January, 2009 and March, 2010
The main thrust of this essay presupposes that the true nature of the relationship between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel to be one wherein the latter won a civil war in 1947-8 and the Palestinian Arabs simply never surrendered, preferring to fight on and so resorting to armed resistance in whatever way possible. I wish to try and shed some light on intellectual and perceptual views on the part of the Palestinian Arabs, the greater middle east and the world at large concerning Palestinian dreams of a nation of their own, the state of Israel and what they both see as a pursuit of justice and security and, unfortunate or not, religious and ethnic hegemony and homogeneity. I will concentrate on the perceptual views of the Palestinian Arabs insofar as those views continue to hold them back and radicalize them and deprive them of nationhood.
I take it for granted that the reader is familiar with various hijackings and violent acts of terror committed by Palestinian Arabs both inside and outside the former Palestine. I am not a researcher and make no claims to be one. This essay is by no means any kind of attempt to summarize a history of the struggle between Jew and Arab but wanders here and there in its explorations with only brief reference to historical events which is done for purposes of context only.
The Palestinian Arabs are in virtual thrall in their own land but can they be considered to be their own worst enemies insofar as managing the best way to seek peace with Israel due to Arab cultural traits that seem devoid of qualities of self-criticism, pragmatism or any kind of impartial view of history and events? It is my contention that Palestinian leadership from the very beginning of the conflict in 1947 have made ill-advised decisions that have led the Palestinian Arabs from one disaster to another and continue to do so. Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state actually stemmed from the interactions between Palestinian Arabs and the Jordanian leadership during Jordan's 20 year control of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 which Israel really had nothing directly to do with.
Broadly speaking, both the Palestinian Arabs and Israel consider themselves to be under siege. Being in effect, prisoners in their own land, the Palestinian Arabs must learn to think outside their own cultural box. Palestinian Arabs need to re-define the how and why of their deliverence into their present untenable position because their reaction in terms of their energies, policies and attitudes have been an abysmal failure for 6 decades. Infighting among various Palestinian Arab groups have also contributed heavily to the continued nowhereland that is Palestinian Arab life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. You have extremes at both ends of the Arab spectrum ranging from groups like Hamas who will not recognize the right of Israel to exist nor give up one meter of the former British Mandate, to other groups who will take whatever nation can be formed out of the West Bank. In the middle are groups who opportunistically prey on the situation for individual reasons having little to do with politics ranging from criminal gangsterism to plain corruption. There is no sign of the Palestinian Arabs showing a united front - every move by one group on how to deal with Israel seems blocked by another with the average Palestinian Arab caught in between in a bewildering internal struggle for hearts and minds at once radicalized yet seeking some kind of peaceful dignity to their lives. Many times in the past violent struggles for control have broken out among Palestinian Arab factions in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza.
Besides post-1948 violence surrounding the founding of the state of Israel ranging from everything from full blown wars to individual attacks as well as infighting among the Palestinians, the whole situation has also degraded into a perceptual war of accusations and counter-accusations, propaganda, religious precepts, information and disinformation. The nature of the propaganda has reflected the cultural proclivities of both sides in that Israel's view has been based more on Western thinking and that of the Palestinian Arabs reflecting a middle eastern cultural tradition. "Cultural tradition" is perhaps too friendly a term as I view the middle east's vision of events past and present to be unremitting in the hypocritical scope of its cultural bias while at the same time accusing the West of that very quality; somewhere in between lies the gulf of 9/11 and other terror attacks on the West. In general terms it can be argued, and not unfairly I think, that a Western view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is generally more pragmatic and fact based whereas the Arab view reflects more cultural self-bias, ego and wishful thinking. In recent years the West's view, though not necessarily Israel's, has degenerated somewhat, helped by Arab propaganda, into a more myopic dialogue based on the West's own version of wishful thinking, which is political correctness. This produces a view that gives an undeserved credit to a decrease of Palestinian terrorist attacks to the Palestinian's themselves rather than either harsh or effective security policies by Israel and the airline industry. In fact, in an Orwellian twist, the very success of the policies of Israel to crack down on terrorism, severe though they are, have purposefully been confused by Palestinian proponents to show how unnecessary Israel's policies are and so such policies to be merely an expression of Israeli racist apartheid. On top of all this, there seems to be scant awareness on the side of Palestinian Arabs and their Arab supporters throughout the middle east how much the middle east's own nations resemble the very "Zionism" the Arabs purport to hate so virulently.
The Palestinian Jews and Arabs went toe to toe in a civil war in 1947-8 and the Jews won. I see no reason to attach morality to the winning or losing of that war but this is being increasingly done by the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters; the winning or losing of such a war is merely the real outcome of an act that was immoral itself. When it comes to morality it is argued by some that in fact, the immorality of the Palestinian Arab-Jewish civil war stems from Jewish immigration into Israel with the declared intent among some of those Jewish leaders to declare a Jewish state.
In the 21st century there have been similar declarations from Mexican organizations within the US that the influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States will take back the southwestern US and it will be declared the state of Aztlan. In Europe, some few muslim groups have declared openly their intent to eventually subvert their host governments. No one believes that these declarations are shared by the vast majority of these immigrant populations and so they are not taken seriously. However it should be noted that a small minority of activists will sometimes seek to politicize and radicalize the politically inert rank and file in order to achieve their aims of cultural advancement. In Europe and America, you do not have a case, as in the anticipated end of the British Mandate in Palestine, where the controling governing body and it's military will cease to exist and 2 groups, one of local people, and one of immigrants, will be allowed to fight it out for supremacy. In order to increase the similarity to what happened in Mandatory Palestine in the 1940's you would also have to have an immigrant population in Europe and America much, much larger than it is.
In the case of Israel this unlikely scenario is exactly what happened and the Palestinian Jews and Arabs, for different reasons, were politicized and radicalized and left to fight it out for supremacy. In that era some Palestinian Arabs had been radicalized and politicized by themes that combined Arab nationalism, a country to come as a result of the anticipated end to Western colonialism in the form of the British Mandate, and fears of and violent clashes with Jewish immigrants. For their part, the Palestinian Jews had been similarly galvanized by violent clashes with Palestinian Arabs, hopes of a nation of their own, and the coming end of the British Mandate of Palestine but with the important difference of European anti-Semitism in the form of the Holocaust. The Holocaust, fresh in Jewish minds perhaps served to motivate more Jewish Palestinians from top to bottom out of fear and even desperation for another Holocaust to not be reenacted. Being so left to fight it out among themselves, the Palestinian Jews came out on top militarily and were able to exert control over most of the former Brititsh Mandate of Palestine. The State of Israel came into existence and subsequently militarily beat off all comers in the form of Arab nations who wished to reverse the results of the Jewish victory. Rule of law and morals played no part in these wars. Insofar as the civil war between Jew and Arab in that land can be said to be continuing, the actions associated with its conduct have more to do with reactions to violence than any respect for law or morals. The Palestinian Arabs react to land seizures and restrictions of their movement violently because, having never surrendered formally or emotionally, they consider the Israeli's to be an alien occupying army in a war that is very much ongoing.
An Arab trait in the middle east when it comes to a perceived enemy like Israel amounts to purposefully confusing the moral issues implicit in success and failure versus the original intent when it comes to the use of violence since the consequence of failed violence can be so far reaching. The Palestinian Arabs have morally and perceptually absolved themselves in complicity in their own predicament by transforming their military failures into a font of morality and this is the direct cause of the unreality in which they move, think, act and react. Conversely, success as embodied by Israel and Western states becomes immoral and therefore to be despised when it suits them; technology represents decadence, to be used as a weapon for expediency only. When it comes to the Arab-Israeli Wars, middle eastern Arabs have a double standard on how they view the legitimacy of the idea of weapons systems from outside the middle east being supplied to Arab countries as opposed to Israel. In short, Arab nations who have militarily confronted Israel like to downplay their purchase of foreign weapons and portray and magnify the West's same support for Israel as being the critical and somehow immoral difference in the outcome of the Arab-Israeli Wars. Continued skewed rhetoric out of the middle eastern press leaves one with the impression that muslims simply cannot accept the idea of fairly losing a war to Israel. With this Arab fascination of the idea of Western support being the deciding factor in Palestinian Arab oppression, one doesn't need to go very far perceptually to arrive at an Arab moral imperative for 9/11.
There is an air of unreality on the side of the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters in terms of blame and historical events that does not exist to the same extent on the Israeli and Western side. It would seem that this sense of unreality has to do with cultural differences with the West in terms of how a culture views and deals with subjects such as success and failure, shame and humiliation, blame and personal responsibility. Aside from material and technological superiority it would seem that many cultures are demonstrably more mature at dealing with such issues than the Palestinian Arabs and the middle east as a whole. It may be simplistic to say that life is what you make of it but, in any case, it does not seem to be an axiom much in evidence in the middle eastern mentality. In Arab countries, could have, would have and should have exists as a type of perceptual reality that seems to dominate the type of thinking that is too often entwined in the middle eastern zeitgeist.
If all the above is true, then Arab perception of every event in the middle east is colored not by reality but by managing the perception of success and failure and so morality comes to be associated with success in a manner that is most unheathly, a type of "doublethink" that George Orwell warned of in the very year of the founding of the state of Israel. Losing a war and suffering the aftereffects is one thing but to transform and extend that loss by unknowingly cultivating an inability to match reality with cultural priorities in this instance is deadly. A mind set in the middle east that puts it at odds with other cultures as a kind of default position contributes to a larger sense of not measuring up to the rest of the world. This has produced In a general sense, the sometimes intense dislike of the West that emanates from some quarters of the middle east. This dislike in turn originates from a false myth of Western involvement in the region created and nurtured by the aforementioned issue of middle eastern cultural self-esteem together with played out ideas of colonialism and imperialism. It seems to occur to no one that if the West wished to militarily occupy and control and colonize the entirety of the middle east it would have little trouble doing so and this puts into perspective inappropriate muslim propaganda of Western desires to humiliate and control the middle east; it's simply unreal. What you have in the middle east is the perpetuation of what amounts to an urban myth wherein the United States and Israel are intent on humiliating Islam while creating a Western and Jewish hegemony in the region; why Israel and the West don't do so in a more direct manner considering the evil aggression attributed to them is never explained. It seems to be taken for granted that the ever so sly West wants "excuses" like 9/11 (which the West may have done itself) in order to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Put forward in this light, Arab fairy tales about Western and Israeli designs on the middle east come off as the childish foolishness that they are. Stories in the middle eastern press about the intentions of Israel and the United States as well as their past history in the region often verge on the fantastic as I show elsewhere in this essay. Apply this intentional or unintentional lack of perception on the part of the Palestinian Arabs to their own situation and it is not hard to see why a decades long violent intransigence has set in. Whatever empirical experiences normally present themselves to sour the loser of a civil war have, in the case of the Palestinian Arabs, been radically augmented by powerful cultural forces to create a profound hatred of Israel and its allies.
Put this all together and you have no trouble understanding why Palestinian Arabs can see themselves as the powerless and innocent victims of world Jewry and Western colonialism or why death can be preferable to shame and loss. A profound but misplaced sense of phony "crusader" xenophobia and self-esteem echoes throughout the middle east. In fact, if anyone should have a sense of xenophobia it should be a felt for the now vanished ethnic Greek culture of Constantinople, admittedly itself once a potent imperial power, which fought off 7 centuries of Islamic attempts at Imperialism and colonialism until finally succumbing in 1453 - it should be the peoples of Spain and Portugal who were invaded and colonized by crusading Imperial Islamic armies which were only fought off after 8 centuries of military ebb and flow. (Ironically, when the last muslim was forced to either convert or leave Spain in the year of Columbus' discovery of America, it was the Jews who, faced with the same choice in Spain, found refuge in Islamic countries, albeit with 2nd class status.) A wholesale perceptual re-writing of history ancient and modern infects the middle eastern mentality like a plague. When Islam compares itself to the West concepts like cause and effect, innocent and complicit or morality and corruption become interchangeble notions according to cultural imperatives. As an adjunct, humiliation can become a source of pride, death the way to live forever and a tactical defeat twisted into a strategic victory and religion interpreted in whatever way best suits those same cultural or political imperatives.
Some few examples are given in this essay of anti-Western rhetoric in the media whose historical lack of perspective and accuracy is only matched by it's ill-advised nature if it is true that these words have propped up and caused Arabic violence towards Israel and the West. Ill-advised I say not only on ethical grounds but for the reason of the disproportionate violent response middle eastern polities are receiving from the West as are the Palestinian Arabs from Israel on the occasion of every terrorist attack; democracies are not above vegeance for it's own sake. Unfortunately, in an Orwellian twist, it is the disproportionality of the Israeli and Western response that becomes the moral issue in the eyes of Islam without reference to the morality of the acts that caused the disproportionate violence in the first place. Islamic humiliation and subjugation and the invasion by the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel into Gaza become self-fulfilling prophecies; in the middle eastern mentality those "Zionist" and Western depradations had effectively already occurred anyway, at least in middle eastern fantasies that helped cause 9/11. Being outmatched by Israeli and Western armies becomes a substitute for morality, entirely stripped of deadly intent. In this sense it is the more deadly delivery system that is the most "immoral" and therefore accurate 105mm artillery fire from Israel is less moral than are inaccurate rockets fired from Gaza. It's not hard to see that when it comes to Israel and the West any act of Islam is perceptually and perpetually justified and even championed and reality itself, subverted, circumvented and mitigated until actuality is unrecognizable.
It is obvious that Israel and the Palestinian Arabs are still in a de facto state of civil war. Israel won that war in 1948 but has never received a formal surrender from the Palestinian Arabs. As such, the Palestinian Arabs have a status resembling prisoners of war more than anything else but with armed fifth columnists in their midst and in the Israeli rear lines as it were. Israeli policies have sought to use intelligence methods, pre-emptive strikes, check points, barriers and other methods to restrict the movements of Arabs and consequently reduce the opportunity for attacks against Israeli's.
Considering their unique status as armed and hostile prisoners with unlimited potential to smuggle and secrete weapons, it would seem that accusations of apartheid and discrimination done to the Palestinian Arabs by Israel are more the result of the Israeli view that they are dealing with a resolutely hostile people on a permanent war footing than by endemic racism. In a constant state of war with the threat of attack at any moment, the prisoners are not going to be treated well by their jailers, some of whom probably hate them every bit as much as they are hated, and so you have bulldozing of houses, relocations and land theft. Is it any surprise the current state of affairs exist? How in the world is justice going to arise for the Palestinian Arabs out of such a situation? How can an Israeli tell who wants to kill them and who would live in peace given the chance? How can one know how many Palestinian Arabs are "enemies" although considering the position of power of Hamas and it's support among the Arabs one would think hostility towards Israel among the entire Palestinian Arab population to be quite high. In this brief synopsis I offer no excuses for behaviour on either side but merely the recognition of the level of the untenable position and level of hatred on both sides. If there is any single mitigating factor I would say it is the refusal of the Palestinian Arabs to offer some kind of formal surrender based on the idea that they lost their war a long, long time ago; they should accept the idea that this war is unwinnable.
My personal view is that the Palestinian Arabs should unite and offer a formal surrender which would pychologically prepare them for what needs to be done because all this talk of negotiation is nonsense; the Palestinian Arabs have no position of strength from which to negotiate. My guess that a formal surrender would give the Israelis what they want the most and that is to negotiate with a foe that desires peace. I think that Israel would be much more ready to be magnanimous than they ever will be under threat of violence and the Palestinian Arabs would have nothing to lose since nothing is what they currently have. Though the Palestinian Arabs have had their teeth pulled outside of Gaza by repressive Israeli policies, the past history of violence looms large in the Israeli psyche and so violent Arab rhetoric is looked at by Israel as violent intent merely circumvented by Israeli strength. For the Palestinian Arabs to stop committing acts of violence merely to gain negotiating points without a true desire for peace to back it up is not going to convince the Israelis. A formal surrender accompanied by a swearing off of all the hate speech may just do the trick. In this sense a formal surrender may be just what both sides need to send them on the right path. A grass roots peace movement among the Palestinian Arabs wouldn't hurt.
Does this mean that I am saying that by not offering some kind of formal submission that the Palestinian Arabs are in effect bulldozing their own houses? My point is that the Israeli's can hardly consolidate their victory or increase their security more than they have short of resorting to wholesale deportations of Palestinian Arabs out of Israeli controlled territory. One might say this ignores the fact that Israel could make wholesale concessions to gain peace but why should they give up their advantage won with blood with concessions which may fall far short of Palestinian Arab desires and so not change things a whit in terms of peace and security. In fact this may only encourage more violence because the Palestinian Arabs think they finally have Israel on the run. Once one starts to concede advantage based on fear of further violence that road may lead entirely in the wrong direction and encourage more attacks. It is a very, very difficult situation. In some ways the strangle hold that Israel holds on the Palestinian Arabs in 2010 may actually be working to bring about a Palestinian state since the options of the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank are as stark as ever. The situation is arguably even more stark in Gaza yet Hamas remains in power and there is no sign of quit in the Arabs there and that is worrying to say the least. What in the world is to be done in the face of such mutual hatred?
While both Israel and the Palestinian Arabs together with a host of 3rd parties have fought, wrestled and parleyed for a solution to the "Palestinian Problem", is it possible that not only are the wrong questions being asked but that there may not be a solution at all? Can the whole situation even be couched in terms of the word solution?
The "solution", if it may be called that, may have occurred decades ago when the Palestinian Arabs lost a civil war against the Palestinian Jews in 1947-8 and on the heels of that came various military defeats suffered by Jordan, Syria and Egypt at the hands of Israel. Let me explore commonly held ideas about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs as opposed to facts on the ground.
"Israel are the occupiers of Palestinian Arab lands." Is this really the case? The Palestinian Arabs entered into a civil war with Jewish Palestinians over land they shared in the final months of the British Mandate in 1947-48 with their eyes wide open; after all, they had been at often violent odds with the Palestinian Jews for years. The Palestinian Arabs, who rejected the United Nations proposal for a 2 state solution, outnumbered the Jews 2 to 1 and furthermore were counting on the aid of their muslim neighbors, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt who were hostile to the Palestinian Jews. The Palestinian Arabs had every hope of expecting to win a civil war with the Jews; the Palestinian Arabs must have felt they were rolling dice that were decidedly in their favor. Certainly one does not engage in war when one expects to lose. In retrospect, rejecting the 2 state solution in 1947-48 and opting for war was the biggest mistake the Palestinian Arabs made. In fact some Arabs claimed the U.N. had no right to any jurisdiction in the matter of Palestine in the first place. What happens to land "rights" in the aftermath of war when law goes out the window and force is left to decide all?
It is hard to blame the Palestinian Arabs for resisting, violently or otherwise, the influx of Jewish immigrants into their land, especially as some of those Jews had the declared aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine which would have to be at the expense of at least some Arabs. This concept of a Jewish state made the idea of the Palestinian Arabs simply learning to live side by side with their new neighbors problematic. Events in Europe concerning the persecution of Jewry by the Nazi regime had nothing to do with the Palestinian Arabs; the Arabs were simply caught up in events they neither wished for nor could control. Under the circumstances conflict in the British Mandated Palestine between Jew and Arab seemed inevitable. The Jews immigrating into Mandatory Palestine brought a 1st world sophistication that unnerved the Arab population which feared being overwhelmed by Jewish economic and technological energies.
This is not an unknown consideration in recent or ancient history. When I was in Malaysia for some weeks in 1986 I learned of a law which went by the term "bhumipatra". The gist of the law was that those of Chinese or Indian minority had to have a Malaysian partner before they could start certain types of businesses. Ethnic Malaysians comprised, I believe, some roughly 75% of the population and Chinese, 25%. The concern on the part of ethnic Malaysians was that, for cultural reasons, the Chinese Malaysians were much more aggressive and ambitious in certain business matters and there was a fear among muslim Malaysians that the ethnic Chinese and Indians would come to have an unwanted hegemony in certain sectors of the economy despite their fewer numbers. The bottom line is that there were economic advantages put in place aimed at keeping Indian and Chinese minorities in check towards which there was no little resentment felt among these 2 minority groups. One can only wonder how much more aggressively the ethnic Malaysians would have reacted to a declaration on the part of either the Chinese or India minorities to eventually set up an independant state within Malaysia itself together with a massive influx of immigration.
Part of this equation may have had to do with Palestinian Arab expectations following the demise of Ottoman influence and the expected temporary nature of the British Mandate - expectations of at last being the masters of their own destiny. The other side of this view is that it was just as wrong for the Palestinian Arabs to want to that destiny to be specifically Islamic as it was for the Jews to wish for a Jewish state but this is where the tussle over "indigenous" rights comes in and the concept of exactly what indigenous is as applied to peoples and cultures. The bottom line is that the Palestinian Arabs probably felt that a specifically Islamic and Arab state would be merely a natural reflection and outgrowth of the historic cultural make up of that area and not a reflection of any kind of racist or exclusionary agenda as the Arabs accuse "Zionism" of being. Christian and Druze minorities may have different ideas about this but we'll never know to what extent a nation called "Palestine" would have been all inclusive in terms of the rights bestowed on its various inhabitants.
It's an understatement to say that even today in 2010, modern Arab states are not as obsessed with "multiculturalism" as is the politically correct left in the United States and there is no reason to think such an appreciation would have existed among the Palestinian Arabs in 1947. Of course, the overwhelming ethnic and religious hegemony in many Arab states does not create a natural outflowing of ideas having to do with "multicultural" societies; the very idea seems to provoke and endemic mistrust of such concepts among muslims. In fact, muslims seem to sometimes take it on faith that they will not fare well in a multicultural society as the creation of the state of Pakistan testifies to. Among muslims, this may be an outgrowth of a type of xenophobia as well as their own historical experiences in terms of how Islam has fared at the hands of non-Muslims and how Islam itself has traditionally treated non-Muslims amongst them. Whatever the case, Islam has very little track record of faring well in societies in which they see themselves as being politically vulnerable. This may be a case of Islam consistantly projecting its own provincialism or expectations onto others or merely be chalked up to a lack of historical experience in such situations.
The point I'm trying to make is that for Arabs and Islam in general to criticise the specifically Jewish nature of Israel or "Zionism" is to criticise a society that is uncomfortably similar to many Islamic nations throughout history extending even to this very day not to mention the similarity of Israel to the very aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs themselves. Arab historians will sometimes point to the tradition and therefore "experience" of Islamic polities having multi-ethnic make-ups in which non-muslims fared well but this was mostly a case of Islamic "largesse" as it were or individual opportunism and not a case of true equality because in the history of Islamic dominated cultures muslims were institutionally number one in the pecking order.
The Palestinian Arabs had lived under Ottoman control for 4 centuries so perhaps they had become inured to living under masters that at least shared their religion and other cultural values. In any event Arabs in Mandatory Palestine resented British occupation, especially so as it seemed to them that this occupation was facilitating the creation of a Jewish state at Arab expense. Under the Turks the Arabs at least had their homes and land and martial violence had not occurred in Turkish occupied Palestine in anyone's living memory. With the passing of the prestige and power of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of World War I, British Imperialism and subsequent Jewish immigration, the Palestinian Arabs became virtual bystanders as the effects of world politics descended on them in force.
