Palestinian Voices Silenced by Western Activism

Protesters fill the streets of London, Berlin, and New York chanting “Free Palestine” with the fervor of a religious movement. They carry signs demanding statehood, justice, and liberation. They speak with absolute certainty about what Palestinians want, need, and deserve. More countries are proclaiming their recognition of the Palestinian state that does not exist. But if you listen carefully to Palestinians themselves, you hear voices that challenge the assumptions and slogans.

You are just not listening to the diversity of Palestinian voices. “You” can be the demonstrators on the streets around the world; “you” can be the left wing demonstrators in Israel and members of pro-Palestinian NGOs; “you” can be right wing Israelis supporting increased settlement and sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and/or Gaza; and “you” is me before I began writing this series of articles collated here into a narrative few mean when they refer to Israeli versus Palestinian narratives.

You may tell yourself you already know the truth (because you do not hear anything different). That is why I begin here:

Two “Silences” You Insist on Hearing

The first silence is after terrorist attacks. When buses explode, when families are murdered in their homes, when women are dragged across the border on October 7, you point to the absence of condemnation and polls showing a majority of Palestinians support violence and declare it proof. Proof that Palestinians “as a people” approve of the violence. Proof that hatred runs so deep in all of them.

The second silence is after failed peace initiatives. When Arafat walked away at Camp David in 2000, when Abbas turned down Olmert’s map in 2008, you listened only to the official voices. Einat Wilf wrote: “no Palestinian voices bemoaning the lost opportunity” as if there are no Palestinians but the leaders with whom Israel deals.

Two silences turned into evidence of what you have believed all along, left and right, Israeli and non-Israeli, each in their own way. I was guilty of this as well.

But the voices exist. Without claims of these voices being representative, let me show you some of them. My goal is to open us up to hearing what is generally not acknowledged.

The Diversity You Don’t Hear

Palestinian Life Beyond Western Narratives

Riwaa is a young woman still living in Gaza. Before October 7th, she had what she calls a normal life: “I had my own job. I was working from home… I was going to the gym and I was having my own routine. I was enjoying my time, my quality time with my sisters, my family, my friends, joining gatherings. I was planning to submit for a scholarship.”

This is not the image of Gazans that fills Western media feeds. Not endless oppression, not perpetual resistance, but a woman with career goals, gym memberships, and plans for graduate school. When pressed about Hamas, her response defies the expected script: “They wouldn’t affect my life, actually. I didn’t feel that they affect on me or threatening my life… They have their own system, their own ideology. As any country has different parties and different ideologies.”

Her family, she emphasizes, stays “out of politics and out of the idea of parties… So we are just living our life.”

Contrasting Palestinian Testimonies

When she talks with Daniel Gordis, Manar tells a different story and one equally distant from Western expectations. Born in Syria, raised in Egypt, she went to Gaza for university and joined the “We Want to Live” protests against Hamas in 2018-19. Today she is a university student in Canada. Her assessment of Gaza is brutal: “The people have no way to dream, not even the children. They don’t know what they want to be when they grow up.”

She blames Hamas directly: “Everything that entered Gaza was taken by Hamas for themselves. The violence against Gazans was committed, not by Israel, but by Hamas.”

What do we do with contrasting testimonies from two authentic Palestinian women’s voices? Sweeping statements like Manar’s may capture the collective trauma she refers to in her interview, but they do not account for individual variations. She describes suffocating trauma that erases hope, yet Riwaa embodies the persistence of hope through education and personal goals in spite of the trauma response she also demonstrates.

Palestinians Criticizing Western Activism

Then there are the voices that emerged in a recent article. Hamza Howidy, a Palestinian in Germany since 2023, wrote: “As a Palestinian who has endured the harsh realities of conflict, I find myself compelled to speak out against the misguided activism that claims to champion our cause. The rise of what I call ‘Pan-Leftism’ and its simplistic slogans do more harm than good to the Palestinian people.”

Rami Saeed, a journalist from Gaza, was even more direct: “‘Free Palestine’ is an anarchic slogan that does not mean anything. The Hamas movement that rules us oppresses its own people and does not represent Palestinians.”

Yahya al-Hajj, a Palestinian activist, added: “We call upon all people of the world to support the Palestinian cause, but not through support of violent resistance that only means more deaths, which we reject entirely.”

Manar’s response to Western protesters who blame Israel is sharp: “It’s not realistic. It’s coming from a place where you have no idea really what’s happening… It’s very ridiculous. It’s stupid. I can’t take it… You are not open to listen to the other side of the reality.”

These are not isolated voices. They represent a spectrum of Palestinian opinion that exists outside the narrow bandwidth Western activists are willing to hear. And that has existed at least since 1948.

