For decades, the phrase “pro-Palestinian” carried a certain moral weight in Western discourse. It suggested solidarity with a people seeking self-determination, an end to hardship, and a path toward dignity alongside their neighbors.
Today, that meaning has shifted. What once aimed at statehood and coexistence has hardened, in too many circles, into a posture that prioritizes the erasure of Israel over the welfare of Palestinians themselves.
This change did not happen overnight. It accelerated after October 7, 2023, and it has been aided by voices that insist the conflict is merely a matter of empathy gaps or false dichotomies.
Consider the arguments advanced in recent years by writers who claim the Israeli-Palestinian divide is bridgeable if only both sides abandon extremism and recognize their shared fate. They point to the extremes: a protester chanting that Zionists do not deserve to live, or a politician calling for the Gaza Strip’s destruction.
They urge dialogue, personal stories, and a rejection of scarcity thinking. They insist it is possible, indeed necessary, to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian because the two peoples are bound together. On the surface, this sounds reasonable.
In practice, it papers over the central obstacle that has defined the conflict for a century: the consistent refusal by Palestinian leadership and large segments of the population to accept a Jewish state within any borders.
History is not ambiguous on this point. The Peel Commission in 1937 offered partition. Arab leaders rejected it. The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 offered two states with clear borders. The Arab states and Palestinian leadership rejected it and launched a war.
After 1967, the Khartoum summit produced the three no’s: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. Offers at Camp David in 2000 and later were met with violence rather than acceptance. Each rejection rested on the same foundation: the legitimacy of a Jewish state itself was the problem, not the precise lines on a map.
Improving living conditions, expanding economic opportunity, or easing movement has never altered that ideological core. Palestinian rejectionism, not poverty or settlements, remains the primary barrier.
October 7 exposed how far the contemporary pro-Palestinian stance has drifted from genuine concern for Palestinian lives. When Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,200 people, took hostages, and committed documented atrocities, the response from many who claim the Palestinian cause was not first and foremost condemnation of the perpetrators.
It was often a rapid pivot to “Free Palestine,” the tearing down of hostage posters, and justifications that framed the massacre as the inevitable result of occupation or blockade. That sequence revealed a hierarchy of concern in which Israeli suffering registers as secondary or even deserved, while Palestinian suffering is treated as the sole moral lens.
The people of Gaza, half of them children, suffer under Hamas’s rule, its diversion of resources into tunnels and rockets, and its use of civilians as shields. A movement that truly prioritizes Palestinian welfare would demand the dismantling of that regime and the return of hostages as preconditions for any progress.
Instead, the dominant strain has treated such demands as distractions.
Education, skewed solidarity, and the proper path to peace
The claim that occupation itself erodes Israel’s moral fabric and that a Jewish and democratic Israel cannot endure without a Palestinian state ignores the reverse reality. No amount of military strength can exhaust the desperation of a population raised on the idea that Israel’s existence is temporary and illegitimate.
Textbooks, media, and public statements continue to celebrate the goal of Israel’s disappearance. Polls conducted after October 7 have shown substantial support among Palestinians for the attacks. When majorities view the massacre as justified, the path to mutual recognition shrinks.
Shared fate is real, but it cannot be realized while one side’s political culture treats the other’s existence as the original sin.
Western pro-Palestinian activism has absorbed this maximalism. On campuses and in progressive circles, the language of indigenous rights and decolonization is applied selectively. Jewish historical connection to the land, continuous presence, and legal revival of sovereignty are dismissed as colonial invention.
Arab conquests and the subsequent cultural dominance across the Middle East receive little scrutiny. The result is a narrative that reframes rejectionism as resistance and terrorism as the voice of the oppressed.
This is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is the instrumentalization of their cause for a broader ideological project that views Israel as the stand-in for Western power.
True concern for Palestinians would confront the incentives that keep them trapped. Pay-for-slay policies, the glorification of attackers, and the refusal to recognize Jewish self-determination have produced generations of radicalization. Economic development alone cannot dissolve an ideology that sees compromise as betrayal.
Peace requires partners who abandon the lust for Israel’s destruction and invest in bridges rather than tunnels, food for their own people rather than weapons, and recognition rather than rejection.
The change in what “pro-Palestinian” means has made genuine progress harder. It has elevated those who refuse dialogue into the moral center while casting those who insist on mutual recognition as the problem. It has turned a political dispute with historical complexity into a morality play in which one side’s agency is erased, and the other’s is treated as original guilt.
Israelis and Palestinians will remain neighbors. Their futures are linked. But linkage does not require pretending that rejectionism is symmetry or that empathy demands ignoring the deliberate choice of terror over statehood.
Until the pro-Palestinian position recovers the capacity to demand accountability from Palestinian leadership and society, it will continue to fail the very people it claims to champion.
These new pro-Palestinian advocates do not stop at policy critique. Many reveal a clear sympathy for Palestinian violence and a disturbing indifference to Israeli deaths.
After the October 7 massacres, their first responses often excused the slaughter as resistance, tore down hostage posters, or pivoted immediately to “Free Palestine” while Israeli families still searched for those missing. Civilian deaths on the Israeli side register as necessary or secondary.
This is not solidarity with ordinary Palestinians. It is a moral failure that treats Jewish lives as expendable and keeps the cycle of bloodshed alive.
The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho.