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AnalysisIsraelWorld

Western ‘Palestinianism’ colonises everything – and hurts Palestinians

The more indispensable Palestine becomes to every Western argument, the more dispensable actual Palestinians become
Andres Spokoiny
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Abstract image of protest (Andres Spokoiny/AI)

Published: 1 September 2026

Last updated: 1 September 2026

One of the keys to understanding Western attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to distinguish between Palestinians and Palestinianism. 

Palestinians are a real people with legitimate rights and aspirations, both individual and collective. There is debate over when Palestinian peoplehood emerged – until well into the 20th century, “Palestinian” functioned primarily as a geographic rather than a national designation – but that historical debate does nothing to diminish the legitimacy or urgency of Palestinian claims today. Like every other people, Palestinians deserve dignity, security, political representation, and ultimately a future they can shape for themselves. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at its core, is therefore a geopolitical dispute: two national movements laying claim to the same land, burdened by history, trauma, and hard-to-reconcile narratives. 

Palestinianism, however, is something else entirely. It is not a movement for Palestinian rights. It is a Western ideological framework that transforms Palestine from a particular political conflict into the central moral lens through which every other issue is interpreted. 

The global Palestinianist movement has become so culturally powerful that Palestine functions less as a concrete political cause than as a universal symbolic language

The extent to which Palestinianism has colonised public life is difficult to exaggerate. 

Climate movements suspend campaigns against global warming to organise demonstrations for Gaza. Pride marches become platforms for “Palestinian liberation”. Labour unions issue declarations about Israel. Literary festivals, immigration protests, museum openings, academic conferences, municipal elections, even mining festivals in Scotland suddenly discover that their central concern is Palestine. At the 2025 Durham Miners’ Gala – a celebration of Britain’s mining heritage – speakers insisted that defending British workers required “freeing Palestine.” 

Pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally against police action during the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February 2026 (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)
Pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally against police action during the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February 2026 (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

The underlying assumption is breathtaking in its ambition: Palestine is no longer one political conflict among many but the hidden key to all of them. Solve Palestine – or, more accurately, eliminate the Jewish state – and capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, climate change, and every other great evil suddenly disappear. 

No, I’m not exaggerating. Sally Rooney recently declared that “the struggle for Palestine is also and has always been a struggle for human liberation and for our future on this earth.” Angela Davis described Palestine as “the centre of the world.” The Climate Justice Alliance proclaimed that “the path to ecological justice runs through a free Palestine.” 

None of these statements merely express solidarity with Palestinians or promote a realistic solution for their plight. They assign Palestine a unique symbolic role among the world’s injustices. 

Of course, people are free to express solidarity with causes they consider just. Nothing is objectionable about that. But solidarity alone cannot explain why a conflict involving a tiny strip of land has acquired a symbolic centrality unmatched by wars that have killed vastly more people, displaced vastly more civilians, or reshaped the international order far more profoundly. 

What we are witnessing is not solidarity but something else: The global Palestinianist movement has become so culturally powerful that Palestine functions less as a concrete political cause than as a universal symbolic language. The result is paradoxical. The more Palestine comes to stand for everything, the less attention is paid to the concrete conditions, institutions, compromises, and policies that might actually improve Palestinian lives. 

The political theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe help explain this transformation. 

Laclau argued that successful political movements are not built simply by accumulating protests, but by weaving disparate grievances into a common narrative. Political entrepreneurs present seemingly unrelated issues as different manifestations of the same underlying structure of oppression. Laclau called this a chain of equivalence. 

At the centre of that chain stands what he called an empty signifier – a symbol broad enough to absorb multiple, often unrelated aspirations. Concepts such as “the people,” “justice,” or “democracy” acquire enormous political power precisely because they remain undefined. Different constituencies can project onto them their own hopes, fears, and grievances. Chantal Mouffe later emphasised that such symbols can become the master signifier, the symbolic centre that gives emotional coherence to an otherwise heterogeneous coalition. 

If the central symbol derives its power from being “empty,” then the same must eventually become true of its antagonist; in other words, the enemy no longer matters for what it actually does but for what it comes to represent. 

Once emptied of their concrete reality, Palestine and Israel become infinitely useful. Palestinians cease to be a people and become Every Victim. Israel ceases to be a country and becomes Evil itself. The less either resembles reality, the more valuable they become as symbols. 

