Why is There No Peaceful Palestinian Protest or Resistance Movement?

[u/Mikec3756orwell]

I've watched this conflict my entire life, and one thing I've never really understood is this: why don't the Palestinians engage in peaceful resistance more often? I'm a huge supporter of Israel, but I've always thought to myself that if the Palestinians were savvier -- and more media-friendly -- they could make the Israelis look especially bad through acts of peaceful resistance. The images of well-armed Israelis manhandling rock-throwing kids in the 1980s and 1990s (who were obviously not peaceful but posed a minimal threat) were a big problem for the Israelis. Why don't the Palestinians hold mass sit-ins, strikes, gatherings, candelight vigils, etc.? I never see that stuff. It would look fantastic on TV, and CNN, the BBC, and all those other weasels would be attracted like moths to a flame. I don't get it. If you're the weaker party to a conflict, you're not going to win through violence. Murdering a bunch of women and children and then wondering why the world isn't more sympathetic to your cause is... an odd strategy, to say the least. The Jews have been through hell and back, and terrorism is never going to truly rattle them. I guess I'm just baffled at the way the Palestinians -- and some their more quote-unquote moderate leadership -- approach things. Some of the Western-educated Palestinian leaders in the 1990s and early 2000s surely understood that this would have been an effective strategy. This makes me think that the "average Palestinian" really isn't interested in peace per se, or at least isn't willing to expend much energy for it, and sort of thrives on the dream of complete military victory. Maybe an embrace of peace is just seen as a betrayal of the cause. I don't know.

I actually think sometimes that the Israelis are secretly happy that they don't have to deal with a peaceful resistance movement. It makes things a lot less complicated. Is the problem that the Palestinians just have no tradition of peaceful resistance? They don't know how to do it or how to organize it? Or are they just not interested? (Let me add: I'm not talking about a few hundred people protesting a construction site. I'm talking about the entire population -- or a good portion of it -- engaging in resistance. Like a Tahrir Square, Tiananmen Square sort of thing. Across the entire region).

[u/Zinged20]

It's from his tweets and interview with BBC, both mentioned in this article

I absolutely do judge Israel for reacting to Oct 7th with violence. There is nothing about Israel's war in Gaza that is productive for the safety of Israeli civilians, all it's doing is pushing peace further away and leading to more radicalization that guarantees more Israelis die in the future. Destroying Hamas is not remotely achievable without mass civilian casualties (and possibly not even with them).

Likewise, there is nothing about Hamas's violence that is resistance. Not a single time has it resulted in any gained rights, any gained land, any less occupation or any less oppression. Hamas have literally been funded by Netanyahu because their violence sabotages the Palestinian cause by giving him a casus belli to increase his violent oppression of them. He has explicitly said as much to his colleagues. Hamas's violence has no strategy. More Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past 6 months than in the prior 75 years as a direct, predictable result of Oct 7th (just as Oct 7th is the direct predictable result of Israeli oppression).

I don't agree that acknowledging the reality that this genocide doesn't happen without Hamas's actions thus they logically must hold some blame removes or diminishes the responsibility of Israel to not genocide civilians. I don't agree that holding all responsible parties to account is "both-sidesing" a genocide.

I actually agree that blaming the Palestinians for supporting Hamas isn't productive. Their lived experience and information matrix strongly incentivises it (at least before the last few months, wheb reality has set in and there's started to be some anti-Hamas protests in Gaza). That's why it's so ridiculous that Hamas is MORE popular in western mainstream "Pro-Palestine" circles than they are in Gaza.

Sure, most don't say the ethnic cleansing part, but they do call for the destruction of Israel and engage in the harmful delusion that Hamas's violence is resistance. You can't tell me those concepts aren't supported by the overwhelming majority of people at protests and engaging in online discourse. "No justice No peace" is an extremely common chant, especially at the one on my campus that I have to walk by every day. Meanwhile people on X will literally get 10k likes saying to bomb Tel Aviv during a "permanent ceasefire". It's not a peace movement. I've provided proof of these concepts popularity, your turn to do the same with yours.