The Pattern of Silencing Palestinian Voices

Historical Suppression since 1948

From the start, moderate Palestinian voices were ignored or crushed, first by the Arab regimes that claimed to champion them. In 1948, Palestinians declared the All-Palestine Government in Gaza, asserting independence, issuing passports, and devising a constitution. The Jericho Conference was convened three months later, deceptively claiming that Palestinian notables endorsed union with Jordan; it was actually orchestrated by King Abdullah to annex the West Bank and deny Palestinian autonomy. By 1959, Egypt nullified the APG and took full military control over Gaza demolishing Gazan autonomy aspirations.

Since then, Palestinians who offered alternatives to the dominant narrative have been silenced by their own leaders, ignored by Arab regimes, and dismissed by Western activists: moderates who spoke of compromise with Israel are branded collaborators and assassinated, critics of PA corruption have been beaten, jailed, or killed, and Palestinians who complicate Western narratives are dismissed as unrepresentative or ignored entirely.

The Cost of Moderate Voices

For example, in 1978, moderate pro-Jordanian local leader Mustafa Dodin advocated pragmatic non-violent means for autonomy and, branded a collaborator, was socially ostracized. Ramallah lawyer Aziz Shehadeh was shot for supporting Palestinian autonomy with Israeli backing. Gazan Abu Rahmeh argued that “Palestinians should understand that peace requires moderation, and in a settlement, no one gets everything he wants.” But nobody was listening.

Zafer al-Masri became mayor of Nablus in 1986 with a pragmatic platform and moderate views toward Israel. He was assassinated within three months. And the list goes on.

More recently, in 2021, Nizar Banat, a critic of PA corruption, was beaten to death by PA security forces. His killing sparked brief protests, then enforced silence fell once more.

This pattern of silencing continues today, but the voices persist. Some Palestinians speak “behind closed doors”, others risk speaking openly. When you listen to them without filtering their words through ideological expectations, a picture different from the familiar narrative emerges.

What Palestinians Actually Say

Voices from the Ground

A Palestinian home renovations worker told an Israeli leftist in 1989: “The worst thing that can happen is for us to have a state.” His voice was later echoed by the politician Hanan Ashrawi, who noted bitterly that “The agreement [Oslo] lacked legitimacy because it bypassed the collective leadership and the representatives of our people.”

Mohammed Massad, a former Fatah fighter from Jenin who became an outspoken critic of the Palestinian Authority exclaimed: “If a Jew came and built a factory here, they would not let us work there. They said it is normalization, and they burned the factories. Why? We need to work! They destroyed our chance for jobs with their own hands.”

His assessment of Oslo was brutal: “They [the PA] became the contractors of the occupation. Instead of building a state, they built villas.”

Zara, a West Bank resident I interviewed (not her real name) told me: “Maybe 90% of the society is against the PA, but they cannot express it openly. Maybe more, maybe 99%.”  Another Palestinian voice went further: “Why doesn’t Israel just take it all and make me a citizen! I don’t want to vote, I want to work.”

Hebron businessman Ashraf Jabari is not afraid to say this openly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QMUdl4VjwM

The Gap Between Reality and Protests

Yet the gap between Palestinian reality and Western protests remains and one Palestinian lamented that “There are more demonstrations on the streets of London than in Nablus and Ramallah.”

Critics will say these are cherry-picked voices, or that such statements are merely the products of despair under occupation. But that quick dismissal itself is a form of silencing. It assumes Palestinians cannot mean what they say unless they repeat the expected script.

These individual voices reveal a pattern, but understanding why they remain unheard requires examining the systems that benefit from their silence.

The Infrastructure of Denial

Economic Incentives Against Statehood

The Palestinian Authority survives on roughly $2 billion annually in international aid, funding that exists precisely because Palestinians do not have a state. Aid dependence has created perverse incentives and they know that sovereignty would end the flow of donor money at some point. Survival, not independence, has become the PA’s highest value.

Regional and International Abandonment

Arab regimes, once champions of the Palestinian cause, now treat Palestine as a grievance to be managed, not a cause to be championed. Gulf states reframe “support” as humanitarian aid and symbolic UN votes while cracking down on protests at home. They do not want another unstable, radical Arab state in their neighborhood.

The international community chants the slogan of two states but will it pay the estimated $30-40 billion required to build the infrastructure of statehood? Recognition without reality has become the ultimate abandonment.

Israeli Role in Silencing Local Voices

Israel has played its own role in this silencing. The government chose to empower the PLO leadership from Tunis instead of local figures who had been expressing moderate and pragmatic attitudes since the 1970s. The Oslo process bypassed them entirely. Today, Israel continues this pattern by propping up the PA against local challengers. When Hebron tribal leaders offer alternative approaches to governance, Israel maintains its relationship with PA officials instead. The preference for a single address over multiple local voices serves Israeli administrative convenience but contributes to the marginalization of Palestinian diversity.

