The Palestinian cause has attracted international sympathy for decades, so why do Palestinians still suffer so grievously? The burdens of Israeli occupation aren't the full story. Palestinians also suffer from bad leaders and bad friends who do them more harm than good. In newsrooms, universities and governments world-wide, supporters of Palestine are more like enablers choosing to ignore the terrorism and tyranny that have wrecked Palestinian politics.
This custom is common from major publications and pundits. In July the Economist wrote that "the catastrophe befalling Gaza stems from the refusal of Israel to negotiate in good faith." In 2012 Fareed Zakaria wrote in the Washington Post: "Peace between the Palestinians and Israelis will come only when Israel decides that it wants to make peace."
Palestinians who support the Islamic Hamas movement take part in a rally showing their support and solidarity with Hamas in the West Bank city of Nablus, 29 August 2014. Zuma Press
Some professors go further in denying and distorting Palestinian politics. In 1994, when Hamas was already perfecting bus bombings, John Esposito, professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, assured National Public Radio listeners that Hamas was distinguished by concern for "community social services" and "small business ventures," including honey production, cheese-making and clothing manufacture. The peace activist Judith Butler, who teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, told students in 2006 that "understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important."
Diplomats consistently ignore the violent and anti-Semitic statements that Palestinian leaders make to their own people in Arabic, as long as those leaders speak soothingly in English to foreign audiences. Veterans of the "peace process" seek to legitimize Hamas with invitations to the international bargaining table, despite the group's clearly stated mission of eliminating Israel and Jews.
Such Western enablers emphasize many of the genuine tragedies of Palestinian life, but they elide whatever facts contradict their pro-Palestinian articles of faith. They insist that Israel won't compromise and a powerful Israel lobby steers U.S. policy, overlooking that Palestinian leaders rejected Israeli offers of statehood in 2000 and 2008. Their idea of progressivism means admiring the Palestinian "resistance"—and remaining silent about the illiberal horrors facing Palestinian women, religious minorities, gays and political dissidents.
This approach isn't simply a whitewash. Rather it portrays Palestinian leaders in purposefully limited fashion, as victims and pawns forever being acted upon by Israel and other outsiders, and not as decision makers choosing how to act toward Israel and their own people. This denies Palestinians' agency, treating them as if they have no responsibility for tyrannizing other Palestinians or terrorizing Israelis.
There is a term for describing the Middle East in a cartoonishly inaccurate but politically self-serving manner that reduces local populations to passive actors in a morality play meant to reinforce prejudices: "Orientalism." The coinage belongs to the late Columbia professor and pro-Palestinian activist Edward Said, who believed that modern Western commentary on the East was simplistic and racist. "Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life," he wrote in 1980, "has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world."
So it is today, but not in the way that Said identified. The custom now is a pro-Palestinian neo-Orientalism that glosses over the real conditions of Palestinian life, focusing instead on condemning Israel. Yet the effect of this neo-Orientalism isn't pro-Palestinian. By ignoring the pathologies of Palestinian politics, it condemns Palestinians to live under leaders who would rather impoverish and endanger their own people than compromise with Israel.
Whatever their intent, neo-Orientalists provide cover for a political structure in Palestine that they would never accept for themselves—which is a form of bigotry. Countless articles are written about intricate details of Israeli coalition politics, typically with hand-wringing conclusions about the election of this or that hard-liner. Seldom do you read about Palestinian politics, where hard-liners throw their rivals from rooftops or shoot them in the street. Perhaps journalists consider such savagery the unremarkable fate of Palestinians who aren't entitled to politics as Westerners are. Textbook Orientalism.
Neo-Orientalist thinking treats both Israelis and Palestinians unfairly. A better approach would expose and reject the terrorist thugs claiming the mantle of a nationalist movement that deserves accountability and sobriety from its leaders. Then popular discussion of the Middle East may regain some humane sense of right and wrong—and the Palestinians may finally achieve security, prosperity and statehood.
Mr. Feith is a Journal editorial-page writer based in Hong Kong.