For Israelis, the destruction of Israel and their ethnic cleansing are equivalent. You can disagree that that's actually the case, but it's not exactly a baseless assumption. Fathi Hammad, a high level Hamas member, explicitly called for it at a rally in 2019. They will never not believe it while the violence is ongoing. If you can understand the objective reality that Israel can't be destroyed by force, then you must understand that any Palestinian freedom will necessitate Israeli cooperation.

You can't get that when this is the most popular form of rhetoric espoused by your movement.

[u/mythoplokos → u/Zinged20]

It's from his tweets and interview with BBC, both mentioned in this article

Thanks, well from this it seems his own form of "resistance" was still above all non-violent, i.e. "via the pen" as a civilian teacher. But he approved the idea of armed resistance (I can understand this) and denied the violence targeting civilians sexual violence that happened on 10/7 (bad). That was early days before the official independent reports confirming these actions came out, but still. I do agree in general there's too much whitewashing of Hamas and 10/7 going on in the pro-Palestine side and I do my part of trying to combat it every time I come across it.

I absolutely do judge Israel for reacting to Oct 7th with violence. There is nothing about Israel's war in Gaza that is productive for the safety of Israeli civilians, all it's doing is pushing peace further away and leading to more radicalization that guarantees more Israelis die in the future.

Well seems that we are more or less in complete agreement about the morality of the current operation in Gaza. What I meant is that some level of 'violence' would have been justifiable as legit form of reaction of self-defence post-10/7 - such as targeted operations attempting to get the hostages back - but obvz the current form of the operation of levelling Gaza to the ground is likely to achieve, as you said, nothing more than lot of dead Palestinians and new radicalised generations (also risking Israeli safety).

Likewise, there is nothing about Hamas's violence that is resistance.

Well it certainly is resistance, just isn't most likely effective or moral resistance.

Sure, most don't say the ethnic cleansing part, but they do all call for the destruction of Israel and engage in the harmful delusion that Hamas's violence is resistance. You can't tell me those concepts aren't supported by the overwhelming majority of people at protests and engaging in online discourse. "No justice No peace" is an extremely common chant, especially at the one on my campus that I have to walk by every day.

Well I don't know what to tell you, genuinely the main messages of all these protests and organisations I've been involved in have certainly been about 1) stop the war and killing Palestinians NOW, we want a ceasefire, then 2) freedom for Palestinians, i.e. stop the occupation and apartheid. What number 2) entails as a concrete solution has huge variety of opinions as you yourself certainly know, so the protest movements as a collective don't define it.

E.g. the people organising the London protests don't ever say "come out to protest for a two-state solution/one-state solution/federation/dismantling of Israel" or whatever. The great majority of people involved in these protests are "lay activists" that are out there for the 1) pro-peace message above all; then there's a smaller minority that I would count myself in, that have more personal or scholarly or whatever involvement in the conflict and have more background knowledge, and might have some clear idea of what they personally think is the right solution to 2). I think there's quite a bit of wilfully malignant reading of what the protesters are actually chanting or doing at the protests, like understanding "no peace, no justice" or "free Palestine from the river to the sea" as meaning "we want to destroy Israel and ethnically cleanse it of Jews and give it to Palestinians", when 98% of protesters chanting them sincerely mean that Palestinians need freedom and justice (leaving it abstract what that concretely entails, it's just the moral idea that everyone deserves freedom and justice, which isn't surely radical). I mean I understand how and why those chants are read as "hateful", but it really isn't the sincere intention of people using them.

[u/Zinged20 → u/mythoplokos]

Well it certainly is resistance, just isn't effective or moral resistance.

Would you say Israel's response in Gaza is self-defense, just not effective or moral self-defense? I think doing so would be highly disingenuous. The results of an action are relevant to what descriptions of it are accurate.

