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Those rabid crowds who have been chanting their slogans — “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” (meaning Israel must disappear, to be replaced by a twenty-third Arab state), or “Say No To Genocide” — as they shut down traffic at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, at the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, and block the main thoroughfare to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, and engage in the same traffic-stopping sit-ins at dozens of other sites, describe themselves as “pro-Palestine.” Elder of Ziyon begs to differ. His take on what prompts these protestors can be found here: “No, the people disrupting traffic Monday are not ‘pro-Palestine,’” Elder of Ziyon, April 16, 2024:
The local news media all get it wrong.
There protesters are not “pro-Palestinian.”
If they were “pro-Palestinian,” they would protest how terribly Lebanon treats its Palestinian “guests.”
If they were “pro-Palestinian,” they would protest how Egypt doesn’t let any Gazans desperate to leave to enter Egypt without paying hefty bribes.
Egypt has closed off its territory to Palestinians wishing to leave Gaza. Even those who only seek a temporary respite from the war in Gaza are denied admission. The only way for a Palestinian in Gaza to gain admission to Egypt is by bribing the right border officer.
The total silence from these protestors about the mistreatment of Palestinians, including denial of citizenship in all Arab states except Jordan, collective punishment (as in Kuwait, where 400,000 were booted out overnight because some had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of the country), in Egypt (where Palestinians in Gaza, trying to escape the war, are prevented from entering), is striking. It appears that the actual suffering of Palestinians in the Arab states is not worth protesting, because the Jewish state cannot be held responsible
And what about the total indifference to the current situation in Sudan, where a civil war has led to suffering many times greater than what the Gazans are enduring? In Gaza, slightly less than one-quarter of the population, or 500,000 people, are in a state of great “food insecurity.” The protestors have instead claimed, incorrectly, that half the country is in a “state of famine.” Meanwhile, in Sudan, 18 million of the country’s 45 million people are truly suffering from a “famine.” Yet none of those protesters busy denouncing Israel for “starving” the people of Gaza — Israel, let’s note, now lets in more food trucks than entered the Strip before October 7 — have even once gone out to protest the conditions in Sudan. For that matter, they haven’t protested the famines, all more severe, and affecting many more people, than the “food crisis” in Gaza, that are ongoing not only in Sudan but also in Yemen, Somalia, and South Sudan.
Why not? There is no way to blame Jews for those famines, so those around the world who are consumed with hatred for what they preposterously call the “apartheid colonial-settler genocidal state of Israel” are simply not interested.