Ask Haviv Anything - 148: What can you do for Palestinians? Stop supporting Hamas

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

This episode we are trying something a bit different. First you will hear a three minute video by American journalist Ayman Mohyeldin, and then a 12 minute response by Haviv Rettig Gur. This segment was originally published to our YouTube channel and I encourage everyone to watch it there so you can also see the visuals.To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).On Patreon and Substack, you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 148 of Ask Haviv Anything. This episode, we're trying something a little bit different with the feed. You're going to hear a three-minute video by Egyptian-American journalist. I'm on Moyyeldin. I hope I pronounced that correctly. I'm on, and then a 12-minute response critique from me. This was originally published to our YouTube channel.

I encourage everyone to watch it over there so you can also see the visuals. But we thought this was worthwhile, significant, meaningful. content to push down the podcast feed as well. Without further delay, I hope you find it useful. Here we go. So I have a quick question for the people who insist that they care deeply about Palestinians. What is the approved way to support them? And I'm asking that actually sincerely here, because if you look at all the different ways people try to protest or express solidarity with Palestinians, look at how they're met protesters on college campuses. That's threatening. You build an encampment. People call the police. You try to boycott Israeli products. That's anti-Semitic.

You ask universities or pension funds in cities to divest. That's also anti-Semitic. You wear a piece of clothing like the kaffia. That's intimidating. You wear a ceasefire pin. That's divisive. You wave a Palestinian flag. That's provocative. You use a slogan and Every syllable of that slogan gets put on trial. You try to pass the United Nations resolution. The UN is biased. You try to impose sanctions like the British government. Can't do that.

That's unfairly singling out Israel. You try to boycott the Eurovision contest. Don't politicize music. You try to post about Gaza on social media or other platforms. You blame TikTok. You blame Facebook. And now if an artist on stage says that free Palestine, and billionaire stadium owners can pressure a tour to remove him and then assure us they still care

deeply about Palestinian suffering and that they want Palestinians to live with dignity and, you know, freedom. So my question really is to Bob Kraft and all of this and everyone else who says that they support Palestinians just not like that. Tell us what is an acceptable method? Which protest is quiet enough, which boycott is gentle enough, which flag is small enough, which act of solidarity is ineffective enough to earn your approval. Look, anti-Semitism is real, it is dangerous, and it must be confronted wherever it appears. But opposing anti-Semitism cannot mean granting the Israeli government immunity from protests, pressure, or accountability.

Because if every peaceful form of resistance is declared unacceptable, then the objection really is no longer about the actual. tactics, it's to the resistance itself. And the message becomes, you may care about Palestinians, so long as you do it quietly, privately, invisibly, and above all, ineffectively. What is the approved way to support Palestinians? He might actually be asking it sincerely, which is awesome. He says, look at how the protests are met. The problem isn't the protests. The problem is the message on the parts of the message that are not exactly about Palestinian freedom. Walk with me here for just a moment and I think you'll see something that I think he's really trying to avoid.

Protests on college campuses are deemed threatening. In some places they were actually threatening. Guess what? Those are the places that went viral. And the kaffia being intimidating, lots and lots of people in kaffia's were violent in the streets, in videos on social media, literally used them as intimidation tools. That's not everybody. You know what?

Maybe that's not most. You know what? Maybe that's a small group. It's not that small because there's thousands of videos and many of them are very viral. Who made the kaffia intimidating? The people seeing the video or the people in the video? The ceasefire pin is divisive. That's where it really gets dishonest.

First of all, it was a ceasefire demanded to the Israelis explicitly to save Hamas. And during the period when people were making those demands, Hamas was producing videos of emaciated Israeli hostages digging their own graves. And if you think the Israelis aren't radicalized by those videos but heard you and said, wait, no, maybe it's reasonable to have a ceasefire as Hamas sends those videos to Israelis. You and the Hamas were sending conflicting messages here. But it gets much worse because guess what?

That ceasefire pin with the bloody hands? Those bloody red hands are one of the most famous symbols in this conflict. Maybe you're ignorant. Maybe you're ignorant. I don't think you're ignorant. Those bloody hands are from the lynch in Ramallah in October 2000. when a Palestinian mob literally ripped the bodies of two Israelis apart. By their hands, they stormed a police station, tore them apart.

And a guy named Aziz Salach is photographed at the police station window displaying his bloody hands to the braying crowd below. He, by the way, was a Hamas fighter. He died in Gaza in combat in 2024. And you demand that we all pretend that a bloody hand in a ceasefire pin, when the explicit messages, Hamas is legitimate and needs to survive this, is new and neutral and has nothing to do with the lynch of Israelis, with an insane mob tearing their body limb from limb.