In 1947 there was no country called Israel or Palestine for that matter; there was a territory, British mandated after World War I, called Palestine. There were no Jewish or Arab organs of government because none were permitted by the British that would exercise any real authority. No sovereign nation called Palestine existed or ever had existed although the territory itself had been decidedly muslim for many centuries. Having said that, there had been a Jewish presence in Palestine going back and pre-dating Islam by many centuries, perhaps going back as far as 3,000 years. In reality, all Jew or Arab could rightfully claim in Palestine before their civil war was private land, a plot of land they physically occupied; there was no national land as it were. On the eve of British withdrawal from the region Palestinian Jews and Arabs fought a civil war for dominance and the Palestinian Arabs came out on the short end of the stick and before any Arab nation formally existed. By the end of the civil war Jordan ended up with the West Bank but exerted no sovereignty and therefore no national sovereignty has ever been exerted over the West Bank and who has lived there has been a question decided by right of conquest throughout history.
While the Palestinian Arab's fellow Arabs in Jordan militarily occupied the land on the West Bank that was to have been set aside for the Palestinian Arabs in a solution brokered by Western powers, Egypt seized the Gaza Strip. Years later in the 1967 War that same West Bank land was taken over by Israel and any nation called Palestine died stillborn. Israel never took the West Bank or the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Arabs but conquered the territory from Jordan and Egypt. The Palestinian Arabs wanted the entire area known as Palestine to be an Islamic country but nothing is what they ended up with. So, as a direct result of civil war between Jew and Arab, no country called Palestine ever existed except in paper plans and the victors of the civil war created the Jewish state of Israel.
The vagaries of the civil war between the Arabs and Palestinian Jews dispossessed Palestinian Arabs of much of their private property and subsequent attempts by Arab nations to re-enfranchise Palestinians in the form of more wars failed and then terror attacks only encouraged hard line Israelis to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs of even more of their land while moderate Israelis against such tactics were largely silenced by the emotion engendered by Jewish deaths. Fate has dealt the Palestinian Arabs a bitter blow. Today the Palestinian Arab's support for groups like Hamas who wish to do away with Israel has only made things worse for Arabs under Israeli control since there is no motivation for Israel to do other than to wish the Palestinian Arabs would just go away and some few Israelis are acting on that wish in the name of survival and out of sheer frustration.
Today, 60 years on, only a relatively few Palestinian Arabs are coming around to realize that violence on their part is and has been an utter failure. What the Palestinian Arabs have done in the way of violent resistance since the disaster that overtook them in 1948 has only served as an extension of that disaster. In part what fuels violent resistance on the part of Palestinian Arabs is a moral attitude stemming from a view of disinvolvement in their own responsibility in the whole affair, as if their own perceptual bias that colors their view of the history of that conflict is not just as bad as those Israeli's they think of as their enemies. Another factor is the idea that violence can wear down Israel's resolve but in many cases the Palestinian Arabs arsenal has been reduced to throwing rocks.
Palestinian Arabs did have a voice in their own fate in 1947 and in choosing violence they chose poorly if understandably and now that voice is muted. When the day comes when Palestinian Arabs realize that they have culpability in the tragedy of their own history without childish excuses then the day will come when they can move forward to a better future; there is a difference between being a victim and having failed to victimize another and been taken to task for it by fate. A man in prison can in a sense be considered a victim and pitied for what he has to go through. However, once the story of how that man got in prison by getting into a fight with another man is considered the story changes perspective. Men in prison have a tendency to downplay their own responsiblity for their fate and so it has been with the Palestinian Arabs. It is taken taken as a truism that men in prison must come to accept responsibilty for where they are rather than blaming others or the system before they can move on with their lives.
The perspective of the Palestinian Arabs must shift from the idea that somebody else put them in their cage to a starker idea that they are simply in a cage and must not repeat their own part in the actions that put them there in the first place, just or not. For Palestinian Arabs to focus all their rage on Israel without themselves shouldering some of the blame will only perpetuate the cycle of violence that has dominated the relationship between Jew and Arab in that land for generations now. What happened happened and cannot be changed nor set right nor Palestinian Arab's sense of justice perhaps ever fulfilled. Decrying Israeli propaganda and "lies" with no awareness of their own history of doing the same thing is foolish.
Arguing over who depopulated what village when and so trying to undermine the "justice" of the Israeli cause or magnify the justice of the Palestinian Arabs cause will accomplish exactly nothing since Israel acts not out of a sense of justice but of out a sense of security, survival and the obligations of reality; Palestinian Arabs need to do one hell of a lot more than win debating points. If the Palestinian Arabs feel those debating points will perhaps affect future legal action internationally or otherwise they are looking at an empty cup. There is only one path open to the Palestinian Jews and that is the path of least resistance accompanied by a mature and more pragmatic attitude of what cards they really have to play without reference to what cards they should have and what cards the Israeli's should or shouldn't have. Justice and fairness has nothing to do with this - if it did then the Palestinian Arabs wouldn't be living the lives they are. Justice and fairness have been trumped by hatred and war. The Palestinian Arabs must come to accept that they will never have the level of justice they crave and that it is this very justice they crave that in part prevents them from moving forward from the harsh reality that has encompassed them. A Palestinian state is within reach of the Palestinian Arabs but not as long as Hamas and their ilk exist, not as long as rockets are fired into Israel and not as long as suicide bombers dream of taking out a bus full of Israeli's.
Although academic Ilan Pappé is an Israeli Jew he has his own bone to pick with his homeland and his historical perspective and arguments on the plight of the Palestinian Arabs almost perfectly mirrors the perspective of far too many Arabs themselves and to that extent mirrors the cause of the continuation of the Palestinian Arab extremity. There are some arguments one cannot afford to win, no matter how good they make you feel or how much they seemingly reflect the justice of your cause if the end result is that argument reflects an attitude in your own mind that will keep you physically where you do not wish to be. It is scant recompense to win an argument that you feel frees you perceptually or morally absolves you of guilt but which helps keeps you in chains because unfairly demonizing your opponent hardens them to your plight and robs you of your own realization of your part in it; these attitudes allow a people to continue to follow failed strategies that backfire on them. Also, a moral argument that bends everything to it's will but the bars of your cage while failing to provide a reflection of why you're in that cage in the first place is not helpful, to say the least. Violence is fueled by such blighted arguments. The Palestinian Arabs need an argument that will physically move walls, checkpoints, Israeli troops, laws and much more and they are in possession of no such argument. Violence large and small has not moved the Israeli's to do anything but tighten it's grip. The only justice the Palestinian Arabs should be thinking about is the justice they could impose in their own state, the justice that could ensure that their children could walk about in their own nation as free citizens and the masters of their own destiny and so the only argument left to the Palestinian Arabs is to argue for peace as a defeated populace since they have not one shred of strength from which to argue otherwise, certainly not as any kind of equal.
If you were a person who mostly agreed with Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", one should keep in mind that it is war itself that enables atrocities and ethnic dislocations and not policies on paper no matter how immoral. No doubt the Palestinian Jews did raze Arab villages to the ground but it is incorrect of Pappé to not mention the occasions this was done to clear blockaded routes or villages from which attacks on Jews were staged. Most importantly, it is common in war for populations threatened with approaching armies to abandon their homes before a soldier is actually physically on their doorstep. For Ilan Pappé to insist that Palestinian Arabs were in every instance forced from their homes by being physically expelled at bayonet point rather than in some instances fleeing rumor of war is far fetched and stretches Pappé's credibility. The problem with Pappé's whole thesis is that he couches the Palestinian Arabs dislocation only in terms of an almost academic and one-sided ethnic moving of people on a map rather than the genuine fear, chaos and hatred war creates. With the introduction of violence events spiral out of control and the right and wrong of it become the might of it. What is inconceivable is that Pappé should couch his so-called ethnic cleansing without that context; it is as if the American's offensive operations in the Pacific in World War II were depicted with no mention of Japanese attacks against Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Wake Island or Guam. However the Palestinian Arabs were forced off their lands the fact that it occurred against the backdrop of war is it's own explanation albeit a not very satisfying one; when have the losers of a war ever experienced satisfaction?
Portraying 400,000 to 600,000 Jewish Palestinians in 1947-48 as invaders who simply and easily pushed 800,000 to 1.3 million Arab Palestinians off their land who had the backing of Arab nations by confidently snapping their fingers is foolish but all too common rhetoric from Israel's detractors; the events Pappé writes about happened against a backdrop of a civil, then national war for survival. However, in Arab media this "invasion" is exactly how the creation of Israel came about. Israelis are not all die-hard Zionists, there are many who disagree with any plan to push Palestinian Arabs off their private land and Israeli's who challenge their own government's treatment of Palestinian Arabs. Also important to note is that if today the Israelis wished to put every single Palestinian Arab within Israel onto trucks and deliver them to the borders of Egypt, Syria and Jordan there is no one and nothing in this world that could stop them from doing so. There would be outrage from around the muslim world and of course some from the West but it would be all in the form of rhetoric and U.N. resolutions and from an Israeli perspective it would be problem solved. One should ask oneself why Israel has not done so and exactly how hard line Israel is towards their unwilling "citizens". If one feels they are in the possession of facts that color as unjust what is happening in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza then at least have the courage to place those events in context. To not provide context is to destroy one's own credibility and so defeat one's own purpose unless that purpose is to provide agenda driven and one-sided propaganda.
It seems a bit late to argue that the Jews were wrong to come to a land in the first half of the 20th century that had only a small Jewish population and set their sights on a wholly Jewish state with talk of the Jewish lack of indigenous rights; it will solve nothing. To whatever extent Zionist's were able to succeed it was surely made easier by bitter strife between Muslim and Jew and the resultant civil war between the 2 sides so in that sense the Palestinian Arabs unknowingly played right into so-called Zionist hands; hardline Zionists who dreamt of an entirely Jewish state may have been handed that state on a silver platter by Arab intransigence, an accidental victory as it were since the odds were too stacked against the Palestinian Jews in 1947 to ever imagine them willingly believing they could come out on top in a civil war for which they were unprepared. Probably never in their wildest dreams did the most die hard Zionists dream they would ever end up with the amount of land and control they did.
Given the profound nature of the disputes between Palestinian Jews and Arabs in the first part of the 20th century and their mutual intransigence it seems hard to believe they ever could have shared a state in harmony. Also, before the 20th century, muslims within the inter-war British Mandate of Palestine had no recent history of living in a society not controlled by muslims, not for 13 centuries. Faced with Palestinian Arab hostility and outnumbered in a sea of Islam, the Jewish Palestinians, however reluctantly or divided, initially accepted the 1947 brokered two state solution as the best they could realistically hope for. But when pressed to a civil war, the Jewish Palestinians fought for their very survival in Palestine; to have lost almost certainly would have forced the Jews to another land entirely.
The Islamic notion that Jews had no right to immigrate to Palestine seems to ironically support the notion that Europeans have the right to resent muslim emigration to Europe. The fly in the ointment in Mandatory Palesitine was the question of a Jewish state and the idea that Palestinian Arabs risked becoming 2nd class citizens in parts of their own land or being entirely dispossessed of it. The Palestinian Arabs willingly engaged in the civil war against the Jews in 1947-8 and without the war the Zionist's would never have succeeded in any plan to seize Arab lands or expel populations. Outnumbered as they were and with hostile neighbors in support of the Palestinian Arabs, it is doubtful the Palestinian Jews ever would have rolled the dice to militarily control Palestine and in fact, it seems as if the Palestinian Jews had their hand forced. In a war in which victory by either side was by no means certain, the so-called plans to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Arabs are so many words on paper and no more. In any event I'm sure there was enough hatred and plans on both sides to go around and there is a reason why war is so terrible.
When it comes to questions of the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homes, villages and land, what seems never to be asked is what would have happened had both Jew and Arab accepted the 2 state solution in 1948. The simple fact is that without war no expulsions would have or could have occurred and so to depict that loss of Palestinian land, whether forced or "voluntary", without the context of war in all it's urgency seems all the more egregious. The point is that Plan Dalet, the supposed Jewish plan to ethnically cleanse land of Palestinian Arabs, could not have happened without a backdrop of war and that very war renders moot the idea of whether Palestinian Arabs lost their homes through expulsion or flight since it amounts to the same thing in the end. Since the Palestinian Jews accepted the initial 2 state solution and the Arabs did not, the idea that Plan Dalet involved anything but a worst case wartime scenario is unlikely. There is no evidence that Palestinian Arabs would have been forced from their homes in the proposed Jewish state had that state come about peacefully. In order to accept the totality of Pappé's critical view of Israel one would have to imagine that the Palestinian Jews purposefully orchestrated a war. In this sense Pappé's book doesn't even make sense. No matter how calculated the Palestinian Exodus was on the part of the Palestinian Jews the fact that it occurred against a backdrop of a war where both sides wanted to do the same thing entirely mitigates any immoral attachment to the event since the larger argument for immorality should be laid squarely on the war itself for which both sides are guilty. Plan Dalet may not have been reasonable or moral but with the onset of war reason and morality was thrown right out the window. Given the nature and history between Jew and Arab in Mandatory Palestine, to have not seen an attempt at ethnic expulsion by either side once war had broken out would have been strange. Furthermore, the invasion of 5 Arab countries into the now former Palestine in 1948 following the Jewish-Arab civil war was calculated to do some ethnic cleansing of it's own; to believe otherwise is foolish.
One should also ask oneself why the territory of the West Bank which was seized by Jordan during the civil war was not subsequently made into a Palestinian State by Jordan during its control over a period of 20 years since the West Bank comprised the bulk of the land that was to have been given over to Palestinian Arabs according to the original United Nations plan for a 2 state solution. One can only come to the conclusion that to have created a Palestinian state at that time would have been a de facto admission on the part of the Arabs of a 2 state solution and the eternal loss of the land that now comprised the state of Israel. It seems incredible but after losing a civil war and after Israel had defeated the invasion of 5 Arab nations that the Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding nation states still had plans to destroy Israel and therefore wanted no half-measures when it came to a Palestinian state. This is where the real crime occurred because further wars only deepened the misery of the Palestinian Arabs and the opportunity for a Palestinian state passed ungrasped; war degenerated into terrorism and this degenerated into a giant barrier and a virtual state of siege of parts of the Palestinian populace. In light of these considerations, accounts like Pappé's seem hopelessly naive, overly simplistic and myopic, not to say disingenuous and agenda driven.
Into this stew one must also consider why in 2010 Palestinian Arabs who are the descendants of refugees and not refugees themselves maintain a refugee status and why the Arab countries in which these "refugee camps" exist refuse to absorb these people into their countries. If fellow Arab states are so in favor of the Palestinian Arab cause why not absorb those Palestinians and make them citizens as did Israel for the hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced from centuries old Jewish enclaves across North Africa and the middle east? It seems as if Palestinian Arabs are in camps merely to be used as pawns to embarrass Israel and the West and encourage even deeper Palestinian Arab bitterness.
Palestinian Arabs like to downplay any mention of the fact that the Palestinian Jews and Arabs decided to go toe to toe in a civil war. When it comes to Arab accounts of the Exodus and subsequent Palestinian Arab oppression by Israel the more one gets the idea that the real crime that occurred, but which Arabs are unwilling to admit, was Israel's coming out on top in the civil war and beating back the invasion of 5 Arab countries upon the founding of the state of Israel. In Arab eyes that is the real and unacceptable crime which they cannot and will not accept or admit. All other criticism seem to be a smokescreen in order to put the entire history of the struggle of Jew versus Arab in a moral light of oppression, colonialism and imperialism in order to shift the argument from the light of failure and willing participation in a war; assuaging Arab failures by feeling morally superior is scant consideration for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs living such unhappy lives.
Given the amount of disinformation and bias attached to Arab versions of the events of 1947-8 and thereafter it is hard to come to any other conclusion than that the concept of history itself is taking a beating in the middle east because in that area of the world history is whatever they want it to be. People in the West are not stupid people and a dispassionate telling of the events leading to the creation of the state of Israel not hard to come by. By practising disinformation the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters are causing immeasurable harm to their own cause if they think public opinion in the West is important. Palestinian Arabs and those sympathetic to their cause may think they are fooling people with revisionist histories of the Palestinian struggle and the West's role in that story but they most emphatically are not. Saying the chickens came home to roost with 9/11 and proving it are 2 entirely different things. Similar accounts of conspiracies and cynical Jewish lobbies in the United States are similarly unpopular in America. Of course there are ethnic lobbies in the United States which are looking out for their own but one ethnic group's attempt to do this is not demonstrably morally worse than another's and so it is once again Jewish success, success itself, which is painted in an immoral light. The only reason an Arab lobby has no influence in Washington is that there has been no Arab cultural presence in the history of America; given that history why would they have any influence compared to Jewish folks?
As I say, the biggest thing I don't like about the tenor of Pappe's book is that it pointedly ignores any realistic context of the nature of the Arab/Jewish civil war that took place in Palestine in 1947-48 which was a battle for not only for cultural predominance but for survival and it is important to remember that in post-1948 battles fought between Arab nations and Israel the intent and declarations on the part of some of the Arabs was for the destruction of the state of Israel; this is not an unimportant consideration when talks about "ethnic cleansing". Laws and the niceties of laws go out the window when one is fighting a war for one's very survival. United Nations declarations seem foolish in this context because civil war is not an academic exercise where both sides good naturedly go back to the status quo that held at the start of hostilities. Only after the military option had once and for all been taken away from the pro-Palestinian Arabs in 1973 with the defeat of the final Arab armies attempt to inflict a military defeat on Israel did the rule of law and the United Nations suddenly begin to look really good to those opposed to Israel. Unfortunately, terrorism increasingly began to look good to certain elements of the Palestinian Arabs.
Say what you want about laws and land but in history it has been armies that have decided what is what and laws seem to be almost an afterthought to justify and consolidate gains. Before the Palestinian Arab-Jewish civil war the rule of international law was attempted and then abandoned as interested foreign powers simply threw up their hands when violence spiraled out of control and the world recognized as an actuality the winners of the civil war and that was Israel. Great Britain, the masters of Mandatory Palestine between the wars wanted nothing more to do with what they considered an unmanageable and costly situation and in any event saw the writing on the wall as far as their once far flung colonial aspirations which were in twilight. Arab and Jew were left to their own devices and violence left to decide the outcome in Palestine that international law had failed to do.
It was not law but violence between Turkey and Great Britain in World War I as regards Palestine that created the British Mandate which itself was nothing more than a legal formality to cross T's and dot I's. In Palestine one tax master was exchanged for another but with that change came national Arab aspirations in Palestine and the region in general. Yet another war, World War II, produced heightened expectations of another national dream, this time of the Jews for a homeland within British Mandatory Palestine. Law in reality was an afterthought in Palestine with the advent of British dominance after WW I and indeed used to manage, consolidate and justify military conquest; Great Britain's presence in Palestine had no legal ground to stand on other than it's military ability to enforce it's edicts which is the basis for all law. When Palestinian Arabs quote legalities arising out of the British Mandate in order to support their position alongside of accusations that the Jews were invaders who had no indigenous history in Palestine one wonders what history legally or morally justified the British presence in the region. Palestinian Arabs seem to agree with whatever agrees with them rather than framing their plight in a consistant moral ethos. Matters were not helped by an inconsistent policy by the British Mandate regarding a Jewish homeland but which was in any case entirely deplored by the Arabs who felt that a Jewish homeland was unacceptable in any form. The Palestinian Arabs I'm sure rightly felt that Europe had no right to solve their own anti-Semitism by enabling a Jewish homeland that would disenfranchise Arabs to any degree whatsoever. On the other hand the increasing Jewish presence in Palestine was a fait accompli that could not be wholly ignored by the Arabs for reasons of reality if nothing else; the Jews in Palestine were not going to simply disappear. The table was set for civil war.
The British announcement to abandon their mandate in Palestine as of May, 1948 emboldened the hopes of both Jew and Arab. In the end, what law and negotiation could not sort out war once again did. It is unlikely that international players from outside the region will ever have any more success using law now than they did in 1948. War is it's own law when 2 sides simply cannot come to terms. It was not international law but armies that created British Mandatory Palestine and the Turks before them. Laws in these situations are just words used to formalize naked conquest. It's foolish to imagine that either the Ottoman Empire or Britain had any legal jurisdiction in Palestine or that the creation of the state of Israel was either legal or illegal. Rather, the creation of the state of Israel was just an extension of what had always held sway in Palestine and elsewhere in regard to the creation of nation states and that is violence.
Today, in the case of the Palestinian Arabs it will be neither international law or violence that solves their plight. The only weapon the Palestinian Arabs have left is self control. Further violence at this point only digs the Palestinian Arabs deeper into a hole and hardens resolve among Israeli's in general and among those Israeli's who comprise a portion of the Jews who have always wanted to get and hold onto the West Bank. Over 400 Israel civilians died in terrorist attacks during the 1st decade of the 21st century and all it got the Palestinian Arabs is the barrier around the West Bank which the Arabs hate but are themselves responsible for; at least they are being held responsible because of the violent minority among them but which the larger Palestinian Arab population supports with it's heart and rhetoric. That barrier dramatically cut down on the number of terrorist attacks so it won't be coming down anytime soon.
For the Palestinian Arabs to invoke international law rather than self control simply spins wheels without effect and maintains the status quo since the United Nations has no real authority or jurisdiction or power. The International Criminal Court for its part uses force to assert its jurisdiction, extraditing individual's to Europe but from countries within which there is a power vacuum or lack of a functional justice system. That won't work in Israel; no matter what proceedings international bodies bring against Israel, no country will ever flex its muscle to enforce them. I cannot imagine any scenario within with a coalition of countries would physically go in and split Israel in two. Further considering that any consortium of countries with the muscle to intervene has probably experienced cultural or physical assault from Islam makes such an idea flatly impossible to contemplate.
The idea that some of the physical terrorist attacks Western countries have experienced are partly fueled by the situation in Israel is spoken of in the West but little more; America being ardent nation builders for a muslim Palestinian population that was mostly happy about 9/11 doesn't seem a likely event. If America decides to help the Palestinian Arabs found a nation it will be to short circuit Arab anti-Western rhetoric rather than any sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs. However, solving the plight of the Palestinian Arabs might improve the West's image in the middle east but also leave it open to future terrorism as a bullying tactic. The disenfranchised in terms of nascent nation states will always be there and frequently hold the major powers responsible simply because the major powers have the strength to make a difference if not already sharing responsibility themselves. Another problem is that it has not been forgotten in the West that at least a part of what happened in the former Palestine was the result of muslim cultural bigotry and European anti-Semitism.
Whatever deep seated feelings middle eastern muslims have of suffering humiliation at the hands of the West which partially fuels terrorism does not make those feelings credible just because they're there. It is not an American's job to prop up the cultural self-esteem of people who may have unrealistic expectations of their place in a global pecking order. A country cannot pursue policies it considers to be right if it simultaneously makes that pursuit into a kind of popularity contest for every member state of the United Nations. Also, specifically in regard to the Palestinian Arabs, it is felt by many in the US that they have largely been the architects of their own demise, their own worst enemies.
