When Humanitarianism Stops Being About Humans

If you genuinely believed a genocide was taking place, what would your first instinct be?

Mine would be simple.

Get as many innocent people out of harm’s way as possible.

Preserve life first. Argue about politics later.

That is, after all, what humanitarianism is supposed to mean. Before questions of borders, history or blame comes a more fundamental principle: protect human life wherever possible. Everything else is secondary.

Yet throughout the war in Gaza, something kept nagging at me.

The moment proposals were made to allow civilians to leave the fighting—even temporarily—many of the loudest voices in the pro-Palestine movement objected. Suggestions that Egypt open its border were dismissed. Humanitarian corridors became politically contentious. Even Israeli-designated safe zones were often treated with suspicion rather than cautious support.

The contradiction was difficult to ignore.

If the overriding concern was preserving Palestinian life, why did so many activists seem more interested in ensuring civilians remained inside an active war zone?

That question stayed with me.

Eventually, it led me to a much bigger one.

What exactly is the Free Palestine movement trying to achieve?

A Moral Test

The war in Gaza did not create this question. It merely forced it into the open.

The catalyst, of course, was October 7.

On that morning, Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border from Gaza. Some civilians followed behind them. Together, they unleashed one of the most grotesque displays of barbarism caught on film. Men, women and children were butchered. Families were torn apart. People were burned alive. Women were raped. Hostages—including the elderly and young children—were dragged back into Gaza.

Much of it was filmed by the perpetrators themselves.

These were not crimes committed in secret like the Nazis did against the Jews. They were recorded, celebrated and distributed as psychological warfare. The point was not simply to kill. It was to terrorise. To humiliate. To leave an entire nation psychologically scarred.

There is something particularly revealing about violence that takes pleasure in its own spectacle. Territorial disputes can explain why people fight. They cannot explain why people delight in torture, humiliation and desecration. October 7 felt less like an attempt to win a military victory than a celebration of cruelty itself.

It was, in every sense, a moral test—not only for Israel, but for the rest of the world.

Moments like these have a way of exposing the principles that actually guide us. They strip away slogans and reveal what we instinctively reward, condemn or excuse when confronted with evil.

To some, however, October 7 was not a day of horror.

It was a beautiful day.

When a Country Becomes a Symbol

What happened next was almost as revealing as the massacre itself.

Before Israel had even begun its military response, demonstrations were already erupting across Western cities. While families were still searching for missing relatives and hostages were being dragged into Gaza, thousands gathered to denounce Israel. Images of kidnapped civilians were torn down or defaced. Chants of “From the river to the sea” echoed through city centres from London to Helsinki, New York to Sydney.

The speed of it all was striking.

There seemed to be very little interest in pausing to understand what had happened, or why. The atrocities of October 7 were not treated as an event demanding moral clarity. They were almost immediately absorbed into an existing narrative in which Israel was already guilty, regardless of what had preceded it.

Over time, I realised this was because Israel was no longer being treated as an ordinary nation.

It had become a symbol.

Not simply a country that could make good decisions or bad ones, but a vessel into which every grievance of the modern activist imagination could be poured. Colonialism. Racism. White supremacy. Apartheid. Imperialism. Genocide. Capitalism. American power. Somehow, all of it converged on one tiny Jewish state.

That helps explain why so many contradictory accusations can coexist without causing much discomfort. Israel is condemned as both a colonial outpost and a foreign occupier, despite the Jewish people’s historical roots in the land. It is portrayed as uniquely expansionist, despite repeatedly exchanging territory for peace. It is accused of genocide while responding to an organisation whose own stated objective is the destruction of the Jewish state. The individual claims are almost secondary. Their purpose is not to describe Israel accurately, but to reinforce what Israel has come to represent.

Once a country becomes a symbol, facts begin to matter less than the role it plays in the story.

Everything is interpreted through that lens. Every action becomes further proof of its guilt. Every piece of contrary evidence is dismissed as propaganda. Nuance itself begins to look like complicity.

That is why conversations about Israel so often feel impossible.

You are no longer discussing a country.

You are challenging an article of faith.

The Humanitarian Test

One of the easiest ways to understand a movement is not by listening to what it says, but by watching what it rewards and what it condemns.

That is especially true of movements that claim the moral high ground.

If humanitarianism is truly the organising principle, then preserving innocent life must come before everything else. Before politics. Before military victory. Before assigning blame.

That principle seems so obvious that it hardly feels worth stating.

And yet, throughout the war in Gaza, it was repeatedly abandoned.

Whenever the possibility of moving civilians out of the fighting was raised, many of the same activists who insisted a genocide was unfolding reacted with outrage. Suggestions that Egypt temporarily open its border were denounced. The idea of neighbouring countries accepting refugees was dismissed as complicity. Even temporary evacuations were portrayed by many as morally unacceptable.

This struck me as extraordinary.

Every major war creates refugees. Ukrainians fled Ukraine. Syrians fled Syria. Millions have crossed borders throughout history in search of safety, often with the hope of returning home once the fighting ends. No one imagines that seeking temporary refuge somehow erases a people’s identity or permanently settles the political questions that caused the war.

Why, then, was Gaza treated differently?

If people genuinely believed civilians were facing extermination, one might expect every available avenue of escape to be welcomed, however imperfect. Humanitarianism demands difficult choices. It does not demand that innocent people remain trapped in an active war zone while political arguments are settled around them.

