Gesture Politics Won’t Help Palestinians

 

Opinion

Bret Stephens

Gesture Politics Won’t Help Palestinians

 

Sept. 9, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/opinion/gesture-politics-wont-help-palestinians.html

Bret Stephens

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

 

This month, France, Canada, Australia and possibly Britain will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly. Also, some 1,800 actors and filmmakers, including Mark Ruffalo and Cynthia Nixon, have signed a public letter pledging “not to screen films, appear at or otherwise work with Israeli film institutions.” And the government of Spain imposed an arms embargo on Israel.

 

Will a single Gazan be helped in any meaningful way by any of this? No. Will Israel be hurt? Not particularly. Will it exacerbate Western antisemitism? More than likely.

 

After Madrid announced its embargo, I wondered what weapons, if any, did it sell to Israel. None, as far as I can discover. But, at least until this month’s declaration, Spain was an eager customer for Israeli military equipment, to the tune of over one billion euros between October 2023 and last April. Even after Spain decided to cancel a purchase of Israeli anti-tank missiles, it must still rely on Israeli cybersecurity and A.I. technology.

 

My advice to Israel, which last year surpassed Spain to become the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter: Reciprocate the embargo fully. Losing those service contracts would weaken Spain’s protection against terrorism. Let Madrid hope that its anti-Israel posturing will keep the threat at bay.

 

Now take the rest of the list.

 

France’s announcement in July that it would recognize a Palestinian state will do nothing to bring one into being. Its main effect so far was to provide a diplomatic victory for Hamas, which allegedly responded by hardening its negotiating stance with Israel over releasing its hostages, while prompting right-wing Israeli lawmakers to push harder for territorial annexation in the West Bank.

 

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As for the wished-for boycott of the Israeli film industry, it would only harm the side of Israel least in sympathy with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It also smacks of an ugly double standard: Do Ruffalo and friends also call for boycotts of, say, Iranian or Chinese arts institutions in protest of the policies of their governments?

 

Also this month, a flotilla of small ships, with the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg among the passengers, will attempt to breach an Israeli naval blockade and reach Gaza with a symbolic amount of humanitarian aid. Her second attempt will probably end exactly as the first one did: in the rear seat of a plane out of Tel Aviv, bringing more attention to herself than her cause.

 

What, then, do these gestures accomplish? The legitimate needs of the Palestinian people are these: an end to this war; an end to being dragged into future wars by Hamas; an end to the chronic misgovernance of the Palestinian Authority; the establishment of a self-governing political order that improves the lives of Palestinians without endangering the lives of Israelis; the eventual creation, under conditions of mutual trust, of a Palestinian state.

 

Immediate recognition of such a state advances none of this. It is the proverbial cart before the horse. France and its fellow travelers aren’t aiming to do much to help actual Palestinians. Mainly, they seek to congratulate themselves. Countries achieve irrelevance when moral onanism takes the place of serious policy as the principal instrument of national policy.

 

Nor does it do anything to change Israelis’ minds. Somewhere near the center of the Israeli psyche lies the thought: The world is out to get us. Save for some shining exceptions, much that’s happened since Oct. 7, 2023, has proved them right: Being accused of genocide the same month they were grotesquely massacred. Watching a pogrom unfold on the streets of Amsterdam. Seeing elderly Jews burned alive in Colorado. Becoming the singular object of a global protest movement that’s utterly indifferent when our NATO ally Turkey bombs Kurds or Syrian forces massacre Alawites.

 

An excess of fear can lead to serious mistakes, and we’ll find out soon if Israel’s strike on Hamas’s leaders in Qatar was one of them. But if Israel’s usual critics can’t be bothered to appreciate the seriousness of the threat Israelis face daily — from Houthi drones, Palestinian gunmen, Hezbollah rocket fire displacing tens of thousands of Israelis or Israeli women being raped and slaughtered by Hamas — they will have no influence over Israeli thinking or behavior. In their one-sided vehemence, they write themselves out of any meaningful conversation about the Palestinian future.

 

So what effect do anti-Israel gesture politics actually have?

 

From Montreal to Paris to Melbourne, diaspora Jews are living through the worst era of open antisemitism since the 1930s. Leaders like Canada’s Mark Carney, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Australia’s Anthony Albanese are no doubt sincere in condemning this. But they are also contributing to a climate of anti-Jewish demonization by treating Israel as a quasi-pariah state whose presumptive supporters can be viewed as guilty accomplices. In their virtue-signaling foreign policy, they are inflicting genuine harms on their own Jewish citizens.

 

Long term, the Jews will survive this — as we always have. The history of governments that sought to win political favor by harming the Jews is usually a story of disgrace and decline.