To my mind, the problem with being 'Pro-Palestine' is that the core of the Palestinian Arab political project has always been about expelling or exterminating the Jews. It is not and never has been a project centred on human rights, or about building a functioning state for themselves.
The violent racism of the Palestinian Arabs goes way back, to before the founding of Israel, with pogroms like the 1929 massacre of Hebron's Jewish community (which bore eerily similar features to the pogrom of Oct 7, including the killing of infants and the elderly, and the sexual mutilation of women).
Anti-Jewish hatred among Arabs is not an outgrowth of the military occupation in the West Bank and predates the modern state of Israel by centuries. It is hard for people who don't know much about the history of the Middle East, and the subjugation of non-Arab minorities (Jews, Samaritans, Assyrians, Yazidis, Druze, Copts) after the Arab Conquest, to understand this. To them, the Palestinian Arabs look like the underdogs, while the well-armed Jews look like the bullies. Back when I knew little about the history of the conflict and just consumed left-leaning media, I used to think this too.
But after living in Israel for a year and reading more widely, I realised that it is the other way around: the Palestinians are the primary aggressors in this conflict. You can be the weaker party and still be the aggressor. Their military and economic weakness does not deter them from continuing to start wars, because they believe that ultimately 450 million Arabs will overcome 7 million Jews. That's why the Palestinians have turned down every offer of a state made to them. They don't want a state, they want the Jews gone and Arab Muslim supremacy restored over the one tiny part of the Middle East that has thus far evaded it.
Something like 80 per cent of Palestinians support Hamas. At a conference in 2021, Hamas laid out its vision for a 'free Palestine' and outlined what would happen to Jews in it:
- Jews who had served in the IDF (which is most Israeli Jews) were to be killed.
- Jews who had not served in the IDF (basically the Ultra-Orthodox) could be merely ethnically cleansed.
- Jews who converted to Islam could be 'integrated into the state'.
- 'Educated Jews' (the scientists, doctors and engineers) were to be enslaved, not allowed to leave the new state of Palestine, but forced to work, for free, for the Arabs.
This is the vision that a supermajority of Palestinians have for a 'free Palestine': one in which Jews are either killed, ethnically cleansed, forcibly converted or enslaved. This, therefore, is what it means to be 'Pro-Palestine'. I don't understand how anybody sane could align themselves with this, but Damon Albarn and most of the British Left disagree, it seems.