FREE PALESTINE? - How the Palestinian National Movement Was Never About Freedom

Freedom does not have to be prescribed - there is choice

This is a guest post from the JPF family by Sally Prag originally published on her brilliant Substack

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Image created in Canva Magic Studio by the author.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search For Meaning

In our comfortable Western democracies, we can moan about anything we like and no one will come after us. Just look at social media right now and you’ll see post after post bemoaning Zuckerberg’s removal of fact checking. A couple of years ago, it was post after post of people bemoaning the existence of the fact checkers.

We can rip apart our government and its policies, and we can do the same to other nations worldwide.

That’s the great thing about democracies — we have freedom as long as we aren’t harming another person or entity. That includes religious freedom and the freedom to align ourselves with one political belief or another.

And as we live our free lives, we hone in on the lack of freedom we see in other places around the world, and boost our moral egos by bemoaning those and screaming for their liberation.

And so we find ourselves seeing and hearing the beautiful sentiment of FREE PALESTINE! on every street corner, banners being marched through our city centres, and social media brimming with it.

It would all be so wonderful and helpful to creating a better world if it wasn’t so pitifully deluded and misguided.

What FREE PALESTINE!* is not

*I use capitals and italics here and going forward to denote a phrase that is rhetoric rather than based on understanding and meaning.

This isn’t about the river, the sea, the geographical knowledge or lack thereof of those calling for a FREE PALESTINE!, or their awareness or lack thereof when it comes to what the notion of ‘Free Palestine from the river to the sea’ means. That’s not the point of this essay.

FREE PALESTINE! is not merely a slogan, affirmation, or demand that seeks to bring about peace and equality.

And it most definitely isn’t about freeing a people without doing, at the very least, immense harm to another people.

(I learnt that there was a difference between FREE PALESTINE! and merely a desire for equality of freedoms and rights when I mistakenly entered a conversation on social media and was quickly ostracised. You see, I do desire the latter. I believe in that with every cell in my being, but that sentiment wasn’t welcome in that space.)

What FREE PALESTINE! does denote is the liberation of the entirety of what constituted the British Mandate for Palestine from 1922-1948. It’s a message that pushes for it to return to being the undivided land upon which the native Arabs had freedom to move within its previous borders.

It’s an understandable and commendable desire. But practically there’s no moral validity behind it. For, to simply remove those green lines that divide the State of Israel from the Palestinian Territories, there would be consequences so dire that would be far from an end to the bloodshed. While it appeals to call for the current citizens of the Jewish democratic state to merely put down their weapons and allow the hatred for them to be unleashed with no resistance (and possibly the UN would happily go along with that) it just ain’t gonna happen.

Whether or not one has an opinion on Israel’s right to exist, the Israeli government has a legal duty to protect its population, and it will continue to do so.

So no, those green lines are not going to be removed, and the Israeli security forces are not going to stop defending the people of Israel.

FREE PALESTINE! is merely a cover for something very un-free

While many see this whole movement as an opposition to the bullying of the Palestinian people by Israel, (and presumably a return to the supposed harmonious society that preceded the establishment of the Jewish state, if they even thought that far, or care), there’s one thing they may have forgotten to do — actually look at what they are advocating for.

And to understand that, they need to know what Palestinian society as a national movement looked like prior to 1948.

In order to understand it better, I dove into the work of Israeli historian, Benny Morris. Morris, though obviously not speaking from the perspective of Palestinians, took a very objective viewpoint in order to truly understand the situation in whole — as I also continually strive to do. Morris was also heavily criticised by his own country for exposing some of the cover-ups from the Arab-Israeli War of 1947–9. Thus, I feel his account is likely pretty accurate.

In his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris describes the background, focusing mostly on the thirty years leading up to the UN vote for partition of the mandate. He explains the population balance between the 70% rural, agriculturally-based or nomadic (Bedouin) population and the remainder being city-based. He describes the immigration of Arabs from surrounding countries as, together, the British and the growing Yishuv (Jewish community) established better infrastructure and industry, creating more employment and lifestyle opportunities. Those Arabs flocked to the cities.

The cities were where the political movements grew from. They were the ones that primarily sought to resist the impending Jewish rule that had been promised by the Balfour Declaration. However, not all of these political groups were in stark opposition to co-existing with Jews, though all opposed Zionism in principle.