Once this happens, the conflict itself becomes strangely irrelevant. There is little reason to study its history, understand its competing narratives, grapple with its moral ambiguities, or search for workable compromises. Accepting the complexity of this conflict threatens the very symbolic architecture that gives it power. 

Indeed, peace itself becomes almost subversive. A negotiated settlement would collapse the ideological structure that Palestinianism has painstakingly constructed. Once Palestine becomes one territorial dispute among many – messy, compromised, tragic, and painfully ordinary – it can no longer function as the master metaphor of global oppression. 

None of this means that Palestinians have not suffered. They have suffered enormously. Nor does it deny that Israel has often contributed to that suffering through grievous mistakes and, at times, grave injustices. Precisely because Palestinians deserve to be treated as a real people rather than as ideological raw material, they deserve something better than being endlessly recruited into Western culture wars. They deserve to be discussed as a nation with political choices, competing visions, institutions to build, leaders to hold accountable, and a future to secure. 

The greatest prestige accrues not to those who improve Palestinian lives but to those who most effectively dramatise Palestinian victimhood

But this raises an obvious question. 

Why Palestine? Why did this conflict, and not another, become the master signifier of our age? 

Some explanations are straightforward. 

Modern politics rewards moral simplicity. Palestine appears to offer a perfectly symmetrical drama: oppressed versus oppressor; colonised versus coloniser; victim versus power. It is a story that can be understood instantly, compressed into a slogan, and exported to almost any political context. That simplicity, though false, is politically useful. 

Palestine offers a common banner under which movements that otherwise have little in common can march together. Islamists who would imprison homosexuals suddenly become allies of LGBTQ activists. Radical feminists overlook movements whose treatment of women fundamentally contradicts their own principles. Anti-racist activists who rightly denounce ethnic massacres elsewhere suspend those concerns when the perpetrators happen to fit the preferred revolutionary narrative. Palestine allows mutually incompatible ideologies to postpone their contradictions in favour of a common enemy. 

Palestine also functions less as a foreign-policy position than as a marker of moral identity. Supporting Palestine increasingly signals membership in a broader moral community. It tells others not simply what one thinks about the Middle East, but what kind of person one is. That is why Palestine appears, often incongruously, in municipal elections, school board meetings, labour disputes, academic hiring committees, and cultural institutions, which possess no conceivable influence over events between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. 

Then there is social media. Algorithms reward emotionally powerful symbols, visual narratives, and moral certainty. Palestine plays on those three dimensions. Images circulate instantly, stripped of historical context and embedded within stories that users already wish to tell about capitalism, colonialism, racism, or empire. The conflict is not merely reported; it is optimised for virality. Other tragedies – equally horrific but less photogenic, less familiar, or less useful – simply disappear beneath the algorithmic horizon. 

Yet none of these explanations fully accounts for Palestinianism’s extraordinary success. 

The comparison with the Uyghurs is especially revealing. 

Since 2017, the Chinese government has subjected the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to one of the most extensive campaigns of repression in the contemporary world. Credible investigations have documented the mass arbitrary detention of hundreds of thousands – possibly more than a million – people in internment camps; pervasive digital surveillance through facial recognition, biometric data collection, and electronic monitoring; torture, sexual violence, and other forms of abuse in detention; forced labour programs; severe restrictions on religious practice, language, and cultural expression; the destruction of mosques, shrines, and cemeteries; the separation of children from their families into state-run boarding schools; and coercive birth-control measures, including forced sterilisations and IUD insertions. 

If one were searching for a contemporary example of colonial domination, cultural destruction, mass incarceration, religious persecution, and technological authoritarianism, Xinjiang would appear to satisfy every criterion. Yet, the Uyghur cause has not colonised the Western imagination. It does not appear compulsorily at climate marches, literary festivals, Pride celebrations, labour conferences, museum openings, or municipal elections. There are no demands that every movement first declare its position on Xinjiang before discussing its own agenda. 

There are, to be sure, legitimate reasons for the difference. Western governments are more deeply entangled with Israel than with China. Palestine has enjoyed decades of well-funded organised international solidarity. China has been extraordinarily successful at restricting access to Xinjiang while suppressing images and testimony. 

But that still fails to explain the extraordinary symbolic value attached to Israel – the ease with which one small conflict comes to represent colonialism, capitalism, racism, militarism, policing, borders, environmental destruction, and the entire system of “Western domination”. 

Palestinianism directs attention toward a theory of the world – and the historical availability of Jews as universal explanatory figures helps explain why

To understand that, one must examine not only the victim but also the antagonist. 

