A lone protester outside my embassy raised an obvious question: How would replacing the Middle East’s only free country with yet another authoritarian Arab state advance the cause of freedom?
As I drove back to the embassy today, one man stood outside alone in the rain, holding a “Free Palestine” flag.
It takes real commitment to stand alone in the rain for hours with a flag. It also takes, in this case, a fair amount of ignorance.
“Free Palestine” is the ultimate oxymoron.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East rated “Free” by Freedom House. Arab citizens of Israel vote in free elections, form political parties, sit in parliament and serve on the bench, demonstrate against the government, and express their opinions openly.
Had the Jewish people vanished from the face of the Earth, and had they not recovered their national freedom in the twentieth century, no “free Palestine” would have emerged. The territory would almost certainly resemble most of its neighbours: another authoritarian and dysfunctional Arab state whose rulers export grievance and instability while their own people pay the price.
When people proclaim “Free Palestine,” which freedom do they have in mind?
No Arab state bordering Israel is rated “Free.” Egypt is an authoritarian military regime. Jordan is a monarchy in which political competition and civil liberties remain tightly constrained. Syria remains unfree after decades of dictatorship and civil war. Lebanon is crippled by sectarianism, corruption, weak institutions and the armed power of Hezbollah.
The governing models already provided by Palestinian nationalism are even less encouraging. Hamas is a jihadist dictatorship that murders political opponents, crushes dissent and tortures critics. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt and authoritarian regime that arrests and tortures dissidents and rules without a renewed democratic mandate. Neither has held national elections since 2006.
The idea that freedom will be advanced by creating yet another Arab state modelled on its neighbours is contradicted by every available example. It would produce another regime, not another free society. And if “Free Palestine” means replacing Israel, it proposes eliminating the Middle East’s only free country in the name of freedom.
There are broadly two categories of people who proclaim “Free Palestine.” The first consists of jihadists and far-left activists who knowingly misuse the word “freedom” as a euphemism for the elimination of Israel. The second consists of those who repeat the slogan without understanding what it means. The old term for them is “useful idiots.”
The political mythology of “Palestine” has nothing to do with freedom.
The Roman Emperor Hadrian did not invent the name. But after the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman authorities replaced the name Judaea with Syria Palaestina, a decision widely understood as an attempt to erase the association between the Jewish people and their homeland.
Centuries later, British imperial rule replaced Ottoman imperial rule and gave Mandatory Palestine its modern administrative form. From 1939 onward, the British Empire restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases and opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, precisely when the Jews of Europe most desperately needed refuge and national independence.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was established in 1964, when the West Bank was controlled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. Its original charter explicitly disclaimed sovereignty over those territories. Its purpose was not to “liberate” them from Israel, since Israel was not there. Its purpose was to eliminate Israel.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union, itself an immense colonial empire stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, packaged Palestinian rejectionism as an “anti-colonial struggle.” The hypocrisy was monumental. The propaganda was remarkably successful. Jewish national liberation was recast as colonialism, while Soviet clients and terrorist organizations were marketed as freedom fighters.
That ideological package, which I call Palestinism, fused historical revisionism, hatred of Israel and the familiar utopian promise of redemption through revolution. The Soviet Union has disappeared, but much of the language it manufactured survives.
Several important Arab states have discarded this charade, made peace and normalized relations with Israel. Ignorant ideologues have not. They continue to chant Soviet-era slogans while imagining themselves to be rebels.
The caravan of history passes them by.
Today, so did my car.
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