The Left has no idea how dumb and bigoted ‘free Palestine’ sounds Brendan O’Neill
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/30/the-left-free-palestine-bigotry-glastonbury-israel/
If Gaza is to be liberated, it should be liberated from the racist and misogynistic Hamas
Is there a more maddening slogan than “Free, free Palestine”? It’s inescapable. Wander into a city centre on a Saturday and you’ll see swarms of the smug belting it out from behind their keffiyehs.
It hangs thick in the air of every campus quad. It’s chanted like a godless prayer by the plummy white saviours of Palestine Action. And of course it rang out across Glastonbury at the weekend.
The eejits of Kneecap said it from inside their tricolour tea cosies. And Bob Vylan too. When he wasn’t hollering for the death of the IDF, or telling us gammon that we’ll never get our country back, he was barking: “Free, free Palestine!”
The crowd went wild. Those three words induce a Pavlovian response in the faux-virtuous middle classes of the modern Left. No sooner does the grim cry hit their ear drums than they’re out of seats and babbling along, making a spectacle of their moral rectitude.
It’s partly the omnipresence of this tuneless motto that makes it so grating. It’s the new “Trans women are women” – a neo-religious mantra that the woke blather on a loop to show the world how righteous they are.
Its aim is less to raise awareness about Palestine than to raise awareness about the ethical perfection of the person saying it. They say “free, free” but all I hear is “me, me”.
But there’s a bigger problem with this noise pollutant masquerading as a rallying cry: it is historically ignorant. Stunningly so. Nothing better captures the cluelessness of the Israelophobes than their unthinking utterance of this daft slogan.
Ask yourself: free Palestine from what? The impression given by this suffocating chant is that evil Israel has its jackboot on Palestine’s throat.
Palestinians’ right to statehood is being frustrated by those bastards in Tel Aviv, the keffiyeh classes will say. And it’s high time to “free, free” the Palestinian nation from the Israelis’ deranged lust for every inch of the Holy Land.
This just isn’t true. It’s a caricature bordering on defamation. The truth is that the Palestinians have been offered their own free state many times. And each time, they’ve turned their noses up at it.
In 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a two-state solution: one state for the Jews and one for Arabs. But the Arab nations said No. And when Israel declared independence in 1948, seven Arab armies invaded the newborn nation.
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