What probably explains why Uyghurism is not a thing while Palestinianism has colonised the political imagination is that Palestinianism derives much of its symbolic power from the identity of its enemy: The Jews. 

Antisemitism has never treated Jews as merely another disliked minority. It has consistently transformed them into explanatory figures. Across radically different societies and ideologies, Jews have been imagined as the embodiment of money, capitalism, communism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, rootlessness, modernity, decadence, secrecy, manipulation, finance, media, and invisible power. Whatever a civilisation most feared or hated, Jews somehow came to personify. Long before Laclau described empty signifiers, Jews had already served as one for nearly 2,000 years. They became the receptacle into which societies poured their anxieties, contradictions, and failures. 

Israel allows this ancient symbolic structure to be translated into the moral vocabulary of the 21st century. The Jew is no longer imagined merely as the hidden power behind the curtains. In the figure of Israel, Jewish power becomes visible, sovereign, armed, technologically sophisticated, and therefore capable of personifying not merely one country but an entire system. 

Of course, none of this means that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic, nor that every advocate for Palestinian rights is an antisemite. What it means is that Palestinianism has inherited a sort of moral structure that places “the Jew” as the embodiment of evil. Sometimes that inheritance is unconscious, sometimes it is adopted and used deliberately. 

Either way, Israel becomes the state whose wrongdoings acquire a different dimension. Russia, China, Syria and Iran may commit crimes, but those crimes remain Russian, Chinese, Syrian or Iranian crimes – they are not made to explain the world. 

The Uyghur cause is “boring” because it merely directs attention toward the Uyghurs. Palestinianism directs attention toward a theory of the world – and the historical availability of Jews as universal explanatory figures helps explain why. China may oppress a people, but Jews can still be made to explain the universe. 

And that has consequences. 

It hurts Israelis, certainly. It fuels a political culture in which the Jewish state is judged not by the standards applied to other nations but by standards reserved for metaphysical evil. It also hurts Jews around the world. Once Israel becomes the symbolic embodiment of global injustice, Jews inevitably become its local representatives. The oldest habit of antisemitism reasserts itself in contemporary language: Jews once again become responsible not merely for what they do but for what they supposedly represent. 

However, above all, Palestinianism hurts Palestinians because the actual flesh-and-blood Palestinians disappear into the symbol. They cease to be a people who need functioning institutions, accountable leadership, economic opportunity, personal security, the rule of law, and ultimately a viable state. Instead, they become the indispensable protagonists of a universal morality play, valued less for who they are than for what they signify. 

Their suffering is transformed into political currency used to explain capitalism, colonialism, racism, climate change, patriarchy, and the failures of the West. But symbols cannot negotiate borders, build schools, reform governments, create jobs, attract investment, fight corruption, or make the painful compromises on which every durable peace depends. 

Indeed, Palestinianism creates a perverse incentive structure. 

The movement rewards theatrical maximalism over attainable improvement. It elevates slogans over institutions, symbolism over governance, permanent resistance over political responsibility. Every concession becomes betrayal. Every compromise becomes collaboration. Every practical success threatens the ideological purity of the cause. 

That is why Palestinianism shows little curiosity about Palestinian political failures. Hamas’ authoritarianism, the Palestinian Authority’s corruption, the absence of democratic institutions, the suppression of dissent, the failures of governance, the fragmentation of Palestinian society – these are all awkward facts because they restore agency to Palestinians, and agency complicates the allegory. 

That also explains why Palestinianism appears strangely indifferent to outcomes. If the goal were primarily to improve Palestinian lives, one would expect an obsessive interest in economic development, institutional reform, educational achievement, anti-corruption measures, diplomatic breakthroughs, and the difficult work of preparing a society for statehood. 

Instead, the movement overwhelmingly rewards symbolic confrontation. The greatest prestige accrues not to those who improve Palestinian lives but to those who most effectively dramatise Palestinian victimhood. Consider Greta Thunberg. She has become one of the world’s most recognisable faces of the Palestinian cause. Yet it is difficult to identify a single concrete improvement in the daily lives of Palestinians that resulted from her activism. Her flotilla generated headlines, photographs, and social-media engagement, but it did not open a border crossing, build a school, create a job, reform a Palestinian institution, or bring the parties any closer to peace. That is a feature and not a bug: Palestinianism produces political capital for the activists, and virtually nothing for the Palestinians. 

