Pro-Palestinian protestors in New York City on May 19. Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Senior Columnist
Rob Eshman
July 3, 2025
When Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib arrived at my house for a recent Shabbat dinner, he looked terrible.
“I think the film shoot upset my stomach,” he said.
That was in late May. The result of that film shoot, a nearly two-hour video, dropped on YouTube in June, and has racked up more than 1 million views. In it, Alkhatib, who was born in Gaza and has written op-eds for the Forward, sits surrounded by 20 self-described pro-Palestinian activists, and one by one debates with them over Gaza, Israel, Zionism and the Palestinian future. It’s called, “Surrounded.”
Watch it, if you have a stronger stomach than Alkhatib, and try to figure out how the pro-Palestine movement got to a place where 19 people who never set foot in Gaza — most of whom aren’t even Palestinian, Arab or Muslim — can smugly lecture a man who has to date lost 35 family members to Israeli bombs about the supposed insufficiency of his support for Palestinians.
In the video, Alkhatib sits at a small table, his debate opponents positioned in a circle around him, and rushing into the empty seat across from him whenever they have a point to make.
First in the chair was a Latino-looking man who pointedly and without explanation refused to shake Alkhatib’s hand.
Alkhatib asserted that Hamas was responsible for launching the brutal attack of Oct. 7, 2023, dooming Gazans to the hell that Israel has wrought.
“So by that logic,” the man answered, “if Zionists wouldn’t have colonized Palestine, then none of this would have begun to begin with, right?”
Alkhatib said that Gaza had the resources to be a jewel, but Hamas led it down a path of destruction. The man rolled his eyes.
“It’s a very simple question,” the man asked. “Who put your parents in a refugee camp?”
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Goading a violent Israeli response and achieving maximum Palestinian casualties was Hamas’s strategy all along, countered Alkhatib — who sought political asylum in the U.S. after Hamas seized total power in Gaza in 2007. “My point is I don’t want what remains of my family to merely become a social media phenomenon.”
Watching to the end of the video, I saw a few canned, expected rhetorical patterns repeat: Israel is guilty of the original sin of imperialist colonization. All evil flows from that, and therefore Zionists get what they deserve. Violence, murder, killing — or, as Alkhabit’s interrogators call it, “the resistance” — is entirely legitimate because, well, see the first point.
Finally, the past matters more than the present or future. The latter item is, astonishingly, only mentioned four times, all by Alkhatib.
A man named William, the only other native Gazan in the circle, said there can never be peace because Ashkenazi Jews came and forced his grandparents and others from their homes.
“I’m a radical pragmatist,” Alkhabit told him, after correcting William’s assertion that most Jewish Israelis are Ashkenazi — the majority are Sephardic or Mizrahi. “I am forward-looking and thinking about the future, though I acknowledge that there have been historic injustices.”
When Alkhatib, who runs the Realign for Palestine initiative at the Atlantic Council, showed up at my house for a quiet Shabbat sinner after the grueling filming experience, he said it had taken up most of the day. He was beat, and perplexed.
“I have more right than anybody to be angry,” Alkhatib said at dinner. “But violence leads to more violence. It doesn’t work. It just goes round and round and everybody dies.”
Our dinner guests included two young Jewish adults, the same age as most of the people in the video. During dessert they each asked Alkhatib a version of the same question: How can they stand up for coexistence, when their friends are 100% anti-Israel?
“For them it’s a zero-sum game,” said one of the guests, a 20-something musician who was at Coachella when the band Kneecap cheered, “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!”
It’s depressing, sure, to see what sometimes feels like an entire generation embrace violence and commit to a dead-end narrative — theoretically in the name of human rights.
But by showing us how that process is unfolding, Jubilee, the company behind the video, is also performing a public service. Years from now, when historians try to answer how the pro-Palestinian movement managed to achieve so little, despite such widespread support, they can watch “Surrounded,” and see why.