In a review of Ilan Pappe's book. "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", Stephan Lendman, who is no fan of Israel, writes about the present day Arab population in Israel: “Since the 1940s, they [the Palestinians] were ethnically cleansed and slaughtered without mercy so their homeland would become one for Jews alone. The shameful result is that Palestinians then and today have almost no rights including being able to live in peace and security on their own land in their own state that no longer exists. Survivors then and their offspring either live in Israel as unwanted Arab citizens with few rights or in the Occupied Palestinians Territories (OPT) where their lives are suspended in limbo in an occupied country in which they're subjected to daily institutionalized and codified racism and persecution. They have no power over their daily lives and live in a constant state of fear with good reason. They face economic strangulation; collective punishment for any reason; loss of free movement; enclosures by separation walls, electric fences and border closings; regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, loss of their homes by bulldozing's and crops and orchards by wanton destruction and seizure; arrest without cause, and routine subjection to torture while in custody. They're targeted for extra-judicial assassination and indiscriminate killing; taxed punitively and denied basic services essential to life and well-being including health care, education, employment and even enough food and water at the whim of Israeli authorities in a deliberate effort to destroy their will to resist and eliminate those who won't by expulsion or extermination. Palestinians have no power to end these appalling abuses and crimes against humanity or receive any redress for them in Israel, the West or through the International Criminal Court Israel ignores when it rules against its interests."
It seems disingenuous on the part of Mr. Lendman to not point out that any "extra-judicial" assassinations as he puts it, have taken place on both sides and ludicrously naive to expect health care or welfare for the intransigent losers of a civil war; this may not be fair but it is the nature of the harsh reality of war, violent resistance and terrorism. The problem for the Palestinian Arabs in Israel was one of a population, as losers of a civil war, that really needed to lay down and accept occupation and 2nd class status in their own land in order to move on, like it or not; this is the unfortunate legacy of a failed use of force. Instead the Arabs held out hope that a military solution in the stripped down form of terrorism would change things and now hindsight is 20/20. As we now know, Arab recognition of the totality of their defeat is precisely what needed to happen to have even a glimmer of hope that the Palestinian Arabs would ever approach being any type of normal citizens within the new country of Israel or realize their dream of an independent Arab state; as bad as this seems there was simply no other alternative but the Palestinian Arabs pursued a bankrupt agenda of terrorism and found themselves in even worse straits. As Emperor Hirohito put it just before the surrender of Imperial Japan in World War II, "We must endure the unendurable." and that is what the Palestinian Arabs could not and would not do. One can hardly blame them since in the case of Japan the Japanese knew that they would eventually become the masters of their own destiny in their own land but civil wars are a different matter entirely. Not really recognizing and accepting their defeat, Palestinian Arab leadership fought a hopeless fight and men like Yassir Arafat doomed the Arabs in Israel to their present sorry condition. To put it more crudely, when dogs fight the loser lays down and shows it's belly in order to not have it's throat torn out - the Palestinians Arabs are slowly having their throats torn out by trying to stay on their feet in a hopeless fight. There is simply no choice for the Arabs in Israel: lay down and opt for part of their former land or die a slow death.
To understand Mr. Lendman's leanings, consider this from his Feb., 2010 essay called "Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence And Occupation" on Countercurrents.org: "From birth, Israel was a regional menace until America became its benefactor in the late 1960s. Now it's a global one, powerful with a large standing army and the latest weapons and technology, nuclear armed and ready to use them. It's belligerent on the slightest pretext or none at all, and a threat to world peace and security because US administrations since Lyndon Johnson supported a nation of 5.6 million Jews in an area the size of New Jersey, partnering in its worst crimes and abuses." Like Ilan Pappe, context is apparently not a weapon in Mr. Lendman's literary toolbox. Also, there is no mention by Mr. Lendman of why Syria, Jordan or Egypt should not be considered "a regional menace" in 1948. To say that Israel is beligerent with no pretext is nonsense of the face of it. If hateful rhetoric can fuel terrorist attacks then that same kind of rhetoric can subject the Palestinian Arabs to "crimes and abuses" as Mr. Lendman puts it; this is a double edged sword.
In a 2010 essay titled, "Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs", Mr. Lendman descends into madness by charging the Israeli government with taking advantage of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to steal human organs. He quotes Haaretz as reporting: "The Israel Defense Forces' aid mission to Haiti left Israel overnight (January 14) with equipment for setting up an emergency field hospital. Around 220 soldiers and officers (were) in the delegation, including 120 medical staff (to) operate the hospital in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince."
Lendman writes, "On January 20, Lebanon's Al-Manar TV reported on the mission, citing a damning You Tube video posted by an American named T. West from a group called AfriSynergy Productions. 'The video presents something to think about while exploiting the horrible tragedy that has befallen Haiti where Israeli occupation soldiers are engaged in organ trafficking.' "
"Its medical teams apparently are doing it in Haiti, exploiting fresh corpses and the living. The Manar TV cited You Tube said 'there are people operating in Haiti who do not have a conscience and are members of the search and rescue teams, including the Israeli occupation forces,' far from home harvesting Haitian organs, and the pickings are plentiful."
"Apparently, the publicity about providing humanitarian aid is cover for this illicit operation, another crime against humanity among Israel's growing list, matched and exceeded by its Washington benefactor with generations more practice."
Incredible stuff by Mr. Lendman which I have quoted for the purpose of showing how far into the muck muslim media like the english language Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Cairo but distributed throughout the Arab world, have to dig to find Western writers that will attack Israel with all the delusional fervor which is de rigueur in the middle east. Contrasting Lendman's writings destroys the credibility of them all; whatever his agenda or world view it has little to do with reality. Although I quote extensively from Al-Ahram Weekly its articles often represent work syndicated throughout the middle east and sometimes the world in English language newspapers and also on websites which are, of course, global. I was in Egypt when I wrote most of this essay and Al-Ahram Weekly simply the paper I read the most.
Ilan Pappé's "reality" is a similar case. In a very interesting review of Pappe's "Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine" by Seth J. Frantzman in Middle East Quarterly for Spring 2008, pp. 70-75 Mr. Frantzman has a section called "The Importance of Context" in which he begins with the following:
"Pappé would have his readers believe that in the years before the Israeli declaration of statehood, the Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine were lacking in the hostility to Jews that made Jewish war-planning necessary. To take just one time period, between the U.N. General Assembly vote to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, and Israeli independence almost six months later, Arab irregulars killed 1,256 Jews in Palestine—almost all of whom were civilians. Pappé might be onto something if Plan D had been drafted in the absence of Arab violence against Jews, or if the Arab states surrounding Palestine were not so serious about answering the declaration of a Jewish state with a war of annihilation. But inconveniently for Pappé, those were the realities of the time—realities that undermine the thesis of his book."
"While no scholar disputes that Zionist leaders adopted Plan D, Pappé's argument—that Plan D is evidence of a desire to conduct ethnic cleansing and constituted a war crime—is a leap of logic. The reality of that time period is one in which Jewish leaders were faced with problems far more urgent and existential than altering the ethnic makeup of certain territories."
Mr. Frantzman concludes his review by writing that Pappe "... does not examine Arab intentions in the five months between the U.N. endorsement of Palestinian partition and Israel's independence, nor does he consider the widespread public statements by Arab officials in Palestine and in neighboring states declaring their goal of eradicating the Jewish presence in Palestine.[37] It is obvious why a polemicist such as Pappé would cleanse—so to speak—his narrative of any such references: To avoid doing so would strike at the core of the reality that he wishes to foist upon his readers, one which precisely inverts the historical record and turns a coordinated Arab attempt at ethnically cleansing Palestine of its Jews into a Jewish attempt at ethnically cleansing Arabs.
Pappé's writings may win plaudits among his new British peers, whose disdain for the state of Israel is legendary. But his disregard for the obligations of the historian and his indifference to academic integrity condemn his work to the realm of the polemic, not scholarship."
David Pryce-Jones reviewed Pappe's book in the 2006 Literary Review. He quotes Pappe as one time saying, ‘We do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers... ‘there is no such thing as truth, only a collection of narratives’. Mr. Pryce-Jones follows that by writing, "If the man (Pappe) announces that he is going to lie to you, why waste time on his work?"
The general thrust of reviewers who dislike the tone of Pappe's book is one of professing that Israel's intelligence preparations were not simply a cold blooded blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs but a tactical and strategic preparation for a coming war in which Jewish survival was at stake and moving hostile populations a reality of war. No doubt that some part of these Jewish intelligence preparations prior to the Jewish-Arab civil war were indeed cold blooded but that is the nature of war which is not a game but an event which is death and destruction. In such a scenario, unpreparedness can be synonymous with death and in the case of the Palestinian Arabs their lack of preparedness to back up their aims cost them their land. What matter the right and wrong of it once the die is cast and survival the overriding consideration?
Wikipedia says the following about the so-called plan for ethnic cleansing of the Arabs in question: "Plan Dalet caused quite a controversy amongst historians. Some see it as a plan which was primarily defensive and military in nature and a preparation against invasion, whereas others think that the plan was an offensive plan that approves of ethnic cleansing, and the conquering of as much of Palestine as possible."
The former seems entirely reasonable and the latter attempted by both sides. I see no reason to hold only the Jewish Palestinians morally responsible for having such aims. In Pappé's view it is really success itself that becomes immoral and not intent since the intent in question was present on both sides; the Palestinian Arabs and their national allies "Plan Dalet" simply failed and so is not discussed on the level it should be and so people like Pappé left in the foolish position of morally criticizing success. There was plenty of rhetoric from Israel's enemies of the "we will push the Jews into the sea" variety and there was no reason for Palestinian Jews in 1947-48 to doubt either the intent of such declarations or the ability of Arab nations to carry it out.
Along similar lines, Pappé is also guilty of attaching some kind of virtue to the lack of competence and scope of Arab military operations rather than their intent and threat which is the real issue. According to Wikipedia, Pappé writes in his book that "the Arab war efforts were ‘ineffective’, and ‘pathetic’. "The fact that, in hindsight, the Arab forces didn't fight well is not a moral criticism to be laid at Israel's doorstep. In 2010 it is this same fog that transforms the relatively ineffective rockets that fly into Israel from Gaza into a harmless activity low on a moral radar because of their very ineffectiveness. In turn, that same fog turns the retaliatory 2008 Israeli invasion of Gaza into a "slaughter". It is like saying that a man who shoots at you with a pistol that misfires does not deserve to be shot in return and that to do so with a better gun is immoral. In this same manner Israel has progressively been hounded for it's decades of success against Arab armies and tough but successful policies against terrorist operations, as if indeed success is itself immoral. It's really a form of academic madness and a perfect example of an "ivory tower" if there ever was one. It would seem as if sufficient bias or adherence to a certain world view in the mind of a person can literally overwhelm their ability to reason; one need only look at the people who believe the United States government attacked itself on 9/11 to know the truth of that. In the eyes of people like Ilan Pappe and Stephan Lendman their pounding of Israel as a Goliath oppressing an Arab David bestows morality on incompetence utterly separated from intent. The fact that a man is not very good at killing you does not make him a "David" nor you a "Goliath". Winning a war does not automatically make one a bully nor holding onto territory bought with blood a form of abuse. If more Israeli's died from rocket attacks would that improve the Israeli position in the eyes of Lendman and Pappe? Of course not since Pappe and Lendman have an agenda that is totally divorced from the reality on the ground.
Both Arab and Jew tried to kill one the other in Palestine in the wars of 1947-8 and long before. The fact that the Israeli's were more successful in dislocating Arabs from their land than the other way around during a civil war which was all about land is not in and of itself immoral. What is immoral is war and in this sense both groups have to shoulder the blame and the Palestinian Arabs have no right to associate and confuse their failure at war and subsequent dislocation from their land with morality. An article in Al-Ahram Weekly for April, 8-14, 2010 has an article about the Palestinian Arab's being "ethnically cleansed" titled, "The Nakba Denial: Concealing Catastrophe". In it, Tammy Obeidallah characterizes what happened and how it is remembered by Palestinian Arabs: "Palestinians and people of conscience all around the world commemorate the Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic. The Palestinian population within what is now Israel - one quarter of which are internally displaced from villages decimated by the Israeli army and Zionist militias - mark the Nakba by marching through the places where their villages once stood."
As an example of how facts can be correct and the context of those facts make them a lie, this article, which describes the horror, death and murder of Palestinian Arabs evicted from their homes, has not one word of context in it about the fact that a war was taking place at the time or mentions the Jewish deaths that were taking place in the exact same time frame. Not one word that the Palestinian Jews had just won a civil war with the Palestinian Arabs and were at the time of the expulsions described in the article in the midst of a war of survival with Arab countries that had invaded from all sides. I am not trying to mitigate the suffering and horror of those expulsions, what I am trying to do is to exempt either side from declaring moral high ground in what was a brutal war.
I see no specifically moral argument to support either side when it comes to engaging in that civil war although muslims obviously feel differently. Muslims writers are monolithic in their claim that Jews had no right to expect any kind of political hegemony among the indigenous Arab population via numbers of immigrants. The same writers who defend the right of muslims to immigrate to Europe and scratch out whatever political and religious hegemony they can would seem to put their views of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine in a rather hypocritical light; muslim populations in Europe have demonstrated no respect for the indigenous populations in the context of which muslim writers put the Jewish "invasion" of Palestine but rather have insisted on full and equal rights in whatever country they are. This is as it should be and so too should it be looked at in Mandatory Palestine. No country in the West has put a numerical number in regard to restricting muslim immigration. In fairness, no European country is in imminent danger of having it's population eclipsed by muslims. One can only wonder as to European reaction to such an eventuality since Europeans are already showing signs of alarm at the Islamification of their countries. In 2009-10 proposed laws against full Islamic veils worn by women in France and minarets on Belgian and Swedish skylines are gaining in popularity.
Articles in the middle east that describe the Nakba consistently fail to contextualize the event in terms of a concurrent war; that is a form of lying. The "denial" that is taking place in regard to the Nakba is on the side of the people who practice and then accuse others of that same denial. The Palestinian Arabs and their supporters refuse to come to grips with the fact that "ethnic cleansing" was a goal not only desired but attempted and backed by violence by both the Jewish and Arab Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. When looking at the history of Palestinian Arabs expelled by violence from their lands and villages through a lens of morality the notion that those Arabs were innocent victims because they failed to do first and better what was done to them doesn't wash. I do not oppose the characterization of the Nakba as an inhumane event but I do oppose the delusional fervor with which the lack of context seemingly liberates writers to demonize the Palestinian Jews and their descendants as goose-stepping agents of apartheid and colonialism, intent on humiliation, cruelty and oppression for it's own sake or because Jews consider everyone else in the world in a light that "goyim are subhuman" as Mr. Cook puts it.
It is war itself that is inhumane in that it drives people to insane levels of cruelty towards their fellow man. Tammy Obeidallah concludes the article thusly:
"The catastrophe is exacerbated not only by those who celebrate the original crime, but by denying Palestinians the right to mourn the loss of loved ones and homeland. This is by far the most damning evidence that not only is Israel an oppressive state that routinely violates international humanitarian law, but also an Orwellian state not content to simply eradicate Palestinians from the map, but to obliterate the memory of their existence."
I myself ask if international humanitarian law was on the minds of Arab militias that routinely murdered Palestinian Jews during the Nakba? This occurred on both sides and to portray anything else is to demonstrate a bias so profound that it overwhelms reason and fact.
One could argue that it is doublethink to blithely portray Israel's celebration of the founding of their nation as a celebration of Arab civilian death marches and the wholesale uprooting of communities. Americans celebrate the anniversaries of their winning World War II. This does not mean they wish they could light cigars on the still burning embers of the victims of the Hiroshima blast. Obeidallah's article is all too typical of how the Nakba is portrayed in the middle east. It serves no one to treat the Israeli's as devils with pitchforks jumping at delight at every discomfiture and humiliation of Palestinian Arabs, in fact it's downright childish. Obeidallah's describing the Palestinian Jews who ousted Palestinian Arabs from their villages as a "depraved band of terrorists" isn't a comment designed to make Israeli's more prone to allow Palestinian Arabs to hold memorials to a tale falsely told, however woeful. Holding memorials that present a false context to the loss of Palestinian homes and land in 1947-48 and thereafter are going to remind the Israeli's of Holocaust deniers more than anything else. If one's cause is just then the naked truth should suffice. One shouldn't wonder that there are some Israeli's who are prepared to move forward with settlement building no matter how unjust when they realize that no amount of fair play large or small, now or in the past, can be expected from the Palestinian Arabs who fought and lost a civil war for dominance in Palestine. Demonizing Israel is not an act calculated to elicit magnanimity from those "Zionists" but merely a memory of how bitter was the civil war between Jew and Arab and what fate might have in turn awaited the Jews had they lost.
Tough policies in the drawn out aftermath of a bitter and cruel civil war on the defeated populace that refuses to entirely renounce terrorism and violence is not the same thing as a willful "system of institutional racial discrimination which is composed of laws, policies and practices that have resulted in second-class citizen status of Palestinians, more land confiscation, discriminatory development planning, segregation of Palestinian communities, home demolitions and forced evictions, in order to ensure Jewish privilege and domination.", as Tammy Obeidallah puts it. I'm not sure about the wisdom of insulting a person who has a foot on your throat when that situation came about as the result of a fight and not because you were laying there and a person just put a foot on your throat from devilishness; those are 2 entirely different scenarios. What would you do if you walked into an alley and saw a man standing with his foot on the throat of another man lying at his feet? Let's say one person comes up as a witness and says it was the result of a fair fight and a second comes up as a witness and says that the man was already lying there? If the man lying there lied to the police about their role in that fight to make the winner look like someone who is merely cruel then they are not in a very strong moral position. Tammy Obeidallah is lying in the article in the sense that the article is telling the end result of what happened and not why and how it happened and that is all the difference in the world.
This type of disingenuous anti-Israeli and anti-Western rhetoric is dangerous and has far-reaching consequences because words do kill. The words that informed America about the attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese because those words were a reflection of a real act that took place. Take those same words and suppose them a lie and you have 9/11. There is a fair telling of history and there are lies and 9/11 proves that a myth believed has the power of a real act. When it comes to historical excuses for violent attacks on Israel and the West the middle east is a font of lies, distortions and unmerited childless expressions of humiliation; one often sees the United States spoken of in the middle eastern press the way a short man with low self-esteem talks about a tall man. I can't speak for Europe but as an American don't expect the United States to give in to intimidation based on a view of history like Tammy Obeidallah's anytime soon because the truth does matter and the United States is not easily spooked like Spain was after the Madrid train bombings. The more violence that spins off from Islam's imagined squirming under a Western boot heel that isn't there the more Islam suffers reprisals. America is not going to tread lightly because of guilt they do not have. A similar thing is happening between the Israeli's and Palestinian Arabs. America has it's share of problems which it readily admits to for such is the nature of our many-voiced society, but the monumental hypocritical and unaware Orwellian madness which purile academics and fundamentalist's in the middle east accuse the US of is just nonsense, a re-writing of history to suit a childish and easily bruised temperament, a Pearl Harbor that never happened.
The Palestinian Arabs could go a long way towards easing their situation if they would put their heads down and admit to their own involvement in the whole history of bitter strife between themselves and the Jews in present day Israel going back at least to 1920 rather than themselves and their supporters putting on a cloak of faultless invisibility. Cruelty, death, murder, there's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the events surrounding the founding of the state of Israel. One can say the outcome has been fair only to the extent that one believes war itself is fair. War and violence surrounds the founding of most every country in the world including the most recent admissions to the roll call of nations. Even today, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, populations strive through violence to create their own ethnic nation states. What is not fair is for the Palestinian Arabs to accuse Israel of trying "to obliterate the memory of their existence" through playing loose with historical facts and other means while the Palestinian Arabs similarly seek to "obliterate" their own violent part in the sordid and ongoing war with Israel through their own policy of disinformation. The only difference between the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli's as I see it from a distance is their roles of winners and losers of a war; the intent was the same on both sides and as I state many times in this essay, there is no moral judgment attached to the tactical aspect of winning or losing a war in which both sides were willing to roll the dice. In the case of Mandatory Palestine, willful war and war crimes were committed by both sides.
Many interested observers of the ongoing conflict in Israel couch the problem in terms of Israel's post-war and unjust treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. The problem perceptually is the same as the question of the Nakba. Palestinian Arabs and their supporters couch the Palestinian's oppression in terms of a post-war scenario that whitewashes the rockets flying into Israel from Lebanon and Gaza and the terrorist attacks that have diminished only because of a great barrier which reasons for it's very existence are also whitewashed and transformed by Palestinian Arabs.
In fact, how history in the middle east is changed according to how much shame and blame is attached to an event is as great a problem for muslims in that region of the world when it comes to world opinion as are the events which overtake them from time to time. A willingness to play and unwillingness to pay is a hallmark of the cultural zeitgeist throughout the middle east; why pay when you can simply re-write the history books all the while accusing others of doing the same? Cultures in the middle east, for all their spiritual braggadocio have never learned the lesson of how accepting responsibility for one's actions and the negative things that accrue from those actions can allow one to move forward rather than staying mired in the worst elements of one's past. The childish anti-Israeli and anti-Western editorials and essays that emanate from the press in the middle east wouldn't pass muster in an American college debate class. As far as American's go, they emphatically do not like that type of storytelling. In general terms, the middle east's version of the history of the conflict in the former Palestine between Jew and Arab amounts to nothing more than a pack of lies, more for what's left out than for what's left in.
It is often stated in the middle eastern press and by supporters of the Palestinian Arabs in general that Israel's actions are illegal and in this sense they are talking about international law. However, no country in this world that has the power to do so allows international law to trump their own national laws nor do those nations formulate their laws to be in keeping with international law. The question becomes, why should Israel do so or be considered to have done anything illegal since they follow their own sovereign laws? Whether you like it or not we in America and countries around the world do the exact same thing. America has been accused by groups like Amnesty International to be in violation of international law within it's own borders and of course ignored them. In the case of Israel those violations of international law often refer to what is known as the Occupied Territories. Under the definition of those Occupied Palestinian Territories the entirety of the United States and half the world is an occupied territory. The United States itself refuses to subject itself to any rulings of the International Criminal Court.
The Palestinian Arabs, like Israel, have chosen in the past to agree or disagree with the jurisdiction of the United Nations or international authority as Arab military fortunes or hopes of such waxed and waned; certainly there has never been any consistent recognition by Arabs in the region of any extra-territorial authority. The Palestinian Arabs left their fate to war and not international law as they at one time had the opportunity to do and have no right to benefit from an inconsistency in this matter that has followed the possible success of Arab military scenarios rather than any respect for international law. Palestinian Arabs have even retroactively recognized as legal the pronouncements of the British Mandate in Palestine, that same Mandate they hated at the time and considered illegal and unjust to the point of outright insurrection from 1936 to 1939. The British themselves had no legal right to be in Palestine and were there only by right of conquest and their treaties, pronouncements and policies mean nothing. Certainly no one in the Arab world wanted them there or recognized British authority and had they the means, Arabs armies would have kicked out the British without so much as a good-bye. Yet you have insanely agenda driven and wholly ignorant writers like William Cook writing articles that speak of how pre-Israel Jews should have complied with British authorities. Cook writes of how the Jews "produced, by deceit and propaganda, an apartheid state that has ruthlessly subjugated the indigenous population by appropriating their land and imprisoning them behind concrete walls and electrified chain-link fences, making impossible a normal life".
