (real or imagined) onto the Jewish scapegoat—settler-colonial imperialist capitalist racist apartheid genocidal baby killers etc etc—with the goal of first turning Israel into a global pariah, all in the hope of eventually destroying it. (Why else would all these same "Ceasefire now" peaceniks cheer the massacre of a thousand Israelis? 10/7 was their Super Bowl and they hit the streets to celebrate.)
Since at least the Second Intifada, when Arafat closed the door on the 2-state solution in our lifetimes and chose terrorism instead of peace, the same pattern, revealing a completely closed universe afflicted with a form of intellectual autism has been locked in:
The Palestinians are always excused. They can use terrorism. They can violate agreements. They can make insane genocidal speeches. There will always be justifications for these in the Western media and academia, which has elected itself official white savior and proxy parent and defender of the Palestinians, and who hold a single sacred party line: Israel MUST be the Nazi, the oppressor, the singular cause of all evil, the purpose being to squeeze this conflict into their Procrustean ideological bed, where they are heroic liberators of the poor brown indigenous oppressed battling the wicked white capitalist oppressors.
For Western media and academia, the entire conflict has a separate symbolic life, none of it to do with the actual people there, all of it designed to make them protagonists in an imaginary revolution and fashioned to meet their personal, political, psychological and career needs (Western upper classes are as addicted to cheap virtue as our lower classes are addicted to cheap calories.)
"Pro Palestine" may have started with legitimate criticism of the settlements and continued with an attempt to “understand” and identify with the weaker side. But eventually, justified criticism turned into an industry of excuses which justified every Palestinian crime and enabled and encouraged their eternal jihad. And now this has morphed into a global hate movement: the familiar campaign of lies, demonization, and dehumanization of Israelis and Israel.
The last thing the Free Palestine! cult has ever wanted is peace. They want to play revolutionary at a safe distance and cheer for Arab and Jewish blood to be spilled for their ideological fetishes. They have already sentenced Israel to death and now their only goal is trying to deliver their death sentence. Nothing else matters to them, certainly not the lives and welfare of the Palestinian people, who are nothing but props and extras to them.
An anti-Hamas/terrorism Pro-Palestinian movement is desperately needed, for the sake of not just the Palestinians and the Israelis but all of the West and humanity.