(July 22, 2026 / JNS)
Consider the evidence. The United Nations has been consumed by the Palestinian issue almost since its founding. Middle East Studies departments often question the legitimacy of one nation—Israel—while devoting extraordinary attention to a state that does not yet exist. Professors with no expertise in the Middle East sign petitions condemning the State of Israel and repeating talking points by Hamas, a terrorist organization. Students paying exorbitant tuition spend more time organizing anti-Israel demonstrations and calling for boycotts than demanding lower college costs.
Meanwhile, a global media with nearly 200 countries to cover remains fixated on a nation roughly the size of New Jersey.
No other conflict commands such sustained political, academic, diplomatic and media attention. It follows from the fact that no other stateless people have a dedicated U.N. refugee agency, multiple permanent U.N. committees devoted to their cause and an annual U.N. day of solidarity. Whatever one thinks of the Palestinian national movement, its ability to shape the world’s agenda has few, if any, historical equals.
Why is that?
It’s certainly not because of demography. Roughly 160,000 Americans claim Palestinian ancestry—about five one-hundredths of 1% of the population. It isn’t uniqueness of cause: Kurds, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Baloch and Sahrawis all want self-determination as well, and the world shrugs. It isn’t even suffering, because Syria’s civil war made 6 million people refugees and killed hundreds of thousands. Sudan, Congo and Myanmar have produced humanitarian catastrophes that dwarf Gaza by any body count. Yet none of it generates a fraction of the sustained global fixation reserved for Palestinian Arabs.
The world, through the United Nations, thought it had solved the land dispute in 1947 with the partition decision. But the Arab rejection of the two-state solution showed that the oft-stated simplification of the problem as two peoples fighting over one land was bogus from the start.
The reality, which former White House chief of staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is just the most recent to ignore, is that the conflict is not over geography but theology; the Islamist forces that dominate the Palestinian cause refuse to accept a Jewish state anywhere in the region, under any borders, on any terms.
Another reason the conflict commands attention is that it is over the Holy Land. The centrality of Jerusalem to the three major religions makes the city’s sovereignty a global concern. Jewish control of the city has been contested by the Catholic Church and Muslims.
The Iran war will end at some point—hopefully, with the destruction of its nuclear capability, ballistic missiles andproxy network. Then you can be sure the world’s attention will turn again to the Palestinians.
Moreover, the Soviet Union and its allies adopted the Palestinian cause as part of their broader effort to weaken U.S. influence in the Middle East. As Israel became an object of the superpower rivalry, American support for it grew, and that growth, in turn, increased scrutiny of Israeli policy.
Building on that, the Soviet bloc and non-aligned nations used the United Nations to routinely condemn Israel; promote anti-Zionism in other international forums; back the Palestine Liberation Organization diplomatically; and encourage the framing of the conflict as one of anti-colonial liberation. It established multiple committees and agencies to focus solely on the Palestinians; the General Assembly produces annual resolutions condemning Israel; and U.N.-related bodies like the Human Rights Council disproportionately focus on alleged Israeli abuses while ignoring actual oppression by serial human rights violators.
Under Yasser Arafat, the PLO first attracted attention to the Palestinian cause through dramatic acts of terror, such as airplane hijackings. It then successfully masked its radical agenda as diplomacy and shifted international perceptions away from violence to the image of a stateless people seeking self-determination. While Israel continued to portray Palestinians as terrorists, most of the world accepted the PLO’s legitimacy, which was boosted by Israel’s eventual recognition of the organization and negotiation of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
While Washington invested 50 years trying to solve the Palestinian problem, Iran built the region’s most formidable proxy network, developed ballistic missiles, advanced toward nuclear capability, captured Lebanon through Hezbollah, dominated Iraq through Shi’ite militias, armed the Houthis and turned Syria into a forward operating base. In that same period, American administrations repeatedly treated the Palestinian issue as the key to Middle East peace while Iran systematically transformed the Middle East itself.
People like JD Vance—and the Biden and Obama officials who came before him—believe that the Iranians are rational actors who can be negotiated with. Because they refuse to acknowledge the possibility of religious war, and, yes, a clash of civilizations with the Muslim extremists, they reach the wrong conclusions. A similarly mistaken belief that the Palestinians are only interested in land—and not driven by the Islamist desire to eliminate the Jewish state—has doomed every U.S. peace initiative.
