The Problem With
Free Palestine

Across named organizations, freedom language can carry a demand for Israel’s removal.

Within Our Lifetime is one example. Rally speeches and a national student organizing toolkit also connect liberation language to ending Israel’s existence or dismantling its political foundations. Read the appeal and the stated endpoint together:

The recurring pattern: language a supporter may hear as a call for rights is attached to an issuer’s program against Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state.

Methods matter too. The National SJP toolkit describes people it labels “settlers,” including within Israel, as non-civilians and military assets. That blanket denial of civilian protection makes its praise of the attack especially consequential.

These examples establish named organizers’ positions, not every person’s meaning when they say “Free Palestine.” Two of the speeches came from the same rally.

Once that endpoint is visible, the next question is whether it is also written into political policy.

When coexistence is permitted only on one movement’s political terms.

BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has stated his endpoint plainly. Writing under his own name in 2022, he said: “definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” He paired that rejection with a proposal to accept Jewish Israelis as equal citizens in a new shared society. BDS itself says it takes no formal position on whether the final arrangement should be one state or two; Barghouti’s proposal is his personal position.

That distinction does not make the endpoint less consequential. Equal citizenship promises individual legal status; it does not preserve Jewish national self-government, control of refuge and admission, or institutions able to protect Jews if they become a demographic minority. Because Barghouti seeks the end of Jewish sovereignty, his assurance of future equality must be evaluated against the political practices he and the movement endorse now.

Those practices are not limited to one speaker. The Palestinian BDS National Committee’s anti-normalization guidelines say joint Palestinian or Arab–Israeli work is boycottable unless the Israeli side publicly recognizes the rights in the BDS call and the activity is “co-resistance” against the system BDS describes as occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid. The guidelines identify many projects framed around “dialogue,” “coexistence,” reconciliation, or overcoming barriers as normalization when they do not meet those conditions.

The policy includes an accountability rule: it calls for boycotting the works, products, and activities of Palestinians or Arabs found to have participated in normalization until they end and publicly renounce that involvement and affirm BDS principles. PACBI applied this approach again in 2025 when it renewed its boycott call against Standing Together, a Jewish–Palestinian movement for peace and equality.

BDS does not ban every joint Palestinian or Arab–Israeli project. It allows projects only when the Israeli side accepts the rights in the BDS call and the work counts as “co-resistance.” In most other cases, it rejects dialogue or coexistence across political disagreement.

That record matters to credibility. A future Jewish minority is asked to trust that equal rights and security will be protected after Jewish sovereignty is removed. Yet the movement’s present rules discourage many bridge-building projects unless Jewish participants first accept its political premises, and impose social and professional costs on Palestinian or Arab participants labeled “normalizers.” That does not prove future rights would be violated. It does give Jews a concrete reason to ask what independent institutions, enforceable guarantees, and political pluralism would protect them when assurances are no longer voluntary.

A separate case involved state-like coercion. Hamas authorities detained Rami Aman after an online meeting with Israeli peace activists in 2020. He spent more than six months in detention and was convicted before his release.

Boycott and imprisonment are different harms, imposed by different actors. Barghouti’s one-state proposal is personal; the anti-normalization and accountability rules are organizational policy.

These costs make coexistence harder. An earlier international forum shows how a justice appeal can also accommodate hostility toward Jews.

A campaign for justice can still make room for hostility toward Jews.

The 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, offers a modern example. Governments attended the United Nations conference, while advocacy groups gathered at a separate NGO Forum. That forum’s declaration singled out Israel for diplomatic, economic, and social isolation. The Arab Lawyers Union distributed a booklet with antisemitic caricatures. US delegate Tom Lantos reported a widely distributed flyer showing Hitler beneath the question, “What if I had won?” Its answer began: “There would be NO Israel…” Jewish participants described threats, while Human Rights Watch later acknowledged antisemitic statements and the targeting of Jews.

Durban did not create this danger. The history behind Jewish fears of losing collective protection reaches much further back.

In Damascus in 1840, a false ritual-murder accusation led to the arrest and torture of Jews, some of whom died. In Baghdad in 1941, the Farhud killed an estimated 150–180 Jews. These events had different perpetrators and political settings. The Farhud’s instigators portrayed Iraqi Jews as British collaborators or Zionist sympathizers and connected violence against them to the conflict in Palestine. Those political claims did not justify attacking Jewish civilians who were treated as collectively responsible. Both episodes show how quickly a Jewish minority could lose protection.

A Nazi propagandist carried the same campaign into postwar anti-Zionism.

Johann von Leers did not discover hostility to Jews through the Arab–Israeli conflict. As a Nazi propagandist, he defended the Holocaust while it was underway. In May 1943, he wrote, “we are exterminating the Jews of Europe,” and demanded their “total elimination.”

