I Actually Spent Time in ‘Palestine’ — Here’s What I Saw About Their Society

By Richard McDaniel

It was my first week living and working in “Palestine” last summer.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, I hiked with a group of Palestinians and foreigners through the Judean hills on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

At one point, two Palestinians began a conversation with me about the conflict. “There was never a Second Temple,” they explained, in an attempt to deny Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel. While I didn’t reflect too much on this conversation at the time, I repeatedly encountered variations of the same disregard for factual accuracy during the summer and beyond.

I’m a student at the University of Minnesota. While I’m a non-Jewish Zionist, I’ve always tried to scrutinize the faults and virtues of both sides in this terrible conflict.

I thought (and still do think, but to a lesser extent) that portions of the Palestinian narrative were important to grapple with.

After first settling into my house in Beit Sahour, I couldn’t help but feel trapped by the gigantic separation barrier and various checkpoints.

When I walked through the Palestinian side of Hebron’s Old City, I was horrified by the extremism of some Israelis, who throw garbage, rocks, human waste, and other debris at Palestinians. Some days later, I felt incredibly vulnerable as Israel placed the West Bank on lockdown during the Twelve-Day War, leaving me stranded in Beit Sahour for much of the conflict. Every night, missiles flew overhead and rattled my house, yet I had no access to bomb shelters.

But what made me truly incredulous in much of the Palestinian narrative wasn’t just the virulent pro-Palestinian activism that I previously witnessed on my campus. It wasn’t merely the falsehoods endlessly regurgitated by anti-Israel politicians.

Instead, what changed for me was my firsthand experiences of the conflict — witnessing the glorification of terrorism at a Palestinian summer camp, interviewing members of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and talking with Palestinians every day.

During one of the many trips I took to Checkpoint 300 from my house on the way to Jerusalem, my primary taxi driver, Ghaith, started talking to me about the conflict.

“Of course we want peace,” Ghaith explained. But five minutes later, it started to sound like coexistence with Israel and the Jewish people wasn’t Ghaith’s actual goal: “Hamas are really good guys. They fight for us.”

Some days earlier, I sat down with Jibril Rajoub, one of the PA’s most powerful figures. At various points throughout our conversation, Rajoub told me that the Palestinians must uphold the principle of nonviolence.

Yet, when speaking to Palestinian audiences, Rajoub frequently advocates for “resistance in all forms” and not returning “the sword to its sheath until there is a state.”

Rajoub also began yelling at me after I confronted him about criticisms of the PA and his comments following Hamas’ terrorism on October 7, 2023, while simultaneously claiming that he’s “more democratic than [I] expect.” After the interview, a Palestinian colleague told me that if she asked the same questions to Rajoub, she’d be tortured by PA forces in Jericho.

More recently, I’ve noticed that many pro-Palestinian activists in America overlook the same factual and logical inconsistencies that I encountered in the West Bank.

“It’s a white supremacist state because that’s what Zionism is,” one of Israel’s most prominent critics told me. When I asked him how this could be true, especially as Mizrahi Jews comprise the largest subgroup in Israel, he flatly responded: “Because it is white supremacy.”

He then went on to describe the systematic discrimination that Middle Eastern and African Jews initially faced, but fully omitted successful efforts of social integration since then.

The pattern continued when he subsequently claimed that “Zionism will never willingly give up any piece of land.” Somehow, he conveniently forgot to mention that the Zionist movement has been open to making concessions with the Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, and Palestinians at various points throughout its history.

Later in the conversation, he stated: “I know a lot of Palestinians…I don’t know a single one that doesn’t want to see Palestine liberated,” by which he means a single democratic state with equal rights for all.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to a 2025 poll, only 12% of Palestinians favor a one-state solution with complete equality.

Last month, I attended a film screening on the “Nakba” — a term used to describe the displacement of roughly 750,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 — by The Jerusalem Fund, an organization that claims to work for Palestinians.

Throughout the film, which consisted of three interviews with Palestinian grandmothers, there was never an attempt to confirm their stories, nor be critical of the Palestinian side. On the contrary, the audience and the filmmakers portrayed the Palestinians as innocent and simultaneously fawned over one grandmother from Sheikh Jarrah, whose young child stated that he wanted to be a martyr in Gaza.

Rather than reacting uncomfortably to the child’s embrace of martyrdom and questioning what this may reveal about the problems within Palestinian society, the audience simply praised the film.

Looking back, my conversation with the two Palestinians who denied the existence of the Second Temple foreshadowed something that I gradually came to recognize: while I was more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause when I first traveled to the West Bank, I came to realize that facts are largely irrelevant for the vast majority of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists.

Instead, objectivity is wholly subordinated to narrative. Across many conversations, I noticed that contradictions and inconvenient facts were always brushed aside whenever they complicated the pro-Palestinian narrative being sold.

This is why I’ve changed my views. A movement that continually places narrative over objectivity does not seek peace and coexistence, but only the delegitimization and destruction of Israel.

Richard McDaniel is an undergraduate political science student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.