There’s a pertinent backstory to the situation in Gaza. In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Fifteen years later, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. In 2000, in conjunction with negotiations brokered by the USA, the Palestinians began a lobbying effort to get Israel to relinquish control of Gaza. “Oh,” claimed the Palestinians in Gaza, “if only the yoke of Israeli oppression is lifted from our necks, we shall make of Gaza a Garden of Eden.” The Israelis left Gaza in 2005, bodily dragging protesting settlers back across the border.
Remember that the Gaza Strip lies alongside the Mediterranean Sea, a very beautiful, idyllic location for beach resorts. Members of the Palestinian diaspora in the USA envisioned creating of Gaza their very own Palestinian resort city with luxury hotels, pristine beaches, swimming pools and casinos. A splendid competitor to Monte Carlo, the gambling alone could finance the whole shebang. But these visionaries and dreamers hadn’t reckoned with their brothers and sisters on-site in Gaza.
As soon as the Israelis withdrew, the very first thing the Gazans did was to angrily dynamite the greenhouses, generators, guard barracks, police stations and any other infrastructure left behind by the Israelis. “We’ll show you!” they shouted across the border.
Next they elected a pious religious leadership who issued edicts based on the Holy Quran: Unmarried men and women cannot bathe together, so hotel swimming pools and pristine beaches are forbidden. Dancing, drinking and socializing between unmarried men and women is strictly forbidden. Gambling is a grave sin, absolutely forbidden and punishable by banishment!
There was a family Tivoli down by the beach, with a Ferris Wheel, a Merry-Go-Round, some other rides for kids. “Certainly you cannot forbid us the pleasure of a family afternoon outing between a man, his wife and their children!” demanded less pious Gazans. With great reluctance and a lot of grumbling, the clerics agreed not to dynamite the Tivoli. They didn’t. Instead, one night, men wearing black hoods showed up with wire cutters, kerosene, dynamite and fuses. Breaking down the gate, they blew up the Tivoli.
A Palestinian-American arrived. Informed of these previous goings-on, he applied very carefully for a permit to build a water park. A simple green park with sprinklers, maybe a water slide. All very low-key. A high wall down the middle with identical facilities, including bathhouses, on both sides, one side for women, one side for men. Strict decorum. Financed by the rich, returning Palestinian out of his own pocket. So, of course, the authorities said “yes.” There was wiggle room for some baksheesh, and if this project went well, “the American” was willing to build apartment houses with financing from fellow émigrés in the diaspora. And it came to pass that he built the water park! And it was good. After several weeks, the clerics called him to their office and told him, “There are reports of unmarried men and women socializing at the entrance to the water park. Such activity is strictly forbidden by the Quran. We are retracting your permit and destroying this den of iniquity!” End of the water park.
All of this comedy took place in the first few years after emancipation.
The Israelis have a relationship with the Palestinians that has been in existence since before the State of Israel. Israeli technology and Arab labor. Whether in agriculture or industry, factory or street-cleaning, the Israelis have always been willing to hire Arabs and pay them well enough to make it worth their time and effort. This cross-border employment has been a feature of the West Bank and Gaza Strip right up until October 2023. Every morning, Palestinians with authorized employment documents traveled into border towns and agricultural collectives in Israel and put in a full day’s work, returning across the border in the evening with their pay in Israeli shekels, a strong currency with a lot of buying power.
There were still angry, frustrated Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. While the Gazans are wildly emotional in their seething hatred, it is the Palestinians of the West Bank who are most deadly, declaring a First Intifada or Uprising in December 1987 and then a Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005. There were Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli towns and cities, stabbings, drive-by shootings of Israeli soldiers at bus stops and other signs of Palestinian fury. In recent years, the Gazans would arrive at the border fence every Friday afternoon and burn automobile tires, blackening the sky.
For their part, the Israelis tried to solve the Palestinian problem. They elected left-wing politician Ehud Barak as Prime Minister on a party platform that focused on peace with the Palestinians. Barak tried. The Americans tried. In the year 2000 at Camp David, they offered Yasser Arafat land for a State of Palestine, the proverbial two-state solution, brokered by the White House to show good faith. Each day began with a recitation of the previous day’s agreements, each of which Arafat saw as a stepping stone to even further concessions. “We want our land back,” he bleated endlessly and who could blame him? Nothing was ever going to be enough because, after all, Yasser was holding out for the entire State of Palestine as it was in 1946, from Nahariyya in the north to Aqaba in the south, from Tel Aviv by the Mediterranean Sea to Jerusalem and the Jordan River. “If I sign this, when I get back to Ramallah, I am a dead man,” he is reported to have said on the last day, at which point President Clinton had steam coming out of his ears.
