Realign For Palestine
@rfpalestine • 5,423 subscribers
Realign For Palestine, @AtlanticCouncil, promotes radical pragmatism, the rejection of violence, the pursuit of peace, and progress for Palestinians.
Videos
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib says that it’s time Palestinians face the reality: that the “Right of Return” is simply not a viable political outcome. Radical pragmatism is the difficult, honest work of moving forward, prioritizing tangible political progress over ideological purity and maximalist fantasies that do not serve the Palestinian cause.
Realign For Palestine108,552 views • 28 days ago
Gaza was not doomed to this fate. Before October 7, the Strip had universities, clinics, an economy, a generation intent on real progress. But Hamas squandered every opportunity and weaponized every resource. The blockade was not born of inevitability but of a movement that openly smuggled in weapons and turned Gaza into a terror state. Over the years, Hamas redirected every institution – educational, healthcare, governmental – toward confrontation, making October 7 the culmination of a long-term strategy in which civilian life was subordinated to a war machine. Gaza had options. Hamas extinguished them.
Realign For Palestine118,030 views • 6 months ago
RFP director Ahmed Alkhatib has noticed a dramatic narrative shift inside Gaza: “away from the resistance story, and toward a nation-building story.” Somewhat counterintuitively, he says, the sheer horror of the past two and a half years, has pushed people in Gaza away from radicalism, and towards more pragmatic, personal considerations: safety, work, electricity, water, a future for their children: “For the first time you’re hearing consistent talk of - we're done with war, we're done with resistance, we're done with Hamas.”
Realign For Palestine62,383 views • 3 months ago
Palestinians are not the threat. Hamas is. And we are not Hamas. We don’t call them freedom fighters or resistance. Only in the West and in the diaspora do they call them those things. We Gazans know exactly who Hamas is: a terrorist organization that has stolen our future and held us hostage in our own land. Hamza
Realign For Palestine91,601 views • 9 months ago
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib provides a sobering assessment of the last 80 years of Palestinian history: “armed resistance” has been an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinian people, yielding only lost land, lost lives, and the steady erosion of any viable future. Violence has and will continue to be a strategic dead end - a cycle of death and destruction that only radical pragmatism can break.
Realign For Palestine12,782 views • 1 month ago
There was a period when a Palestinian state could have been declared: before 1967, when Gaza was under Egyptian control and the West Bank under Jordanian rule. There was no Israeli occupation of those territories and no settlements. East Jerusalem was not under Israeli control. But no Palestinian state emerged. Later, after 1973, another opening appeared. Egypt pivoted from war to peace. Israel showed it was willing to trade land for recognition. Again, no Palestinian state. Why is that?
Realign For Palestine19,099 views • 2 months ago
I want to honor my family’s memory by confronting the destructive rhetoric that has brought Palestinians decades of blood, despair, and wasted possibility – and cost members of my family their lives. And that also means recognizing the humanity of Israelis: their legitimate security concerns, the horrific trauma of October 7, their unassailable right to their Jewish homeland. Acknowledging another people’s truth does not diminish our own. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Realign For Palestine22,439 views • 6 months ago
A one-state solution is no solution at all; it is a fantasy that ignores where our societies truly are. The path forward starts with separation and security, followed by voluntary cooperation – economic, cultural, social – with connections deepening over time. Post-war Europe offers us a clear historical precedent. But it must begin with rejecting violence as incompatible with the interests of both peoples. From that foundation, everything becomes possible.