Cook writes the Jews only deceptively "claim that they were the victims of people who want to destroy them and drive them into the sea." Cook also writes about the Nakba thus: "...tens of thousands of Zionists swarmed upon their (Arab) villages and wiped them off the map'". Cook is a perfect example of a writer who lives in a world whose history is upside down and where facts are of no account whatsoever.; a wall built to (successfully) prevent an onslaught of successful terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians during the 2nd Intifada becomes an "apartheid wall". Also, no infantry unit of the Israeli Defense Force existed above brigade strength in 1948 which is apparently no problem for Cook and his "tens of thousands of Zionists" who I guess swarmed like ants over the Arabs; however many "tens of thousands of Zionists'" there were were double the number of Palestinian Arabs. No surprise that Cook is also a writer who will write entire articles on the subject of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs without once mentioning a war between the two or the Arab willingness to enter into such a war. If words kill, a writer like Cook who teaches in Southern California bears his own responsibility for 9/11.
James Zogby, the Lebanese-Catholic president of the Arab American Institute and Arab and leftwing apologist had a syndicated article in April of 2010 in which he wrote about what he considered a connection between heated rhetoric and violence and the danger of those "who write blogs or articles that consistently defame or distort..." He further writes in this article that "writers bear responsibility for their words and behavior of those whom their words motivate to commit illegal acts." Of course Mr. Zogby in this article titled, "Before It's Too Late" is talking about distorted rightwing rhetoric against the left in the United States. I put down Mr. Zogby's quotes because I wonder if he feels the same about distorted and inflammatory anti-Western rhetoric coming out of the middle east either before or after 9/11 and whether, as President of the Arab American Institute, he fairly applies his logic to those he has an affinity for as opposed to those he does not. Considering the current state of affairs around the world and the Arab hand in acts of violence, it seems rather more urgent to consider this in light of people who are actually acting on "distorted" rhetoric by killing people as opposed to rightwing nutjobs Mr. Zogby is concerned about who have yet to act on the rhetoric of which he specifically refers to in the article. In the same article he writes, "We've seen the ugly racist placards, heard the chants and shouted epithets, and witnessed the raw anger at rallies. Can violence be far behind?" Mr. Zogby is talking about events like American "Tea Party" rallies in 2009-10 but I couldn't help but think how much his remarks reminded me of television footage where American flags and effigies were burned in the middle east with disturbing regularity before 9/11 in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Chickens fly a long way and roost where they will, agenda or no, left or right, Jew or Arab. That violence begets violence is a truism in this world that one can swear by. That rhetoric begets violence has a less certain progeny but as we wind deeper into the 21st century people are certainly sitting up and giving increasing credence to the possibility that words do kill.
Following or not following law to suit an agenda rather than out of respect for those laws is a smokescreen that fools no one and is only a part of the disinformation campaign anti-Western and anti-Israeli individuals and organizations put forward as representing some kind of justice. The problem with this use of justice by the Palestinian Arabs is that the justice is considered valuable only when it flows in one direction. Distance in time is no barrier to the Palestinian Arabs when it comes to international verdicts in their favor but those they at one time rejected apparently considered temporally irrelevant. Palestinian Arabs pick and choose from history that which they wish to and fair play has nothing to do with it.
The bottom line is that there is no fairness attached to the long, complicated, hateful and stubborn story of the strife between the one time inhabitants of Palestine. In the end it cannot be unfairly said that war was the chosen arbiter of both sides and naturally the losing side has since tried to downplay in whatever way it can it's own involvement in that war. This is not an action calculated to garner support in the international community and has worked only to whatever extent the Palestinian Arabs have succeeded in convincing others of the disingenuous reading of their own history and part in that war.
As far as the Occupied Palestinian Territories are concerned, once again Arabs decided to let war be the arbiter of their fate, this time in 1967. The present day West Bank or Occupied Territories were already in Arab hands and would have stayed so had not Arabs decided to push their luck and once again go to war against Israel to regain land lost in 1947-48 and hopefully put an end to Israel itself. That war backfired on the Arabs and now Jewish settlements are being built on land the Palestinian Arabs had and wish they had again. These lessons of the futility of violence against Israel seem to be entirely lost on many Palestinian Arabs and so walls are built and their lives become ever more oppressive while they commit terror attacks, shoot rockets and simultaneously cry "foul" to the international community. A hopelessly biased view on the part of the Palestinian Arabs wherein nothing they do is wrong and nothing Israel does is right only eggs on the more radical among them, serving no apparent purpose but to increase their own misery. Adding to that misery in whatever small way, it is not helpful for the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters to portray Israel as having "stolen" land when it fact that land was won fair and square in a war. There is no question that it would be nice for the Palestinian Arabs to have their own country and that country be as large as possible but how in the world is undeviating rhetoric that Israel unilaterally invaded and stole land going to help achieve that goal? To me it it is not a question of justice that a Palestinian country be brought into existence. Justice was placed in the hands of the gods of war long ago and did not favor the Palestinian Arabs. War itself has nothing to do with justice per se but having said that, there was nothing particularly unjust about the manner in which Israel won their wars with the Arabs who actually, even in retrospect, had a lot going in their favor; certainly in sheer numbers the Palestinian Arabs had the advantage in with a 2 to 1 superiority over the Palestinian Jews and that is not including the Arab nations.
Throw in the surrounding Arab nations and it's a wonder that Israel exists at all. Forget all those fantasies that helped motivate 9/11 that America made all the difference - it simply never happened; America played virtually no role, certainly no material role in the events in Palestine in 1947-8 or 1967 for that matter. After 1967 it was too late to for the Arab nations to defeat Israel because Israel now had nuclear weapons, acquired, I might add, without the help and somewhat to the chagrin of the United States. Even if all the Arab nations had nuclear weapons, an attack on Tel Aviv, for example, would simply bring about mushroom clouds above Damascus, Cairo, Mecca and Tehran in return. Any likely hood of a doomsday scenario for Israel as the result of an attack by Arab nations will result in nuclear weapons being used.
Pappe states in his "Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine":, ‘I have no illusion that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonizes a people who have been colonized, expelled, and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonized, expelled and occupied them." The problem with this quote is that there is no sign that Israel and it's supporters "demonize" Palestinian Arabs" in the same manner, great lengths and stretching of reality that Israel's detractors do. Middle eastern critics of Israel routinely assign the most cynical and Roswell-like conspiratorial motivations to Jews on a regular basis. If Israel or the West for that matter should demonize anything it is the Arab penchant for disinformation in the form of re-writing history and claims of past innocence. In the mythology of the Arab world the Palestinian Arabs have been the blameless victims of aggressive colonialism and imperialism which as regards the creation of Israel is not true. Israel is a byproduct of the twilight of French and British Imperialism and European anti-Semitism. The British Mandate in Palestine was ostensibly to be a transition to Arab sovereign nations. Hitler changed that simple scenario by killing European Jews wholesale, motivating the surviving Jews of Europe to make real the Jewish dream of their own state in Palestine. European war and aggression are the culprits here and Arab and Jew the victims unfortunately set one against the other.
Middle eastern Arabs were in fact the relatively short-lived victims of British imperialism. However it is important to view this event in context. The British were merely the latest empire builders in Palestine, following the vacuum left by the tottering old man that was the decaying Ottoman Empire and before that the Mamluks of Egypt 4 centuries before the Turks. Palestinians hadn't been the true masters of their own destiny within any kind of historical memory though they sometimes rose high in the Ottoman bureaucracy. However one views the context of British imperialism or "colonialism" in the region, Jewish peoples and the creation of the state of Israel were certainly not any part of it. Critics of Israel are fond of using the words "imperialism" and "colonialism". These are loaded words and should be used with more discretion in the context of what is happening within Israel.
Of importance in the question of Jewish attitudes in Palestine in 1947 it should not be forgotten that at the beginning of outright hostilities between Jew and Arab at that time that a bare 2 1/2 years had passed since Jewish liberation from concentration camps which were an attempt to systematically kill every one of 11 million Jews in Europe. In light of this, Palestinian Jewish reaction to Arab threats to push them into the sea and the fear this engendered together with then recent European traumas cannot be exaggerated.
In 2010 it is and has been for many years Egypt that has carried the flag first militarily and then rhetorically for Palestinian Arabs which ironically resulted in the Egyptian government signing the first Arab peace accord with Israel. It was in Cairo in 1947 that Arabs determined to fight a 2 state solution with naked force upon the termination of the British Mandate. In a kind of passing of the torch from Egypt to Saudi Arabia the 9/11 hijackers mostly Saudi origins show the level of animosity towards Israel in a country considered a religious leader in the muslim world. More importantly it is the myth in the middle east that it is only with American support that the Palestinian Arabs in Israel continue to suffer oppression when nothing could be further from the truth. That is why the disingenuous nature of so many media editorials in the middle east is important to note. There is a great deal of bitterness in Egypt towards Israel over the success of the Israelis in their civil war with the Palestinian Arabs and that bitterness is exacerbated by Egypt's own failure to successfully intervene on the side of the Arabs. Where the United States comes in is that it is generally regarded in Egypt and the middle east that Palestinian Arab and Egyptian failure in this regard would never have happened and continue to happen even now without Israel's support from the United States. This myth which bears no historical fact is taken as true in the middle east and so you have 9/11. Arab armies that came up short against Israel snuggle up close to the idea that but for active military intervention of the US they would have defeated Israel.
Wikipedia has the following entry in it's posting of the events of the 1967 War: "According to Israeli historian Elie Podeh: "All post-1967 [Egyptian] history textbooks repeated the claim that Israel launched the war with the support of Britain and the United States. The narrative also established a direct link between the 1967 war and former imperialist attempts to control the Arab world, thus portraying Israel as an imperialist stooge. The repetition of this fabricated story, with only minor variations, in all history school textbooks means that all Egyptian schoolchildren have been exposed to, and indoctrinated with, the collusion story." The following example comes from the textbook Abdallah Ahmad Hamid al-Qusi, Al-Wisam fi at-Ta'rikh:[191]"
In mid-March, 2010, American General David Petraeus gave over a white paper to the Senate Armed Services Committee that stated the following about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and the following passages were quoted this way in Al-Ahram Weekly for March, 25-31, 2010: "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strengths and depths of US partnerships with governments and peoples... and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, Al-Queda and other militant groups exploit the anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence through the Arab world through its clients, Lebanon's Hizbullah and Hamas."
It is significant that Petraeus used the word "perception" in regard to how the middle east views the American-Israeli relationship, perhaps implying that the middle eastern view is less than reality driven. Reality or not, there is no question that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs cause anti-Western sentiment out of all proportion to that conflict's true importance. It is a regional issue but one that has indirectly caused death far outside the middle east. The reality is that muslims favor muslims and not dispassionate history and that is not going to change anytime soon.
Many media around the world I read at the time saw Petraeus' message as significant. There is a definite sense that the United States views the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict as jeopardizing Americans in a variety of ways because of the ill will engendered towards the US by Islam. The issue is one of whether the United States will give in to a perception of what it does as opposed to what it actually does. My own opinion is that it is not what is happening in Israel that is the problem but the distorted and self serving view in the middle east of what is happening in Israel that endangers Western lives. Some see no difference in this and to others, such as myself, it is a crucial difference. One is caving in to another's fantasy view of the world and America's politically correct sense of guilt as opposed to a real situation that needs to be addressed in terms of a nation's guilt in interfering in the middle east.
If America had a history in the middle east in any way similar to it's history in Vietnam that would be a different thing. The problem is that Islam's impaired judgment is to the point where muslims in the middle east imagine that America does have a track record in the middle east similar to Vietnam. In what passes for intellectualism in the middle east facts have little to do with anything. The West in general is thought of as oppressors of the muslims world and some among those muslims are more than happy that the West get a taste of the violence that Islam perceives itself as experiencing at the hands of the West. In it's own way even the American media contributes to the problem. The journalistically adrift CNN stated categorically in a piece on TV in April, 2010 broadcast in Egypt that Israel's security depended on the United States when that is not at all the truth.
The problem is that with the advent of the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan the muslims now have that real violence but only in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy based on their own hatred of the West and not the other way around. For the easily confused the question becomes, which came first, the chicken or the egg? The radicalized in Islam love to confuse history in their favor and there is no sign among those in the middle east who dislike the West that they feel any responsibility for Iraq or Afghanistan. To them 9/11 was a welcome act of vengeance meant to wake up America to the "reality" of what is happening in the middle east, America's chickens coming home to roost. Yet there is no seeming awareness or guilt in Islam that those chickens have flown all the way to Iraq and Afghanistan. In the reverse logic and madness that is anti-Western Islamic rhetoric, Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of why 9/11 happened in the first place and so all that has come to roost is middle eastern "doublethink". With all the nonsense about weapons of mass destruction, there seems to have been little awareness in the middle east that the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were simply against those countries whose heads of government were the most vocal in their anti-American rhetoric. Bereft of a military target after 9/11, American leadership fell back on the idea that words indeed do kill and that, like Pearl Harbor, simple vengeance was not thought of as being above an extension of national and political will.
In an article by a Magali Rheault about a Feb, 2008 event about Muslim-West perceptions at the Center For National Policy in Washington, D.C., Ms. Magali wrote the following: "Drawing from Gallup's breadth of public opinion data, Ms. Mogahed sketched the profiles of the two groups, at times shattering stereotypes of what terrorist sympathizers look like. First, both groups share several values. Radicals and moderates say religion is an important part of their lives. Secondly, they also use the same attributes to describe what they admire most about the West -- namely, technology, rule of law, individual responsibility, and fairness of political systems. But perhaps most importantly, both the moderate and high-conflict groups have a deep sense of being treated as inferiors and being humiliated by the West. In fact, what they resent most is the West's "disrespect for Islam." "
I think this sense of humiliation by muslims at the hands of the West goes to the heart of what helped cause 9/11. Whether that humiliation is justified is another matter. Most importantly, the quote mentioning the West's "disrespect for Islam" is something I find disturbing and problematic and also a motivation for 9/11. Although it's quite nice for cultures to respect one another the way that idea of respect is couched within the middle east with regard to the West makes it sound like a job or an obligation on the part of the West. The disturbing part is that there is never a sense that Islam itself feels any sense of reciprocity in this matter of cultural respect. Does Islam respect Christianity? The truth of the matter is that I don't care and I doubt if many Americans do. For me this difference speaks to the sense of arrogance Islam carries about itself and wraps itself in, as if it's all about Islam, almost an addiction to parochialism. For a culture and religion that thinks so much of respect and cultural understanding there is little sense of either when it comes to those perceptions flowing from Islam towards the West so why should it flow back to them? Like it or not, cultural respect is often based on accomplishment and competence and on a world stage there is little of that from the middle east and Islam has not proved to be a religion that is much admired by others for the very reason of Islam's own apparent disregard for other religions; wanting respect and deserving respect are 2 different things. A culture that thinks so much of respect and is apparently so easily humiliated reveals a lot about that culture's world view and, if I may say so, also reveals a rather childish insistence on being treated like an adult while refusing to act like one.
Say what you want about Israel and the West trying to demonize Islam, Islam itself and the middle east's penchant for rhetoric which circles the wagons around itself and whose opinions are virtually always "us" against "them" rather than a consideration of the intellectual value of an argument is not a quality that is much admired in the West. I think it's fair to say this much about the middle east and Islam: for a region that has no global significance other than oil and a religion that most people don't really care about one way or another, those 2 elements are causing a lion's share of trouble on the world stage. Islam's and the middle east's perception that it is unfairly thought of negatively is not true; the middle east and Islam are rightly, in my opinion, thought of in the West as trouble makers and it's hard to argue otherwise. The entire continent of South America causes no trouble for anyone outside that region and so is rightly generally thought by the rest of the world as a culture of Latinos and Catholics who are not trouble makers. If Islam and the middle east could sit back and dispassionately compare themselves to the rest of the world I think they would see themselves as much of the world see them, as a loud and hubris ridden culture that people are truely sick of hearing about.
The first problem with giving into Islam's self-serving perceptions is that Israeli's detractors in the middle east see Israel as not only oppressing the Palestinian Arabs but as a colonialist, imperialist power that has larger designs on the middle east which is not the case. The 2nd problem is that Islam sees Israel as not able to oppress either the Palestinian Arabs or further it's nefarious designs to encroach into the middle east without the US. This is not the case either. The US supports Israel but has not been the deciding factor in either it's creation or success through to 1973 which is when the current status quo developed. In short, in order to appease Islam the US would have to stop doing something it has never done and is not doing, at least not on the level of which it is accused. The 3rd problem is Iraq and Afghanistan.
The important word is indeed perception. Will the US appease Islam because of Islam's inane perception of what the US has done and is doing as far as enabling Israel to oppress the Palestinian Arabs and set it's sights on other land in the middle east? One may as well pacify them by passing a U.N. resolution that Santa Claus is not real. Not likely that the US will or should since it is not the responsibility of America to excuse Islam for being overly paranoid about Israeli designs or vindicate Islam's shame at being humiliated by Israeli armies by admitting to being the critical difference between Israel's military successes. Israel has done just fine on it's own and this is something that Islam will simply not accept for the simple reason that it is too humiliating to accept. In the eyes of the middle east it must have been the powerful US that caused Islam's failure against Israel. America made good Israeli material losses during the 1973 war with Egypt but so too did the Soviet Union for Egypt and so the effect is canceled out and there is no evidence that this act was critical. In fact the US may have been critical in saving Damascus and Cairo since Israel possessed nuclear weapons at the time and making Israel safe made Cairo and Damascus safe. Also, the US may have saved the surrounded Egyptian 3rd Army by pressuring Israel to stand down at the end of that 1973 conflict.
Whether reality or lack of it will motivate either the US or Israel solve the Palestinian problem is problematic. The West is not big on giving in to delusional behavior just to attain peace on the part of cultures which can sentence a TV personality to death for sorcery or hold a woman responsible for her own rape or which generally look at themselves through rose colored glasses. If a country's history books and view of itself are impossibly slanted why is that an American problem? To give in would leave the West open to a whole host of future problems. By that I mean that a best case solution for the Palestinian Arabs in the eyes of the middle east may not really solve a problem that is caused more by Islamic medieval attitudes, jealously and arrogance, but more than anything a total inability to apply the concept of fair play to culture's outside their region or their own history for that matter; in short, a Palestinian state may solve nothing in terms of Islamic fundamentalist hatred of the West. After all, they now have the self-fulfilled prophecies of Afghanistan and Iraq to misrepresent. Already, those 2 conflicts are portrayed in the middle east with less and less reference to 9/11. In any event, threatening death to an American in Nebraska because of Israeli settlement policies in Jerusalem or the West Bank is not likely to make the US government lie down.
Acts of violence by terrorists will move neither the United States or Israel to stop doing something they don't actually do, namely subjugate and humiliate Arabs across the middle east. Petraeus mention of a muslim "perception of US favoritism for Israel" is a crucial part of the myth that terrorists hold in their minds regarding the US because Islamic detractors of the West would perhaps characterize that "favoritism" as an unholy partnership to oppress and subjugate Islam in the middle east with the US holding the Israeli reins. Even in the Western media it is generally regarded that the United States has a great deal of influence over Israel and could force Israel to back off in it's policies towards Palestinian Arabs if it wanted to. But how can the US influence Israel in regard to it's larger designs on hegemony over Islam if those are plans that Israel does not have?
This portrayal of Israeli and US intentions towards the larger middle east is a myth as is the nature of the Israeli-US partnership. In my opinion the United States influence over Israel is exaggerated by Islam for the simple reason that so doing assuages the shame that muslims feel over losing to an opponent they had every reason to have success against. The success of Israel over the decades has occurred without any crucial material support from the US, notwithstanding claims to the contrary. The US has no real power to make Israel do anything because the US was mostly a cheerleader during the critical events between 1947 and 1973 and in fact opposed Israel and supported Egypt during the Suez Crisis. All sides in Israel's wars have had weapons sold to them and there is no reason to single out the US for doing so to Israel without criticizing Egypt for receiving Soviet arms. The problem with my arguments is that they include common sense and there is little of that when it comes to how the middle east views Israel. The United States has never made the crucial difference in a single event that has occurred in the former Palestine and fomenting that myth as being true will encourage more terrorist attacks in the West and in turn will kill many more in the middle east for such is the nature of revenge of the strong against the weak. Disproportionate force is not something Israel considers immoral but is an axiom they live by and so it has proved in Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
Even if the US is Israel's closest ally Israel is not going to allow the US to dictate policy in a situation where the past survival of Israel itself has been at stake and where Israel has arrived at it's more secure position for the last 3 decades by their own sacrifice. Close ally or no, no country has had to walk in the shoes of the Jews in the former territory of Palestine since the end of the Holocaust in 1945 and I think it is difficult to overestimate how much this factors in to an Israeli determination to hold on to what they feel is theirs; there are no rockets landing in Kansas. Israel is going to hold themselves as the sole deciders when it comes to what their policies will be towards the Palestinian Arabs. Just because of current Israeli predominance in their struggle against Palestinian Arabs and their muslim neighbors it doesn't mean that Israel is going to simply forget the history of that struggle and how they arrived at their predominance. One thing is for sure, Israeli predominance did not arrive by way of a one single military ally nor from UN declarations or the decisions of international courts. Alone Israel fought and won and alone they will make their decisions. To me it is crucial to understand this not only to understand what little influence other countries have over Israeli internal policies but also to an understanding of why Israel will jealously guard it's prerogatives as a sovereign nation when it comes to the Palestinian Arabs. One should remember during the American Civil War the hostility with which the Northern Federal Government of the United States treated any idea of a European country either involving itself directly in that war or trying to take advantage of American distractions to meddle in the Western Hemisphere.
When it comes to all this hateful rhetoric emanating from the middle east and directed at the West those who encourage it little realize that they are playing with matches and where it all could eventually lead. As things stand now in 2010, for me, it is only a matter of time before a terrorist succeeds in detonating a dirty nuclear bomb in the West, probably in the United States; not if, but when. The summit hosted by President Obama in April, 2010 about keeping nuclear materials out of the hand of terrorists speaks to this conclusion among other Americans. Considering the horror that has enveloped Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of 9/11, one can only shudder to think of the reaction of the United States in the event of a radioactive device exploding in a population center. One can easily imagine a furious American populace howling for blood and saying, enough is enough. I can imagine Tehran, Damascus and Mecca itself being given 72 hours notice to evacuate and the same 1,000 year nuclear lesson that was visited on the Japanese being given over to the middle east. Groups like Al-Queda must ask themselves what their end game is or whether they are simply suicidal maniacs with no real political agenda who risk laying the middle east to waste.
In this sense the hateful rhetoric coming out of the middle east and directed squarely against the United States comprise arguments that muslims should be fearful of winning. I am not worried about losing a moral argument concerning the track record of the US in the middle east but muslims should be worried about winning those arguments if it is true that words kill and killed on 9/11; just look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Those 2 examples could be considered light punishment if Al-Queda gets its hands on nuclear material. Although middle eastern complaints about American aggression towards and humiliation of muslims is a fantasy, the idea of groups like Al-Queda quite literally dooming Islam is no fantasy if Mecca can be considered the heart of Islam. Instead of venting their rhetorical spleen on the West, writers in the middle east should figure out ways to rein in their own hate speech as well as their fundamentalist "brothers".