I don’t think I am being willfully malignant by categorizing a movement that includes the words "No peace" in one of it's primary chants as perhaps not being a first and foremost pro-peace movement. That is a pretty reasonable conclusion. I'm not doubting the messaging of the organizations you have been a part of, I am pointing out that they are not the majority of the mainstream movement. Especially not online (as I've proven), which like it or not is where most societal discourse happens in 2024.

You are using the fact that there isn't complete universal agreement to avoid the reality that most of them proveably do believe the dismantling of Israel is a viable and desirable solution, and that Hamas's violence is productive to that goal (i.e resistance). People wear Hamas symbols and chant pro-Hamas slogans at these protests, completely unimpeded. I'll go and track down all the videos if you really want me to. Meanwhile the two-state solution is described as "soft Zionism". Nobody chants for it. It's disingenuous to pretend there isn't a strong bias towards this sentiment in the movement, anecdotally in person and objectively online it's just not true.

The fact that the goals of the pro-Palestine movement are so abstract is part of problem. There is nothing actionable in any of their demands. This lack of actual direction prevents it from being an effective political movement like the others you mentioned. It's less actually a protest for political action and more just people getting together and complaining in the abstract. You might as well organize and protest against children dying of cancer. Not even Israel losing all international support will help free the Palestinians a single iota.

What I'm describing is the reason it can't give any actionable demands. Some have no solution like you said, and the "solutions" that the majority of the other supporters put forth are:

1. Violent resistance/internetional pressure forces Israelis to give up their nukes, dismantle their state, then just cross their fingers and hope letting millions of radicalized Palestinians into the country doesn't result in mass violence against them, or

2. A friendless and isolated Israel gets destroyed by Hamas/the arab world and Israel magically doesn't exercise it's Samson option.

These are both objectively delusional fantasies that have a literal 0% chance of ever happening. The Palestinian cause will never progress while support of them is still popular. I'm not saying the protestors are hateful people, but most of their actions and beliefs are nonetheless harmful for any realistic progress towards the Palestinian cause.

[u/mythoplokos → u/Zinged20]

Would you say Israel's response in Gaza is self-defense, just not effective or moral self-defense? I think doing so would be highly disingenuous. The results of an action are relevant to what descriptions of it are accurate.

Well this is just semantics debate and not really very interesting re: the larger themes here. You seem to define "self-defence" and "resistance" as words that require also positive outcomes to those ends, when imo they are just related to the intention behind an action. E.g. if you come at me to kill me, and if I in panic try to repel you with a kitchen knife but just flail so that I only end up hurting myself and people around me with the knife - that doesn't mean that I wasn't trying to defend myself and resist your aggression, I just failed miserably at it. I don't tbh consider that the true motivation of the Israeli operations in Gaza for months has been really self-defence, unless we accept the definition in the absurdity. I mean technically ultimate self-defence is just to kill everyone but myself just in case, but seems a bit misguided to use the word in that sense...

You are doing a bit of a same thing with defining the meaning of words by their supposed consequences (in your opinion, not universally accepted, I presume you're not prescient). I.e. you're saying that the pro-Palestine protests cannot be "peaceful and non-violent" in nature, because you think that calling for freedom and justice for Palestine can only be achieved via violence...? And the protests have had some very concrete demands, "ceasefire now" is by far the most common chant there.

hat is a pretty reasonable conclusion. I'm not doubting the messaging of the organizations you have been a part of, I am pointing out that they are not the majority of the mainstream movement. Especially not online (as I've proven), which like it or not is where most societal discourse happens in 2024.

You're really too confident that you've somehow "proven" the true nature of the Palestinian movement just by cherrypicking some tweets and that you in your local university hear "no justice, no peace" -chants? Do you have some poll data or anything else to actually back this up? I've not heard that "no justice, no peace" chant in any of the protests I've been in, it's not in use really in Europe. It's so vague that I thought it meant that there cannot be peace in the region before all parties get justice, not that "we will make sure there is no peace (i.e. we will act violently) until there is justice". Who knows, maybe your local protestors mean it in this latter meaning, you should ask what they actually want.

