"Westsplaining" Palestine

"'Westplaining' seeks to explain away what many Palestinians 

clearly say, so as to avoid having to deal with the consequences."

"[T]he Palestinian 'cause,' despite continuing to enjoy global support and attention, seems to have gone nowhere. The reason is that the 'cause' has never been the one so many Westerners created in their minds....

    "It is understandable that the West wants to believe that many Palestinians engage in violence because they seek 'freedom from occupation,' or are 'angered by settlements,' or 'want to improve conditions in Gaza.' Those are rational, limited, and understandable goals that Westerners can feel good about supporting. But they are projected goals, inventions of a Western mind.The vaunted Palestinian 'cause,' of which Abu Daoud spoke [i.e., the man who planned the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, who remained unrepentant to his dying day], and which Hamas has dutifully pursued, has never been about any of those goals. Its followers have made it clear, for more than a century, in words, actions, and strategic decisions, that their 'cause' was always one: the prevention, and then the destruction of a Jewish state in any part of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Hence 'Free Palestine' and 'From the River to the Sea.' ...
    "[T]he Palestinian 'cause' was always singularly and consistently about nothing less than ensuring that the Jews have no state in any part of the land. This western tendency, which I have come to call 'westplaining,' seeks to explain away what many Palestinians clearly say, so as to avoid having to deal with the consequences. ...
    "'Westplaining' rests above all on an inversion of cause and effect. Israel’s extended military presence in the West Bank becomes the cause of Palestinian violence – 'occupation' – rather than the outcome of an ideology that refuses any agreement that would end Israel’s military presence ... if it means accepting the legitimacy and permanence of free Jews living in their own state in the remaining part of the land. ...
    "Today only those truly determined to deny the largest, most brutal, massacre of Jews since the Holocaust will look away from the slaughter of October 7. It turns out that, indeed, when given the chance, when Israel’s military fails to stop them in time, many Palestinians do mean to carry out, literally and gruesomely, 'Itbah al-Yahud – the slaughter of the Jews. 

    "It is time to stop looking away. It is time to end appeasement. For too long, Palestinian groups have been nourished, indulged and sustained by their enablers to keep fighting for an annihilationist cause, rather than moving on, and creating prosperous lives for themselves. 

    "If anything is to emerge from this hellscape, it should be a true reckoning with what the Palestinian 'cause' has been for over a century. Nothing less than its complete defeat, and the reprogramming of its ethos away from destruction and towards construction will do."

~ Dr Einat Wilf, from her column 'There can be no peace so long as Palestinians want to annihilate Israel'