And to think that this all could happen just because middle eastern muslims have fallen in love with the idea that the so-called and self-inflicted degradation of the Palestinian Arabs absolutely could not have happened without the help of the United States. Making the issue of what has happened to a small and relatively globally unimportant population of people into a cause célèbre throughout the muslim world may yet prove to have been a horrible, horrible mistake on the part of Islam. While childish notions of terrorists bleeding America economically dry are cleverly bandied about in the middle east it is muslims who are doing the bleeding and also playing with fire and that fire burns just like Dresden and Hiroshima; lessons entirely lost on the "intelligentsia" of the muslim middle east. It is painfully obvious that middle eastern writers who concoct hate speech against the West have not connected the dots between their pompous, deluded and self-righteous rhetoric, the dead at the World Trade Center and the fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together with the suicidal fanaticism evident in certain quarters of Islam these may be the most important symbolic foreshadowing looming like a mushroom cloud over the middle east's fantastic penchant for self-fulfilling prophecy. For every American killed at Pearl Harbor how many Japanese died - 1,500, 2,000? For every Israeli killed in a terrorist attack how many Palestinian Arabs die - 5, 10, 20? For every person killed on 9/11 how many muslims have died in Iraq and Afghanistan - 50, 100? If 100,000 Americans die in the wake of a dirty nuclear bomb attack what will be the butcher's bill in the middle east - 10 million? The people in the middle east who are so fond of hate speech and punishing America just don't get the fact that they are punishing themselves.
In light of the terrorist acts coming out of the middle east one could question who is bleeding who dry. The West may itself be purposefully putting off developing oil alternatives in order to bleed the middle east of its oil. So would the day be that much closer when, bereft of it's oil dollars which help fund terrorism and anti-Western rhetoric, the middle east will be transformed into an irrelevant backwater on the world stage, its overweening arrogance and pride intruded upon by reality itself.
From the distance of the United States one thing is painfully evident: muslims in the middle east support the cause of the Palestinian Arabs because they are muslims and for no other reason. The right and wrong of it have nothing to do with reality in a region that can reasonably be considered to be rife with cultural bigotry which puts a muslim-friendly spin on every event, past and present. If the Palestinian Arabs were Christians no one in the middle east would care. It is not about justice per se but justice for muslims and this type of cultural bias doesn't fly in the US. This is the principle reason why the vast majority of Americans scoffed at the idea that 9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost. For Americans the so-called punishment of 9/11 was for an American crime that never happened other than in the delusional fantasy that is the culture of the middle east.
With the exception of the permanently offended like Ward Churchill and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, few Americans gave credence to any credible reason for Islamic outrage against the United States. Also, Americans have long memories when it comes to who sided with the Soviet Union in the middle east and who did not during the Cold War. It is unlikely that the United States is going to give over it's relationship with Israel for people who represent Islamic cultures that Americans consider to live in a world of historical fantasy and who also seem to be permanently and disproportionally offended. In particular, the comments about the United States by political leaders in Iran are so pointedly ridiculous that they seem as if coming from people who are mentally challenged; as I write elsewhere, it's hard to tell if they are incredibly savvy at disinformation or incredible idiots encouraged by living in the kingdom of the blind. The perception among many in the United States is that Arab national voices are louder than their track record of either achievement or contribution to any in the world that are not muslims; "Doctors Without Borders" is not the result of an Islamic mindset but a Christian and Western one. To many Americans, muslim national energies are generally wrong headed and waste time in tearing down and complaining rather than putting their heads down and trying to build a better world. Americans have a appreciation that those in the middle east were not only not unhappy with the events of 9/11 but privately and not so privately celebrated those events.
9/11 speaks to the dangerous dislocation the nature of muslim rhetoric can produce and how such a dislocation can affect an Islamic capacity to admit defeat and how that lack of capacity differs from the West. Fundamentalists in Islam speak in terms of being willing to absorb generations of punishment in order to achieve their aims. In the middle east, defeat can be turned into victory with a little playing fast and loose with historical facts and the blame for failure is effectively shifted away from Islam itself and shifted onto the West. If one doesn't understand this about the muslim psyche surrounding events in Israel then one has no chance of understanding the true nature of 9/11. In the muslim psyche "defeat" becomes victory, victory in a civil war becomes naked aggression, oppression and occupation, emigration becomes "invasion", a poorly armed Jewish Palestinian militia in 1947 described as "armed to the teeth" with no contextual mitigation; words and so eventually reality itself become subverted and planes fly into the World Trade Center because of Islam's failures and jealousies and emphatic inability to look at itself dispassionately. In this fantasy world it is the United States and it's proxy Israel who are seen as an aggressive colonial and Imperialist power, implacably hostile towards Islam and with greedy eyes set on the middle east as "vast and cool and unsympathetic" as Well's Martians, a United States that is the enabler, the true oppressor of the Palestinian Arabs and Islam itself. We are looking at two totally different cultures in terms of their ability to look at themselves and how words can be subverted, transformed and finally, kill. One need only to read editorials in the middle eastern media to see this depiction of Israel and the West over and over again. Self-criticism is alive and well in America and Israel but in Arab lands is not a cultural trait much in evidence.
What the Arab world has failed to realize and address is how it's "dislocation" from reality, it's lack of self-criticism, has negatively affected it's military performance although this is readily recognized in the West. Living in a never-never land is fine for disinformation and embellished rhetoric but is not conducive to successful military operations. One cannot build a business, economy, competive university or a whole host of social and infrastructural entities by having a favorable view of oneself. The Arab world does not benefit from it's distorted view of history, far from it. Lies repeated often enough become truth if not challenged. While Arab countries often criticize the West for it's failure to understand the historical perspective of the middle east, in fact it is the middle east itself that is intellectually isolated in terms of a balanced approach to it's own history. One need only look at what an unbalanced view the Arab view has of the medieval Crusades as opposed to it's own era of conquest. There is no comparison either in temporal terms or in terms of land conquered between the two yet it is the Crusades that Islam cites as a hateful ancestral memory. This is as good an example as any I've seen of the propensity of Islam towards hypocrisy in it's view of itself versus the West.
The information society is alive and well outside the middle east and not so healthy within the Arab world. The internet is making inroads into the middle eastern cultural scene and so young people are not so easily fooled as they used to be. An unhealthy informational society leads to a skewed view of history, skewed policy, skewed decisions and skewed actions. Political rhetoric from the middle east aimed at the West has a smug and preachy tone to it but in fact is naive and Arab "scholars" would do well to learn how to listen. In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king and this has ensorceled Islam. Muslims would do well to consider the origins of their superior yet eminently parochial attitudes in the light of a culture Islam seeks to oppose that ferreted out fractal geometry, the uncertainty principle and sent spacecraft to Mars. At the beginning of April, 2010 Saudi Arabia has sentenced a Lebanese TV personality to death for sorcery and it's been a long time since the Salem Witch Trials. Sophisticated Islamic fundamentalist's are not.
What I am mainly referring to in writing of this are the many articles published in the middle eastern press which are so historically inaccurate, so distorted, so biased, so full of hateful rhetoric, so hypocritical and generally so incompetent that they are simply hard to credit. That a sermonizing, look down your nose attitude is also so prevalent in these articles makes them all the more unbelievable to read. To say that they are overbearing and pompous in their self-righteous attitude is an understatement. To whatever extent such articles reflect examples of middle eastern political savvy or utterly self-absorbed ethnocentrism one can say that it is to that extent that Islam is it's own worst enemy. And to that same extent Islam is expressing rhetorical arguments it cannot afford to win. When one declares won and acts on an argument that is hopelessly prejudiced then one is a loser.
The amount of hostility directed towards Israel and the United States is phenomenal to behold in the Islamic press. And the re-ordering of historical events and their context and loose but constant usage of such words as "expansionist", "colonialist" and "imperialism" no less wondrous. Middle Eastern newspaper articles about Israel and the United States have a clear resemblance to Pravda in the 1960's. The gulf between what passed for truth in the US press and the Soviet Union during the height of the cold war is every bit as great in the case of the middle east. In 2010 journalist Galal Nassar has written that Israel and United States are behind the Somali pirates hijacking and ransoming oil tankers. Mr. Nassar's idea is that the United States and Israel benefit in the form of an excuse to expand their presence at the crucial constriction of the Bab al Mandab Strait at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden. As in so many such arguments, why any country as agressive and powerful as the US and Israel would actually need an excuse for its navy to cruise international waters is not explained. I would like to know Mr. Nassar's idea about the Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident - a Zionist plot?
The world of "doublethink" that George Orwell depicted in "1984" is hale and hearty in the middle eastern press. The blind, stumbling and naive giant that is the middle eastern stereotype of the United States is a more accurate description of Islamic propaganda than the US. In the United States there are voices of dissent that come down on every side of the question of the Palestinian Arabs but in the middle east there is no dissenting voice. If any exist, they certainly would not be allowed to speak in the middle eastern press in any manner that would even remotely be evenhanded when it comes to Israel. Some Americans are critical of Israel the idea that Israel is wrong 100% of the time and Islam right 100% of the time is too stupid to be countenanced. In the Islamic press every move a Jew has ever made in the former Palestine has been the wrong move and every move a Palestinian Arab has made the right one. Why even write such endless trash if one is simply singing to the choir? As an American accustomed to a bickering press with a large variety of views I have to admit that I just don't understand the dial tone emanating from the middle east that calls itself journalism or pretends to any type of dispassionate historical viewpoint.
Although the middle eastern press pillories the US for it's unwillingness to face it's own past, in the US there is in fact a great deal of history, press and general knowledge of the mistakes of slavery, the Vietnam War, the Tuskeegee Experiment, the Trail of Tears and everything else under the sun. Their are no voices in the middle eastern press that speak of such things in Islam's past. No sense of it's own past of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, naked and aggressive war, cultural supremacy and bigotry - nothing. When it comes to colonialism Islam itself is as successful a practitioner of the act of any culture in history - when Islam came it came to stay and colonize and in this was more successful than it's closest rival in history the British Empire, especially in terms of longevity. In terms of longevity only the Roman-Byzantine Empire could compete with imperial Islam unless one makes a clear distinction between dynaties such as the Fatimid and Abbasid for example.
Entire swaths of the world have been recent and not so recent victims of colonialism and imperialism and most of those cultures have emotionally and intellectually moved on and live in the present. The notable exception to this is the middle east from which issues a constant cacophony of cries and complaints about colonialism and imperialism. To me this is a direct reflection of to what extent those middle eastern cultures live in the worst of the past, keep it alive, and why old hatreds die so hard. Whether as an individual or as a culture, for one's body to live in the 21st century and one's mind to live in some bitter past that is constantly re-lived is a recipe for failure and even disaster.
The Arab penchant for a world view so biased in favor of itself and lacking in the ability to self-criticize is 2nd only in it's unremitting hostility towards Israel. This is why the Palestinian Arabs currently find themselves ghosts in their own land; Israel simply isn't buying into any of the nonsense in the middle eastern press. In fact, anti-Israeli rhetoric only convinces Israel that, in Islam, they are up against a foe that is intractable and cannot be reasoned with. If words kill than they can do an unlimited host of other harmful things when those words subvert and circumvent common sense. When words themselves are subverted and circumvented so too is reality itself. In the middle eastern media, ineffectual rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel become non-violence in a sense and the intent of those attacks relegated to a twilight zone. On the other hand a successful Israeli version of those same rocket attacks becomes "disproportionate". There is little doubt that the people who fired the rockets from Gaza into Israel wished they would have killed an Israeli in every instance but because they weren't able to the intent is mitigated and relegated into some Orwellian version of reality and it's inherent immorality downplayed. As I've emphasised, in the middle east, success itself becomes immoral and failure moral because this is what those cultures have come to relate to - failure. This speaks to the lack of self-esteem of Arab cultures since they are so willing to view themselves as moral through failure, the eternal underdog. The moral weight attached to the rocket attacks from Gaza should carry equal weight to the Israeli invasion of Gaza itself but this is overwhelmingly not the case; in the middle east Israel's invasion of Gaza is reduced to Israel killing children. Subversion happens when 2,000-3,000 rockets shot into Israel from Gaza are ignored in the middle eastern press and Israel's Dec., 2008 invasion of Gaza is portrayed simply as Israeli brutality or a war crime. Shooting rockets at civilians isn't a war crime because they're inaccurate? In the middle eastern press it is entirely normal to see the Gaza invasion by Israel referred to simply as "mass killings" with no context of rocket attacks ever even mentioned. If few Israeli's were killed it wasn't for lack of trying by Gazans so citing the lack of Israeli casualties is a form of lying. In the case of the Palestinian Arabs it is time to stop enraging a people who are effectively their masters. In so provoking Israel groups like Hamas are serving up Palestinian lives so Israel can be viewed as a brutal aggressor. This works to a certain extent in the Western press but the Western press can't free the Palestinian's from their plight or profoundly affect Israeli policy. For Hamas to trade Palestinian lives in order to win a public relations battle by provoking an Israeli invasion of Gaza accomplishes nothing. Palestinian Arabs may indeed have won the public relations battle with Israel over Gaza but at what cost? In the end nothing was changed but the depth of misery in Gaza which was increased many times over.
The penchant for people to associate and confuse failure with morality and success with immorality is not a middle eastern phenomena exclusively. It is alive and well in the West though not as profound and for different reasons. Watch Hollywood film's that routinely depict wealthy bankers as naturally corrupt and poor people much less so. On a larger stage one need only watch a day of CNN to see how the West is apologetic and even guilty about it's own success and gracious in the exact opposite manner in regard to 3rd world countries. Those less fortunate countries are routinely depicted as more spiritual and innocent than is the West in politically correct code for ethical and moral.
Consistent with this depiction is the more specific middle eastern application of this idea to violence, the idea being that having an army that fails is morally the same as not using an army. When it comes to Arab violence directed at Israel and Israel's reactions, murder, attempted murder and self-defense are concepts rhetorically juggled in the air in the middle eastern zeitgeist to fall wherever they most benefit Islam and most discomfit Israel. This is the variable yardstick that Palestinian Arabs and their Arab neighbors use that allow those Palestinians to be shown to be innocently oppressed rather than defeated but violently resisting; in the middle eastern press, a meter is not a meter without being carefully considered in the light of "Zionism". Adopting such a general world view in the West in regard to the technologically disadvantaged, how else can one explain the West's double standard that the hegemonic cultural sovereignty of 3rd World nations is sacrosanct no matter how culturally bigoted, such as pre-Israel Palestine, but that Western Europe, America and Australia, rather than having their own cultures, are nothing more than multicultural airport's at the service of one and all in the 3rd world? If the average American reacted to immigration the way the Palestinian Arabs did to the Jewish influx in Mandatory Palestine they would be pilloried.
It is time for the Palestinian Arabs to consider the better part of valor or risk remaining nationless vagabonds living at the whim of people they despise.
When it comes to the middle eastern press, consider where the example below can lead and how it can help or enlighten a single person in the middle east.
An online article for Cairo's Al-Ahram, June, 2008 issue by Ayman Al-Emir begins:
"Empire's last hurrah
Stupidity and irresponsibility exploded the American empire from within", writes Ayman El-Amir.
The article begins: " Of all the empires in history, the United States will go down as one of the most aggressive and least inspiring. After nearly 160 years of warfare and imperial conquest, US policy, and the war machine it marshaled, has left nothing in its tracks but death and destruction, with no lasting cultural value."
One could easily believe that Mr. El-Amir is in fact talking about the medieval and late medieval empires of Islam itself. Apparently all the technological, artistic and medical achievements of the West in the last 100 years merit the phrase, "no lasting cultural value", notwithstanding the fact these achievements are used every day in the middle east, in great profusion and to great effect.
Firstly, in terms of pure naked aggression the United States cannot hold a candle to the aggressive manner nor centuries long time frame in which Islamic armies descended on countries all around the Mediterranean Basin and beyond so it is impossible to recognize Mr. El-Amir's history. Islamic armies terrorized and conquered peoples all around them for 6 times as many centuries than the United States has existed as a nation.
In terms of lasting cultural value, the culture of the United States and what it has produced in it's short history has dominated the world in a vast array of areas unprecedented in history and these achievements will redound through the centuries as building blocks of the entire future history of the world. How one can make out the truth to be otherwise requires a great deal of purposeful blindness, jealousy and bias, with jealousy perhaps the key word here. I'd like to see Mr. El-Amir live without his cell phone, laptop, car, stereo, television and plethora of other things in his daily life that make him an American but without American values or ingenuity and that is his hypocritical failing and perhaps the nexus of what lit the fuse that burns so brightly when it comes to Arab views of the West.
Perhaps these very things serve only as daily reminders of failure to Mr. El-Amir and many of his fellow Arabs which engender nothing but jealously. For me it this daily reminder of simultaneously living with and despising Western material ephemera which has created the jealousy of the West among anti-Americans throughout the middle east; these material objects are like an addiction that only serve to remind Islam of it's own weakness and lack of contribution and achievement in these areas. In speaking of the middle east one is not speaking of a "laid back" and pragmatic culture which can readily absorb such feelings but an overly proud and even arrogant culture that is easily stung. Some cultures pragmatically accept their true status in the world when it comes to the matter of cultural and technological achievement and some take such things as if they were thrown in their face. In this sense there is a profound difference between knowing a thing and creating that thing and this must eat away at the ego of men like Mr. El-Amir. After all, when he looks up at the moon in the night sky a man like Mr. El-Amir must see an American moon.
In writing of an American "Empire" and it's track record of "imperial conquest", Mr. El-Amir provides a nearly perfect example of what constitutes blind stupidity. It's hard to imagine how one can pack so much misdirection, distortion, bias and ignorance of history into such a small paragraph as Mr. El-Amir's. One might say it takes a lot of practice and this paragraph may qualify as the shortest science fiction novel ever written, no disrespect to Forest J. Ackerman. One would think America were Nazi Germany and in fact, many in the middle east do; certainly Israel is often painted in such a way. In Mr. El-Amir's world view, Pearl Harbor must have been an act of American imperial aggression. Articles like this and others I quote from in this essay are so bigoted, so willing to brutally twist history and metaphors to support the hatred of America that was present before the articles were even written that it almost rises to the level of hate speech.
Echoing Mr. El-Amir, descriptions of Israel as an "aggressive, racist and expansionist state" are par for the course in middle eastern media, this last quote coming again from the intellectually debauched Ayman Al-Amir in Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly for March, 18-24, 2010 in an article titled "Washington's Worst Ally". So, by proxy, it is America in some muslim eyes that supports Israel and Palestinian oppression and in order to support that view an entire twisted version of historical events in Palestine/Israel and America's place in those events has emerged as gospel in the middle east and in this mad history the word "conspiracy" looms as large as Mr. El-Amir's American moon. If the history of the Palestinian/Jewish conflict in the last 6 decades is viewed only from the muslim side that history becomes virtually unrecognizable. No Palestinian/Jewish civil war occurred but only the advent of a practically fully formed Zionist state, "armed to the teeth" (Mr. Al-Amir, same article) that came, saw and conquered. And in the muslim scenario surrounding events that created Israel, the Palestinian Arabs, Jordan, Syria and Egypt come off as innocent bystanders defensively reacting to Western Imperialism and colonialism spearheaded by Israel which in muslim minds somehow describes the advent of the state of Israel as proxy of the West with it's evil and ambitious plans to eventually subjugate the entire middle east.
In this muslim version of history it is rarely mentioned how many muslim lives the United States saved in the former Yugoslavia, the support the US gave Egypt against Israel, France and England during the Suez Crisis or for an Afghanistan beleaguered by Russian occupation, no admission of how Russia facilitated more material support to Israel in 1948 than did the US. To do so would be a fly in the ointment to Islam's fraudulent claims of American hostility towards Islam.
Below the Al-Amir article on the same page Sam Bahour describes the Palestinian Arabs under a "violent military occupation" as if the violence between Jews and Arabs has been all on one side since 1947 and so it is always what is left out that is as big a distortion as the twisted versions of history prevalent in Egyptian and middle eastern media when they discuss Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Bahour mentions the "1967 Israeli occupation", meaning the West Bank, without any reference to how that "occupation" came about and so only telling half the story and that type of one-sided description is endemic in the middle east when it comes to Israel and the West in general.
Bahour writes about "the siege on Gaza, Jewish-only settlements, the separation barrier built on Palestinian lands, draconian restrictions on Palestinian movement and access...", as if such events occurred in an utter vacuum with no reference whatsoever to how such policies came about in the first place. However one views such events they need to be put into context to be judged and to do otherwise not only amounts to propaganda but throws doubts onto how much the writers themselves believe in the justice of their cause if they feel constrained to leave out important facts for fear of the truth weakening their position. Unfortunately this type of self-aggrandizing propaganda is rampant within Islam.
It is in such an atmosphere of rhetorical and historical self-delusional fantasy that the 9/11 hijackers enacted their own brand of justice, justice whose motivations are hopelessly skewed by a partisan re-telling of the nature of the relationship between Islam and the West that amounts to nothing more than a muslim fantasy enacted to salve muslim pride and obscure xenophobia, failure,, cultural and religious bigotry, racism and incompetence. As an example of the attitude of another culture, it is not unfair to say that America caused much more harm to the Vietnamese as it ever did in the middle east yet the middle eastern muslims cry 100 times as much as the Vietnamese who long ago moved on with their lives.
Once again Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly for March, 18-24, 2010 offers further evidence of it's anti-Israeli bias by offering up a wonderfully confused anti-Semitic article that ironically argues against it's own anti-Semitism. My own thoughts after reading the article were that I didn't know if the author is anti-Semitic or not but he certainly doesn't like Jews.
The author in question is Jeff Gates and the essay appropriately titled, "Anti-Semitism". As an example of Mr. Gates writing and debating skills you may ponder this sentence: "Is it anti-Semitic to report that the so-called 'mastermind' behind 9/11 cited as his motive the US-Israeli relationship?" In one brief sentence Mr. Gates debates and contradicts himself by at once implying that a man in fact was not the mastermind of 9/11 but then citing the importance of his motives behind the hijacking he was not the mastermind of. The entire article is full of such wonderfully confused rhetoric and is written on the skill and reasoning level of a 12 year old and is anti-Jewish to the hilt while emphatically and may I say unsuccessfully arguing otherwise.
Elsewhere in this essay Mr. Gates claims the following: "...I included the noun 'Jew' in a Google search. I received in return an automated response from the ADL implying that I was an anti-Semite. Why? More importantly, how did a Google response appear in my e-mail inbox - automatically - from the ADL?"
The very day I read that quip by Mr. Gates I Googled the word "Jew" so that I too could receive such a response from the Anti-Defamation League in my inbox. Also that very day I contacted the ADL through their web-site asking if they could use this very essay I'm writing in some way. I am waiting in suspense for the ADL's response branding me possible Jew hater or Champion Of the Jews. The fact that Mr. Gates writes for the Huffington Post website speaks not only to the quality of the writings on that site but also to it's sometimes lunatic leanings; journalism it is not, agenda driven it is.
One can only wonder what the state of Palestinian Arabs in the former Palestine would be if they had seen sooner how hopeless it was to continue to violently resist after a conventional military solution had failed. To whatever extent the desperate act of 9/11 is an extension of Palestinian Arab reluctance to recognize the reality behind their lost fortunes then that same fate of the bootheel coming down even harder on Arabs in Israel has also happened to muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aircraft hijackings, terrorism and anti-Western rhetoric have proven no match for the American and Israeli armed forces. For every terrorist act anti-Western reprisals are so much worse and so in that context the oppression of muslim peoples by the West becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy based on bankrupt and hypocritical dogma and rhetoric; the more fundamentalist muslims succeed through violent terror the more muslims they kill, not only in the former Palestine but around the middle east.