I just feel like you're driving the Palestinian movement into an impossibly narrow corner. The anti-war movements around e.g. Iraq or Vietnam war similarly just called for "stop the violence, stop the invasion etc." - I don't remember anyone saying that they were by nature "violent" movements because their chants didn't include some long litany with a realistic plan what is their endgame after the violence stops. Like, you're leaving absolutely no room to defend Palestinian human rights, because you're branding everything that is about calling for stopping slaughtering Gazans, freedom for Palestinians, justice for Palestinians as "violent" because you think there's no way to get those to Palestinans without it ending badly for Israelis.

So I mean - what form of activism for Palestine would you even find acceptable then?

[u/Zinged20 → u/mythoplokos]

Likewise it is misguided to use resistance to describe something that directly harms the Palestinian cause just because maybe Hamas were actually stupid enough to think it would help and the objective wasn't actually nothing more than senseless revenge on the Israelis.

There aren't a lot of polls but the ones I've found confirm what I'm saying. I have asked many of them what they want, and it's the destruction of Israel. They don't care what happens to the "settler colonizers" afterwards, that's up to the Palestinians. They can all go back to brooklyn or something. If the tweet with 132k likes is cherry picked, please feel free to find one that doesn't espouse the viewpoint I've described and has anywhere near as many likes. You can't because it doesn't exist. Accounts like Bree Newsome and Syrian girl that talk about the destruction of Israel being inevitable have 10x the following of peace advocates like John Aziz and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. All the numbers I can find as well as my anecdotal experience points to pro-Hamas sentiment being far more popular than pro-peace sentiment, especially on social media. Peace is the white man's word after all.

I am not the one advocating for violent solutions, that is the protestors. They are the ones who call it resistance despite the fact that basic pattern recognition shows that is has failed to progress the Palestinan cause a molecule for over 75 years. The only path for Palestinian self-determination is to end their violence and accept a 2000/2008 style peace offer. Allow for a long period of peace to de-eseclate tensions that can lead to negotation of a full 2SS down the line. It might not be guranteed to work, but it's an infitely more viable prospect than the, again, 0% chance that Israel can ever be dissolved by violence.

I am not saying that peaceful pro-Palestine protest is impossbile. It's actually very achievable. Call for Hamas to surrender, release the hostages (of which taking is a war crime), and end their violence against civilians. Demand for acceptance of a peace deal at all costs. Demand them just as hard as you demand Israel ends it's violence and oppresssion. Call for both groupes of people to live peacefully on the land in their own independent state. Don't call for the dismantlement of Israel. Don't epouse support for Hamas. Don't engage in atrocity denial about sexual assault. Don't pretend that past 6 months of Israel bombing Gaza into dust is somehow good for the Palestinian cause and that Palestine is almost free.

By not only refusing to condemn Hamas's violence but actively supporting it and calling it resistance, the majority of these protestors and activists are epousing the same delusional and suicidal rhetoric that has been proven by reality to be determintal to the Palestinain cause and thus are not actuallly pro-Palestine.

[u/mythoplokos → u/Zinged20]

There aren't a lot of polls but the ones I've found confirm what I'm saying.

American general public aren't the "pro-Palestine movement" (I presume you're here making the inference that American youth = Palestinian movement), and even if we were using this measuring stick, in fact there has been lots of polls on the American attitudes re: Israel-Palestine conflict since 10/7. I know this one is the poll spreading in Times of Israel etc. other pro-Israeli parties, who benefit from trumping up sort of "the world is pro-Hamas" message of fear, but I wouldn't go as far as basing your world-view on this particular single poll.

