Try as They Might, They Can’t Hide the Truth

A s vitriolic mobs on university campuses and in downtowns around the country vociferously assault Israel and sometimes batter Jews and police officers, policy-makers and commentators attempt to justify their ideological and political goals by characterizing the mobs as purportedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian rather than antisemitic and pro-Hamas.

That’s not how Democratic senator John Fetterman sees it. He told Semafor that the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University could be broken down into two groups: “There’s the pro-Hamas, and then there’s the really pro-Hamas.” According to a new NBC News poll, just 34 percent of Democratic college students say Hamas deserves blame for the October 7 attack on Israel.

Try as they might, the policy-makers and commentators who try to justify the mobs cannot obfuscate the ugly truth: By their support for the Palestinians against Israel, these mobs support the most extreme manifestation of antisemitism — the killing of Jews.

Palestinian society — going back to at least 1920 — has prioritized this.

Over the course of three decades before the founding of the State of Israel, while Britain administered the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — and as Jews there focused on building cities, towns, and institutions of civil society — Arabs pursued relentless campaigns of mass murder against Jews, particularly in 1920, 1929, and 1936–39.

Their hatred of Jews was so intense that, during World War II, these Arabs worked with the Nazis. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who as the grand mufti of Jerusalem was the cleric in charge of Jerusalem’s Islamic holy places from 1921 to 1937, helped foment a pro-German coup in Iraq in 1941 and then fled to Germany after it failed. After meetings with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, he participated in numerous German radio broadcasts calling for an end to the Jews. In 1945, Yugoslavia accused him of being a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslims to serve in an SS division that killed Jews in Croatia and Hungary. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004, claimed the mufti was his uncle.

During the first 19 years of Israel’s existence — while Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, often referred to as the West Bank — Arab residents of these occupied territories crossed cease-fire lines and committed terrorist attacks against Jews in Israel. Since then, and particularly in the past three decades, these Arabs (who generally began referring to themselves as Palestinians after the 1964 founding of the PLO) have accelerated their killing campaigns against Israeli Jews.

From 1993 to 1999, Palestinians committed more than 90 terrorist attacks. Between 2000 and 2005, during the Second Intifada, they killed more than 1,000 Israelis. Since 2006, Palestinians have perpetrated hundreds more terrorist attacks, and they’ve started wars in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021, and — most notoriously, with their October 7 pogrom — 2023. Palestinian armed forces, particularly Palestinian Authority militias during the Second Intifada, and Hamas’s forces since 2008, have fought these wars and committed the worst of these terrorist attacks. They have indirectly perpetrated many more by inducing their subjects to kill Jews through indoctrination, exhortation, and the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” policy — under which the purportedly perennially cash-strapped entity pays terrorists and their families, offering bigger payments for deadlier attacks.

Polling data show that Palestinian society, broadly, supports destroying Israel.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found in June 2023 that 70 percent of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution — and that 52 percent believe that the armed struggle against Israel is the most effective means to achieve a Palestinian state. Moreover, 66 percent of Palestinians believe that the State of Israel, founded in 1948, will no longer exist by 2048. A December 2023 poll found that 82 percent of West Bank Palestinians and 57 percent of Gazan Palestinians agree with Hamas’s decision to conduct the October 7 attack and that 85 percent of West Bank Palestinians and 52 percent of Gazan Palestinians are satisfied with Hamas’s behavior during the war. The Arab World for Research and Development found, around the same time, that 83 percent of West Bank Palestinians and 64 percent of Gazan Palestinians support the October 7 attack and that 78 percent and 70 percent, respectively, support a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”

The ugly truth is that Palestinian leaders have made the destruction of Israel their top priority. Another ugly truth is that, notwithstanding the benign characterizations used to excuse them, the mobs on American campuses and in American cities support that cause.

John Fund is the national-affairs reporter for National Review. David Simon is a lawyer in Chicago.