Most #Jews and #Palestinians want peace. Extremists, narcissists ​and other ‘allies’ only block the way

...Meanwhile, the discomfort at much that is said and done at the growing US protests is real. At Columbia University in New York, demonstrators were filmed chanting: “We say justice, you say ‘How?’ / Burn Tel Aviv to the ground / Ya Hamas, we love you / We support your rockets too”. Another one runs: “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it.” In that same vein, some students are no longer content simply chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; they now hold up placards with an Arabic version. The trouble is, those words say: “From the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab” – meaning there will be no Jews from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, a goal that spells doom for the 7.2 million or so Jews who live there.

...Though, to be clear, the most striking condemnation of this hardening of supposedly pro-Palestinian rhetoric has come not from Jews, but from Palestinians. The protesters have taken “an extremist, maximalist, inflammatory, unreasonable, and totally illogical approach which is harmful to the pro-Palestinian cause,” wrote Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza-born Palestinian analyst who has lost a staggering 31 members of his own family in recent months. Via social media, Alkhatib urges the demonstrators to stop “wasting time with slogan-driven and maximalist activism that does nothing”, and instead to “use your western privilege to actually help the Palestinian people and promote a pragmatic path forward by engaging Israeli and Jewish audiences”.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/26/jews-palestinians-peace-gaza-narcissist-allies

#Israel #gaza