You can tell how much activists really care about Palestinians by their response to revelations that things are much better for them than these advocates thought.
For example, the proper reaction to finding out that Gaza has a population growth above the global average—even now—is to rejoice. But if all you wanted was to accuse Israel of “genocide,” you will either ignore such news or show visible disappointment. Thus, many Palestinian advocates are revealed to be monsters who want Gazan civilians dead so they can score cheap political points against Jews.
Similarly, when a UN agency says that excess weight is more of a problem for Gazan children than hunger, most normal people would be happy to hear it. Not Palestinian “advocates,” because healthy Palestinians won’t win them any arguments on their campus quad.
Nowhere does this reality assert itself more than in the constant stream of images from prewar Gaza.
The gleaming photos and videos of Gaza “before October 7,” as they are always titled on social media, are presumably meant to shame Israel and to a lesser extent Hamas. But Western “pro-Palestinian advocates” deserve their fair share of the shame as well.
Those advocates, after all, bought into a narrative of Gaza as an “open air prison,” a beaten-down series of refugee camps and donkey carts. It’s a startlingly imperialist mindset. Progressive Westerners still treat Palestinians like cavemen, and therefore these Westerners value neither Palestinian life nor Palestinian property.
The lesson of all the “look at what they did to Gaza” videos and pictures is how little Gaza’s advocates knew and how much of other people’s lives they were willing to risk.
But the pictures are only part of the story.
During the dreaded Israeli “occupation,” Gaza had a fully functioning international airport. When Yasser Arafat rejected Palestinian statehood and launched a war against Israel, the IDF rendered the airport inoperable. A few years later, Israel left Gaza entirely.
Rather than rebuild the runway, Gazans looted it for materials. Rather than use the greenhouses left behind by Israelis—thanks in part to the American Jewish donors who bought some of them from Israelis and gave them to the Palestinians—Gazans looted them, too. Within a month of the Israeli disengagement, Gazans had already looted an estimated 30 percent of the structures.
With the agricultural equipment went the agricultural jobs that were supposed to lift the Palestinian economy—this, again, funded with about $14 million of American Jewish money.
As time went on, and Hamas grew in strength, all these trends worsened. Hamas was an extractive dictatorship, taking whatever it could for itself and leaving the Palestinians with less and less.
Which is why it’s true, yes, that Gaza had high unemployment and poverty even before the war. Do you know what else it had? Extremely high literacy rates, both among adults and children. Gaza’s literacy rate of over 98 precent was on par with Jordan’s and higher than the other Arab states in the region. The year before the war, Gaza graduated 13,000 from university.
In 2015, the Washington Post wrote an article all about the Gazan middle class. Not the wealthy of Gaza, mind you—this isn’t about the presence of a few rich people in a landscape of pure poverty:
“Media images beamed from the Gaza Strip rightly focus on the territory’s abundant miseries. But rising from the rubble of last summer’s devastating war with Israel are a handful of new luxury-car dealerships, boutiques selling designer jeans and, coming soon to a hip downtown restaurant, ‘Sushi Nights.’
“This is the Gaza outside the war photographer’s frame, where families of the small, tough, aspirational middle class will splurge on a $140 seaside villa with generator power to give their kids a 20-hour staycation with a swimming pool and palm trees.”
I do love that phrase: the Gaza outside the war photographer’s frame. If you paid close attention, you could occasionally get glimpses of the real Gaza—a place no one wanted to see, because it was too normal, too relatable, too valuable to throw away in a series of misguided wars against the Jewish state. But if Western activists didn’t have pity for the Palestinians, they’d have nothing for them at all.