What ‘Pro-Palestinian’ Really Means.

Jpress ^ | Jan 2, 2026 | Jonathan Braun

[Freeleesy]

Since October 7, 2023, a new political reality has taken hold in Europe and the United States – the emergence of a large, sustained anti-Israel protest movement joined by organized factions of the radical left and, in some cases, elected officials.

The movement calls itself “pro-Palestinian,” and the mass media accept the label, though it dramatically understates the ideology and objectives of the headline-making protesters.

Some pundits – and politicians – prefer a different description: “critics of Israel.”

All of which is as grotesquely misleading as referring to Nazis as pro-German critics of Jews or Klansmen as pro-white critics of African Americans.

The protesters are not mobilizing and marching because they oppose particular Israeli policies or a specific Israeli government. They oppose Israel itself – and want it to disappear, one way or another.

Israel’s eradication is the organizing principle and central objective of this movement. Its members and leaders don’t demonstrate, disrupt traffic and commerce – and destroy property – to demand Israeli withdrawal from disputed territories in order to make room for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They demand the destruction or political dismantlement of the Jewish State and the creation of a Palestinian state in its place.

For them, the issue isn’t borders or settlements in Judea and Samaria. The issue is Israel’s existence. In the eyes of these “pro-Palestinian” protesters, Tel Aviv is just as illegal as Tekoah, Ashkelon as illegal as Ariel.

Their aim isn’t to reduce Israel from the size of New Jersey to that of Rhode Island, say, but to cut the state out of the Middle East entirely.

Opposing the right of a Jewish state to exist in any part of historic Palestine, the protesters justify or rationalize terrorism inside Israel – and attacks on and intimidation of Jews everywhere who are assumed to back it – while supporting strategies that are designed to isolate, delegitimize, and fatally weaken it.

The evidence is visible in their slogans and lies. “Free Palestine,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada,” along with accusations of Israeli “settler colonialism,” “apartheid” and “genocide” all point to the same sinister goal: elimination of Israel, regardless of its size or borders.

The rhetoric both reflects and supports the ideologies and objectives of Israel’s implacable enemies – most notably, Iran’s Islamist regime and its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Marxist-Leninist terrorist group founded by Yasser Arafat’s main political rival, George Habash, which pioneered airline hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The maximalist anti-Israel position – that no Jewish state has the right to exist anywhere in historic Palestine – isn’t new. Fanatic anti-Zionism as an ideology dates back at least to 1937, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, as head of the Arab Higher Committee, led opposition to the first official partition proposal.

In response to escalating Arab violence in Mandate Palestine, a British commission chaired by Lord Robert Peel proposed dividing the land into a small Jewish state and a larger Arab state with a British-controlled corridor around Jerusalem.

The Mufti initially led a boycott of the Peel Commission while rival Palestinian notables pursued unofficial contacts. Though he eventually testified before it, he used the platform to oppose any division of Palestine and demand a complete end to Jewish immigration and land purchases.

Most Zionist leaders moved in the opposite direction – toward acceptance of partition in principle as the framework for eventual statehood. They fiercely criticized the tiny, fragmented territory allotted to the Jewish state, and the 20th Zionist Congress formally rejected the Peel plan. But that same congress in 1939 authorized negotiations on the basis of partition, and Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders treated the commission’s work as the first official international recognition of Jewish statehood, hoping to improve the terms later.

The divergence was decisive. On the Arab side: institutionalized rejection of any Jewish state. On the predominant Zionist side: foundational acceptance of partition as the normative international path to independence.

Two years later, on the eve of World War II, when Neville Chamberlain’s government issued its infamous White Paper proposing a unitary Palestinian state within a decade – one in which Arabs would be a clear majority and Jews would become a supposedly protected, permanent minority – some Arab leaders favored acceptance. The Mufti vetoed it.

Even this pro-Arab framework, approved by the House of Commons on May 23, 1939, conceded too much to the Zionist cause in his view, despite it representing a clear betrayal of the Balfour Declaration’s support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine at a moment when Germany’s Jews, stripped of rights and property, were desperately seeking refuge.

