Palestinian nationalism negates itself
By the very standards they apply to Israel, the Palestinians have abrogated their right to self-determination.
My new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.
Palestinian nationalists, however depraved their other arguments, often believe they have a trump card: self-determination. That is, they argue that, since the Palestinians are a nation, they have the same inalienable right to self-determination in their own state as all other nations.
By asserting this universal principle, Palestinian nationalists appeal to the highest ideals of the modern West and much of the international community, turning the Palestinian “cause” from a chauvinist, irredentist, exclusionary, and openly racist movement into a sacred ideal.
The problem, however, is that the principle cuts both ways. Since they assert that the right to self-determination is universal, Palestinian nationalists must address the question of the Jews’ right to self-determination.
They do so through redolent hypocrisy. That is, they openly deny that the Jews are a nation at all, and declare that the Jewish state is so horrific, so relentlessly evil, that its existence can no longer be borne.
Once again, however, two can play at that game. If, as the Palestinian nationalists claim, the nature and conduct of a state can abrogate its right to self-determination, then we are entitled to ask what the nature and conduct of a Palestinian state might be.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we more or less know the answer, because we have already seen such a state in action. The Hamas-run Palestinian state in Gaza that took shape after Israel’s 2005 disengagement and now has, for the most part, effectively ended through its own self-destruction, was an experiment, and the results are in. Given Hamas’s ongoing popularity among the Palestinians in general, moreover, we can be certain that, regarding any Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the results would be largely the same.
The results of the experiment were not sanguine: The Hamas state was a racist theocracy dedicated to terrorism and subversion that eventually committed a genocidal attack on Israel that killed more than a thousand people and would have killed many more if not for the swift and heroic action of civilians and soldiers on the ground.
All of this, moreover, was in blatant violation of the international law under which the Palestinians demand self-determination itself.
The UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, for example, defines genocide as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
During the October 7 attack, the intent was clearly genocidal, as evidenced by the nature of the attack itself, which deliberately targeted civilians and slaughtered them without regard to age, gender, or any other consideration.
Moreover, during the attack, Hamas clearly committed acts 1, 2, and 5, and through the years of relentless terrorism and rocket fire that preceded the attack, attempted to commit act 3.
In other words, Hamas is guilty of genocide on four of the five counts and, given its pledge to keep committing October 7’s until Israel is destroyed, would have continued to commit such crimes until its genocidal intentions were achieved in total.
Clearly, then, any Palestinian state would be dedicated to the violation of international law by the commission of the ultimate crime.
Genocide, however, is not the only crime that would be the avowed intent of a Palestinian state. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625, passed in 1970, declares that “No State may use or encourage the use of economic political or any other type of measures to coerce another State in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights and to secure from it advantages of any kind.”
Hamas was clearly guilty of this crime, using any and all means at its disposal to subordinate Israel in every possible way and secure advantages from it.
The following clauses are even more relevant:
Also, no State shall organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities directed towards the violent overthrow of the regime of another State, or interfere in civil strife in another State.
The use of force to deprive peoples of their national identity constitutes a violation of their inalienable rights and of the principle of non-intervention.
Every State has an inalienable right to choose its political, economic, social and cultural systems, without interference in any form by another State.
Literally all the available evidence proves that the Hamas state and any future Palestinian state did and will do everything possible to “organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities directed towards the violent overthrow of the regime of another State, or interfere in civil strife in another State.”
Indeed, this has been the stated intention of Palestinian nationalism in all its forms since it emerged in the early 20th century and is still declared today in such slogans as “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary.” Unfortunately for the ultras, both slogans call for the commission of what are considered blatant crimes under international law. Moreover, these intentions have been constantly and consistently put into action for a century, with distinctly bloody results. The October 7 attack, after all, was a Palestinian terrorist massacre at scale.
These crimes, moreover, and indeed the ideology of Palestinian nationalism itself, clearly seek to employ the “use of force to deprive peoples of their national identity”—namely, the Jews, whose national identity is explicitly rejected by all Palestinian nationalists. As the resolution states, this in itself “constitutes a violation of [a people’s] inalienable rights.”
Moreover, the entire genocidal campaign against Israel, undertaken both by Palestinian nationalists and, ironically, the UN itself, which seeks to undermine Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist, especially as a Zionist state, obviously violates Israel’s “inalienable right to choose its political, economic, social and cultural systems.”
It seems, then, that Palestinian nationalism and any state it has founded or will found are, were, and will be, in their essence, criminal under international law.
The conclusion is inescapable: The Palestinians may or may not have a right to self-determination, but they have no right to determine themselves on the destruction of Israel. Unfortunately for them, the destruction of Israel is fundamental to their national identity and therefore fundamental to any state they have founded or will ever found.
In a supreme irony, then, by the very standards Palestinian nationalists and their supporters apply—quite falsely—to Israel, the Palestinians have abrogated their right to self-determination. The establishment of a Palestinian state was and will be not just inadvisable, but a crime.
One could say, of course, that the Palestinian nationalists’ standards are unfair. One could ask where the end of Palestinian self-determination leaves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or what political future it grants the Palestinians themselves. One could claim that, even if all this is true, it is still morally incumbent on Israel to end its occupation of Judea, Samaria, or indeed Gaza in some way. One could argue that the two-state solution is still the best solution on purely pragmatic grounds.
What one cannot argue, however, is that the Palestinian right to self-determination has not been abrogated by the Palestinians themselves. That is, their own ideology negates itself. If we are to take Palestinian nationalists at their word, then the realization of their ambitions cannot be justified under any circumstances whatsoever.
The reason is that the essence of Palestinian nationalism is the assertion that those who would deny the Palestinians’ right to the land deserve it not for themselves. But it is they who wish to deny another people’s right to the land, and therefore, it would seem, deserve it not for themselves.
Whether or not we ought to agree is another question, but at the very least, we should take their opinion on the matter into consideration.
another irony is that the palestinians' entire national identity is founded on the (false) sense of having been displaced by the jews/zionists (false because if they had simply been willing to live peacefully instead of attempting genocide of the jews, then there would have been no displacement--their displacement was a self-inflicted wound, the ultimate "own goal").
so not only is their very national identity a recent artifact of bad social decisions, but then they even go on to culturally appropriate true facts of jewish history (trying to equate "nakba" with holocaust, claiming indigeneity when the muslims/arabs only colonized the area centuries to millenia after the jews had had a state there, inventing the absurd concept of "antipalestinian racism" to equate with antisemitism/antizionism, etc).
I've been saying exactly this for years. And yet giving these murderous lunatics their own state has become the top priority of the world while Western allied peoples like the Kurds get no consideration at all as they are persecuted by the enemies of civilization.