One can only wonder what it is in the psyche of such peoples as the Palestinian Arabs and their ilk to continue to resist when hopelessly outgunned and so bring onto themselves only further misery. "Cutting your losses" does not seem to be a phrase much in fashion in Gaza and Israel among Palestinian Arabs. The wisdom or cultural viewpoint of men like Yassir Arafat as the one-time leader of the Palestinian Arabs contrasted with Robert E. Lee following the Confederate surrender in the American Civil War seem to be worlds apart. The Western view of living to fight another day has trouble understanding suicidal fanaticism; the Japanese aerial kamikaze attacks at the close of World War II were little understood by American military brass and even less admired. Many in the West view the current plight of the Palestinian Arabs, as bad as it is, to be largely self-inflicted, first by an unwillingness to pragmatically accept a de facto Jewish presence and future in Palestine, then a willingness to engage in civil war with those Jews and then yet again an unwillingness to realistically accept the loss of that civil war, cut their losses and move on. Instead for decades factions amongst the Palestinian Arabs have engaged in wrong headed actions that in the end have served only to ensure that the Palestinian Arabs will be ground even further under a boot. Futile violence against Israeli citizens has been accompanied by wildly fantastic slogans never delivered upon and yet the desire to kill Israelis continues unabated though severely minimized by Israel's policies and reprisals. The loser of a civil war must surrender or be held to account for it's own willingness to compromise its future. There are only 2 choices when one loses a civil war: surrender or fight on in the form of violent resistance by any means possible. In the past this violent resistance has included aircraft hijackings, assassinations, murder, kidnappings, bombings and rocket attacks - all committed by Palestinian Arab "freedom fighters".
Hard reality must be understood and accepted rather than any dream that what is fair and right in the aftermath of a civil war can be achieved; in losing a civil war the loser must take what it can and do nothing to ensure an even worse fate, a lesson lost on the Palestinian Arabs as is the apparent meaning of the word "lose". In this context it would be inaccurate to describe the general Northern political attitude towards the defeated southern Confederacy after the American Civil War as graceful but what actually happened could have been far worse. That "worse" scenario would have needed only the type of terrorist activity within the former Confederacy that has happened in Israel and the West Bank on the part of the Palestinian Arabs to have provided a similar scenario within the South; decades of oppression would surely have followed any violent Southern intransigence and bitterness on both sides would have been far worse in consequence. One can only imagine how the North would have reacted to post-Civil War rhetoric with attendant violence emanating from the South depicting the Northern forces as aggressive, marauding and expansionist armies without any reference to the civil war the Southern Confederacy all too willingly engaged in. Such a subversion and transformation of words and so the perception of history itself may have contaminated the next generation in the American South with who knows what violent results. For me this is an exact analogy to the muslim rhetoric that comments on Israel, the West and the Palestinian Arabs and with disastrous results. Furthermore, in light of what I've written above, is a population that has done so much to contribute to the prolongation of it's own "oppression" and "occupation" either truly oppressed or occupied when they themselves arguably hold the key to ending the strife? What can Israel do, give up what it gained in blood in a horrible civil war for survival when violent extortion, hatred and not peace is the only coin the Arabs have to offer Israel? This is not realism and Israel holds all the cards.
What I'm writing about here are concepts surrounding the idea of "unconditional surrender", a concept whose ramifications in time of war and it's aftermath are insufficiently understood and appreciated. At the time of World War II, the insistence on the part of the allies of the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan was carefully considered and calculated by F.D. Roosevelt for the effect it would have on the future military behaviour of those 2 Axis powers. Both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were fighting a war they had effectively lost at least a year before they actually surrendered. This made the continuation of the war considered to be a war crime by the Allies, above and beyond the already considerable war crimes Japan and Germany had committed. The reason that both Japan and Germany continued to fight is that they held out hope that if they made the price in Allied casualties sufficiently high that they could break the resolve of the Allies and win a negotiated peace, leaving the respective Axis regimes in place and their industrial capacity to wage war seriously diminished but intact. In this regard, Germany and Japan, thinking the "democracies" to be somewhat morally weak and decadent seriously underestimated the true nature of the resolve the Allies had. The United States had an especially serious bone to pick with Japan and so too the Russians with Germany. There was no way in the world that Japan or Germany ever had any chance of avoiding unconditional surrender to the Allies with it's attendant military occupation; in short, utter and total capitulation. Continuing to fight without hope of winning created crimes like the Allied fire bombing of Dresden in Germany and the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the Allies point of view, by prosecuting their advantage to the bitter end they not only meant to depose the regimes in Japan and Germany that waged aggressive war on their neighbors and so build new democratic nations but, most importantly to impose a 1,000 year lesson on those countries that would be burned into their cultural memory. The Allies were not going to wage a war unprecendented in its scope and savagery only to revisit the scene of the crime, so to speak, in another generation as proved to be the case with World War I.
In the aftermath of a scenario involving the military as well as perceptual unconditional surrender of a nation some countries and cultures are better equipped to deal with the reality of such a loss than others. The idea of accepting a military defeat was worse for Japan than for Germany because of the zeitgeist of shame present in Japan although it must be said that both Germany and Japan fought to the bitter, bitter end. The Allies however, were willing to go to the bitter end. The important thing when all was said and done was that both Germany and Japan psychologically accepted their defeat and, however reluctantly, were made to see, at the point of a gun as it were, that what they had done was wrong. I think the psychological aspect of Japan and Germany coming to terms with the reality of the fate that had enveloped them cannot be overestimated in factoring in how much it eventually allowed those countries to put their sordid past behind them and join the ranks of democratic nations. Unconditional surrender is one thing but to accept it in one's heart another. Both Germany and Japan continued to fight on when the reality of their impending strategic and tactical defeat was written in large letters, causing untold horror and death to be visited on their respective civilian populations. The difference between what happened to Germany and Japan and what has happened to the Palestinian Arabs is that once those 2 Axis countries did decide to capitulate it was over and, with the exception of some sporadic terrorist attacks in Germany, move on. Fairness and justice had nothing to do with the decision of Japan and Germany to move on into the future but pragmatism and cultural survival did. The Palestinian Arabs have never decided that "it's over".
Had Germany and Japan continued to fight a kind of a sustained campaign of guerilla warfare based on terror attacks with the moral support and connivence of the civilian population on the level of that which has occured among the Palestinian Arabs, those countries could conceivably be under military occupation to this very day. Had such a thing occurred Japan and Germany would certainly have incurred even worse and ongoing damage to their infrastructure, which was already virtually a wasteland in some areas, and untold further deaths among their civilian populations. The point of all this is that, for whatever reasons, the Palestinian Arabs have never psychologically accepted an unconditional surrender that perhaps might have allowed them to move on and have their own country generations ago. Speculation on the reasons for this might prove useful in ferreting out how to move the Palestinian Arabs along a path that will free them from several generations of a virtual and unending state of war. Thoughts of the past and it's fairness or lack of it must be put aside and pragmatism put in place, not an easy thing among the Palestinian Arab community but a quality they will have to learn to cultivate or simply put, continue to pay the price. It may well be that even after all these years the Palestinian Arabs simply cannot accept the idea of the former territory of Palestine being shared. Political infighting has certainly played a major role in the Palestinian Arabs failure to achieve nationhood. Palestinian writer Ramzy Baroud perhaps sums up the problem inherent in the current Palestinian Arabs plight by writing, "...you fight back in your weakest possible moment..."
For their part I'm not trying to suggest that the Israeli's have any ideas or philosophies about the concept of unconditional surrender but the Israeli's would certainly be easier for the Palestinian Arabs to negotiate with when it comes to the idea of a Palestinian state if resignation to the reality on the ground was shown by the Palestinian Arabs. The idea of freedom fighters, the right of resistance, etc., is just so much hot air. The fact is that the Palestinian Arabs lost a war and won't admit it to themselves or anyone else because they cannot reconcile the reality of what has befallen them with their cultural pride and religious imperatives; a similar situation caused Nagasaki and Hiroshima to be needlessly bombed and so in war, pride can be and is fatal. One can win all the moral arguments one wants to against Israel and it will not change and has not changed the situation on the ground one iota. In regard to the Palestinian Arabs having lost a war, the view they themselves and they supporters have about Israeli oppression is increasingly portrayed in terms that ignore the fact that a war ever took place at all. In World War II, Imperial Japan seriously underestimated the resolve of America and so too have the Palestinian Arabs in regard to Israel. Israeli resolve as of 2010 shows no signs of being shaken. In terms of violence on a grand scale, resolve is a concept that must be tempered with an accurate assessment of one's abilities or resolve simply degenerates into madness and murder.
It sounds crazy to say so but the Palestinian Arabs must put aside their hatred and learn to become friends with Israel. It can be done. The fighting between Americans and the Germans and particularly Japan was more bitter and murderous than anything that has occurred between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel, but within a few years after the end of World War II Japan and Germany had put aside past enmity and could be considered to view Americans in a friendly light. This can and must happen among the Palestinian Arabs for the simple reason that it is the only solution that will have a lasting effect. Even in the unlikely event that a Palestinian state is created with the current animosities in place, that new state will never be free of the threat of Israeli invasion and partial control of that new state's borders and air space if hatred among the Palestinian Arab's is allowed to continue and fester; a new Palestinian state must start on the right foot perceptually speaking or the West Bank will simply become a larger version of Gaza. The Palestinian Arabs must seize hold of themselves and acquit themselves as adults as befits a culture that aspires to nationhood. The Japanese and Germans didn't just sign accords of unconditional surrender at the end of World War II, they surrendered in their hearts as well, however sullenly, and to an amazing extent really. Perhaps one can say that something in the cultural natures of the Americans made it easier for the Japanese and Germans to accept defeat and even cultivate a grudging respect for those who had defeated them. If the Palestinian Arab's do not embrace this example, cultivate it and take it into their hearts they will continue to suffer. Easy or not, the Palestinian Arabs must find a way. Holding onto the idea of an Islamic Palestine gone 60 years, holding onto the idea of only accepting just settlements, holding onto the moral high ground, holding onto pride, fear of shame, revenge, U.N. resolutions, and most of all violence - all that has accomplished exactly nothing for Palestinian Arabs in the past and will continue to do so in the future - it must be set aside, permanently and whole heartedly. In the greater middle east, the attitude that so greatly despises Israel and all it stands for, anti-Semitism or not, must similarly be set aside.
In light of continued Arab hatred for Israel how can Israel unilaterally end the strife between them and the Palestinian Arabs? Like their Arab opponents Israel also holds a key to ending the strife between themselves and the Palestinian Arabs and by extension strife with the rest of the Arab world. The first problem to this scenario is asking what motivation Israel would have for giving up it's position of strength, a position that it has won through sacrifice and blood and at terrible risk. Another aspect to this question has some possible insight into Israeli attitudes in a quote from the above mentioned article by Sam Bahour. In it, Mr. Bahour quotes "Minister of Defense Major General Ehud Barak" as saying, "If, and as long as between Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic... If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a bi-national state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state." Can the Jews of Israel ever accept a truly democratic state that is not specifically Jewish? Is a state that is specifically Jewish or Islamic or Christian actually a democracy? General Barak implies as much. Conversely, will the new Palestinian state be less specifically less Islamic than Israel is Jewish? How many middle eastern polities can make the claim to be less Islamic than Israel is Jewish? And how many of those polities pillory Israel for what they themselves aspire to and maintain?
General Barak statement brings up an interesting and puzzling conundrum for Israel. If Israel were ever to make Palestinian Arabs who live within Israel full-fledged citizens in the true sense of the word then Israel would have to set aside it's idea of a specifically Jewish state. Israeli Jews would have to face the idea of living in full equality with Arabs who could conceivably one day wrest majority control from Jewish Israelis by democratic means. There is no sign whatsoever that Israeli's are willing to do this and so Arabs living in Israel must seemingly relegate themselves forever more to 2nd class status based either on Israeli law or minority numbers or emigrate to a hoped for Palestinian state, giving up their land and/or status. The problem is that Palestinian Arabs understandably seem unwilling to engage in either scenario but the lure of their own state may be the only chance they ever have.
So, Israel has the power to unilaterally create an Arab homeland centered on the West Bank. However, with Gaza as an example, however imperfect an example, what motive based on events in Gaza could the Israeli's possibly have to allow a hostile state to exist side by side with Israel? Gazans have been anything but thankful for the Israeli withdrawal from The Strip and so Israel has maintained a stranglehold of Gaza's borders, including it's sea and airspace. Egypt has in equal measure been put off by Gazan behavior and maintained the same status as has Israel in regard to it's own border with Gaza.
One can easily see that without a wholesale and convincing renunciation of violence towards Israel, the Palestinian Arabs have no independent state in their future. And with no sign of Israel willing to accept Palestinian Arabs as full and equal citizens, there is no future for Arabs within Israel either. There is simply no motivation for Israel to give up land or it's position of power without a strong guarantee of future peace which seems nowhere to be seen.
In light of Arab intransigence what other hard choice has Israel had but to decide to unilaterally move on and ethnically consolidate it's territories when any chance of a peaceful co-existence with Palestinian Arabs within or outside of Israel itself in the so-called "Occupied" or "Disputed Territories" seems a pipe dream? The amount of sheer hatred arrayed against Israel begets more hatred in return and a hardening of Israeli policies in regards to Jewish settlements and the ethnic dislocation of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Die hard groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas who encourage violent resistance by Palestinian Arabs make peace almost impossible. When met with violence Israel has shown that it will respond in kind on every occasion in addition to tightening the screws and preempting violence wherever and whenever it can. It is important to remember that Israel is surrounded by muslim countries "armed to the teeth" and implacably hostile to the very existence of Israel; niceties of international law versus survival itself seems an obvious choice. Those Islamic countries that surround Israel have been held at bay for 6 decades only by military force and no other consideration, certainly not law, and so Israel survives. The idea that international law would ever constrain those muslim countries from doing away with Israel were they militarily capable of doing so is ludicrous and so why should Israel have any great reliance on international courts which issue Western versions of fatwahs with no teeth.
To show how little Islamic viewpoints lack any ability at fairplay, consider the issue of Jerusalem and then consider the comment made in an article in Al-Ahram Weekly for April 15-21, 2010. The author, Almira Howeidy describes how Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey in 2010 used "strong language to denounce Israel's Judaisation of Jerusalem, insisting that the "fate of Istanbul is inseparable from Jerusalem's." Strange that Prime Minister Erdogan hasn't remembered the "Islamification" of the most famous architectural structure in Turkey, the Hagia Sophia, now a mosque but originally a Christian church, not to mention the entire city that was called Constantinople. I guess the fact that it happened in the 16th century means it doesn't count. Still, based on the Prime Minister's comment, apparent current Turkish largesse in these matters could easily reverse the process and allow the Hagia Sophia to be re-consecrated as a Greek Orthodox church.
How far does one go back in time before an act is no longer considered wrong or relevant: 43 years, 557 years? Evidently the convenient answer for Islam is: somewhere in between, or at least whatever number satisfies Islam's own vision of its infallibility when it comes to notions of cultural morality and supremacy. The Prime Minister Erdogan's further comment that the, "fate of Istanbul is inseparable from Jerusalem's", was an unintended bit of humor that at once condones what happened to Istanbul/Constantinople and apparently therefore, the "Judaisation" of Jerusalem. In the middle east, any bit of history that makes Islam look bad or precludes its criticisms of non-muslims is so invisible that it is quite literally forgotten. For the prime minister to unwittingly condone Israeli policies in Jerusalem is typical of muslim "scholarship" and any sense of Islam's own guilt for it's past of Imperialism or colonialism is similarly forgotten or retroactively endorsed. When a culture forgets or transforms its own past, pointing fingers at others becomes most problematic. The prime minister in this article is also quoted as referring to Jerusalem as "the apple of our eyes in our heritage". Is Prime Minister Erdogan referring to Turkey's military conquest of Jerusalem early in the 16th century which the Ottoman Empire held for 400 years until the British Mandate at the close of World War I? The prime minister would seem to be a stand up comedian of considerable power and his jokes written by the Islamic penchant for inadvertant historical hypocrisy by Islam's own "moral" and "guilt" ridden "hyper-awareness" of its own history. Perhaps I'm overreaching here but the notion is still an amusing one to me. I also don't understand why the "Islamification" of Jerusalem is any better than the "Judaisation" of that city or why either one is particularly necessary; this is a language I don't speak or understand and neither do Americans.
The Palestinian Arabs have a hard question to ask themselves in 2010 after so many decades of hurt on both sides but with the upper hand decidedly held by Israel and that question has to do with how Israel can benefit by helping Palestinian Arabs achieve some kind of state. Rather than thinking what they can get, the Palestinian Arabs must start to think in terms of what they can offer to Israel that will make the Jewish state come around. The Palestinian Arabs tried to deliver terror in hopes of wearing down the will of the Israeli people and that emphatically has not work. All terrorism has achieved in Israel is for the grip on the Palestinian Arabs to be tightened to the point where they cannot breathe. Palestinian Arabs must now go down another path, end the anti-Jewish and anti-Western rhetoric, realize that Israel is here to stay and deal with that fact rather than some pipe dream of hegemony. Palestinian Arabs must give over concessions in the form of a guarantee of future peace with Israel. Without such a guarantee why in the world would Israel even consider helping the Palestinians to achieve anything? Not only do the Palestinian Arabs have to consider what they can offer Israel to motivate Israel to loosen it's grip but they better start being creative about it rather than offering intransigence and blame and promises of further violence. Palestinian Arabs must learn the lesson that to commit violence against Israel is to commit violence against themselves.
Although muslim rhetoric emanating from the middle east regarding the Palestinian question is almost entirely one of blame against Israel the Palestinian's themselves as well as their allies must come to recognize that what has happened to Palestinian Arabs has been their own fault as much as anyone's. No one forced the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine to answer Jewish immigration with violence. One cannot mitigate that violence with the specter of a Jewish state that would succeed the British Mandate. In the end, the violence between Jew and Arab may have had as much to do with the creation of Israel as anything. Talk of Israeli depredations, apartheid, occupation, aggression, expansionism and oppression in a manner which specifically puts the entire onus onto Israel serves no purpose whatsoever other than to harden Israeli resolve and put off the day when Palestinian Arabs can walk in the sun. In fact, hardline muslim rhetoric by supporters of the Palestinian Arabs does more harm than it does good. Israel is well aware of the hatred with which they are contending in the middle east and the one sided and, from their point of view, eminently unfair nature of the accompanying rhetoric. Such rhetoric suggests and invites futher intransigence which in turn invites violent acts which in turn only provide Israel with motivation and an excuse to respond in kind and to further tighten their grip. What is left is only smug, feel good proclamations by Arab commentators about the essentially evil and aggressive nature of Israel and it's Western supporters and in the end absolutely nothing is achieved but Arab failure.
The purposeful and childish nature of the obfuscation and disinformation spread about by writers such as the examples I cite in Al-Ahram Weekly are maddening to read and the 2009-10 Russell Tribunal On Palestine, for example, only echoes such rhetoric in a manner that paints a picture of the fault laying entirely with Israel which is portrayed as an occupying and oppressive colonialist power. Certainly it is true that only Israel itself can physically halt or reverse policies hurtful to Palestinian Arabs but why should it do so in a climate where all blame is placed on them. Threatening yet toothless denunciations of Israeli violations of international law are not only worthless but harmful; what international law does the firing of rockets into Israel violate? Who in this world really expects Israel to accommodate international law in the face of such provocations? Academics is one thing and that is all proclamations of international law amounts to that ignores violent and terroristic provocations.
Israel will never acknowledge any international laws which fail to understand the reactive lockstep nature of actions Israel has taken to protect itself rather than simplistically and rather foolishly portraying those actions as unilateral naked aggression. Nevertheless the above mentioned Russell Tribunal was reported on in Al-Ahram Weekly in March, 2010 in exactly such a manner by the same Stephan Lendman whose expansive review on Pappe's book is quoted above. The truth such "tribunals" should recognize is that what they are looking at in Israel is a civil war which has lasted for 60 years; how can one be said to be oppressing an opponent that has not surrendered? Some Palestinian Arab communities have the quality of prisoner of war camps in a war that is not over. The current status quo and plight of the Palestinian Arabs is the result of an ever tightening of the screws by Israel in response to what has amounted to ever more futile military actions on the part of Palestinian Arabs and their supporters.
The fact that those military escapades on the part of the Palestinian Arabs within the West Bank and Israel itself have been reduced to almost nothing due to the manner of Israel's response to those terror attacks is no reason for Israel to be portrayed by it's detractors as aggressive or oppressive. Was it oppressive for the North to militarily react to the Southern attack on Fort Sumter at the onset of the American Civil War? Oppression is a concept neither here nor there in this context. What we have are merely 2 fools who've decided to follow a fool's path for such is the nature of war - 2 fools who are at such odds that they couldn't abide the idea of sharing a society. What we're really talking about here then is success versus a lack of success and to attach moral or ethical considerations to such a context is neither here nor there. In such a scenario, the more 2 sides have some kind of equality in a civil war, the less morality is attached to their respective actions but let one side gain the upper hand and suddenly the moral spotlight is shone on the winner; foolish. The American Civil War is an exception in this regard because the South's attachment to slavery put it on a moral collision course with history from the very onset and the same is true of Nazi Germany because of its murderous racial agenda. Aside from those examples of Genocide and slavery, most wars are seen as immoral because of the act of war itself and the acts within those wars which kill civilians.
Moral considerations can be appropriate in a case where one side in a civil war is an unwilling participant or where one side wholly capitulates and yet is even further oppressed but neither is the case in the former Palestine. So, in a civil war in which success has been achieved militarily but with a loser that refuses to admit defeat it is not the victor's "oppression" that is the issue but the refusal of the loser to allow the victor to entirely disengage from violence in a war they've already won and this is the case in the former Palestine. Disengagement in the form of renouncing violence on the part of Palestinian Arabs could then allow them to move on to a non-violent future, however uncertain, shameful or distasteful; shame will fade with the passing years and having one's land and the right to live on that land as a free person will help assuage such shame.
One can say that the Palestinian Arabs were willing players in the civil war with Palestinian Jews and that those Palestinian Arabs have never capitulated to the reality of their military defeat. This is the true nature of what is happening in Israel and whether it is 100 inaccurate rocket attacks into Israel or 1000 accurate rocket attacks attaches no moral or ethical nature to Israel's reaction and all the "impartial" tribunals in the world that don't recognize this amount to exactly nothing because survival has it's own laws. It is not "oppressive" to take measures to prevent a population from killing you. Let the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and Israel foreswear violence and cease to support Hamas and other such organizations and Israel can loosen it's grip and the Palestinian Arabs will at least have a chance to live better lives. I simply cannot imagine Israel allowing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state to exist on it's borders that would hold any promise of violence towards Israel. As long as the Palestinian Arabs support groups whose founding charters not only do not recognize Israel but call for it's destruction then Palestinian Arabs will be refugees on their own and neighboring lands.
