by Wayne Besen • October 4, 2026 • Israel and Palestine, News, Opinion, Politics, Weekly Column • Comments (0) • 21

The Pro-Palestine Movement Has Hit a Dead End

The Global Intifada Can’t Hate Its way into Helping Palestinians, Nor Will It Intimidate Jews into Bending at the Knee

At first blush the “Free Palestine” movement appears to have momentum. In reality, it has been an abject failure that is going nowhere fast. Never in human history has a cause received so much publicity yet achieved so few results. Having hit a dead end, this effort has curdled into a worldwide orgy of antisemitism that has only made Jews reaffirm the importance of Israel–the opposite of what this movement wanted.

The chief strategic blunder was morphing from a Pro-Palestine movement into a “Global Intifada.” Its leaders decided that the best way to bring Israel to its knees was bullying Jews across the planet. This required coercion against the apolitical or Jewish allies too, tyrannically forcing people to declare “Free Palestine” or face threats and a manufactured online backlash.

By embracing such repugnant tactics, the movement has irritated and alienated the very people that it should have courted. It has been reduced to stalking Jewish singers and actors, harassing delis and haranguing synagogues.

If the Global Intifada (GI) was interested in influencing Israeli policy, it would organize narrow protests at the Israeli embassy that condemned Bejamin Netanyahu’s government. By widening its targets to include Jewish entertainers, students, politicians, business leaders and houses of worship–the GI exposed its true mission–piggybacking on Gaza to unleash waves of antisemitism. In this equation, Palestinians were a mere afterthought in their larger crusade.

The GI’s premise, that spewing hate would cause diaspora Jews to pressure Israel into changing course, was fatally flawed. After three years of futilely attempting to turn “Zionist” into an epithet and working to systematically exclude Jews from public life, these insults have receded to white noise.

Such bilious anger, combined with chronic policy incoherence, has left this flailing crusade increasingly radicalized and desperate. After falsely accusing Israel of genocide and embracing every wacky antisemitic conspiracy theory under the sun, the GI was left with nothing in its advocacy holster. Once a movement smears its opponents as “Baby Killers,” it has nowhere left to go rhetorically. Smart activists know this and that’s why they speak with deliberation while trying to avoid premature escalation.

The GI movement has boxed itself into an awkward crouch where its only move is loudly belching “Israel!”. When no change occurs, it turns up the volume and screeches “ISRAEL!!!!” After that inevitably falters, they turn the decibels up even higher and caterwaul,

“ISRAEL!!!!!!!”

At no point do these third-rate activists question whether their tactics are backfiring or whether they have an achievable end game. When you talk to these radicals, a high percentage of them actually believe that they can insult Israelis, 80-percent of whom were born in Israel, into uprooting their lives and moving away to far away countries they’ve never even visited. The hallucinations run so strong with this crowd that they ought to package their mass delusions as a drug and sell it at nightclubs.