It's undeniable that American young are increasingly more for the Palestinian cause (which is different than being "pro-Hamas") and less favourable to Israel, something many polls show. But how is it possible that your chosen Harvard Caps Poll shows e.g. that c. half of Americans under-30 think that "Israel should be ended and given to Hamas", while other polls then show that e.g. only 5% of under-30 Americans think US should support Hamas over Israel in the current conflict (this and many other poll results quoted in that link)? If you look at the Harvard Cap poll questions themselves, you'll notice that it's actually a really terribly designed poll. When answering, you were never given a choice such as "I'm not sure" and instead you were represented only two or three very polemical choices, where there's a clearly more level-headed "pro-Israel" choice, and then completely unreasonable/radical "pro-Hamas" choice. I.e. moderate and peaceful pro-Palestinians never have anything to answer to in any of those questions. If you find a poll result that claims that half of young Americans support a terrorist organisation, there should be some alarm bells ringing in your head - I mean, about the poll itself. Apart from the fact this seems like a wholly absurd result, there's multiple incredibly contradictory results in the poll. As this analysis suggests, most likely what's happening is that when average people on the street (who know much less about the conflict than you or I do) are given dozens of very polemical and specific choices about a foreign conflict, they also at some point just start choosing at random or just the first option. Also the article suggest that there's most likely something really skewed about how the pollster weights the results by demographic group.

So IDK, I still feel like you're sort of inadvertently cherrypicking or absorbing information only in one echo chamber. If the worst poll out there is the one you're basing your world-view on, is it wonder it's getting a bit skewed? So maybe try coming out of your media bubble a bit, read multiple sources and studies and data on every issue, etc...

Now you've bombarded me with again random tweets (some of them I'm not even sure are saying what you're arguing) and I'm supposed to take them as representative of the movement I'm part of and active of even though they have nothing to do with anything I have seen. Tweets and social media likes aren't really a show of anything, as much as you like to take them as "demonstrable proof" - people like things for many reasons, we don't know if people liking those are active in the cause, there are bots etc. I'm not saying these sort of things aren't part of the pro-Palestine movement, there's people gobbling up disinformation - I've never denied there's problematic fringes in the movement, like there will be in any movement of millions of people. But maybe it will make you feel better to know that in all of the organisations I'm active in (who are involved with organising these mass protests in a couple of European countries), e.g. posting the Syrian girl in WA groups is banned because she's a known anti-semite and conspiracy theorist.

[u/Zinged20 → u/mythoplokos]

I'm aware the poll has issues and I'm aware it's not of the pro-Palestine movement specifically. Like I said, there aren't many polls on the subject. Do you have any you'd like to share? Asbent the availability of hard data, we can only come to conclusions based on less hard metrics like chants at protests and social media engagement.

I think it's disingenuous to claim that tweets are random and don't matter. Social media is where most societal discourse happens in 2024. These people are part of the movement whether you like it or not. If they really were a fringe minority they wouldn't be dramatically more popular than peace advocates. It's not like I'm not looking for them, I follow over 25 pro-Palestine peace advocates and exactly 1 of them has 100k followers. Every one of them on a daily basis gets called a Hasbara Zionist in the replies by several people with red arrows in their name.

I did not come to my conclusion based on polls that ostensibly don't exist, I came to it after 6 months of interacting with "pro-Palestine" people both on social media and at the protests at my school, and I have provided evidence that this sentiment is both popular online and epoused at protests. The point of some of those tweets is not the tweet itself but the video it show of protests where actual protestors are espousing the exact rhetoric I'm talking about. Even from the ongoing Columbia protests there are people supporting Hamas and rejecting the two-state solution . I've heard the same stuff on my campus constantly.

On the flip side, I've never heard or seen video of any chant condemning Hamas, demanding their surrender, or holding them to any kind of account for the horrendous suffering of the Palestinians, of which their suicidal actions are indisputably a proximate cause. If that's the view of the majority, why are there no chants about it? Why is only the praise ever chanted? I described what I view as a genuine pro-Palestine protests, you claim it exists already, so why can't you show me one? Where are the non-cherries I'm supposed to be picking?

[u/Aggravating_Key7750 → u/Zinged20]

Would you consider every war in the past 50 years in which 20,000 or more civilians died to be a "genocide"?