“Fuck it!” said the Israelis when Ehud Barak came home empty-handed. Forsaking endless, worthless peace initiatives, the Israelis elected Binyamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud Party as Prime Minister and began expanding settlements into the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The Gazans elected Hamas over rival political party Fatah in January 2006. They elected Hamas. Their choice. In June 2007, Hamas took control of the enclave, chasing the last Fatah officials out of Gaza. Remember that the Gazans chose Hamas, a point worth considering when 6,000 of their shock troops breached the border fence on October 7, 2023, raped, burned, beheaded, pillaged and massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 240. Not your usual political activity.
Imagine for a moment how Gaza would look today if all the billions of dollars that Hamas has spent on tunnels and arms had instead been used to facilitate the existence of ordinary people. Decades of lament, “Boo hoo hoo, we have no bread, our children are starving, it’s the fault of the Israelis!” finally have a plausible explanation. The aid money has been used to build the 450 miles of tunnels under Gaza and stockpile the thousands of missiles and weapons in their arsenal.
The Gazans are suffering, their towns and cities flattened. Famine and disease run rampant. They brought it all upon themselves.
[ This interim report constitutes a single chapter in a book-length project. ]
Three cheers for the pro-Palestinian protesters occupying college campuses all across the United States! No one is as well-informed and well-meaning as they. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and today’s young people on college campuses are angry for change.
It all feels a little unreal. Cultural appropriation at maximum level, these are white people and blacks parading as Palestinians. They don’t speak Arabic. Squatters, their plastic tents look nothing like the refugee camps in Gaza. Masks on their faces, their heads are wrapped in black and white checkered head scarves, even if no one has taught them how to properly fold and wear a keffiyeh.
The Fédération Internationale d’Occupation gives each encampment a G-rating, starting with lowest-ranked “Meh” and ascending to award-winning “Holy Shit!” Columbia, for example, came in at a penultimate top rating of “Oh, Wow!” Criteria include speed of erecting encampment, use of plywood barriers, contents of arsenal, toilet facilities, chants, media contact, number of arrests and the overall size and cleanliness of the site. While sheer size is the major determinate— bigger is always better— chanted slogans, handling of the media and the number of arrests can have a direct impact on the final decision to award a particular rating. So far, there have been more than 2,500 arrests made at 60 different universities and colleges. UVa has a somewhat boring encampment, but with the arrest of 25 students, it still garnered an “Oh, Wow!” rating based mostly on past performance.
Competition is fierce, especially among top tier universities.
Thanks to the ubiquity of social media, encampments are instantly aware of changes made at other locations across the country. When Columbia saw violent clashes at UCLA grabbing media attention, the protesters in New York decided to regain supremacy by occupying Hamilton Hall, a campus building. As in chess, each player tries to outfox their competitors with tricky tactics and new slogans. Palestinian students have the added incentive of protesting the hellscape in Gaza.
That the protesters’ primary focus is the carnage in Gaza is a typically false narrative used as a smokescreen to hide their true intent, which is the eradication of Jews and the overthrow of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West, in favor of an Islamic caliphate. It makes sense that they harbor an authority complex: These young activists will be saddled with the mess left over from the missteps of current governments all over the globe. Student activists in the 1960’s shouted “Burn it all down!” Today’s vanguard chants “Globalize the Intifada,” which is basically the same thing, a fiery resistance movement for whom the only acceptable outcome is the total destruction of the existing power structure worldwide.
Is that all?
No one has any right to criticize these young freedom-fighters. Their grievances are real: A $60,000-a-year college tuition is no joke.
It’s a little hard to speak out against the student activists when their teachers and the mainstream media egg them on. In what may be a first, the teachers and faculty of Manhattan’s New School, thinking outside the box, have set up an anti-Israel encampment inside a campus building. Six nylon tents in a row in assorted colors, it looks like an art installation. Rating: Meh.
When they chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” the protesters are, of course, referring to the River Nile and the Red Sea. Voracious, militant and long-suffering, the Gazans want to be the canary who swallowed the cat: Skipping the arid Sinai Peninsula entirely, they want to appropriate Sahara elSharqîya, the entire eastern seaboard of Egypt, with Luxor as their capital. Tricky.
No friend of Israel, Ethiopia recognized Palestine on February 4, 1989.
The Palestinians in Gaza are only too glad to get the support of college students everywhere. As they say in Sweden, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m pro-Palestinian.”
The pro-Palestinian activists on our college campuses are learning important life lessons like how to spit on Jews, kick Jewish students, diss the media, occupy buildings and trash libraries. While the unenlightened bourgeoisie among today’s students focus on final exams, graduation ceremonies and securing summer internships, the pro-Palestinian protesters gird for a major disruption of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. Chicago, of all places! Google “1968 democratic convention protests” to see history repeat itself.
