The body of a motorist lies on a road following a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel October 7, 2023. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

When Benedict Cumberbatch stood on stage at the “Together For Palestine” event at Wembley Arena and solemnly recited lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, On This Land There Are Reasons to Live, many in the audience swooned, seeing it as an act of courage and humanism.

It wasn’t.

It was a performance — one that captures the moral blindness of much of the Western left (and extreme right) on this conflict. What Cumberbatch delivered wasn’t an ode to peace. It was the sanitization of a man who spent decades denying Jewish history, justifying violence, and romanticizing Jewish erasure.

And it was chillingly familiar.

In the 1930s, celebrated artists gave cultural cover to the Nazi Party. Richard Strauss led the Reichsmusikkammer as Jewish musicians were purged; and Leni Riefenstahl’s films, like Triumph of the Will, dazzled critics even as they glorified Hitler. Their art wrapped hate in beauty, and gave genocide’s ideology a veneer of sophistication.

That’s what Cumberbatch just did for Darwish — cloaking eliminationist ideology in lyrical packaging.

Romanticizing Erasure

The lines Cumberbatch recited are widely shared as “uplifting”:

We have on this land what makes life worth living…
This land is called Palestine, and it will remain forever Palestine.

But in context, this isn’t love of a homeland. It’s a rejectionist claim that all the land “will forever be Palestine,” with no acknowledgment of Jewish history, presence, or right to sovereignty.

There was never an independent “State of Palestine.” Before the modern Arab-Israeli conflict, “this land” was ruled by ancient Israelite and Jewish commonwealths and kingdoms, and then by a series of foreign empires: the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Islamic Caliphates, Crusaders, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire.

Jews have lived in Israel continuously for over 3,000 years — and even after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, Jews remained the plurality until the Arab-Islamic conquests. It was only after crushing the Bar Kochba revolt that the Romans even tried to erase Jewish identity by renaming Judea “Syria-Palestina.”

Erasing that history — as Darwish does here — isn’t universalism. It’s denialism.

Airbrushing Antisemitism

Darwish was not a wistful humanist. He was a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and for decades, he was one of its chief propagandists. His most infamous poem, Passers Between the Passing Words (1988), didn’t just reject Israeli policy — it rejected Jewish existence in the land:

Leave our land…
Get out of our blood. Get out of our memories.
Get out of us.

This wasn’t metaphor. Even at the time, Shimon Peres decried it as “a call for the destruction of Israel.” It portrayed Jews as alien “passers” to be purged from the land, from memory, and even from Palestinian “blood.”

And it wasn’t a one-off. In A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies (1967), Darwish depicted Israelis as soulless invaders “who come to our land to kill, and do not see the human in the human they kill.”

In Identity Card (1964), he accused Jews of having “stolen the orchards of my ancestors.” These aren’t just anti-Zionist statements. They are antisemitic – portraying Jews as greed-driven thieves, denying Jews any rootedness, humanity, or right to be in their ancestral homeland (and ignoring that before the Arabs rejected the partition plan in 1947 and launched a war to destroy Israel, every piece of land owned by Jews in “this land” had been legally purchased — mostly from Arabs and Turks).

Yet none of this seemed to trouble Cumberbatch. He simply delivered Darwish’s lines, framed as transcendent and beautiful, with the eliminationism and antisemitism airbrushed away.

The Western Left’s Moral Blinders

Much of today’s Western left has adopted a posture that treats complexity as colonialism and erasure as justice. They wrap themselves in keffiyehs, quote an antisemite like Darwish, and proclaim themselves defenders of the oppressed — all while ignoring that the ideology they romanticize rejects the Jewish people’s right to exist at all in their ancestral homeland.

They ignore that this same ideology — embodied by Hamas — led to the mindset that carried out the October 7 massacre, burned children alive, raped women, and kidnapped babies. They ignore that Hamas still openly declares its goal is to annihilate the world’s only Jewish state.

And they ignore that Darwish’s words helped cultivate generations of Palestinian Arabs to believe peace will come only once the Jews are gone.

This moral blindness lets them recast eliminationism as “liberation” — to celebrate a poet who told Jews to “get out of our blood” as if he were a harmless dreamer. It lets them cosplay righteousness while reinforcing the very ideology that perpetuates this conflict and keeps Israelis and Palestinians trapped in war.

Performance, Not Principle

If Cumberbatch truly wanted to recite poetry for peace, he could have chosen voices from Israeli and Palestinian coexistence activists — people who have lost loved ones, yet still work for reconciliation. Instead, he chose a man who dehumanized Jews as monsters and demanded they erase themselves from the land, from history, and even from memory.

That is not art in service of peace. It is art in service of erasure. And it is the perfect metaphor for the Western left’s approach to this conflict: a comforting performance that airbrushes antisemitism, denies Jewish history, and excuses the very ideology that makes peace impossible.

Unless, of course, Benedict Cumberbatch truly wants Mahmoud Darwish’s “vision of peace” to prevail — a “peace” in which Israel and the Jewish people are erased from “this land.” And given what Hamas did during the hours it briefly controlled a sliver of Israel on October 7, we sadly already know exactly what that “erasure” would look like.

Because when art makes erasure seem beautiful, it helps pave the road to atrocity.

Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.