It's a kind of cover that you do it all through this whole video. This thing that Hamas makes it into, the message that Israelis actually receive, what the people on the ground, the resistance on the ground actually turn your activism into, please ignore all of it. Just listen to me, the American liberal. I'm the only version of this that matters.

I'm the only version of this you're allowed to see. And he goes on. You use a slogan, and every syllable of that slogan gets put on trial. I think he's talking about from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Once again, your problem isn't me. Your problem is Hamas. What the Palestinian factions on the ground think that slogan means is what that slogan means. Not what's happening in your head over there in New York or London.

How could you possibly expect it to be otherwise? And it isn't every syllable that's put on trial. the intentions of the people who invented the slogan you're shouting and who still mean the original meaning of it. If I have videos of a crowd shouting, River to the sea, Palestine will be free, and then in Arabic, River to the Sea, Palestine will be Arab, which rhymes in Arabic. Well, that's going to shape how I understand what the thing means. You pretend the slogan means what you wanted to mean. By the way, what you genuinely authentically mean. You want civil democracy for everyone on earth. Amazing, beautiful, deeply American. Not relevant if Hamas is actually the people

pushing the agenda back in Palestine. And here's the point again. Hamas ruined that for you. Not the Jews. Chamas thinks it means ethnic cleansing and genocide. The complaint that you try to pass a UN resolution and the UN is declared biased. But the UN is ludicrously and cartoonishly biased. Not a little bit. Not around the margins. More resolution. are passed against Israel, then against the very resolutions you want, then against all the wars and all the conflicts and all the tyrants and all the genocides and all the human rights abuses of all the world combined altogether for decades. Actually, literally, look it up.

Israel isn't in the dock at the UN for its actions, even if its actions are exactly as terrible as you claim. But because it's a minority. The Muslim bloc, the Arab bloc, Western nations that don't want to piss off, they're Qatari investors. They let the Arab world off the hook at the UN for genocides and slavery, active slavery today. The UN is structurally and openly and cartoonishly biased, and nobody pretends otherwise. That might affect how we are going to relate to the next resolution.

Imposing sanctions is unfairly singling out Israel. Look, the British just had, like a week after imposing those sanctions, declaring those sanctions. warm and fuzzy meetings with the Qatari leadership, which backs terror groups, where 90% of the permanent residents aren't citizens and can't become citizens, where nobody has civil rights, we're criticizing Islam or the Emir are felonies,

and they're good friends. Now, you can do that if you want. It's international politics. You can care about war and civil rights in one place and not care about it in another, because that's how your interests fall, and the Jews can point out the hypocrisy, because holy cow, it's there, and it's you.

And that's not even an argument you shouldn't do it. That's just an argument. Yes, it's absolutely hypocritical. You don't actually care about the thing itself, about the principle. Obviously, you really think the British government really deeply cares about those principles, truly? And it isn't just another way of playing politics. And that's going to be my take on Macklemore. Of course, an artist should say what they feel,

and audiences can be annoyed, that this movement, which keeps demanding not to be judged by its worst elements, but is so often led by its worst elements. The activist core are the ones who think Hamas are the heroes. No matter how much they torture Palestinians, no matter how much they demand literally genocidal demands of the Israelis. Well, if that worst element is so big, if this movement demands to be everywhere,

it's a legitimate for audiences to think it's getting super annoying. And now to your big question, which is utterly legitimate and reasonable. So what's an acceptable method? You know, I'll get to this question. I'll answer it, I swear. But first I want to ask my question, which is the same question. And then I'll answer yours. How much insane singling out at the UN would make you question the UN system?

How much explicit anti-Semitism in pro-Palestinian marches and rallies about Jews controlling the media and the White House and the world's banks and keeping the Arab and Muslim world down? And the explicit Nazi imagery and calls for Israel to be destroyed, this community of millions, the last living Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere, people who had nowhere else to go when they built in Israel. Half of Israeli Jews are exiles from the Muslim world, from the Arab world. No Jew can live in Iraq today.

That was one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world. They're all Israelis now. And by the way, they vote right wing in Israel, their grandkids. And it has a lot to do with what the grandparents experienced. How many calls for that community to be destroyed in your marches? How much would there have to be to make it legitimate for us to question your movement? What should Jews do about all of us? of that. Stay quiet. Sit still. Are Jews allowed to point out that Hamas' charter calls

to kill all Jews and you guys cannot bring yourself to criticize Hamas because Palestinians get to decide how their resistance needs to work, even if that's explicitly genocidal? Muslim world anti-Semitism is shared by a majority of Muslims across huge swathes of the Muslim world. According to the best and most neutral polling we have, such as pupils. So if the movement that declares itself pro-Palestine, doesn't doesn't ask just for Palestinian freedom, but it's huge pieces of it. And the more you get into the activist core, the more you hear this, the demand is for Jews to allow themselves to become a vulnerable minority in the Middle East today, to dismantle their self-determination,

not to build it for Palestinians, but to dismantle it for the Jews. Just in the last 15 years, there have been multiple mass expulsions in the Middle East, genocides against vulnerable minorities in the Middle East, right next door. Syria! That's the explicit plan of the most powerful Palestinian political faction. Chazbalah, actually go and ask Chazbalah what it wants for the Jews of Israel. A new movement can't bring itself to criticize that resistance? When do Jews get to complain about any of that? When is actually calling this anti-Semitic?

