There is perhaps no symbol that sums up the anti-Israel movement’s MO more transparently than the red hands.
2000, a Palestinian mob lynches Israeli Jews Yossi Avrahami & Vadim Nurzhitz after they make a wrong turn into Ramallah. Aziz Salha, one of the lynch mob’s leaders, raises his hands, covered in their blood, to the cheering crowd, before dumping their bodies out the window for them to multilate.
Putting the images side-by-side, it could not be more obvious that what protesters are emulating is this specific image, this specific pose.
Context matters, and it could not be more obvious what this symbol means in the Palestinian context.
But the organizers of these protests are relying on viewers a) not having this context, and b) carrying over meaning from symbols in other contexts that maybe share some visual similarity with one element or another.
After all, it’s not like red hands have never been used anywhere else with any other meaning, like “there is blood on your hands”.
Or specifically over the mouth, to represent the silenced voices of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
Likewise with just raised arms (without the red hands), such as the “hands up don’t shoot” used in the Ferguson protests.
And some people do try to claim these give plausible deniability for the Palestinian Red Hands. But if you think about it for even 2 seconds, raised red hands as an organic combination of these ideas makes no internal sense.
In “there’s blood on your hands”, the protestor’s hands are symbolizing the perpetrator’s, while in “hands up don’t shoot”, they symbolize the victim’s.
So am I imagining Netanyahu/Biden/whoever as having blood on their hands? If so, why is he raising his hands like he’s telling the police not to shoot? -or- Am I supposed to imagine Palestinians are raising their hands to say “don’t shoot” to the IDF? If so, why is there blood on the Palestinians’ hands?
Ockham’s razor: the simpler explanation is that they are just referencing an infamous moment in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
They are saying to those who know the Israel/Palestine context—to Israelis, to Jews—“we will rip out your heart and smear your blood on our hands”, while those who don’t know it are meant to hear “we’re just Michael Brown begging not to be shot, we’re missing Indigenous women & girls, we’re every victim that has ever existed & Israel has all of our blood on their hands”
And the emotion that the latter invokes in you is the reason why you will let them do the former.