Good hearts or no, there are many writers who accuse Israel of being an apartheird state. There is a huge difference between what was apartheid in South Africa and Israel's isolation and control of what it considers threatening populations of Palestinian Arabs, however wrong-headed; terrorism and ethnic hate do not bring out the best in people to say the least and the West Bank barrier is no more an "apartheid wall" then were the trenches of World War I. No matter how much one dislikes or disagrees with such actions and the motives behind them it is simply not apartheid and raising the specter of such as if such isolational tactics against the Palestinian Arabs are done purely out of a colonial, racist agenda are dishonest and helps no one. One could easily argue that the treatment of Palestinian Arabs in refugee camps in Lebanon are apartheid policies.
Here are some interesting comments from Wikipedia about the inappropriateness of the application of the term "apartheid" to the state of Israel which one can follow up on as there are many contrasting views as well:
"In an essay comparing their experience as black South Africans whose families fought against apartheid with the current situation in Israel, Rhoda Kadalie and Julia Bertelsmann wrote: "Israel is not an apartheid state ... Arab citizens of Israel can vote and serve in the Knesset; black South Africans could not vote until 1994. There are no laws in Israel that discriminate against Arab citizens or separate them from Jews. ... South Africa had a job reservation policy for white people; Israel has adopted pro-Arab affirmative action measures in some sectors. Israeli schools, universities and hospitals make no distinction between Jews and Arabs. An Arab citizen who brings a case before an Israeli court will have that case decided on the basis of merit, not ethnicity. This was never the case for blacks under apartheid."
"Benjamin Pogrund, author and member of the Israeli delegation to the United Nations World Conference against Racism, has argued that the petty apartheid which characterized apartheid-era South Africa does not exist within Israel: "The difference between the current Israeli situation and apartheid South Africa is emphasized at a very human level: Jewish and Arab babies are born in the same delivery room, with the same facilities, attended by the same doctors and nurses, with the mothers recovering in adjoining beds in a ward. Two years ago I had major surgery in a Jerusalem hospital: the surgeon was Jewish, the anaesthetist was Arab, the doctors and nurses who looked after me were Jews and Arabs. Jews and Arabs share meals in restaurants and travel on the same trains, buses and taxis, and visit each other’s homes. Could any of this possibly have happened under apartheid? Of course not."
"In response to increasing inequality between the Jewish and Arab populations, the Israeli government established a committee to consider, among other issues, policies of affirmative action for housing Arab citizens."
"According to Israel advocacy group Stand With Us, the city of Jerusalem gives Arab residents free professional advice to assist with the house permit process and structural regulations, advice which is not available to Jewish residents on the same terms."
Here are some more comments from Wikipedia's page about Israel and Apartheid:
"Critics of the claim that Israel is motivated by racism argue that, unlike apartheid, Israeli practices, even if they deserve to be criticized, are not prompted by racial hatred. Benjamin Pogrund writes: "In any event, what is racism? Under apartheid it was skin colour. Applied to Israel that's a joke: for proof of that, just look at a crowd of Israeli Jews and their gradations in skin-colour from the "blackest" to the "whitest"... Occupation is brutalising and corrupting both Palestinians and Israelis... [b]ut it is not apartheid. Palestinians are not oppressed on racial grounds as Arabs, but, rather, as competitors — until now, at the losing end — in a national/religious conflict for land."
John Strawson, professor of international law at the University of East London argues against likening the concept of Zionism to apartheid, saying "...the way in which the "one-state solution" was posed recycled much of the old discourses on Zionism which constructed it as an essentially racist ideology comparable to apartheid. At the core of the argument is the position that as Israel defines itself as a Jewish state this is an ethnic state based on a racial hierarchy. In this account Jews become the South African white population and the Palestinians the non-whites. The racist content of the state was seen in many laws which discriminate against non-Jews and in favor of Jews. Any discriminatory laws are seen as proof of a racist regime a position which if systematically argued would find almost all states as mainly characterized by racism. However, some apparently discriminatory laws, such as the 1950 Law of Return should perhaps be seen as affirmative action in that it turned the Nazi discrimination and definition of a Jew into the basis for citizenship in Israel. The view that Israeli as a state based on ethnic-nationalism is inevitably racist is a highly problematic. First most European states defined themselves as nation-states and ethnicity has played a major role in sustaining nationalism. Within the Middle East the relationship between ethnicity and state formation is clearly at work in Turkey where constitution defines a citizen as a Turk (despite the 30% of the population who are Kurdish), and Egypt’s official title is the "Arab Republic of Egypt" (and yet it contains large Coptic, Nubian and Berber minorities). It is not the case that supporters of the Kurdish right to self determination are denounced as racist who seek establish an exclusive ethnic state. Nor is it the case that states not based on ethnic-nationalism are consequently accommodating to the indigenous populations as the example of the United States and the position of First Nation American graphically demonstrates. The view that suggests that the attempt to create an ethnic-national state is either motivated by racism or unique is thus highly problematic given any serious study of nationalism. Zionism is a form of nationalism which along with other all other nationalisms is necessarily based on the privilege of inclusion and the discrimination of exclusion."
Here is another small piece from Wikipedia:
"Malcolm Hedding, a South African minister who worked against South African apartheid, says: "Calling Israel an 'apartheid state' is absolute nonsense. You might have structures that look like apartheid, but they're not. The barrier fence has nothing to do with apartheid and everything to do with Israel's self-defense. There was no such barrier until the second intifada, when people were being murdered on the highways. And the country does not dehumanize its minority in the sense of apartheid. The issues are totally different.""
Here is yet another which really goes to the heart of the issue of so-called Israeli "apartheid":
"Ishmael Khaldi, deputy consul general of Israel for the USA's Pacific Northwest, and Bedouin Muslim, in response to Israel Apartheid Week, criticising the analogy, says "Do Israel's Arab citizens suffer from disadvantage? You better believe it. Do African Americans 10 minutes from the Berkeley campus suffer from disadvantage - you better believe it, too. So should we launch a Berkeley Apartheid Week, or should we seek real ways to better our societies and make opportunity more available...Vilification and false labeling is a blind alley that is unjust and takes us nowhere...You deny Israel the fundamental right of every society to defend itself...Your criticism is willfully hypocritical....You are betraying the moderate Muslims and Jews who are working to achieve peace...To the organizers of Israel Apartheid Week I would like to say: If Israel were an apartheid state, I would not have been appointed here, nor would I have chosen to take upon myself this duty."
"John Strawson, professor of international law at the University of East London argues against likening the concept of Zionism to apartheid, saying, "Within the Middle East the relationship between ethnicity and state formation is clearly at work in Turkey where constitution defines a citizen as a Turk (despite the 30% of the population who are Kurdish), and Egypt’s official title is the "Arab Republic of Egypt" (and yet it contains large Coptic, Nubian and Berber minorities). It is not the case that supporters of the Kurdish right to self determination are denounced as racist who seek establish an exclusive ethnic state. The view that suggests that the attempt to create an ethnic-national state is either motivated by racism or unique is thus highly problematic given any serious study of nationalism."
The following is a typical comment by proponents of the idea that Israel is practising apartheid against Palestinian Arabs. It is on the website, "Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid" as of 2010: "Last year, in the wake of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, the BDS National Committee declared March 30th the Global BDS Day of Action. This day of action coincides with Palestinian Land Day, which symbolizes Palestinian resistance to Israel’s ongoing land expropriation, colonization, occupation and apartheid."
Wikipedia has the following about the concept of Israeli apartheid: According to Gerald Steinberg the attempt to label Israel an apartheid state is "is the embodiment of the new antisemitism that seeks to deny the Jewish people the right of equality and self-determination." In a 2004 article he writes "The 'Zionism is apartheid' propaganda is also used to justify Palestinian terrorist attacks and the efforts to deny Israelis the basic human right of self-defense against being ripped apart in bus and cafe bombings."
To me it is the last 15 words of that comment that provide all the context one needs to absolve Israel of accusations of apartheid which are almost invariably put in terms that make it seem as if Israel is an active proponent of the idea for reasons of some racial agenda endemic to the Jewish community. Arabs themselves have not exactly been a role model when it comes to the idea of living alongside Jews though this seems to pass unnoticed by most critics of Israel. Why do the Palestinian Arabs insist on having their own country that will be exclusively muslim, Arab and Jew-free when they seek to deny that same idea to Israel which itself is not Arab-free despite so many careless claims of ethnic cleansing? In fact, for countries like Lebanon, Syria and Jordan to keep Palestinian Arabs in refugee camps and deny them citizenship would seem to be a form of apartheid if one likes to play fast and loose with words.
If one needs a glimpse into the truth of this, consider the following article published in Al-Ahram Weekly for April 15-21, 2010. The article is by Franklin Lamb and is titled, "Can Lebanon Come In from the Cold?". The article is about Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with some 250,000 inhabitants. Mr. Franklin writes the following:
"The disturbing paradox of Lebanon depriving its refugees of the most elementary civil rights, some of which are even granted to Palestinians by their arch-nemesis, the Zionist occupiers of their own country, is increasingly being condemned in Lebanon." Mr. Franklin further describes the refugee camps occupants as people "who exist in abject squalor, humiliation and indignity."
He goes on, "Lebanon by refusing to even allow Palestinians the right to work in dozens of professions or to own homes, stands in clear violation of no fewer than 43 international legal obligations contained in treaties, conventions, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Lebanon played a major role in drafting, international customary law, and indeed its own constitution."
Mr. Franklin quotes unnamed Lebanese citizens as giving such arguments for denying access to Lebanese society as, "If we grant civil rights to our Palestinian refugees it could interfere with their right of return!" or, "The Palestinian refugee population poses a security risk for Lebanon and before any civil rights are discussed this must be resolved."
Mr. Franklin gives a comprehensive list of jobs barred to Palestinians in Lebanon. The list is so long that it is easier to mention "the only four jobs listed by the Lebanese Ministry of Labor that are open to Palestinian refugees are: midwife, financial brokerage firm owner, roving photographer and land surveyor. All Palestinian job seekers are required to have been issued the nearly impossible to obtain work permit."
Mr. Franklin goes on to quote "Souheil El-Natour, long time analyst of the Palestinian camp populations in Lebanon, and director of a Human Development Centre (HDC) in Mar Elias Camp" as saying, "This scheme by Lebanon is among the most egregious easily preventable massive human rights violations imaginable, given what the largest and oldest refugee population on Earth has been through."
Seen in this light, the accusations of Israeli apartheid are seen to be made either by people with good hearts who are incredibly naive, simple minded, politically correct and ill-informed or by cynical one-sided propagandists to whom truth and context are totally irrelevant. One can easily argue that, because of terrorism, Israel has more of an imperative in its treatment of the Palestinian Arabs than do Arab countries in their treatment of Palestinian refugees. The simple truth is that the Arab host countries with Palestinian refugee populations consider those Palestinians to be not only trouble makers but dangerous ones at that - the "Black September" battles and expulsion in 1970-1 of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Jordan is proof of that.
The true nature of the situation in Israel is at once so much more complex in terms of proper context and so much simpler in terms of stark reality that most people seem lost in the middle which is a never-never land of U.N. resolutions, accusations of apartheid, colonialism, racism, imperialism, oppression, Jewish hegemony, conspiracy and a whole host of nonsense which is perceptually neither here nor there in trying to make a true assessment of the nature of the relationship between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel. I do not wish to whitewash the fact that except for events in the former Palestine that there would be no refugees to mistreat in the first place but neither do I lay blame for this solely at the feet of the Palestinian Jews and state of Israel. There is no doubt that the Palestinians have suffered mightily for some 6 decades but the solution to the end of this misery lies not in trying to catch out Israeli hypocrisy by childish comparisons to Hitler and apartheid, but by Palestinian Arabs admitting their own role in the entire affair and where that role has left them.
Those among the Palestinian Arabs supporters who wish to help should consider how the continued use of violent resistance on the part of a defeated populace not only enables the worst among the Israelis but brings out the worst among otherwise moderate people. The Palestinian Arabs seem to little realize that their intransigence means time is running out on them as the Israeli's, ever further convinced that the Palestinian Arabs will not change, are moving on with their lives and national aspirations which will serve to ever more isolate those Arabs through marriage laws, restriction of movement, further loss of land and other means. Palestinian intransigence also allows those Israeli's who wish to eventually annex the West Bank more power and uncut Israeli moderates. The Israeli view of every Arab in their midst as a potential 5th columnist is a very real one and cannot be underestimated. In this sense, it is encumbent of the Palestinian Arabs to allay this view by offering to acknowledge the reality of their military defeat, the reality of Israel itself and to surrender while there is still something to surrender for.
As I say, Israel is not standing still but very much acting on the partial assumption that the Palestinian Arabs will never wholeheartedly surrender the views they held in 1948. Currently, Israel is holding the West Bank as their ace in the hole but will not do so forever and even now there is a creeping realization in the form of creeping Jewish settlement encroachment in the West Bank that the Palestinian Arabs will never change their position. As currently situated in 2010, those Jewish settlements can be reversed and abandoned by Israel as was done in Gaza but the situation for the Palestinian Arabs is very fragile; the Palestinian Arabs must come to their senses and soon. The world will never decry Israel in the same way it did South Africa because it is not at all the same situation and Israel will defend it's right to security with the same fervor it did in prosecuting its wars with Arab nations. No doubt Israel is tired of the situation and this can be played on but the Israeli's cannot be threatened or cajoled. Israeli's insist that whosoever criticizes them tell Israel how those critics themselves would react to bus bombings and rocket attacks. Israeli's do not buy into the idea that their security policies can or should be portrayed as endemic racism; even the most moderate among the Israeli's who decry the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs know better than this, having lived under the threat of terrorism or served in wars themselves. Having said that, there are certainly Israeli's who disagree with their government's treatment of the Palestinian Arabs to greater and lesser degrees, Arabs both within Israel and in the occupied West Bank.
In history there have been many instances of ethnic civil war where one side has formally surrendered to the other - this has never happened in the case of the Palestinian Arabs. One may as well portray POW camps in America which had German prisoners as apartheid because the German population was kept apart from the American, not the best analogy but it serves to slide the argument around to view it better. Without some formal acknowledgement of surrender the Palestinian Arabs resemble prisoners of war more than anything else. Using the term apartheid in this sense is entirely wrong. It only serves to even further radicalize Arabs and so incites them to more acts of futile violence which only contributes to their own predicament.
It is true that Palestinian Jews wanted a specifically Jewish state but not necessarily one that had an unwilling population of Arabs yet this was foisted on the Jews by war and victory in that civil war which was unique in history and with it's own unique problems. Jewish victory has rung partially hollow because the foe they defeated will not stop squirming and Israel seemingly holds the proverbial tiger by the tail, unwilling to hold on and unwilling to let go of its prisoners. The nature and meaning of language in the form of such words as "occupation" and "apartheid" are subverted in favor of a dishonest agenda because the facts on the ground in Israel simply don't support their true meaning. Both those words carry the connotation of naked aggression which is not the case because this civil war took 2 sides to happen. The fact that one side has been beaten into the ground does not change the fact that that side was and continues to be, however ineffectually, a willing participant in violence and so in it's own continued degradation. South Africans played no part in bringing apartheid or degrading racial policies onto themselves and this is a crucial difference. If the oppression of the Palestinian Arabs is as bad as portrayed by themselves and their supporters then there is absolutely no need to engage in Orwellian discourse that not only subverts language and so too reality but the Palestinian Arab's own cause itself. In Gaza things were so bad even before the 2008 Israeli invasion that one can only feel sorry for a populace so deluded as to vote a group like Hamas into power. It is hard to imagine that the Gazans so little understand the true nature of their predicament that they don't know that things in Gaza will never be as they wish until they feel the exact opposite about Hamas as they do today and disband them.
This is not to say that Palestinian Arabs all support violence towards Israel. The vast majority of the Palestinian Arab population however, has been radicalized, in part through propaganda and in part because of the nature of their plight. The nature of that plight becomes one of reality on the one hand and perception on the other. The reality is that some few people within the Palestinian Arab population wish to kill Israelis and it is doubtful these Israeli deaths are greatly mourned within the Arab community. Besides propaganda the perceptual part of the problem is this: to what extent should the fact of that violence be blamed on the rest of the population? Can one argue that the Palestinian Arabs should take their violent factions in hand or suffer the consequence and so in that sense are responsible? Whatever the rhetorical moral dimension to that response the fact is that the actual response in history and reality, has been yes; Palestinian Arabs must take their own in hand or be punished for the most violent among them.
This question of to what extent a civilian population should be taken to task and are liable for punishment and death for what those in their midst do in the form of organized violence came up on several notable occasions in the 20th century during actual conflict in World War II. Unfortunately the war time answer was that civilians are legitimate targets and so German and British cities were bombed and atomics mushroomed above Japan in World War II. During World War II the fire-bombing of Dresden was considered controversial at the time by officials high up in Allied command as Dresden was not a military target yet the operation went on nonetheless and it was a brutal horror. The Allies were more generous in regard to any ideas of civilian complicity after the war ended but during the war itself all bets were seemingly off.
In the March, 11-17, 2010 edition of Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly, Sukant Chandan starts an article like this: "The Palestinian oppression continues primarily due to the financial, diplomatic and military support that Israel receives from the US, and secondly the acquiescence of pro-Western states in the region. After the fall of the Zionist state's long lost brother - the apartheid state of South Africa - the Palestinian struggle remains perhaps the leading and most potent anti-imperialist struggle in the world."
This rhetoric is all too typical of anti-Western and anti-Israeli voices in the middle east; hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy piled on top of distortions, half-truths, and disingenuousness brought to the level of an outright lie. The intellectual childishness of many articles is so great that the attendant verbiage becomes mere window dressing for hate; many anti-Western, anti-Israeli articles would be more informationally transparent if they simply said, "Israel/United States: bad, Islam: good". The United States gives 2 billion dollars a year to Egypt in aid which is a country that in no way likes Israel. Israel is a financial giant in the region and has never relied on the US to win it's military battles with it's muslim neighbors; Chandan's all too common myth of U.S. material support to Israel making all the difference in the plight of the Palestinian Arabs goes right to the heart of why 9/11 happened in the first place. Even if American support was critical why is that not okay and why is it okay for the Palestinians to have countries supporting them militarily? Apparently it's okay to have outside support if that support fails and this gets to the heart of much of the rhetoric coming out of the muslim middle east in regard to Palestinian Arabs and Israel; in other words, military failure is somehow lionized and made to seem moral from the muslim side while military success is somehow looked down on as oppressive, imperialist and immoral when it comes from Israel or the West; a successful military force like the United States is denigrated for it's very success while some type of inferred or implied morality springs from the incompetence of the military in Syria and Egypt. Not using the military card in the 21st century by Islamic armies speaks more to their own incompetence, decadence and Israel's nuclear arsenal than to any outflowing of morality from the middle east; somewhat ironically, it is the West whom hard line muslim clerics often define as decadent.
It is hypocritical in the extreme for Chandan to compare Israel with apartheid South Africa without mentioning that for 13 centuries non-muslims in Islamic political entities in the middle east have been 2nd class citizens under muslim regimes that were and largely continue to be military dictatorships; in those medieval and late medieval states no non-muslim enjoyed the same institutional rights and privileges as a muslim. Now that Israel has a country that wants to be thought of as a country with a specifically Jewish nature in a sea of Islam the shoe is on the other foot and muslims don't like it. During the centuries under what could just as easily be described as muslim "oppression", Jews and Christians suffered in silence and now that the roles are reversed, and having failed militarily, Islam is crying about it like babies; Islam does not like and has never liked sharing power and has no tradition or history of doing so.
With the type of hypocritical rhetoric on the part of those who side with the Palestinians such as Chandan, a solution will never be found if "solution" is even the right word to frame the issue of the Palestinian Arabs and Israelis; can there be a "solution" for the loser of a civil war, especially for one that refuses to admit defeat? Was there a "solution" for the Southern states that lost the American Civil War? It's not even a relevant term in some ways. One thing is for certain: had the American South not laid down and accepted defeat, whatever bad times the South had in the post-Civil War years would have been much worse and for much longer and that latter scenario is essentially what has happened to the Palestinian Arabs. Bitterness over being on the losing end of a civil war can last a long time and it is important to remember that the American southern city of Vicksburg refused to celebrate the Fourth Of July until 1943 as a result of events during the American Civil War 80 years before; can you imagine that they were so bitter that they didn't celebrate the Fourth Of July during it's first occurence of World War II? If such bile can last so long in a country with essentially the same culture then how much worse is it in the case of the Palestinian Arabs trying to reconcile their military failure and subsequent second class status in their own homeland with a Jewish culture which it regards as alien?
For Chandan to frame the "Palestinian struggle" as anti-Imperialist is further evidence of how much wishful thinking pollutes any chance of clear thought when it comes to those who wish Palestinian Arabs had come out on top against the Palestinian Jews in the late 1940's. The founding of the nation of Israel has nothing to do with imperialism and in any case, imperialism in it's true sense hasn't existed on the part of the West since before World War II and now resides only in the minds of those who simply don't like the West to the point where they have to alter the very nature of present day events, of history itself, and even the meaning of words in order to satisfy their dreams of self-innocence. The word Imperial in it's true sense refers to a military empire and the United States for example has no empire though try telling that to America's detractors. In order to support this rhetoric, the very meaning of the word Imperialism has been changed to accommodate anti-American thinking in an Orwellian semantic delusion to fit America into their peculiar view of the world; lacking an empire in this true sense of the word, anti-Americans simply redefine what an empire is and so a proxy American empire appears based on American diplomatic or cultural stature. This results in a type of dreamworld wherein the West is portrayed as militant and marauding Crusaders and Islam as innocent bystanders with no reference whatsoever of how Islam came to militarily dominate so much of the medieval known world through naked aggression in the first place. In history, military players come and go as the fortunes of countries ebb and wane and Islam definitely had their time and now philosophically begrudge others theirs as if Islam never played such a game in the first place. Islam eschews military adventurism because of the waning of their cultural fortunes and not because of any tide of morality emanating out of the middle east.
In the middle east the memory of the once great military success of Islam has become a bitter one and all that remains of that success in some circles of Islam is overweening arrogance based on oil money and a past of racial, cultural and religious superiority that no longer exists though the bigotry largely survives intact. The Ottoman Empire in particular was noted for the utter arrogance with which the "Sublime Porte" would treat with the West. In every respect the religious superiority of Islam in all countries it conquered throughout history is no different from the Zionism they so bitterly deride the Israelis for and which institutional Islam continues to practice wherever it can; a desire for evenhanded multiculturalism is not a trait to be found within muslim psyches and cultures in the middle east. To me it's perfectly understandable for a culture to want to maintain it's own cultural identity without an influx of outsiders but when Islam reserves that right for themselves and denies that right to Europe and America than it is simply hypocrisy. The simple fact is that the reason the Islamic middle east maintains it's cultural hegemony is because few from outside those Islamic countries wish to emigrate to them and despite muslim criticism of the West and the United States, muslims are banging down the door to live in the West.
In that same March edition of Al-Ahram Weekly in which the Chandan article appears, there is also an article by Aijaz Zaka Syed titled "Fighting Israeli Apartheid". In this article, Mr. Syed writes, "There are many parallels between South Africa and Palestine. And not just in the tyranny of a minority over the indigenous majority. In fact, the apartheid that Palestinians have suffered is perhaps even worse than what Nelson Mandela's people experienced under the white racist regime for nearly three centuries."