At both California’s Occidental College and Pomona College, Jewish and Israeli students have been verbally harassed, physically surrounded, followed, threatened and intimidated by protestors, who have shouted “Go back to the gas chambers!” “Kike!” “Fucking Jew!” “Fucking Zionist!” and “Murderer!”
Extra points for the protestor who gave a Hitler salute in front of Jewish students during a demonstration at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. While not a new phenomenon, it shows that some demonstrators know their history. Signage at DePaul University in Chicago includes the gem “Netanyahu is a modern day Hitler and Biden is his b****.” Someone is a poli sci major! Kudos.
The fun isn’t limited to colleges, as big brother’s and big sister’s activism gets copied at the high school level. A pro-Palestinian riot took place at Hillcrest High School in New York. A Jewish teacher was the victim of a targeted attack at a school in Sheepshead Bay. The New York City school district has suspended 30 students for “unacceptable acts of antisemitism” and a dozen staffers have been disciplined.
Guilty secret, I too have been a demonstrator! When coffee pods caught on in 2004, I spent my Saturdays and Sundays at the local supermarket, demonstrating pod-based coffee makers. Takes one to know one!
Overworked and looking at video footage, I am forced to ask: Don’t these young people have anything better to do all afternoon than sit among their tents on the quad popping speed and toking marijuana? To deny rampant drug use among these pot heads is another false narrative.
Considering that 99% of the demonstrators have never set foot in Gaza, that doesn’t stop them from being thoroughly convinced of the infallibility of their opinions. They feel strongly. They share the conviction that Third World people are suffering. They envision a “Free Palestine”— with no Jews and no Israel. Despite the murder, rape, torture, dismemberment, burning, pillage and hostage-taking carried out by Gaza militants on October 7, these students from the American middle class see Israel as the aggressor! “What about the 13,000 (or 30,000 or whatever fantasy figure the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza comes up with) Palestinian dead?” they complain. Never having served in the military or experienced combat, these youngsters do not understand that war is hell and that there are casualties. It’s 5,675 miles from Columbia University to Gaza City. It’s 7,584 miles from UCLA to Khan Yunis. These protesters should hop a plane, go there and see for themselves. Instead, they occupy their college campuses and they riot. They don’t know what they are talking about.
Even ignoring Arabs’ long history of difficulty dealing with the truth, the Gazan Health Ministry’s outlandish claim of 30,000-plus deaths is a crock of shit. It never happened. Here is your false narrative exposed to the light of reason: Step back a second and look critically at this Big Lie. Thirty thousand dead bodies don’t disappear like a wisp of smoke. Where are they?! That many dead would be stacked like cord wood. There would be endless photographs and video, just like in the concentration camps after the Holocaust. We’re TOLD that they were stacked in the corridors of Al-Shifa Hospital, but the rest is a pipe dream. It wouldn’t matter that the Palestinians exaggerate, but all these marching young people protesting on college campuses complain of the disproportionate casualty rates, when it simply is not true. There aren’t even any lists with the names of the deceased. No bodies, no photographs, no names, just an empty claim. Shame on you, Gazans, for being liars. Congratulations on harnessing this worthless claim and turning it into golden propaganda!
When the protestors claim that Jews are “white colonizers” of Palestine, they’re full of bilge. Colonizers, colonizers, more than two thirds of Israel’s 9.2 million citizens are people of color from lands across the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Mizrahi from Arabia, Sephardi from Spain and Portugal, black Jews from Ethiopia.
Anyone accusing the Israelis of genocide shows their unfamiliarity with urban warfare. Genocide is the extermination of a people, something which the Israelis have gone to great lengths to avoid. Genocide is the Nazi war machine systematically killing 6 million Jews during World War Two, the Turks wiping out Armenians in 1915, Hutu militias murdering the Tutsi in 1994 during the Rwanda Civil War. Yes, the Israeli war effort has caused a mass migration in Gaza; the majority of the population has been displaced. But no one is carpet bombing their tent cities, no one is strafing civilian population on the roads. It is the Israelis who use roof-knocking bombs, noisemakers that land on the roof of an apartment house, warning the residents that they have only minutes to evacuate before the building is bombed. The IDF’s war is with Hamas, not the civilian population of Gaza. The Israelis warn the civilian population in advance before carrying out military operations. They do what they can to avoid civilian casualties. Yes, shit happens. Seven members of José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen were killed in a night airstrike. Accidents are no proof of genocide.
While the encampments on college campuses are full of hot air, the effects of global warming cannot be entirely ignored. Intermittent flooding has been reported in some areas.
Young militants claim their revolution is led by angry out-groups, but if you want to know who is behind these protests, follow the money trail: SimSalaBim Palestinian Flag Co. of Qatar, Keffiyeh Looms, Inc., Americana Tent Company, Apex Mask Apparel and Luxe Megaphones. “Kapitalismus über alles,” as Karl Marx would say.
