The ugly truth of Palestinian violence

Excerpt from a debate with a veteran war correspondent

Over the weekend, I found myself debating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an award-winning war correspondent who has been covering the issue for almost 40 years. Although I’m not going to divulge the person’s name or their comments, what follows are my own remarks.

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Year in and year out, surveys among Palestinians have shown that nearly every instance of genocidal violence against Jews in Israel has enjoyed 70-80% support. This is not, as you say, a “very small minority.” Denial won’t help address the problem.

Like you, I too have been there—lived there, in fact—and have also interviewed many Palestinians myself, and my experience tracks with the polling data. That said, Israel does engage in information warfare. Both sides do. That’s why it’s good to do survey validation research—methodological review, source and funding criticism, provenance analysis. But putting our respective anecdotal experiences aside, as well as the results of survey data that is far more methodologically robust than either of us asking people questions, why not regard their actions?

See how they celebrate each new murder and attack, including October 7, crowding to see Jewish corpses, dancing around rape victims, old women singing the zaghrouta when Jewish children are murdered, men handing out sweets to Palestinian kids when terrorist rockets land on Jewish daycares, and families bringing their own children to watch the death parades.

Or making Salha’s hand a symbol to celebrate, chanting “from the river to the sea,” the fact that the founding father of Palestinianism was himself a Nazi who adored Hitler and tried to send Jewish children to literal Nazi death camps then later bragged about it, or that when Hamas wasn’t killing as many Jews—because they were planning October 7—their popularity fell and that of groups who were killing more Jews, like Lion’s Den, rose.

We can visit the region 100 times and talk to 1,000 people, or we can rationalize the genocidal sentiment among Palestinians by arguing that this is the result of long-term oppression—as many Palestinians themselves frequently do—but to deny that this genocidal sentiment exists at the levels that it does is simply not very helpful. For the sake of Israelis and Palestinians alike, we have to contend with the very real and very high levels of hatred that fuel a lot of the violence we have been seeing. If for no other reason, than for the sake of the children caught in the middle.

As for the claim that I am employing a double standard, I’m not a big fan of rape and genocidal murder and I don’t much care whether the people doing it are Russian, Israeli, or Palestinian. That’s one standard, not two. You would appear to have one for Israelis and Russians but another for Palestinians.

As for Netanyahu, my only comment would be to note that just last month I saw that the Israel Democracy Institute found 87% of Israelis think he should take responsibility for October 7 and 73% want him to resign. So if he is “out of control,” as you say, though I don’t agree, it should follow that a supermajority of Israelis have moral clarity on the issue. Now compare that to Palestinians, 90% of whom, as of late 2024, believe Hamas committed no atrocities on October 7. That is psychotic in the literal, clinical sense of the word.

Imagine if 90% of Israelis said zero Palestinians children have died in the conflict. You simply never see such stratospheric levels of delusional groupthink in any population, not even Nazi Germany, where even at the peak of the war only about 44% of Germans supported the Nazi Party—it may have gone higher later on, but we lose reliable data around 1943-44—and the only way you get very far above half the population is typically by artificially manufacturing consent through means of totalitarian rule and a victimhood mentality, however rooted in actual historic oppression it may be, like the one Germans were fed in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles.

Not by coincidence, the scapegoats then were also the Jews, and I say not by coincidence because, as I mentioned before, the founding father of Palestinianism was a literal Nazi who adored Hitler and laughed and bragged about trying to send Jewish children in Palestine to Nazi death camps in Europe. We must not forget or hand-wave away such facts when taking account of the two sides here.

Yes, there are monsters in Ukraine, even literal Nazis, and yes, the government is corrupt and all of that, but one side is nevertheless a liberal democracy whose people overwhelmingly want to be left alone and the other is a totalitarian fascist state whose people support genocidal violence in alarming numbers and whose military uses its own people as canon fodder in the grossest imaginable way. The same is also true of Israel, for all its obvious flaws, and Gaza, except Gaza is worse because most Russians do not actually hate Ukrainians in the way that most Palestinians hate Israelis and, indeed, all Jews. And because Hamas manages to use not only its militants in the same psychopathic manner, but its entire civilian population.

So I understand what you say about double standards, and I’ve seen it in other conflicts, and it repulses me. But what I also see is that people witness the horror that the Palestinians are enduring, and have endured before, and thinking in simplistic black-and-white terms, they simply conclude that these people are innocent victims. The truth is more nuanced. They are, of course, victims in one sense. But they are also more genocidal in sentiment than Germans during World War II ever were.

They are not tender lambs. In fact, on almost any metric you care to look at—women’s rights, gay rights, tolerance of other faiths, anti-black racism, antisemitism, tolerance of free speech, support for suicide bombing—they are among the least tolerant and most hateful societies on the planet. I know that’s more statistical data, which you said you tend to discount, but we cannot simply bury our heads in the sand in the face of empirical information.

And this doesn’t mean Palestinian children deserve to suffer or any such evil notion, but it is quite tiring and morally repugnant to hear such a bigoted society framed as if they are merely nothing more than good-hearted fishermen and olive farmers. I suppose then white Southerners of the United States were nothing more than fun-loving cotton planters.

As for the allegations of rape, no one has proven allegations of rape to be a fabrication, not even The Intercept article you shared above. That article debunks the body of evidence The New York Times used to assert that it had found a coordinated and systemic campaign of rape. The Intercept found no forensic evidence and no firsthand survivor testimony, just Zaka “witnesses” and vague hearsay, as you note.

That does not mean no such campaign took place, much less that no individual incidents took place. It means the Times’ evidence for “proving” that campaign was bogus. Lawyers call this fruit of the poisonous tree. It means the evidence is bad, not that the defendant is therefore innocent. As far as I know, no serious voices on this issue claim there was zero rape. The debate is over whether rape was consciously used in a systemic manner as a weapon of war.

I do want to say, however, thank you kindly for keeping this debate civil despite our disagreement. In my experience, that’s rare when it comes to this topic.