Remaining anti-Israel factions part 1: Muslims

By Lucy Rogers

The two remaining anti-Israel factions I wish to cover in this series are (a) Muslims and (b) ethnic minorities struggling to process hurt and anger due to racism and colonial oppression of indigenous peoples. This post will cover the former.

As a preface: I have chosen not to label either of these factions “intellectually dishonest” per se, for a few reasons. Firstly, I know that I would be playing into the hands of my enemies because I would immediately face the bad faith accusation that I believe all Muslims intellectually dishonest by virtue of being a Muslim (or for that matter, all members of ethnic minorities struggling to process hurt due to racism by virtue of the fact) which would be grossly offensive and is not in fact my view.

Secondly, in fact the Muslims at these protests are by far the faction I have the most respect for (with people struggling to process race-related hurt a close second). I think that the mentality that “OK, what happened on October 7 was wrong, but I am a Palestinian and I am focussed on Palestinian suffering” is a perfectly respectable position, as long as violence towards Israeli civilians is genuinely condemned. My primary intention at these protests has always been to protest intellectually dishonest Westerners, not Muslims per se. However, Westerners have no such excuse for their wilful refusal to engage with atrocities committed against Israeli civilians on October 7.

Thirdly, I think that “intellectual dishonesty” is quite harsh language, and while various other factions (such as Westerners who are starry-eyed about Hamas because allyship with the oppressed makes them feel good about themselves) are deserving of it I am reluctant to describe anyone I have more respect for in such terms.

Anyway, I have a number of insights on the Muslim faction resulting from regular kōrero (dialogue) with them over the past two and a half years. Muslims tend to perceive the Palestine/ Israel conflict as a defensive war. (Ditto the Israel/ Lebanon conflict.) This is not just due to the displacement of 700,000 Arabs in 1948: it is also because ongoing violence from a small group of Jewish extremists in the West Bank/ J&S is a serious problem according to Palestinians I have spoken to at the protests. Apparently attacks are happening weekly at present and according to people I have spoken to at the protests this has been happening ever since the American embassy was transferred from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem some years ago. (I note by the way that the Jewish extremists in question are a couple of hundred lunatics out of 8 million Israelis: they’re less numerous than the Mongrel Mob.)

One man I spoke to has just got back from the West Bank/ J&S. Apparently a Jewish extremist was caught by the Palestinian Authority with a rifle in the past fortnight as he was about to attack a mosque in Ramallah. The PA handed him over to Israel, who allegedly released him. (I have no way of verifying this because it isn’t being reported in Western media.) He sent me a video from the Arab media showing the handover, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13LdVrouz-g

Furthermore, the IDF detaining Palestinians in the West Bank/ J&S without trial is perceived to be the moral equivalent of Hamas taking Israeli hostages on October 7. According to the same man, Jewish extremists attacked his village during the past fortnight as of the time of writing, and the villagers tried to stop them. The actual villagers involved could not be identified, so the IDF allegedly then came and arrested three random villagers instead out of revenge. Having been the victim of police bullying myself, I can well believe that this happens when police (or soldiers) exercise unaccountable power.

I disagree by the way that Israeli prisoners and Hamas hostages are morally equivalent. No Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli prison has ever been forced to his own grave, unlike Evyatar David. While as in any country isolated cases of rape no doubt happen in Israeli prisons it would be severely punished by the Israeli courts, whereas the idea of Hamas prosecuting the people who raped Israeli hostages is laughable. And until recently Israel did not engage in the death penalty, whereas many hostages were murdered without having done anything wrong.

According to the protesters, Israel also arrests journalists who are critical of them, including people who work for Al Jazeera. (Again, this is one side of the argument. Many Al Jazeera “journalists” are Hamas operatives. The hostage handover was planned, directed and filmed by Hamas. But I am relaying what I have been told by Palestinians at the protests.) Accordingly, there is considerable resentment amongst Palestinians at the protests in Auckland that people called for the release of the 251 Israeli hostages but following the ending of that crisis that the plight of 9000 Palestinians held without trial in Israeli prisons is perceived to be being ignored. (One person I spoke to estimates that about half of Palestinians in administrative detention are there for no good reason, including women and children.)

There is a lack of awareness amongst most of the Muslim protesters of the extent of the atrocities committed on October 7. Many of them sincerely believe that civilian casualties are exaggerated and some of them also believe that the Israeli army murdered its own people pursuant to the Hannibal Directive. (This is a discredited conspiracy theory which was refuted in a UN report on the subject, which found that only 14 Israeli deaths could be attributed to the Israeli military. I am not agreeing with this nonsense, I am simply explaining here how many of the Muslim protesters see things.)

Also, in their view the casualties in Gaza (70,000 people including combatants) far outnumber the casualties of October 7. (Again, I am not agreeing with this logic necessarily, but explaining their perspective.) Accordingly, some Muslim protesters can get quite upset with me at the protests in Auckland for predominantly focussing on the Israeli narrative when they think that the suffering in the conflict disproportionately falls on Palestinians.

Many Muslims also perceive Israeli expansionism in the West Bank/ J&S as a form of fascism. Netanyahu’s government is believed to want to take over the entire West Bank/ J&S (not entirely without reason, I should add) and the belief that Jews are God’s chosen people is perceived to justify the conquest of the land. I have heard people sincerely compare Netanyahu with Hitler. (In my view of course this is beyond ridiculous because the casualties in Gaza are nowhere near comparable with the 11 million victims of Nazi Germany, and the number of Palestinians killed by Jewish extremists in the West Bank/ J&S this year is in the double digits.)

Most of the Muslims at the Auckland protests do not support a two-state solution. People I have spoken to say that they think that Jewish and Muslim communities have coexisted in the past (for example, in Iran, which still has 8000 Jews today) and could co-exist in the future in one state. I think this is absolutely naive of course because it would just result in a massacre (October 7 is evidence of that) and Hamas has sworn to drive all the Jews into the sea, but this is what they think.

I have some criticisms of the Islamic faction. Firstly, I think that hostility towards Jews is far more common amongst Muslims than many of them want to admit, and this plays far more of a role in the Israel/ Palestine conflict than many of them acknowledge. Secondly, as I already mentioned earlier in this series it is entirely possible to form sincere beliefs which are influenced subconsciously by things that a person wishes to be true. October 7 denial is really no different from Holocaust denial. They arrive at that stance because that is what they want to believe. (In fact, I suspect that Holocaust denial would be more common amongst Westerners if the villains weren’t white.) The same is true of October 7 denial, which comes back to hostility to Jews qua Jews.

In other words: despite the very legitimate criticisms that Muslims and Palestinians have of Israel, and despite the fact that many of them are good people, the refusal of many of them to believe what happened on October 7 in the face of overwhelming evidence available via a simple Google search reflects there is something more to the attitude that many Muslims have on the conflict than just balanced criticism.

This is complicated of course by the fact that when sufficient numbers of people within a culture accept falsehoods because that is what they want to believe, people who are genuinely intellectually honest and who hold beliefs for the right reasons can come to believe those falsehoods. Which is to say: I think there is genuine room for kōrero (dialogue) amongst Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and whakaako (education) about October 7, which is encouraging and which is consistent with Gazan political commentator Ahmed Alkhatib reporting that about 50% of Gazans he encountered while on a humanitarian trip there were willing to change their views on what happened on October 7 when confronted with video evidence.