‘I have a hard time now looking at Palestinians in the same way,’ Corey Gil-Shuster said. ‘Palestinians don’t want peace.’
Not many Jews wander around the Palestinian territories in their spare time asking people on the streets of Ramallah, Jenin, and Bethlehem what they think of Hamas — Corey Gil-Shuster has been doing it since 2012.
Shuster, an academic at Tel Aviv University, has traveled across Israel and the territories for over a decade, asking regular people questions “that nobody really wants to talk about but we need to talk about,” he tells National Review. Accompanied by a simple camcorder — and by a translator, when speaking with Arabs — Shuster documents his conversations on his YouTube channel, known as the “Ask Project,” which features quick, punchy clips shot in a low-budget, gritty manner.
So far, Shuster has released over a thousand videos, each of which features a simple question submitted by a viewer, and his channel has garnered more than 117 million views. Nearly 400 of those videos include interviews with Palestinians.
A liberal by temperament, Shuster’s extensive experience interviewing Palestinians about the decades-long conflict left him with an open mind toward the diversity of viewpoints that exist in the Palestinian world. But the October 7 Hamas massacres — and the adulation and celebration it inspired across Palestinian society — have narrowed his perspective considerably.
“I have a hard time now looking at Palestinians in the same way,” Shuster said in an interview with National Review. “Before, it was theoretical; that they could try to butcher us. And then it happened. I know it happened in terrorist attacks [before], but [never] to this level of animalistic pride. The videos of them butchering people and taking pride in it” left him deeply disturbed.
“I think I’m more on the left in a lot of ways. I have left-wing liberal values, more or less, although I agree with the right-wing assessment of the Arab world,” he said. “The right-wing is much more correct than the left-wing, but that’s a different thing.”
In the wake of the attack, Shuster decided to repost earlier clips in which he asked Palestinians and Arab Israelis their thoughts about Hamas. He also shared earlier interviews with Israelis gauging their willingness to make peace with Gazans.
Looking back on those videos in light of the October 7 atrocities drove home for Shuster just how intractable the problem really is.
“Palestinians don’t want peace with Israelis. They don’t even see Jews as being native to this land. So, they think we have to go back to Poland.” Shuster said.
When Shuster points out to Palestinians that many Israelis trace their heritage to the Middle East, they typically respond, “it doesn’t matter, they have to go back.”
When Arab contacts began sharing social-media videos of the unfolding atrocities on October 7, Shuster initially couldn’t tell if they were authentic or ripped from old footage of the Syrian Civil War. The recordings showed Palestinians on social media reacting to the clips with hearts, happy faces, and laughing emojis.
“It’s too soon to say how it’s changed my view,” he said. “I do know that I was thinking about having to go back to the West Bank and I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can look at Palestinians anymore. I’m having a really hard time.”
“I would have to hear from them: ‘This was really barbaric, and it went too far,’ but I’m not because they’re seeing in their social media feed Hamas is wonderful, Hamas did this to liberate Palestine,” he said.
Shuster, a keen observer of the Israeli national mood, said that Westerners haven’t fully grasped the degree to which the devastation of October 7 has altered the Israeli psyche.
It’s been difficult for Shuster to grasp the disconnect between the scale of the horror — when you adjust for the size of Israel’s population, the Hamas attack claimed thirteen times as many lives as 9/11 — and the rush on American college campuses and in Western media to rationalize terrorism.
Western leftists who celebrate Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters fundamentally don’t understand who they’re aligning themselves with, Shuster said.
Speaking with NR earlier this year, prior to the attack, Shuster highlighted the story of Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay Palestinian who had sought asylum in Israel but was kidnapped and beheaded in Hebron.
“I tell queers for Palestine people, they’re incredibly misinformed,” he said. “Like, you should support gay people. That’s great. And you support Palestinian rights. That’s terrific. However, understand it’s a shockingly homophobic society.”
Shuster’s perspective cuts both ways. He also feels that Israeli society has become desensitized to prolonged conflict with Palestinians and their unwillingness to acknowledge a Jewish state’s right to exist. “But does that mean that a child — a 12-year-old or 15-year-old — who throws rocks deserves to be shot? Or lose an eye?”
“I also blame Palestinians for [this], and they do send their children. They encourage it. They see them as heroes,” Shuster said.
“I think Israelis have a kind of sociopathic tendency to them that they have dehumanized Palestinians to a huge degree,” Shuster said, citing “the constant terrorism from Palestinians.”
“So, if you say to somebody, a Palestinian was beaten or killed, they would say, ‘Well, they probably deserved it.’ That’s the mainstream. That’s not right-wing. You’d have to prove to them that it was somebody who really was just a bystander,” he said.
Even before the Hamas attack, Shuster believed the prospects for a long-term peace deal were shrinking, due both to the rightward shift in Israeli politics and the level of anti-Israel indoctrination that younger Palestinians have grown up with.
“There’s been no change,” he said. “There’s been no direction or improvement. Neither government is giving any vision of what is going to happen.”
Shuster’s encounters in the territories have given him a unique perspective on the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians define themselves in hostile relation to each other. “I tie their sense, for Palestinians, to this idea of hating Jews in Israel. That’s a formative part of their identity,” he said. “On this [Israeli] side, you have had people, at least for the last hundred years, who created infrastructure and institutions and a culture around this new idea of what Israel is. On the Palestinian side, you definitely have a culture, but you have no infrastructure, really bad institutions.”
The divergent sentiment is particularly pronounced on the Palestinian street. Palestinian “politicians say we believe in a two-state solution, but the people do not,” Shuster said. “Nobody wants [that], other than people maybe my age and older, like 50-year-olds and up. Young people — when I do meet someone who actually believes in some form of coexistence with Israelis — I wanna hug them. It’s so rare that when it happens, I have to stop myself from actually hugging them.”
If Shuster’s hopes for the future were bleak before, they’ve only gotten more so since October 7.
“Everybody — mainstream and right-wing — want revenge,” he said. “They want blood … People are really, really, traumatized, and they are angry.”