The tidal wave of Palestinization that has engulfed the West represents the biggest threat to decades-old Palestinian quest to be viewed as a nation.
Since October 7, the Western pro-Palestinian movement transformed into a well-organized global force with structure, funding, and access to the centers of power.
There has been a hostile takeover of the Palestinian cause by the West: The Palestinian flag is no longer about Arabs in Palestine – it is mostly used as a Western cultural icon; the quest for Palestinian statehood is no longer about Palestinians’ self-determination but about the Western concept of “justice”; and Palestinians’ dire condition in Gaza is no longer about their human rights to flee a war zone and stay alive, but about protecting Western principles, such as opposition to ethnic-cleansing.
The question is not “What is best for Palestinians?” but “What is best for Western pro-Palestinians?”
As discussed in my book, The Assault on Judaism, Palestinians have been drafted to our era’s attempt to eradicate Judaism, which is carried out through the Western ideology of Israel-bashing: negating the idea of Judaism, through negating the idea of Jewish state.
Therefore, the term “Palestine” has been re-appropriated by Westerns to that end.
This is not the first time this happened.
Palestine: A traveling term
This term “Palestine” was first introduced by the Romans. Expelling the Jews from their land, they renamed Judea as Palestine. Over the centuries, this term was accepted by Jews themselves. The Land of Israel and Palestine became synonymous.
But in the 1920s, the West migrated the term. Arabs in Palestine at the time expressed their collective sentiment through the nascent Hashemite Arab Kingdom of Syria. They identified as Syrians. When France took over Syria and ended the Arab Kingdom, Western colonialist offices imposed a new identity on Arabs in Palestine: “Palestinians.” British diplomat Mark Sykes (of the Sykes-Pictot agreement) even came up with a flag.
While this colonialist identity-engineering exercise was initially rejected by Arabs living in Palestine, European powers cultivated the notion of Palestinian nationalism in order to promote their own Western interests: The British as counterforce to the Jews, Germans as counterforce to the British, and since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU and European governments as a counterforce to the State of Israel and by extension to America.
This worked and, by the turn of the 21st century, it was clear that the term Palestine, as well as the Sykes flag represented the national movement of Palestinian Arabs.
But in recent years, and especially since October 7, the term has been migrating, yet again, from describing a group of individuals in the Middle East, toward describing an abstract concept in the West.
This, for example, was reflected in the September 2023 University of Pennsylvania Palestine Writes festival. American students were not expected to write of the longing for a land they never been to – nor knew much of – but about such concepts as: occupation, suppression, injustice. Similarly, President Donald Trump referring to Senator Chuck Schumer as a “Palestinian” is not a reference to his ethnic background, but to his ideology.
Some can argue, cynically, that the re-appropriation of the term is legitimate. After all, it was Europe who “owns the copyright” on the term Palestine: The Romans created it, and the British, French, and Germans promoted it.
But what about the human rights of Palestinians themselves?Voluntary de-Palestinization
Repeatedly, Palestinians are denied their basic rights to personal self-determination by their European oppressors. When Palestinians chose to be employed and mentored by Jewish-owned businesses, European governments launched aggressive campaigns to have those businesses shut down, such as SodaStream. Similarly, when Palestinians in Gaza chose to flee a war zone, the West failed to provide escape routes, and now that President Trump has introduced such a plan, Westerns are opposing it, effectively denying Palestinians the basic human right to leave.
There is an inevitable clash: Europe and Europhilic circles in the United States care exclusively about Palestinian national rights, even at the price of Palestinian human rights. This, while Palestinians naturally care about their personal safety, prosperity, and indeed rights as human beings.
To put it bluntly, Europeans and Western pro-Palestinians dehumanize Palestinians.
We are in an era of seismic changes. The Middle East of September 2023 is not coming back, and therefore, Western foreign offices and seasoned peacemakers should get rid of legacy frameworks and assumptions that, perhaps, were relevant back then, but are only standing in the way of peace today.
In this realm, there is a golden opportunity to shift away from frameworks based on a zero-sum game, such as “land for peace” and the two-state solution, toward frameworks that are based on a win-win, such as the Abraham Accords and President Trump’s Gaza relocation plan.
The writer is the author of a new book, The Assault on Judaism: The Existential Threat Is Coming from the West. He is the chairman of the Judaism 3.0 Think Tank and author of Judaism 3.0: Judaism’s Transformation to Zionism (Judaism-Zionism.com). His geopolitical articles can be accessed on the website: EuropeAndJerusalem.com