Instead, something else seemed to take priority.

Protecting the narrative had become more important than protecting the people.

It was around this point that I realised my disagreement with the movement wasn’t primarily about Israel at all.

It was about humanitarianism.

The movement spoke constantly about Palestinian lives, yet again and again seemed willing to subordinate those lives to a political objective. Every civilian death became evidence against Israel. Every proposal that might reduce civilian suffering was treated with suspicion if it complicated the broader narrative.

Gradually, a pattern became impossible for me to ignore.

The movement appeared more committed to condemning Israel than to preserving Palestinian life.

That is an uncomfortable conclusion to reach.

Because if it is true, then the movement is not simply mistaken about Israel.

It has become something fundamentally different from what it claims to be.

Beyond Palestine

If humanitarian concern were the movement’s organising principle, we would expect to see the same moral urgency wherever comparable human suffering exists.

But that is not what we see.

The civil war in Sudan has produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. Millions have been displaced. Entire communities have been destroyed. Famine continues to threaten vast sections of the population.

Yemen tells a similar story. Years of war have left millions facing starvation, disease and displacement. The scale of human suffering is almost impossible to comprehend.

Yet these crises occupy remarkably little space in Western activism.

There are no weekly marches that bring entire city centres to a standstill. University campuses are not consumed by encampments demanding action. Social media feeds are not dominated by Sudanese or Yemeni flags. Few people organise their political identity around these conflicts.

That disparity deserves an explanation.

The disparity cannot be explained by the scale of suffering. If anything, the comparison only deepens the mystery. Sudan and Yemen have witnessed humanitarian catastrophes on a far greater scale than Gaza, yet they have inspired nothing remotely close to the same moral outrage in the West.

Media coverage undoubtedly plays a role, but it cannot fully explain a disparity of this magnitude.

The question, then, is not why people care about Palestinians.

The question is why this conflict commands a level of moral obsession that humanitarian catastrophes of an even greater magnitude do not.For me, this was the point at which the movement’s priorities became impossible to ignore.

The simplest explanation was no longer that it was primarily motivated by concern for Palestinians.

It was that opposition to Israel had become far more important than caring for Palestinians.

Once that possibility occurred to me, many of the movement’s contradictions stopped looking like contradictions at all.

They became exactly what one would expect.

When Humanitarianism Becomes Ideology

Looking back, I no longer think the modern Free Palestine movement can be understood simply as a humanitarian campaign.

Humanitarian movements organise themselves around people. Their instinct is to reduce suffering wherever they find it, even when doing so requires uncomfortable compromises. They do not ask whether the people in need are politically useful. They ask how their suffering can be alleviated.

Ideological movements operate differently.

They divide the world into moral categories: oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, victim and victimiser. Once those roles have been assigned, every event is interpreted through that framework. Facts that reinforce the narrative are amplified. Facts that complicate it are ignored, excused or reinterpreted until they fit.

Viewed through that lens, much of the movement begins to make sense.

Israel is no longer treated as one nation among many. It has become the embodiment of everything the movement believes is wrong with the modern West: colonialism, capitalism, American power, racism and oppression. Palestinians, meanwhile, cease to be people with agency, complexity and competing political visions. They become symbols themselves—the permanent victims in a moral drama that has already been written.

Once those symbolic roles are fixed, reality becomes incredibly difficult to accommodate.

Calls for peace become suspect if they leave Israel standing. Hamas’ brutality becomes something to explain rather than confront. The suffering inflicted upon Palestinians by their own leaders receives comparatively little attention, while every Israeli action is treated as further confirmation of an already settled verdict.

The movement itself has become something of a Frankenstein’s monster—a coalition of ideologies and activist causes that often have little in common beyond a shared hostility towards Israel and, more broadly, the West. Under ordinary circumstances, many of these groups would regard one another as ideological opponents. Yet the hate towards Israel has become powerful enough to suspend contradictions that would otherwise seem irreconcilable.

Marxists march alongside Islamists. Secular progressives defend movements whose values they reject almost everywhere else. Feminists excuse organisations that severely restrict women’s freedoms. LGBT activists rally behind movements that have imprisoned, tortured and even killed people for being gay.

Viewed in isolation, these alliances appear bewildering.

In reality however, the coalition does not exist because its members share a coherent vision of the future. It exists because they have found a common enemy in the present.

Israel.

Once I reached that conclusion, I found myself looking back at everything else through a different lens.

The response to October 7.

The opposition to civilian evacuation.

The indifference towards Sudan and Yemen (and other conflicts).

The obsessive need to cast Israel as the singular source of injustice in the modern world.

None of it seemed contradictory anymore. It all pointed in the same direction.

Conclusion

Humanitarianism is one of the noblest instincts we possess.

It asks us to see human beings before politics, before ideology and before tribal loyalties. It insists that innocent life has value regardless of who that life belongs to.

The moment those priorities are reversed, something fundamental changes.

People cease to be ends in themselves and become instruments in a political struggle. Their suffering becomes useful. Their deaths become symbolic. Their lives matter only insofar as they advance the cause.

That is why I no longer believe the modern Free Palestine movement is fundamentally humanitarian.

Because somewhere along the way, Palestinians themselves stopped being the point.

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