The US Campaign for Palestine Rights wrote a fundraising email on Valentine's Day:
But today, on Valentine’s Day, I’m reminded of the power of love, hope, and community.
At the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, our love for Palestine fuels our organizing and advocacy work every day. And our hope for justice and collective liberation inspires us to keep fighting, especially in moments like this, when our communities are under attack.
It seems to me that this claim, that their "love for Palestine" is what fuels their advocacy, can be empirically tested.
I asked an AI (ChatGPT) to go through a sample of their posts on their website and X feeds and determine how many of their posts show a "love of Palestine" as opposed to a hate for Israel.
My hypothesis is that they, and most "pro-Palestinian" organizations, are more fueled by hate for Israel than "love for Palestine."
Each item was classified into one of three mutually exclusive categories:
Love-of-Palestine (LP)
Affirmative depiction of Palestinian society independent of antagonists.
Examples: culture, daily life, education, art, religion, civic activity.
Mixed Humanitarian (MH)
Descriptions of hardship without explicit attribution of agency.
Oppositional-to-Israel (OI)
Messaging primarily criticizing, accusing, or mobilizing action against Israel or related actors (e.g., boycott campaigns, genocide allegations, protest calls).
I used nearly all of their X posts for the past two months and all of their website posts for the past year (according to Google searching.)
Across roughly 90 items:
About 82% of the messaging was directly about opposing Israel
About 17% described suffering without explicitly naming a perpetrator
About 1% actually presented Palestinian life on its own
In other words, almost none of the content showed Palestinians as a society — people studying, building, creating, celebrating, debating, or governing themselves, which is what one would expect if their main motivation was "love for Palestine.". Instead, the structure was overwhelmingly, "Israel acts → Palestinians experience → audience mobilizes."
Even many sympathetic posts about hardship were functioning as evidence in an accusation rather than as a description of a community.
Then I asked a second question: Who is the main actor in the sentence? Is the message about Palestinians doing things and living their lives — or about Israel doing things to them?
This was categorized as:
Israel-centric (IC)
Israel is the active agent performing actions.
Reactive-Palestine (RP)
Palestinians appear primarily as recipients of actions.
Palestine-centric (PC)
Palestinians appear as independent social actors.
This method avoids subjective interpretation by analyzing syntactic structure rather than sentiment.
The results were
|
|
|---|
| Israel-centric | 61% |
| Reactive-Palestine | 37% |
| Palestine-centric | 2% |
Thus, even humanitarian content largely operates as evidence within a "blame Israel" narrative.
This matters because movements normally centered on a people tend to talk about the people — their culture, institutions, internal life, and future.
Here, the narrative center is different. Israel is usually the subject of the sentence. Palestinians are usually the object of the sentence.
So the communication is organized less around presenting a society and more around presenting an adversary.
In other words, there is almost no "love of Palestine" exhibited. It is nearly all opposition to Israel.
I strongly suspect that analysis of other "pro-Palestinian" group messaging would show similar results. When even Palestinian
cookbooks are usually framed as "
resistance" and not as pure celebration of Palestinian cuisine, the entire "pro-Palestinian" movement appears to be centered about what they hate rather than what they love.
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