On not pitying Palestinians

Israel has had a bad week, as I suppose you don't need me to tell you.

First, the botched raid on the so-called humanitarian flotilla trying to run the Gaza blockade. Then, Helen Thomas, doyenne of the Washington press corps, telling the "Jews" to "get the hell out of Palestine" (i.e., Israel as such) and back to Germany and Poland, where they had so recently prospered.

As a Jewish non-Zionist, it's not my purpose to defend Israel, an imperfect society in an imperfect world, but certainly more decent and humane than the states, groups and individuals dedicated to its destruction. If there is a mystery of iniquity on this planet, it is the ineradicable persistence of anti-Semitism, and if there is a single lightning rod for it, it is the State of Israel.

This anti-Semitism is only partly reflected in the demonization of Israel. It also takes the form of fetishizing Israel's supposed victims, the Palestinian "refugees" of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. (The vast majority of Palestinians, of course, live in Jordan and other neighboring Arab countries.)

If Israelis are devils, logic dictates that the Palestinians must be victimized angels; that is, passive sufferers of "ethnocide" or "genocide." For this reason, Israeli violence against Palestinians is always blameworthy, no matter the provocation, whereas Palestinian violence against Israel is always excusable if not laudatory, the heroic resistance of a subject people.

Jewish sympathizers too

This is only anti-Semitism turned inside out. People who hesitate to associate themselves with the likes of Khadafi or Ahmedinajad can feel innocently virtuous in speaking up for the poor Palestinians. You cannot go to a peace or justice rally anywhere, no matter what the subject, without someone decrying their plight, however out of context. Often enough, the speaker is a Jew, which makes the sentiment even more welcome.

Nothing on earth, in short, seems more politically correct than pitying Palestinians. I have done my own share of it, but no more. Among stateless or secessionist peoples— Tibetans, Kurds, Chechens, Basques— they are the least deserving of sympathy, and if anyone wants to actually do them good, you should tell them so.

None of these other groups, even when they contest or covet the territory of recognized states, espouses their destruction as such. Tibetans don't demand the end of China, nor Chechens of Russia, nor Basques of Spain. Palestinians alone— or at least a majority of them as indicated by poll after poll— seek the destruction of their neighbor. And that reason alone is why they lack a state of their own.

Hitler's guest

It's true that Palestinians have been manipulated by their Arab neighbors, and betrayed by their leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini to Yasser Arafat. Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem under British rule, was a virulent anti-Semite who embraced Nazism, spent the war years in Berlin as the guest of Hitler, and was given a tour of Auschwitz by Himmler. He was nonetheless tipped as the leader of the Palestinian state envisioned by the 1947 U.N. General Assembly partition plan.

Of course, Husseini rejected the plan, as did the Arab League, and openly called not only for the destruction of Israel but for the extermination of the Jewish population of Palestine: "Murder the Jews," he directed his followers. "Murder them all."

The U.N. partition plan was based on a reality, both historical and political, which hasn't changed over more than six decades: that "the claims to Palestine of the Arabs and Jews, both possessing validity, are irreconcilable." The Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 created two refugee populations: a Palestinian one of somewhere between 500,000 and 900,000, and a Jewish one of 850,000, evicted from centuries-old communities in the Middle East.

Jordan's silence

The Jewish refugees had a nation to go to: Israel. The Palestinians, on the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, had none. Jordan could have annexed the West Bank but chose not to do so, instead setting up squalid camps for a stateless population. Egypt did likewise with the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

No Arab advocated a two-state solution between 1948 and 1967, including the Palestinians. Instead, all were bent on destroying the new Jewish state, and the Jews themselves.

As President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt prepared for war in 1967, he declared his objective to be the "annihilation" of Israel. Hafez al-Assad of Syria called upon his soldiers to "pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews." The prime minister of Iraq anticipated "practically no Jewish survivors" of the coming war. The Palestinians prepared to be the happy beneficiaries of this "liberation."

After the Six-Day War of 1967 they found themselves with Israeli rather than Arab masters. The U.N. reiterated its plan for a two-state solution in its Resolution 242, though on rather less favorable terms than 20 years earlier (wars do have consequences). The Palestinian response was to reject "all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine," i.e., the destruction of Israel.

Arafat's agreement

Another generation was to pass before Yasser Arafat agreed to negotiate— not, as it turned out, a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli forces from 99% of the populated West Bank in favor of a Palestinian Authority, which assumed the prerogatives but not the responsibilities of a state. Arafat finally showed his hand at Camp David in 2000, when he not only rejected terms that went beyond U.N. 242, including a capital in East Jerusalem and $30 billion in refugee compensation, but responded instead with a new war that cost 2,300 lives and prominently featured female and child suicide bombers.

This last point deserves emphasis. Two female suicide bombers of the Intifada, Andalib Suleiman and Ayat al-Ahras, were given a choice between martyrdom or shame after having been deliberately seduced and impregnated by terrorist operatives in Bethlehem and Dehaisi. Between them they blew up eight civilians, including two Chinese working in Jerusalem. The children in their wombs perished with them.

To die as a martyr

It has been justly said, I think, that a society willing to sacrifice its children— Palestinian suicide bombers have been as young as 11— has embraced a "culture of death." It would obviously be unfair to convict all Palestinians of such attitudes. But in a poll of 1,000 Palestinian youngsters aged nine to 16, 73% expressed the wish to die as martyrs. Rarely if ever has any society been so morally self-condemned.

Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, having repented for a book in which he denied the Holocaust, has declared his willingness to accept Israel's existence. But Hamas, the terrorist organization that drove Abbas's Fatah party out of the Gaza Strip following Israel's withdrawal in 2005, remains unflinchingly dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. One might say that the Palestinians remain luckless in their leaders, except that Hamas was installed in power by a popular election, and would very likely win a similar poll in the West Bank.

One basis for sympathy

If, of course, your position is that the Middle East is the land of Allah, not an inch of which is to be surrendered to the infidel, then the rejection of Israel is indeed a sworn duty. But that is the only basis on which the Palestinians can claim sympathy or support.

They have it, of course, from many if not most of their Muslim brethren. They extort it, directly or indirectly, from those who must do business with oil sheikhs. They get it, gratis, from anti-Semites or those beguiled, wittingly or not, by a pervasive climate of anti-Semitism that is now stronger than ever.

Where they shouldn't get it is from anyone who believes in tolerance, pluralism and diversity, who thinks that no god, whether named Jehovah or Allah, parcels out real estate to the faithful, and who thinks it is time to stop casting Jews into the fiery furnace or driving them into the sea.♦


To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read other responses, click here.