The liberal left-wing media is appalled that police have used riot gear, tactical vehicles and flash-bang devices to clear tent encampments and school buildings occupied by the activists. What happened to freedom, equality, human rights, social progress, justice reform and international solidarity? These virtues must not be impeded, just because some anti-Israel demonstrators are disrupting campus life, threatening fellow students, painting swastikas on the doors to the dorm rooms of Jews and tramping on the Israeli flag in public. Where is police solidarity with the working class? Long live Yasser Arafat, who popularized the black-and-white checkered keffiyeh headscarf!
[ A separate chapter will deal with American mainstream media’s narrative about the poor little Palestinians getting beaten up by the big bad Jews. Palestinians are murdering rapists. That sad history will also be covered in a separate chapter. ]
An unexpected occurrence in New York City and Portland, Oregon is the influx of homeless people onto college campuses. Taking advantage of a fluid situation, they erect their own tents among those of the protestors. To the students’ credit, they shrug off these interlopers as meaningless excess baggage and unimportant to the Palestinian cause. One direct result of this occupation within the occupation has been that the number of actual students arrested on campus is constantly only a fraction of the total number of persons incarcerated.
Playtime in a sandbox, filled with self-importance, these kids are having a blast, giving the bird to the authorities. Often, their demands include that all disciplinary action against demonstrators be expunged from their university transcripts.
Enduring such protests, the question every university administration must ask itself is this: Is it better to expel 150 Palestinian exchange students and take back the campus or should they cave to the pressure of left-wing institutions and the media, letting the occupiers call the shots? Who are the grown-ups in the room and who is the 800 lb. gorilla?
Dr. Jill Stein, presidential candidate for the Green Party, announced on X on April 27 that she, her campaign manager and her deputy campaign manager were among 100 people arrested while trying to set up an encampment at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. It will be interesting to see how presidential candidates use the continuing turmoil to their advantage during the upcoming campaign season. If Dr. Stein manages to monopolize the Muslim vote, she could well siphon off support that Biden desperately needs to get re-elected.
The good news is that even arrested demonstrators from encampments with a low rating of “Meh” have been invited to visit Congress by House of Representative members Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Cori Bush of Missouri. “Those who refuse to stop the genocide in Gaza think they can arrest and brutalize their way out of this,” said Bush at a news conference on the steps of the Capitol with five of the students who had been arrested. Afterwards, a young man with long brown hair, a bush hat, extensive piercings and dressed in baggy jeans paraded in front of the Capitol chanting “Go back to Poland!” and waving a sign saying “END the WAR in VIET NAM.”
Looking abroad, we see that the coastal town of Malmö in southern Sweden is hosting the 68th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest. Under Palestinian flags and the banner NEJ TILL FOLKMORD (“No to Genocide”), 12,000 protesters marched on May10th to the concert venue at Malmö Arena in the center of the city. Among the protestors was climate activist Greta Thunberg. Accusing Eurovision of allowing Israel to “artwash” its image, fans and musicians have called for Israel to be banned from the contest. More protests are expected as the contest finals approach. The Swedes are hosting because they won last year. Around 180 million people all over Europe and Asia will watch the grand finale live on TV. Claiming to be politically neutral, politics has always lurked under the surface of Eurovision. In 2022, Ukraine won with the heart-breaking anti-invasion rap song “Stefania,” while Russia was banned from the proceedings. This year, Israel’s entry in the song competition is called “Hurricane,” based on the October 7 attack. The protesters ask why the West cares so deeply about Ukrainians but not Palestinians. Maybe because the Ukrainians aren’t murdering rapists. The choices life gives us are seldom easy. Queers for Palestine have called on Britain’s entry to boycott the event.
Paris, France is such a disappointment. Tent villages spread around the city are full of migrant workers from Africa and Asia seeking asylum and employment, yet few of them are willing to risk deportation by joining the students in front of Sciences Po University to protest la guerre en Gaza.
Mountaineers huddle inside their yellow, single-walled tents pitched on the South face of Mt. Everest. They act as if Gaza is three thousand miles away. Which it is.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Gaza, Israel is forced to invade Rafah to ferret out and destroy the underground leadership of Hamas. With Hamas’ threat of continuous repetitions of the October 7th terrorist attack, anything less is untenable. Once Hamas is defeated, the Israelis and Gazans will return to an uneasy co-existence, rebuilding the Gaza Strip amongst the wreckage, this time without tunnels and rockets.
The first six letters of “demonstrators” spell “demons.” The lasting damage is that by their actions, these pro-Palestinian demonstrators are ushering in the quick and easy re-election of Donald Trump.
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