Some people now think that anti-Israel propaganda is manufactured by Qatar; however, its investments in the United States are relatively recent and don’t explain the decades-long obsession with the Palestinians.
For many years, Arab states supported anti-Israel Arab student organizations, but that stopped long ago. As my research has shown, there is little evidence that Arab funding is responsible for the hostile environment at universities today (in part, because so little is transparent); instead, the most vitriolic critics are coming from academic departments unrelated to the Middle East that have been poisoned by intersectionality and the fraudulent colonial-settler paradigm, which has intertwined the Palestinian cause with broader progressive movements concerning race, colonialism and social justice. A generation raised on this framework has become leaders of student movements and joined faculties where such groupthink is de rigueur.
Anthropologists and gender-studies faculty, for example, are not being funded by Qatar; still, they are among the most vigorous demonizers on many campuses, replacing the anti-Israel Marxists of the 1960s and ’70s.
Until this election cycle, siding with the Palestinians was self-defeating: Candidates who tried it were outspent and lost the votes. Recent primaries show that hostility to Israel can now be a winning position and that shift has occurred even against opponents backed by deep-pocketed pro-Israel donors.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no fool, yet he plays one when he suggests that the near-total collapse of public support for Israel among young people and Democrats is because of TikTok. Algorithmic anti-Israel content has undeniably shaped a generation’s instincts. Gen-ignorant is also oblivious to history and context. But pretending the images out of Gaza had no independent effect on public opinion is its own form of denial.
As CNN commentator Van Jones observed, all this generation seems to know is that Israel kills Palestinians. No public relations campaign, however polished, was going to offset what they saw with their own eyes.
But, again, this is all since Oct. 7, 2023. Far more Americans may support the Palestinians today than in the past, but the issue was always high on the political agenda of nearly every U.S. president, including Donald Trump, who offered his own Mideast peace plans. They were prodded by Arab governments that said they cared about the Palestinian cause far more than they actually did and by a foreign-policy establishment hostile toward the U.S.-Israel relationship since 1948.
Even after Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco normalized relations with Israel without waiting for the Palestinian issue to be resolved—disproving the “linkage” theory—the Emanuels and Arabists still insist regional peace requires Palestinian statehood. Having watched Trump bend Israel to his will, some now believe that those same pressure tactics can force a Palestinian state into existence, even though majorities of both Palestinians and Israelis reject the two-state framework.
Emanuel and other “two-staters” ignore the reality on the ground; that is, the presence of 500,000-plus Israelis living in Judea and Samaria (aka, the “West Bank”) and 300,000 in Jerusalem. And they underestimate the psychological aftermath of Oct. 7: an Israeli public that is now far more willing to absorb international condemnation than to gamble its security on the establishment of a new Hamastan named Palestine.
You would expect a professed Zionist like Emanuel to appreciate these realities. Instead, like many American Jews, he assumes to know better than the Israelis who bear the consequences of these decisions.
The Iran war will end at some point—hopefully, with the destruction of its nuclear capability, ballistic missiles, proxy network and its regime. Then you can be sure the world’s attention will turn again to the Palestinians.
Even today, the Palestinian issue has become an obsession for much of the Democratic Party. At a time when Americans face pressing challenges at home, many Democrats—not just progressives, as the recent House vote on aid to Israel demonstrated—have chosen to make common cause not with the Middle East’s only democracy and America’s most reliable regional ally, but instead, with the supporters of autocracy, theocracy and terrorism. In doing so, they have turned against the one country in the region that most closely shares America’s values and strategic interests.
Equally concerning is the fact that the vice president of the United States, who is the contender for Trump’s throne, has embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories and made Israel the scapegoat for his appeasement of Iran.
The Palestinian movement has failed to create a Palestinian state but succeeded in persuading much of the world that the fate of the Middle East, and even international peace, hinges on the resolution of one dispute involving a people who comprise a tiny fraction of the world’s population. That belief has shaped U.S. diplomacy for half a century, distorted international institutions, poisoned academic discourse and diverted attention from the forces that have posed the greatest threats to regional stability.
Whether one supports or opposes Palestinian statehood, it’s time to ask why the world has mistaken the Middle East’s most visible conflict for its most consequential one.