How much of it does there have to be for us to point at it? And now to your question. So what's an acceptable method to support Palestinians? Do all of it. But be clear. being fuzzy about whether while you declare Gaza a genocide, you actually back Hamas and it's explicit demand for a genocide. Kind of like being pro-Israel without being pro-Itamar Ben-Gvir and his calls for mass expulsion. A-PAC passed that test. APAC, when this government was formed

in Israel four years ago, put out a press release angrily denouncing the fact that Ben-Gvir was in the government and he had not got called for mass expulsion. Where's the pro-Palestinian group making sure to pass that test? That the most extreme and violent and brutal of all Palestinian factions is not the hero of this story. The one that wants eternal war because they are assured by God that if it's a zero-sum contest where one nation lives and one nation dies, the Jews are definitely going to die because God's on their side. That's Hamas.

So where's the pro-Palestinian group passing that test? You want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to have massive and explicit bigotry in your ranks, in your messaging. You want to support it on the ground in Palestinian society and still only be judged by the most fair and the most liberal-minded and the most peaceful and the most decent among your ranks. And there's lots of those.

And maybe you're one of them. But, you know, we're not living in Vermont. If you have an activist movement that supports Hamas, Hamas will take you back home. If the Palestinian factions on the ground think that river to the sea means the destruction of Israel and some significant chunk of your movement does too, you can't demand that we all take your own specific liberalism,

as if it just means civic democracy, for everyone as the only legitimate meaning, as the only meaning that matters. The worst meaning is the most important meaning, especially if it's also the meaning of most of the people on the ground who invented the actual phrase. That's how this works. Your activism empowers Palestinians. That's a good thing. That's a reason to be an activist. Unless because you refuse to distinguish, it empowers genocidal Salafist jihadi Palestinians, who are the most powerful group in Palestinian politics even now. even when most Gazans are actually sick of them. So if we discover, for example,

that a majority of Gazans don't want Hamas to remain in power, that the Arab world backs now the Board of Peace, approved by the UN Security Council, that everybody wants to send in countless billions, get the Israelis out of Gaza, and begin the rebuilding. But the condition is Hamas disarming, and Hamas won't disarm and won't allow it to happen, and most Gazans now want them to.

If we discover that, and you don't care, and you don't distinguish, between the people who want evil things and the people who want good things, then that's on you. You're not even doing what Palestinians in Gaza tell us they want. If you empower Hamas, you get to share in the blame for what they've done, what they plan to do, the cruel way they hold Gazins hostage now, not Israelis. Distinguish between yourself and evil.

Be specific about what you support. I'm sorry that it undermines you a bit when you can't find it in yourself to stand apart from racists and violent jihadists. But that you could fix today. Here's my protest, and it's for Palestinian freedom and self-determination, just like the Jews have. You think somebody would come at you for that? Here's my demand, and it's for two people to live in peace. And everything Israel does to make that harder, that's what I'm going to punish. How many people do you think are going to come after you for that? Here's my UN resolution, but just to make it at least pretend to equality in international bodies, I'm also going to pass a resolution on Sudan,

the bloodiest war of the decade, that's an explicit and unquestionable genocide, and which none of us anywhere on earth have ever given a shit about. Not because we actually started carrying, just to cover for the next resolution on Israel, just to notice how utterly and egregiously bigoted the whole system actually is against the world's only Jewish state. You know, try not to be bigoted. It's your responsibility to make sure your actions are clean of this racist contamination, nation and it is there. And you're pretending it's not. That's not my responsibility. And it matters that you don't even try. So you will always be seen through the lens of al-Chamas uses your support on the ground. And guess what? Chamas is doing that to you. The racists in your movement

are doing that to you. And you're allowing it, which is why they're doing it to you constantly and easily, while complaining it's my fault for noticing. Do everything for Palestinians. but distinguish between good and evil. And you won't. Because it's not actually about liberation for Palestinians. It's actually about destroying Israel. Maybe you actually agree with Hamas. Maybe that's the problem here.

If you don't, that's on you. You need to say that. Not me.