After the war, von Leers continued publishing antisemitic material. He moved to Egypt in 1956 and became an adviser on anti-Israel propaganda. Israel and Zionism became new political vehicles for the same older worldview. A contemporary CIA report recorded his aim to “convince two billion non-Europeans of the Jewish danger.”

The audience expanded and the language shifted toward anti-colonial liberation, but the alleged enemy remained a worldwide “Jewish danger.” In von Leers’s work, anti-Zionism did not replace antisemitism; it carried it into a new geopolitical setting. His record does not define every criticism of Zionism. It does show that explicitly Nazi antisemitism entered postwar anti-Zionist propaganda rather than simply disappearing in 1945.

The apartheid and racism framing did not begin as a response to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In 1961, South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd declared: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” In 1965, PLO Research Center founder Fayez Sayegh described Zionism as inherently colonial and racist. Both accusations preceded the 1967 war.

At the time, Israel did not control Gaza or the West Bank. Egypt held Gaza under military occupation, while Jordan had annexed the West Bank. Neither created an independent Palestinian state. The original accusation therefore targeted Israel’s existence and Zionism’s claim to Jewish national self-determination, not Israel’s post-1967 occupation, which had yet to begin.

In 1975, a draft sponsored by a group dominated by Arab governments reached the UN General Assembly with Soviet-bloc backing. The adopted resolution placed Zionism alongside colonialism and apartheid and declared it “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It converted an existing political charge into an international anti-racist judgment. The General Assembly revoked it in 1991.

The Soviet record shows why that framing was dangerous. Soviet authorities used “anti-Zionism” to make Jewish national identity, Hebrew study, ties to Israel, and requests to emigrate evidence of political disloyalty. Jews could lose their jobs, face surveillance and searches, be refused permission to leave for years, or be imprisoned as “anti-Soviet” activists. Calling the campaign anti-Zionist allowed the state to persecute Jewish collective life while denying that it was persecuting Jews.

Durban joined the language of anti-racism to a campaign against Israel’s legitimacy while overt hatred of Jews circulated around it. BADIL published a caucus defense of the declaration’s Israel clauses; PCHR defended it too.

Durban occurred before both October 7, 2023 and the June 2007 Gaza blockade. It shows an earlier international setting in which a justice appeal coexisted with hostility toward Jews.

These episodes do not form one continuous movement, and criticism of Israel does not by itself establish hostility toward Jews. The NGO Forum was separate from the governments’ conference. Durban occurred during the Second Intifada and after earlier access restrictions. Attendance does not establish endorsement.

Palestinian freedom can mean statehood alongside Israel.

Negotiation has already produced peace between Israel and former enemies, and Israeli leaders have repeatedly accepted territorial compromise and Palestinian political recognition. That record differs from programs that make liberation depend on Israel’s elimination.

1. 1978–82

   Peace with Egypt and the return of Sinai

   Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty that ended the state of war, established normal relations, and required Israel to withdraw its armed forces and civilians from Sinai. Israel dismantled its settlements and completed the return of the peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty in 1982. It was a concrete demonstration that Israel would exchange territory captured in war for peace and security arrangements.

   Read the treaty history ↗
2. 1993–95

   Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin

   In the Oslo process, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism; Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The agreements created Palestinian self-government and a process for negotiating permanent status. Rabin also signed Israel’s 1994 peace treaty with Jordan. On November 4, 1995, a Jewish extremist opposed to his peace policies assassinated him after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

   Read the mutual-recognition letters ↗ Read the Knesset account of Rabin’s life ↗
3. 2000

   Camp David & the Clinton parameters

   Camp David ended without agreement. Clinton’s later proposal set out Palestinian statehood alongside Israel, with territorial, security, Jerusalem, and refugee arrangements.

   Read the parameters ↗
4. 2001

   Taba

   Israeli and Palestinian negotiators worked on the core issues. Their joint statement reported substantial progress and remaining gaps; no final agreement was reached.

   Read their joint statement ↗
5. 2007–08

   Annapolis & the Olmert–Abbas negotiations

   The leaders jointly committed to negotiations for Israel and Palestine living alongside each other in peace and security. The process did not produce a final peace treaty.

   Read the joint commitment ↗

The Egypt and Jordan treaties became lasting agreements. Oslo established mutual recognition and Palestinian self-government but did not produce a final Israeli–Palestinian settlement. The later negotiations also ended without final agreements, and there is substantial debate about their adequacy, responsibility for failure, and the effects of violence and political constraints. Their significance here is the demonstrated political horizon: territory can be exchanged for peace, former enemies can recognize one another, and an independent Palestine alongside Israel is a different goal from replacing Israel.