A rabid antisemite, who spent the war years in exile in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as an Axis ally and propagandist, the Mufti would not agree to any arrangement that implied acceptance of Jewish communal rights or an enduring Jewish political presence in Palestine in any form. Operating from Rome and later Berlin, where he met with Hitler, hobnobbed with Himmler and Eichmann, and actively supported the Nazi Final Solution, the Mufti broadcast Arabic and Islamic-themed appeals urging Muslims to wage jihad against the British and kill Jews wherever they could be found.

In the spring of 1943, he moved beyond broadcasting to become an active recruiter of Bosnian Muslims for the first non-Germanic Waffen-SS formation. He toured Zagreb, Sarajevo, and other population centers, meeting Muslim religious and political leaders, publicly endorsing the unit and using his title as Grand Mufti to encourage enlistment. SS reports credited his visit with a strong positive impact on recruitment, with roughly 21,000 men signing up for what became the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar – a Germanized form of the Turkish word for a curved dagger that served as a recognizable symbol of Ottoman military and police authority when the region was part of the Ottoman Empire. Naming the division Handschar linked it to Islamic soldiering traditions.

When it comes to opposing Zionism, there is no meaningful daylight between the Mufti’s ideology and today’s anti-Israel movement. What is new is its scale, influence, and access to power. Never before have enemies of Jewish statehood mobilized sustained mass demonstrations across Western capitals and elite campuses. Never before has hatred for Zionism gained such traction among democratically elected officials, especially those on the political left.

Not too long ago, it would have been unthinkable that a New York City mayor affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America – an organization that steadfastly supported Israel through much of the Cold War – would not only decline to back the Jewish State but would articulate a position more extreme than that of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The distinction matters. The PLO’s longstanding demand that Israel withdraw to pre–June 1967 lines is obviously unacceptable to Israel and to any friend of Israel who is familiar with its strategic vulnerabilities and history. But since the late 1980s, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority have at least formally recognized Israel’s right to exist and have endorsed a two-state solution, however hollow or insincere that endorsement may be.

That position is categorically different from one that rejects Jewish statehood outright and embraces slogans calling for Israel’s annihilation.

Put differently, the PLO position on Israel is now more moderate than the position of Zohran Mamdani’s DSA. Its recent caucus statements and resolutions condemn Zionism as a racist, colonial, and imperialist ideology, insist that the organization must “fight” Zionism in both principle and practice, and threaten to expel party members and disqualify candidates for membership who oppose BDS or support Israel in any way. An influential DSA caucus argued that all members must show sincere commitment to the cause of Palestinian “liberation.”

While most Western anti-Israel protesters, including Mamdani and the DSA, don’t share the Islamism of Hamas or the doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism of the PFLP, their positions on Israel’s right to exist substantially converge.

Intersectional politics has fueled this convergence. By dividing the world into oppressors and oppressed, intersectionality casts Palestinians as victims and Israelis as villains. Once that framework is accepted, solidarity with “Palestinian resistance” becomes a moral imperative, overriding discomfort with terrorism or theocratic barbarism; hence, the bizarre phenomenon of groups like “Queers for (Hamas-ruled) Palestine.”

Adding to the threat, the anti-Israel campaign has established a beachhead in Congress. Deceitfully invoking the language of human rights and international law, the Squad and their allies seek to cut U.S. military aid to Israel while declining to condemn maximalist, one-state, eliminationist slogans. The effect is to normalize demands drawn from the same poisonous, rejectionist well, marking a sharp break from decades of bipartisan consensus.

News organizations have played an important role in enabling this development. By labeling even the most violent, virulently anti-Israel demonstrations as simply being pro-Palestinian, major media outlets sanitize rejectionism, deflect scrutiny, and mislead the public about what is actually being demanded – thereby creating political space for a movement whose dominant discourse aligns with U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organizations and their missile-mad, nuclear arms-seeking state sponsor.

In short, while the vocabulary may have changed, the extreme, uncompromising anti-Zionist position has remained fundamentally unaltered since the 1930s. From the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, from the PFLP to the DSA, from Habash to Mamdani, it is the same stance.

Politicians who fail to confront and denounce this reality are either cowardly or complicit. Journalists who refuse to report it truthfully aren’t just failing their profession. They are aiding and abetting an abomination.

[Jonathan Braun is a former managing editor of the NY Jewish Week newspaper and former associate editor of Parade Magazine who reported from Iran before the 1979 Revolution].

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TOPICS: Politics
KEYWORDS: israelophobia; pallyweid