“Free Palestine”: Moral Exhibitionism and the Right to Kill Jews

by Franck Salameh

The “Free Palestine” movement and its fellow travelers seem to have issued a contemporary Western world smitten by “moral exhibitionism” a license to kill Jews. Indeed, when in the midst of a brutal war a claim gets made that one party, Israel, is committing a genocide of the Palestinian people—even as making such a determination and its converse are often tendentious, emotive in the fog of battle—the result is nothing short of a death warrant that makes the murder of Jews morally licit, refurbishing (Nazi Germany-style) the kind of medieval blood libels that in the twentieth century brought about the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry.

“Why did the Holocaust take place?” asked rhetorically a Palestinian Fatah official on Egyptian television in February 2024. Exuding the kind of classic antisemitic prejudice so charming in its untaintedness, his answer was as predictable as it was simple: “Why? Because Jews and World Zionism were planning the takeover of Germany, and they had begun decaying [the place] economically . . . which instigated Hitler’s reaction.” So in this mindset, Hitler was an average guy simply reacting to an insidious Jewish cabal, and in that sense he was as justified in mass-murdering unarmed Jews as were Hamas’s “razzia pogromists” of October 7, 2023.

This article examines some of the cultural and intellectual bearings that lend legitimacy to this kind of thinking, and to the “Free Palestine” phenomenon in particular, which advances hoaxes and stereotypes that feed a modern, restituted, “righteous” form of antisemitism. Exploring these sorts of temperaments by examining historical and journalistic chronicles, political texts, and Palestinianist historiography and popular attitudes, this article also reflects on a Western world’s post-October 7 cultural, intellectual, and academic preoccupations—the “Global North’s” modern challenges, as it were, an area that has become the breeding ground of an acceptable, non-controversial antisemitism, in many quarters validating a righteous “right to kill Jews.” Using the phrase “Global North” in the meaning given it by Gilles Kepel, the West seems to have been assigned to a space painted as irremediably colonialist, racist, and slave-holding, a West that is an eternally guilty practitioner of apartheid and other ills of human history. It is a “Global North” that is summoned to self-recriminate, self-hate, and self-abnegate, and that must be replaced by a rising—once subjugated but now liberated—beatific “Global South” that ostensibly never colonized and never brutalized, and which is otherwise a carrier of noble human values and humanistic truths that the West ought to espouse.

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