But there was one political faction that chose to see that Jews merely existing in the land was a threat to Arab rule, or really to Muslim Arab rule, despite Jews having always lived within the land since way before any Arabs took root. Note I use the word “chose”, because it was a choice. It was a choice to attempt to obliterate Jewish society before it became too widely established.

That political faction was run by the al-Husseinis. They chose the path of Jihad — holy war — and stopped at nothing. Jihad allows for the use of untruths and propaganda to frighten the population into violent action, and advocates fedayeen (suicide/self-sacrifice). It has no place for “non-believers” such as the many Arab Christians who also lived in the mandate.

Up until the Arab Revolt beginning in 1936, there were several political factions in place, often guided by their religious beliefs, or merely by their family alliance. The refusal by these opposition groups to go along with the al-Husseini-led strikes led the al-Husseinis to use any means possible to annihilate anyone who opposed them.

(Note that the al-Husseinis modelled their training methods on Nazi youth camps, and were later endorsed and supported by Hitler and Mussolini, for their shared desires to rid the world of Jews, and their admirably violent means that stopped at nothing.)

As for the 70% who lived in the villages, they were largely apolitical and happily coexisted with Jews where both lived side-by-side. They didn’t see themselves as affiliated to any supposed nation called Palestine, for each village was self-guided by necessary structures that pertained to the aspects of agricultural village life — a way of life that had worked for centuries. But fear of unfolding violence eventually spread to the villages during the 1947–9 war, whether through actual violence or propaganda, and the population there was soon impacted politically.

The al-Husseinis eventually won the political battle within the vast majority of Palestinian society. Yet not through democratic means but purely through terror and propaganda which eventually fed a vicious cycle of violence as the war between the Yishuv and the native Palestinians broke out and then escalated.

And so the propaganda and terror has continued…

FREE PALESTINE! may appear innocent and morally right, it has a prescribed narrative and agenda. It is not free at all, nor is it guided by anything remotely free.

Of course the 1947–9 war only helped to push more into the radicalised camps of the al-Husseinis’ political angle, and the 75 years since of ongoing violence has seen these radical groups expand their capabilities as well as their efficiency and professionalism.

Goodness only knows what disaster would await should the dream of a FREE PALESTINE! be realised.

When Israel uprooted every Jewish settlement from Gaza in 2005 and declared it to be under its own rule, it wasn’t long before a brutal civil war broke out there. Now, with yet more uncertainty in the pipeline, we are seeing civil war breaking out in the West Bank as the (merely) moderately fascist Palestinian Authority (PA) tries to ensure its rule against the rise of Hamas’s popularity. Like the State of Israel, the PA has now banned Al Jazeera from operating there, since Al Jazeera is funded by the very same corrupt Islamist government that supports Hamas (no, Al Jazeera is definitely not at all without conflicts of interest, in case you hadn’t realised).

But yes, Palestine should be free, as we all deserve to be

To be absolutely clear, I am not by any means saying that Palestinians do not deserve to live free and dignified lives. On the contrary, it’s the least every single human being on this planet deserves.

The real problem is that the definition of freedom that was formed by the al-Husseinis as early as 1919 has remained the definition that still guides the Palestinian National movement — meaning “Jew-free”. Hamas explains with absolute non-ambiguity in its charter that this is central to a “Free Palestine”.

Yet it’s for that very reason that freedom has never come to them, because freedom and intolerance cannot coexist. There is a clue in the normalisation of relations that other Middle Eastern countries decided to make with Israel — peace serves all parties, economically, socially, and spiritually.

These do-gooders have many opinions on how a FREE PALESTINE! should look. But only the Palestinians can choose to see what it can look like for themselves. And as long as they choose the one prescribed by the al-Husseinis, they will probably never be free.

However, they could choose a different way. Many individuals always did, and many more are doing so now.

I am not idolising Israeli society in the slightest. While there has always been a significant number of Israelis who have strived for and actively worked towards coexistence over hate (many of whom were targeted by Hamas on October 7th), Israel also has a problem of extremism and vile intolerance, and new choices need to be made there too. Ultimately, Israeli freedom will never truly exist until there is also a place within Israeli society for Palestinian freedom. Likewise, a free Palestine is not the result of the removal of Israel but a result of the acceptance of Israel.

It’s the contradiction that keeps on contradicting, but is not necessarily a dealbreaker. If one person is capable of shifting their perspective, so then can an entire society.

Everyone, whether in Israel, Palestine, the rest of the Middle East, or the entire world, can choose coexistence over intolerance, love over hate, if they want to.

Freedom does not have to be prescribed. It can be a choice.