The result is that Palestinians become indispensable to the movement precisely insofar as they remain unresolved. A Palestine at peace with Israel would matter profoundly to Palestinians, but it would be catastrophic for Palestinianism. 

None of this is an argument against supporting Palestinian rights. On the contrary. It is an argument for taking Palestinians seriously enough to refuse their transformation into ideological mascots of Western radicals. Peoples are not metaphors and nations are not allegories. 

As Palestinian writer and analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote: “I, and many others … struggle to find a political home in today’s pro-Palestine movement. (That movement) is dominated by maximalists, zero-sum positions, slogan-driven voices and narratives. Pro-Palestine activism has been reduced to incendiary language that fails to capture the multiple moving parts of what is needed to advance the just and urgent Palestinian aspirations … they can’t present viable and pragmatic ideas that are not mere rhetorical statements.” 

Every time Palestinianism colonises another unrelated issue, the vicious cycle deepens, and the more actual Palestinians like Ahmed suffer. Because the more indispensable Palestine becomes to every Western argument, the more dispensable actual Palestinians become. 

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About the author

Andres Spokoiny

Andres Spokoiny

Originally from Argentina, Andrés Spokoiny is President and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network. He has served as the CEO of Federation CJA in Montreal and worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Community in Paris.

More from the author

Seven questions we need to ask

Comments5

  • Avatar of Dag Lakerda

    Dag Lakerda5 September at 04:37 pm

    This is a sober and clear analysis of a complex reality that is confusing and baffling. Written with precision and nuance without religious or nationalistic schmaltz. Kudos Andres, what a masterpiece!

  • Avatar of Larry Stillman

    Larry Stillman5 September at 12:42 pm

    Spokoiny is a bit off the mark here. Certainly, there are revolutionary elements around the world, including Australia, who see Israel as the pinnacle of imperialism and colonialism. But there is also non-ideological moral outrage because of the sheer brutality of Israeli responses post-October 7, and now, settler attacks. That on top of half a century of unfettered occupation & the Naqba, and sadly, frequent Diaspora endorsement . However, Spokoiny conveniently avoids raising all this as a cause of hate . Unless Israel productively engages with what remains of Hamas, the PA, and others, and engages in a tough compromise- which Arab states have said they will support- this opposition will continue.

  • Avatar of judy

    judy3 September at 03:05 pm

    (begin part 2)

    UNGAR 242 [22 November 1967] emphasises, “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security … ” and requires “(i) “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; (ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

    *** NOTE: “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”

    *** NOTE: “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied”

    *** NOTE: “political independence of every State [ *** both Israel and Palestine *** ] in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries”

    …

    UNGARs 181 and 242 apply to both States. Neither upheld / upholds its responsibilities.

    Peace,
    Judy

  • Avatar of judy

    judy3 September at 03:04 pm

    (begin part 1)

    Some fact-checking:

    “The Right of the Jewish People to live in a Secure State in the Ancient Holy Land was declared … by a SuperMajority of the United Nations on the 29th of November 1947.” [Mark Ian]

    …

    UNGAR 181 defined THREE areas to be carved out of the Mandate for Palestine:

    “Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in part III of this plan, shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948. The boundaries of the Arab State, the Jewish State, and the City of Jerusalem shall be as described in parts II and III below.” [UNGAR 181, 29 November 1947, I.A.3]

    Part II defines the boundaries of The Arab State, The Jewish State, and the City of Jerusalem [“a special international regime”].

    UNGAR 181 does not say anything about any “Ancient Holy Land.”

    …

    (end part 1)

  • Avatar of Mark Ian

    Mark Ian1 September at 09:09 am

    The Right of the Jewish People to live in a Secure State in the Ancient Holy Land was declared after the Holocaust by a SuperMajority of the United Nations on the 29th of November 1947 .
    Both the USA and USSR voted in favour the United Kingdom abstaining and France voting in Favour .

    The Security Council in 1967 under Resolution 242 recognised that Israel has to live in Secure and Recognised Borders and in a Peace Settlement a Palestinian State would be built within the West Bank of the Jordan if that Palestinian State was willing to live in Peace with its Jewish Neighbours.
    However the Arab Majority States met in Khartoum in the Sudan Africa and Proclaimed the three No’s No Recognition of Israel No Negotiations with Israel and No Peace with Israel ..
    From the River to Sea Palestine will be Free is a call to demolish the Jewish State of Isreal .
    Hamas Hezbollah and Iran call for the destruction of the Jewish State by Violence.
    This is Western Palestinianism .