During a week-long anti-Israel demonstration organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, SJP erected a model separation barrier on campuses across North America. The symbolic wall is riddled with anti-Israel slogans, drawings, and falsehoods. Each section of the barrier is intended to portray the injustices that Palestinians face, each one placing blame on the Jewish State.
Meanwhile, Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus are being beheaded and slaughtered by militants of the Islamic State.
According to Haaretz, “more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, took over about 90 percent of the camp in the last week” – an act which Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli-Arab Member of the Knesset, rightly called a “crime against humanity.” According to the United Nations, around 18,000 civilians remain trapped in the camp.
But of course, this massacre did not appear on SJP’s wall. The protection of Palestinian lives is an afterthought for a group whose main goal is to delegitimize Israel, and in a world where other governments demonstrably value Palestinian lives far less.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (including pregnant women, children and women with infants) are routinely deported to Syria, where they are banned from working in over 30 professions, including medicine and law. They are banned from owning property, attending public schools, benefiting from public health services, and even making an enforceable will.
On their own turf of Gaza, Hamas uses Palestinian civilians to shield terrorists and weapons from the Israel Defense Forces.
None of these atrocities appear on SJP’s symbolic wall because SJP’s primary interest is condemning Israel. If Palestinian rights, autonomy or security were their first priority, one would expect to see protests against Palestinian oppression elsewhere. Instead, Jews are the only target. As Golda Meir might have said, they hate Israel more than they love their own people.
The Islamic State massacre of Palestinians is all the more paradoxical because the group being massacred is statistically most supportive of the group that is massacring them. Compared to all other Arabs in the Middle East, Palestinians show the most support for the Islamic State. A survey by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies showed that 24 percent of Palestinians view the Islamic State as “positive” or “positive to some extent.”
Palestinians in the Gaza strip even held a rally earlier this year in support of the Islamic State, with one marcher declaring that the Islamic State is rightly following Islam’s orders to “punish and kill those who assault and offend Islam’s Prophet Mohammed.” Yet it is now Palestinians who are being punished and killed by Islamic State operatives.
Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to have security and peace. Sadly, they are being used as pawns in an international campaign against Israel by people who do not care for them very much, but who have a very loud voice on American college campuses.
Eliana Rudee is a Fellow with the Haym Salomon Center. She is a graduate of Scripps College, where she published her thesis in Perceptions and Strategic Concerns of Gender in Terrorism. Follow her @ellierudee. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
