Palestine Seems Fated to Miss Out on Statehood

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Boston CCTV footage has gone viral, of hooded agents of the Department of Homeland Security arresting a 30-year-old Turkish student on the street. Rumeysa Ozturk has since been detained in a Louisiana facility, pending deportation. Her crime, it appears, has been to display support for the Palestinians — the Trump Administration says, for Hamas terrorism.

It is doubtful that I would today be acceptable as a visitor in Trump’s US. The DHS could discover that in February I attended a London performance to fund humanitarian aid for Gaza, and indeed gave some money for tents.   

My wife felt unable to go, because although she deplores Israel’s government, she said: “I can’t help it. I am Jewish. I can’t face attending a Palestinian event.”

I went alone, and found myself among 200 Londoners listening to Palestinian writers, poets, musicians. The check I wrote was probably wasted money. Israel, still bombing hard, permits little aid to enter Gaza. No matter. I wanted to make the gesture, because the plight of the Palestinians seems so terrible, as a growing number of Americans agree. A Gallup poll shows a steady decline in support for Israel, to 40%, and matching increased sympathy for the Palestinians, to 33% of respondents. 

Nonetheless, what struck me about that charity evening in London was that we attenders felt like losers. I saw several friends in the audience, people who support noble minority causes, from Amazonian rain forests to famine relief.

It was the sort of European group that used to turn out for Spain’s Republicans when they were fighting against General Francisco Franco’s fascists in the 1936-39 civil war. The Republicans ended up on the scrapheap of history.

Likewise today, nobody loves the Palestinians. They have never produced a leader of remotely the stature and magnetism of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Their most conspicuous figurehead was Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004 notorious for violence, incompetence and corruption.

Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s justification of Israeli treatment of Gaza as a just reward for Hamas terrorism seems unconvincing, because it’s so hideously disproportionate. Well over 40 Palestinians, many of them children, have died for every Israeli massacred in the ghastly October 2023 atrocity, according to Hamas casualty figures, which don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Netanyahu himself comes from a family that was among the foremost supporters of pre-1948 Jewish terrorism. His father Benzion, whom I knew, and who remained until his death in 2012 a huge influence on his son, was a prominent Revisionist, the movement led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who proclaimed that Zionism could only be fulfilled by force.

Its military arm was the Irgun, which in 1946 blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 British, Arab and Jewish people and which, together with the Stern Gang, was responsible for many murders of British personnel in what was then Palestine, administered by the British under a League of Nations mandate. Since 1948, the bodies of Jewish terrorists, including the 1944 assassins of Lord Moyne, British minister in the Middle East, have been returned to Israel for public burial as heroes. 

My purpose here is not to dispute the merits of Jewish or Arab violence, but merely to recall the very old truth that today’s terrorists become another generation’s martyrs and heroes. Two successive Israeli prime ministers, Menachem Begin (1977-83) and Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84), were ex-“freedom fighters,” the former with Irgun and the latter with the Stern Gang.

I recently heard a former British foreign minister describe his difficulties in persuading Margaret Thatcher, as premier, to receive either at 10 Downing Street. She regarded both as responsible for the murders of British people, and only reluctantly bowed to the imperatives of diplomacy.

But this is ancient history, and relevant today merely because of the vehemence with which Netanyahu denounces terrorism, while offering the Palestinians no plausible political future. Moreover, since the ascent of Donald Trump, Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank have become ever more brazen.

Last month, settlers assaulted the house of Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian filmmaker who won a 2025 Oscar jointly with Israeli Rachel Szor, for their documentary No Other Land, about the plight of the Occupied Territories. It was a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service who said in the great 2012 Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers: “Occupation has made us a cruel people.” When Israeli troops were called to Ballal’s house during the March settler outrage, they detained him and not the attackers. 

On my own visits to Gaza and the West Bank as a reporter two decades ago, like every other foreigner I was subjected to a torrent of rhetoric about the wickedness of Israel. Most of it was hysterical absolutism. I nonetheless reflected when I emerged, after the usual petty harassment by Israeli troops as a presumed Palestinian sympathizer, that if I lived under such oppression, I wouldn’t talk much reason, either.

Yet while most of the world is appalled by the treatment meted out to Palestinians, nobody is going to do much about it, including the neighboring Arab nations. The foremost victim, caught in the middle, is Jordan, a small, poor country with a population of 11 million, a third of them non-citizens. Its rulers have always been terrified that they will be obliged to accept up to 5 million Palestinians expelled from Gaza and the West Bank, who would probably topple the Hashemite Kingdom.  

Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah, is impaled on a dilemma: His nation depends on US aid, which has now been suspended. He condemns the American-backed Israeli assaults on Gaza, calling them “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law” and “a war crime.” Most of Jordan’s people have become bitterly hostile to the US and critical of their king for participating in the air defense of Israel against Iranian attack. 

Meanwhile the Palestinians cling to their lost heritage with the same hopelessness as Native Americans displayed in the late 19th Century West, and their plight is comparable. I believe that we have now reached a turning point. The Trump administration, which embraces Netanyahu as a soul brother, has licensed the Israelis to do as they wish to the Palestinians. Orthodox Jews are tightening their grip on the country, and assert ever more vigorously the case for a Greater Israel, extending from the Jordan river to the sea. Evangelical Christians in the US share the view that such is historic destiny. 

This seems likely to come about, with annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza. Arabs have few civil rights in Israel, and in the event of annexation will certainly not be granted votes for the Knesset. 

I feel deep pity for the Palestinians, partly because I have seen their tragedy at close quarters. But I now recognize them among history’s losers. If I were a Palestinian I would seek a new life elsewhere, not because this is just, but because it is fate. 

There is nothing left for the Palestinians amid the devastation of Gaza and Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Their fate over the coming decades, I fear, is to become a global diaspora, echoing the tragedy of the Jews for almost two millennia. Trump’s proposal for a resort in Gaza is sick but might one day happen. 

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His histories include ‘Inferno: The World At War, 1939–1945,’ ‘Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975’ and ‘Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962.’

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion