A Few Simple Questions for All the Righteous Souls Condemning Israel

You say you are especially concerned over the fate of powerless Palestinian civilians. Very well, so where were you when Assad’s forces butchered countless Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp?

1. You say you must stop Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians. According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza, over 200 people have lost their lives in the enclave during the current round of fighting. According to Israel, most or at least very many of these were armed Hamas terrorists, but leave that aside. How many furious protests have you attended since the start of the Syrian Civil War ten years ago, in which hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim civilians have been killed and millions of refugees have fled their homes?
2. When was the last time you took to the streets in your rage over the ongoing Chinese genocide of the Muslim Uighurs?
3. I’m sure you’ve made your voice heard about the expulsion and genocide of the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, haven’t you?
4. Or the slaughter of civilians in Yemen caught between Saudi Arabia and Houthi rebels armed by Iran?
5. Oh, but you say you are especially concerned over the fate of powerless Palestinian civilians. Very well, so where were you when Assad’s forces butchered countless Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp?
6. You say you only have a problem with Israel and hotly deny that you have an antisemitic bone in your body. So why do you march alongside people like these?
7. You say that Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians is “racist” and exactly comparable to South African apartheid or American oppression of Black people. So you let racists like these know that their words were unacceptable, right?
8. You claim Israel is a Goliath trampling on a Palestinian David, but why do you ignore the extremely powerful backers of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists and the genocidal threats they are constantly making against Jews?
9. You claim Zionists are like Nazis, but do you know that one of the main founders of Palestinian nationalism actually met with Hitler and collaborated extensively with the Nazis?
10. You demand to know why Israel and America are blocking the Palestinians from having their own state, but do you know how many times the Palestinians have been offered their own state, and have refused even to negotiate about it? Perhaps you haven’t heard of the British Peel Commission of 1937, but you do know that when the United Nations voted in 1947 to establish Israel, it voted for an Arab state to be created alongside it, right? Or how the Arab League vowed in 1967, in response to Israel’s post-Six Day War offer to pull out of most of the newly occupied territories, that there would be no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and no peace with it? Just since the start of the current century, Yasser Arafat stormed out of the Camp David in 2000 rather than even discuss Israel’s offer of almost the entire West Bank, and Mahmoud Abbas did much the same in negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert from 2006 to 2008.

No doubt I will be accused of presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in black-and-white terms favoring Israel, as if the Jewish state is always blameless and pure in its actions and bears no responsibility for the ongoing violence. I do fault Israel for moving to expel Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, just to pick out one spark for the current round of hostilities, and the country owes its own Palestinian Arab citizens something better than second-class citizenship. But I challenge anyone to find another country that has done better, under a century-long state of constant siege.