The Silence That Speaks

In the West Bank today, most Palestinians are in what one resident called “survival mode.” They are tired of politics, tired of slogans, tired of waiting for leaders who only steal from them. One man told me bluntly: “Nobody cares about the Palestinian people. Not Israel, not the Arab world, not the Americans. Not even our own leaders. We are on our own.”

That is not the language of resistance; it is the language of exhaustion.

The quiet abandonment is not only external. It is internal too. Palestinians have stopped believing in the dream their leaders still parade in front of cameras. The gap between daily Palestinian reality and Western projection only grows wider when protests abroad claim to speak in their name.

What Western Protests Actually Do

When protesters in London or Berlin chant “Free Palestine,” they are drowning out Palestinian voices with their own. Palestinians themselves have said so: Hamza Howidy calls the slogans “simplistic” and harmful, Rami Saeed dismisses “Free Palestine” as meaningless, and Manar describes Western activism as coming from people who “have no idea what’s happening.”

Many of these protesters, of course, genuinely believe they are amplifying Palestinian voices and supporting Palestinian liberation. Their intentions may be sincere. But impact matters more than intention, and the impact, as Palestinians themselves attest, is to replace authentic Palestinian discourse with Western projections of what Palestinians should want.

The Cost of Not Listening

This selective deafness carries real costs. When Western activists ignore Palestinian voices they contribute to the silencing they claim to oppose. When they chant slogans that Palestinians themselves call harmful, they become part of the problem rather than the solution.

When they refuse to hear Palestinians who express ambivalence about statehood, pragmatism about coexistence, or criticism of their own leaders, they perpetuate the very marginalization they claim to fight against. This does not serve Palestinian interests but, rather the psychological needs of Western activists.

Instead, acknowledging that Palestinians, like any people, hold diverse views about their future, leads to understanding that dignity and self-determination can take many forms.

The State of Not Listening

American and European leaders repeat the phrase “two-state solution” like a liturgy. It is recited to reassure allies, to calm critics, and to give the illusion that history is moving in the Palestinians’ favour. But it is not policy. It is theater. I have shown this in other articles (listed in the Appendix).

What makes this more than rhetoric is what it erases. Palestinians who think differently, who do not fit the script, whether it is Ashraf Jabari in Hebron, or anonymous West Bankers who say they would prefer residency in Israel over citizenship in the Palestinian Authority, or Riwaa in Gaza simply describing a normal life before war. Their positions are dismissed as unrepresentative or inauthentic, as if only one political line counts as “Palestinian.” And it means that real Palestinian voices, diverse, contradictory, and often pragmatic, are not heard.

The Conclusion You Might Not Want to Hear

The refusal to listen takes many forms. When Riwaa focuses on family safety rather than national liberation, some may think she is abandoning her people. When Manar blames Hamas rather than Israel, some may think she has internalized oppression. When anonymous West Bank residents privately admit that they would prefer Israeli residency to the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, some may think they are surrendering. But these people are talking about the lives they live and the futures they envision.

Your failure to listen has become part of the problem you claim to solve. The question is: when will you begin to hear what Palestinians actually say? When will you hear their quiet insistence on ordinary life, jobs, gym memberships, scholarship applications, and the simple right to speak without being erased? Listening simply means taking Palestinians at their word in all their contradiction, ordinariness, and complexity, the positive and the negative.

The complexity of a people cannot be reduced to your slogans, no matter how loudly you chant them in distant capitals or on the streets of Israel. It is time to listen. Who knows where that will take us? And where we might have been today had we been listening from the start.

Appendix:

This analysis is the final article in the “Silenced Palestinian Voices” series, part of the broader “Quiet Abandonment” investigation into the world’s retreat from the Palestinian cause.

The Quiet Abandonment Series

The Gulf States have moved on from Palestine
Statehood? Not so fast The Gulf’s real attitude to Palestine
Neighbours Egypt and Jordan privately oppose Palestinian statehood
Diplomacy’s Denial: American and the peace process that is not
Europe loudly says “Palestinian state.” Under its breath: “not really.”

Silenced Palestinian Voices Subseries:

Silencing Palestinians with reconciliation on the table
Roots of resistance, 1967 to 1987
Voices among the stones, 1987 to 2000
Silenced twice – the women who led the first intifada
Gaza and the West Bank – One people? Really?
Survival mode in the West Bank, 2000 to 2025
Dreams interrupted, life in suspension in Gaza