Realign For Palestine17,966 views • 6 months ago
I’ve spoken with people who once voted for Hamas and now say, without hesitation, “Cursed is the day I believed them.” They weren’t voting for war or jihadism or even “resistance”; they were voting for promises of change, service delivery, an end to corruption. What they got, instead, was catastrophe. And yet many Palestinians still struggle to believe the full truth of October 7. Part of that denial comes from trauma, part from the psychological binaries of conflict, and part from years of curated narratives pushed by outlets like Al Jazeera. But the horror recorded on Hamas’s own GoPros leave no room for ambiguity. They broadcast to the world exactly what they were doing. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Realign For Palestine17,366 views • 6 months ago
We’re seeing Western newsrooms, and often left-leaning Jewish journalists, deciding which Palestinian voices are “authentic” and which are unacceptable. As if our suffering, our identity, and our political agency require editorial approval. Every Palestinian has the right to speak honestly about our own lived reality without being patrolled by gatekeepers who claim to champion our freedom while policing the boundaries of what we are allowed to say. It is bizarre, and frankly outrageous, to be told I’m “not Palestinian enough” because I refuse to recycle the “Pro-Hamas” talking points expected of me.
Realign For Palestine16,719 views • 6 months ago
Ten years ago, RFP director Ahmed Alkhatib tried to build an internationally run, Israeli-approved airfield in Gaza. It became his introduction to radical pragmatism: “working outside the confines of ideology and outside the confines of transient reductionist positions.” What surprised Ahmed most was who he found willing to engage. There were real partners on the Israeli side, including people he didn’t expect. And at the same time, to his surprise, many in the “pro-Palestine” movement opposed the move. In their view, the airport would have given Gazans freedom of movement, but was opposed by many activists because they believed that if Gazans could leave, they might not come back – and that this would “serve Zionism.” “I was like, well, except that's my mom and dad and brother and sister, so would you like to trade places?”
Realign For Palestine11,907 views • 4 months ago
I wish more Jews and Israelis understood how ordinary Gazans feel: how they despise Hamas, how they just want to live in peace. They are more human, more relatable, more similar to Israelis than their portrayal in the media. Similarly, when I speak with Palestinians about my conversations with ordinary Israelis, it’s like a window opens to a world they’ve never been allowed to imagine. There is a missing link between our two peoples. Unfortunately, whether it’s because of Israeli media, or Al Jazeera, or the outrage-fed algorithms of social media, that gap has only ever widened. If we could only find a way to meet each other more across the divide, everything would begin to change. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Realign For Palestine15,485 views • 6 months ago
On Friday, we took the first step toward changing the conversation on Israel and Palestine when we officially launched #RealignForPalestine, a radically pragmatic approach to end the violence and start the future. Peace is possible. It has to be. The time is now. Join us.
Realign For Palestine27,958 views • 1 year ago
It’s disturbing how many activists (especially in Western academic circles) strip Palestinians of agency. They speak about us as if we are incapable of moral judgment, of political decision-making, of any responsibility at all. It’s breathtakingly condescending. Yes, the power imbalance with Israel is real. Yes, Palestinians have endured decades of structural injustice. But there is still room for accountability and self-correction. We cannot build a viable future if we pretend our decisions had no role in getting us here. We squandered opportunities. We made catastrophic choices. And acknowledging that isn’t “blaming the victim.” Please realize that Palestinians are full human beings with the capacity to choose a better path. If that triggers people, it says more about their prejudices than about our struggle.
Realign For Palestine12,536 views • 6 months ago
After joining the 2019 anti-Hamas protests in Gaza, Hamza was arrested, jailed, and beaten. But he was willing to endure it because he thought he had accomplished something. But on release, he learned that the global media took no notice. It was all for nothing.
Realign For Palestine17,164 views • 11 months ago
Though militarily dwarfed by the IDF, Hamas is winning the information war—and using the West to entrench its narratives. Western activists end up doing Hamas’s dirty work—whitewashing the terror group’s criminality and oppression of the Gazan people, glorifying its “heroic resistance” that has created zero benefits and brought only death and destruction, and rubber stamping its catastrophic decisions that have set back the Palestinian cause by decades. Before you share a meme or slogan or post, consider—whose cause are you really advancing? 👉🏽 Learn more about how to realign for Palestine at
Realign For Palestine16,410 views • 1 year ago
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