In Mr. Syed's view making imperfect analogies is more important than facts since Jews are, like ethnic Arabs, also indigenous to Palestine and they are not a minority in Israel even if you include Gaza. Also, comparing 300 years of naked colonialism in South Africa to the 60 year long civil war in Palestine which resulted from Jewish people fleeing a thousand years of pogroms and genocide in Europe and so returning to what they viewed as their original homeland is plain bigotry masquerading as facts; Palestinian Arabs losing a civil war for land with an influx of Jewish immigrant neighbors which one could not live with in peace and then forced to endure the debilitating and oppressive effects of that loss is just not the same thing albeit in one's own homeland. Oppression is oppression but the South Africans were invaded and pushed aside without there ever being any hope that they would participate on an equal basis in what had been their own land. The Palestinian Arabs did have equality and control over their own destiny, were unsatisfied with this status and so rolled those dice and lost a civil war. It should be noted that in this same article Mr. Syed agrees with this essay that only a "global Ghandhian movement" can solve the plight of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.
And yet again in March, 2010 in Al-Ahram Weekly we have this gem by a Galal Nassar in an essay amazingly titled "Reverse Logic" and with this essay we are now all the way through the middle eastern looking glass. In writing about Arab states giving in to Israel continuing to oppress the Palestinian Arabs, Mr. Nassar offers the following:
"Is it not just possible that by acting in a weak manner we are encouraging the Israelis to wage war, or continue to wage war? Is there a name for what Israel is doing in Palestine other than war, however low-heat and slow going the war may be? Doesn't this remind you of Europe in the 1930s? It was Europe's appeasement of Hitler that made him go for broke. Once major European countries were OK with smaller countries going down, there was no stopping the Nazis.
Who can say that Israel, a state with an insatiable appetite for expansion, will not set its eyes on other Arab land, anywhere between the Nile and Euphrates? There will be no stopping Israel once it succeeds in gulping up already occupied land and incarcerating the Palestinians in towns that resemble concentration camps.
Knowing what we know about the corruption of Arab elites, who can vouch that Israel and it's allies will not manipulate regional leaders, foment religious and ethnic grievances and exploit what is rampant opportunism and selfishness to keep us down forever?"
Really incredible stuff typical of force feeding inaccurate historical analogies and evil Israeli intentions to whoever is stupid enough to believe them.
The following month saw another article in Al-Ahram Weekly by Mr. Nassar entitled, "Peace and Resistance". In this article Mr. Nassar further stakes his claim to real estate on the other side of the looking glass that is a significant contingent of the middle eastern press in writing of "the common enemy of the Arabs; namely the US-Israeli coalition". While the article talks about the plight of the Palestinian Arabs in it's various forms and explores means to force Israel to the peace table it nowhere mentions anything about a past war in the region between Jew and Arab. What it does helpfully suggest is that "Arab leaders should do something to prove that they are at war with Israel and its big ally, America." Mr. Nassar then goes on to say that he is "...not asking for armies to be sent against Israel.", while in the same article suggesting that continued violence by the Palestinian Arabs themselves and "Muslim fighters" may be their only hope for a just peace. Mr. Nassar's logic is difficult to follow semantically and otherwise since any type of violence against Israel by muslims has resulted in a bloody nose for Arab armies. Mr. Nassar's articles usually start with a detestation of Israel and the United States and then awkwardly portray events in order to suit that destestation rather than the other way around.
It would be difficult to make up such incredible "commentary" and if I didn't read it I would have trouble believing the absurd state of fantasy that resides among educated people in the middle east when it comes to their distorted view of the world they live in and the state of current affairs. Really, one need look no further to understand why Arabs are flying airplanes into New York skyscrapers because of course the "allies" of which Mr. Nassar writes is in the main the United States. In the eyes of Mr. Nassar and his colleagues Israel and the West are more than just an entity that collectively oppresses the Palestinian Arabs but Arab hegemony throughout the middle east. The fact that Mr. Nassar can actually write that he believes the Israeli's are about to rampage throughout the middle east like Nazi Germany is sad to behold from an adult human being and a sad reflection of the idea of an Islamic think tank.
It seems to be a popular idea among many to somehow portray the Israeli's as Nazi's, unwittingly and hypocritically committing the exact same crime against Palestinian Arabs that were perpetrated against the Jews themselves. How one can accuse the Jewish people, who were the ones who endured the Holocaust themselves and who have to live next to Palestinian Arabs every day as being somehow unable to appreciate such a double standard while some distant critic can so clearly see it is the height of smug arrogance.
And if this is the world view of a relative moderate like Mr. Nassar then one now can understand something of the "thinking" and "logic" that reside in the minds of fundamentalist muslims? Spokespersons for organizations like Hamas or Hizbollah lie so fluently and so often that I hesitate to even call it lying, rather, it's a way of life, a culture and therein lies the problem. I have no idea what such organizations think they are going to accomplish with their deluded rhetoric. Does Hamas really think anybody believes anything they say? Do they do it because they're savvy purveyor's of disinformation? Do they do it because they are total idiots? Is it a middle eastern tradition to simply say whatever favors you or your point of view? Whatever the truth of it a reflection of enlightenment it is not. Far from being enlightened, systematic lying by politicians and the media leads a culture to forget what they did with the truth in the first place and myths grow, gain credence and then become reality. This type of activity can lead entire cultures into a perceptual trap of immense proportions because many individuals within those cultures trust their leaders or media outlets.
The entire situation regarding the middle east's xenophobic view of the world is sad and more than a little dangerous not to say a nearly flawless example of people seeing what they want to see. In the middle east, self delusion has not only risen to the form of an art but something of a career as well. As a sidebar it is no surprise that an outnumbered Israel has been consistently able to defeat armies composed of such "thinkers". Whatever the opposite is of an insatiable desire for knowledge middle eastern pundits like Mr. Nassar apparently have such a quality in abundance. Mr Nassar near the end of his essay states, "...the best way to stop war is to prepare for it. It is because we are unprepared that Israel has been able to wage war against us for decades now." George Orwell himself couldn't have put it better.
Reverse logic indeed. Apparently Mr. Nassar considers such nations as Egypt and Syria to have been unprepared at the precise moment in which they were prosecuting military operations against Israel. An unintended and unconscious joke perhaps? There is no hope of common sense ever prevailing against such an epic distortion of historical events in the region. How an educated writer can behave in such an ignorant manner and dissemble so fluently speaks to what it is that the West and Israel are really up against in the middle east. Not only does Israel have to contend with the bitter reality of real events in the region and their role in them but with events that never took place but which are laid at their doorstep.
To understand the extent with which some Egyptians relate to the Palestinian Arabs one should note that Egyptian writers routinely use the word "we" and "us" when describing something regarding those Palestinian Arabs. This is more than just conscious solidarity but something that resides in the present psyche of many Egyptians, perhaps in this and recent generation's national character itself. Little wonder that Anwar Sadat was assassinated since he must have been seen as betraying the Palestinian Arabs and so Egypt itself. The bond between the Egyptian people and Palestinian Arabs is undeniable.
In rejecting a 2 state solution in 1947, the Palestinian Arabs obviously had no intention of sharing Palestine with the Jews and one cannot help but wonder if the Islamic tradition of never sharing power equably with non-muslims had something to do with this; if so it is ironic because if the Palestinian Arabs had gotten the upper hand, the Palestinian Jews could expect at best to continue to live in Palestine as 2nd class citizens and at worst, expect to be forcibly expelled from Palestine altogether and in fact it is the reverse that has occurred. In the military conflicts that occurred between Muslims and Jews around Israel from 1947 to 1967, the present state of affairs were largely decided. Palestinian Arabs and their supporters had rolled the dice and lost. It is ludicrous to expect the Jews to go back to the state of affairs before the conflicts started in earnest in 1947-48 considering the fate they themselves would have suffered had the Palestinian Arabs come out on top. The Palestinian Arabs are going to have to not only take what they can get but like it. If the Palestinian Arabs get their own state and show too much hostility towards Israel, Israel could invade, take the land back and never give it up again.
I do not disagree with the idea that the Palestinian Arabs are suffering under Israeli rule but it is not and has not been happening in a vacuum of preceding events nor events in which the Palestinian Arabs themselves have not taken a hand in their own downfall. I also disagree with muslim writers on how that downfall came about; easy to do since the general tenor of middle eastern writers on that topic is delusional to say the least. Let's not talk about this issue as if European Jews descended on Palestine in the 1920's and 30's with overwhelming military force, numbers and money and stole the land from the Arabs living there as is the case with all too many muslim writings about pre-Israel Palestine. That is a much more complicated story and I take issue with pro-Arab Palestinian and anti-Israeli writers who minimize certain events in order to make their own biased arguments more palatable. Whenever a writer takes up the torch of the Palestinian Arabs a fog of illusions seems to descend over actual historical events and this may very well be because the "side" of the Palestinian Arabs is in fact an untenable one and the story no more complex than that of one side having militarily defeated the other which has subsequently refused to surrender and so live in giant POW camps.
To portray the eventual Israeli predominance as an inevitable Juggernaut and the Palestinian Arabs as never having any part militarily in the whole affair and with no chance of coming out on top is not a picture of Israeli oppression over those Palestinian Arabs but of a loser with it's one time military options taken away by force; one might as well portray Northern oppression in the post-Civil War American South without any reference to the events of 1861-65 and the initial successes of the Confederate armies and their original willingness to let their fate be decided by war. But this manner of rhetoric and it's wholesale ignoring of historical events is precisely what one hears over and over again from muslim writers in the region. Let it not be forgotten that this military scenario is exactly what happened in Palestine in the late 1940's and as happened in the American Confederacy, those Palestinian Arabs let their destiny be decided by war. This is a far cry from a portrayal of Jewish Zionism oppressing an innocent Arab population which never decided to take a hand in a military solution to Jewish immigration and the myth that the West in the form of the United States tipped the scales in the favor of the Jews is just that, a myth. How the Palestinian Jews ever came out on top against such staggering odds as they faced in 1947-48 is something of an eyebrow raiser but it was done without any significant outside help. Years of terrorist attacks against Western targets are in part founded on the idea that Israel oppresses Palestinian Arabs only with the help of the West when in fact Israel has never received nor needed such help; not one American soldier has ever been directly involved in Arab-Israeli conflicts.
Ironically it is European and not Arab anti-Semitism that indirectly created the state of Israel. Before the mass migration of Jews to Palestine in the mid-20th century Islam had no history of institutionalized anti-Semitism though there were some horrible pogroms from time to time. The fact that an Islamic Palestine in medieval times made Christians and Jews dress in yellow speaks more to racial and cultural superiority than specific anti-Semitism. Islam has become radicalized towards the Jews as a direct result of events in the former Palestine. Jewish enclaves that had existed in muslim countries for centuries suffered their own dislocation after the events of the 1967 war as Arab nations became embittered over Israeli successes.
What Ilan Pappe fails to put into it's proper context in his book is the idea that the Palestinian Arabs, had they been the winners of the civil war, would almost certainly have done, (and had done in the past) to the Jews what the Jews have done to them and that is a far, far different ordering of events than Pappé is willing to put forward. There was much terrorist violence on both sides before the civil war and both sides are guilty of re-writing history to suit themselves although I would say that muslims seem particularly adept at reordering the context of historical events. The idea seems to be that the Jews had no business in Palestine in the first place and this is to argue that muslims have no business with 1,000 mosques in Great Britain.
The crux of the entire issue as I see it is not the history but the reality of where Palestinian Arabs and Israeli's now find themselves. However they got there it is the reality of the relationship between the two that must now be addressed. That relationship is one where Israel holds all the cards and any further type of violence on the part of the Palestinian Arabs is not only futile but counter productive. Like it or not the Palestinian Arabs must come to see that organizations like Hamas stand between them and their dream of a land they can call their own every bit as much as does Israel.
Even if you accept the idea that that the Jewish State of Israel was created in an illegitimate and illegal manner, Israeli Jews are not going back to Europe any time soon. What good does it do to cite the Zionist's from 100 years ago telling their followers that Palestine was an "empty land" ripe for the Jews to return to? How can one move forward with that bit of information?
Palestinian Arabs should study what happened to the Germans and Japanese after World War II and the South at the end of the American Civil War and take what lessons from this they can. One thing is certain, the Palestinian Arabs are negotiating with no power and must act accordingly. Bigotry, violence and violent slogans, disinformation and hypocrisy have and will continue to accomplish nothing and in fact hurt the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian Arabs must operate from a realization of their true position in this relationship which reflects the Israeli perception that those Palestinian Arabs are unrepentant prisoners of war and potential 5th columnists in their very midst. They should also throw into this mix the successful stratagems of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Mass civil disobedience with an emphasis on the backing of international good will can add credibility to the plight of Palestinian Arabs which the international community would find hard to resist.
In once again using the analogy to the American Civil War, if men like Robert E. Lee served to mitigate the effects in the American South of what occurred after the Confederacy lost that war, then men like Yassir Arafat had the opposite effect for Palestinian Arabs. Had Arafat not adopted a posture of defiant intransigence, who knows how much better off Palestinian Arabs would be today; the Palestinian Arabs have to reverse that trend. Arafat, being utterly corrupt and with little pragmatic regard for the eventual fate of his own people never would have countenanced Robert E. Lee's view of surrender. Basically that view was, "Boys, it's over and we have lost. Go to your homes and prepare for the worst and hope for the best." Arafat never at any time had the respect to have ever convinced the various Palestinian Arab factions of such a view because Arafat was a man cut from an entirely different cloth. Yassir Arafat prospered from the conflict between Arab and Jew and had little real interest in ending the conflict. What a man like Robert E. Lee saw as the pragmatic way out after honorably having done all he could do would have been looked at by a man like Yassir Arafat as dishonorable and weak and the passing of an opportunity for his own aggrandizement at the horrible expense of the Palestinian Arabs, many of whom, unfortunately, saw Arafat as a hero. One often hears the phrase, "cooler heads prevailed", but in the case of the Palestinian Arabs it has been "hotter heads" that have prevailed. Men made of sterner stuff than Yassir Arafat have been nowhere in evidence among the Palestinian Arabs with no sign of any emerging as the visionary the Palestinian Arabs so badly need. For a man to materialize among the Palestinian Arabs who can combine vision with a Machiavelian ability to deal out and fend off violence will be a tall order.
If Arafat was cut from a different cloth than a man like Robert E. Lee, then so too is Islam compared to the West. In Islam's long and varied history there have been no evidence of phrases like, "the greater good", no documents like the Magna Carta, no sense of compomise with other cultures outside of Islam. Unlike Europe, within Islam, individualism, for whatever reasons, has never taken hold and there have been no revolutions in the name of the common man. In the middle east, Kings and princes or their close equivalent still hold sway in many polities and the word "president" is sometimes interchangeble with the term "dictator" as has been the case in Egypt with "President" Mubarak for almost 3 decades as of 2010. In fact, Mubarak is trying to create a climate where his son will succeed him as president in a dynastic scenario not at all popular in Egypt. Islam in the middle east has no history or traditions of democracy and one wonders if such a thing is possible. Having examples of democracies in the West for the middle east to follow is problematic since a fear and dislike of Western culture and governance resides side by side with admiration within Islam.
A second problem is the Western idea of the separation of church and state. The United States, recognizing that religion and democracy were incompatible, immediately formally separated the two on its founding as a nation. Present day Turkey is attempting to be the first important muslim country to do the same but has a long way to go. The secularization of Turkey and other muslim states is problematic because Islam feels itself to be the only legitimate source of laws for men to follow and on a grass roots level this is deeply felt throughout the middle east.
It may well be that Western democracy is simply not attainable within the middle east. The middle east may have to go through its own growing pains and come up with a system of governance more in line with its cultural traditions. For middle eastern nations to mimic democracy without its own profound cultural grass roots feeling of the urgency, necessity and value of a republic is a lot to ask; it will have to be the people themselves to create from the bottom up and not the other way around. Having the template for a thing and learning to do it yourself are two entirely different matters; a template doesn't teach but experience along with imperatives does. The United States attempts to create democracies within Afghanistan and Iraq will fail because democracy is entirely too artificial a concept for those countries to absorb. To whatever extent Iraq has a chance to succeed as some kind of republic it may ironically be because of the forced secularization of the country under the dictatorship of Sadaam Hussein. However, even if there is no civil war in Iraq following the withdrawal of American troops, the hatred of the West runs so deep that Iraq may reject democracy just to follow something that defines it as being apart from the US and that something will inevitably involve the religion of Islam. Afghanistan is a much worse scenario for democracy to take hold in and there is, in my view, no hope of such.
The Palestinian Arabs had a choice between living in some kind of peace with their Jewish neighbors or throwing the dice in a military confrontation which they subsequently lost. The Palestinian obsession with the idea of them being the sole proprietors of the former Palestine despite other ethnic groups besides Arabs and Jews and with a 2,000 year old history of many ethnic groups comings and goings has attained the status of an urban myth and a somewhat racist one at that.
In regards to Palestinian refugee camps, Gazan Arabs, similar to Lebanon, have gone so far as to not allow refugees to accept permanent housing in Gaza, preferring instead to keep refugees in a never-never land where the only and unlikely option is a return of these refugees to "their land" in Palestine, thereby keeping alive the flames of a war already several times lost while some of these refugees wish only to reluctantly accept the de facto loss of their homes and land and to get on with their lives.
I think many of us can understand the mystical attachment that people can have for a land but when that attachment is exaggerated in pursuit of an agenda one can only feel for those generations of Palestinian refugees who have not only lost their land and homes but continue to be cynically used as pawns in a hopeless cause. Many times in history great migrations have occurred, sometimes as a result of military force, sometimes reluctantly done for economic reasons but life goes on, whether you will it or no. Many Palestinian Arabs dispossessed of their land have come, however unwillingly, to pragmatically accept this loss and the politically motivated idea that these people can never again have productive lives unless they have this exact piece of property rises to the level of childish stubbornness. I am not claiming that this acceptance is in any way easy but I am claiming that it is necessary because it is reality. One must keep in mind the dispossessions of land brought on by crusading muslim armies from the 6th to the 15th centuries and even beyond to keep this whole Palestinian and Jewish struggle in perspective; I'm sure those now forever vanquished cultures had their own mystical attachment to their lands and culture. To the muslims, it sometime seems by their rhetoric as if this type of dispossession is okay as long as it is muslims who have come out on top and indeed any reference to this history of the Islamic conquest of the middle east and North Africa is nowhere to be found in any rhetoric or in any contextual regard in term of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
I have no admiration for people and cultures who try and re-write history in such a way as to minimize their own role and guilt in military conflicts. Japanese school history text books remain strangely silent on the Empire of Japan's activities on the Asian mainland from 1933 to 1945 to the fury of the Chinese. Among some Japanese, attitudes about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are strangely defiant as if they themselves had no role to play in bringing about such destruction on themselves or no role in bringing about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in what the Japanese blithely called, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", a term that could have come straight out of George Orwell's "1984" Contrast this with books that were written by southerners after the American Civil War; bitterness there was but no sense of unreality. Americans have a great deal of difficulty understanding the East's penchant for denying those facts in their own history they have no wish to confront; Russia, China, Japan and the middle east have all been guilty of publishing history books that sometimes amount to novels. It's natural that Americans have a problem grasping this since, like other people, Americans tend to project their own beliefs onto other cultures in lieu of specific information to the contrary.
Along these lines one cannot help but think that the Gazans re-write history as it is being made. In their Jan. 20, 2009 online edition, in an article that speaks to the cost of rebuilding damaged infrastructure in the wake of the then planned Israeli withdrawal, the BBC credit their correspondent on the scene, Aleem Maqbool, with saying, "Many are angry and feel that the world did not do enough when it mattered to stop the violence..." If one cannot get a clear view of what is happening at the time it occurs then what chance is there for the history books. No mention of Hamas and the rocket attacks into Israel in this context of responsibility. If the Gazans accept the idea that someone else should do something to stop the violence, where is the responsibility of the Gazans themselves for preventing the violence in the form of rocket attacks into Israel and for having voted Hamas into power in the first place? The rest of the world doesn't live in Gaza and a good first step for preventing the violence that has occurred in Gaza for the first 3 weeks of that Israeli invasion is to stop shooting rockets into Israel and stop supporting those that do rather than bringing the world at large into it. The whole thing smacks of sheer idiocy and delusion, Gazan rhetoric which addresses not at all why the Israelis invaded in the first place.
This same article quotes an unnamed Hamas leader as saying that the Israeli withdrawal was a "great victory over Israel". That type of foolish rhetoric, without even a nod towards the reality of the situation encapsulates the delusional thinking that has proven such a disaster for Palestinian Arabs and neatly sums up 60 years of "great victories".
Something should be said in this context about Israel's aims in invading Gaza and also about Israel's so-called failure in invading Lebanon in 2006 because I do not believe Israel failed in Lebanon. I believe that in both Lebanon and Gaza, since there was no conventional army to fight as in 1967 and 1973, that Israel's aims were two-fold. The first was to attack such military positions and high ranking individuals as the Israeli intelligence services and conventional army forces were able to locate. Second was to damage civilian infrastructure with a two fold aim to at once to punish civilians who allowed anti-Israeli military units to operate amongst them and to turn those civilians against those groups if possible, hoping that the responsibility for civilian deaths and wrecked infrastructure would be laid at the door of such groups as Hezbollah and Hamas. Palestinian Arabs have in the past purposely killed many civilian Israeli's and tried to do the same with rocket attacks for years before the Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the the Gaza War Palestinian Arabs raised a hue and cry about civilian deaths in Gaza. The dual standard that Palestinian Arabs and their supporters can hold in their heads at the same time smacks of madness. How in the world can Israel ever reason or negotiate with people who seem to be bigoted to the point of perceptual insanity? A Palestinian Arab civilian death is cause for moral outrage and an Israeli civilian death considered in an entirely different light.
In the Beirut based online edition of Dar Al-Hayat for Jan.19, 2009, a Jameel Theyabi mentions, "...the terrorist Israeli war machine murders the innocent children indifferently." How would the rockets Hamas fires into Israel differ in the context of that comment other than the fact that those rockets murder even more "indifferently" because they cannot be aimed accurately? Again, pure delusional bigotry wherein basically muslims are always right and Jews always wrong doing ostensibly the exact same thing. Muslim reportage of the Gaza invasion by Israel in many cases amounts to little more than outright lies since the term disingenuous cannot adequately describe what is going on here.
In that same online edition, an article by Patrick Seale titled, "The Battle For Legitimacy", presents a more subtle use of disingenuous rhetoric to lend credence to a point of view. I say "subtle" because the article lies about what it leaves out more than what it cites and in reality will fool few neutral readers but is the type of article that is eagerly gobbled up in middle eastern circles by those who simply do not like Israel. In what should have been a key point in the entire article, Seale dismissively mentions Hamas' "futile rockets", the firing of which deserves an article all to itself. The use of the word "futile" in this context is extremely significant for why it was used. Agenda driven? You decide. Again, apparently an unsuccessful rocket attack is not as bad as a successful one; intent is thrown out the window and muslim incompetence in military affairs almost lauded as non-violent. Unwittingly portraying muslim military potential as so incompetent that it is considered almost non-violent would be humorous in another context.
A further example of the never-never land of Islamic rhetoric against Israel is to be found once again in Al-Ahram Weekly for March, 4-10, 2010 in an editorial about fears of Israeli aggression against Al-Aqsa Mosque and other holy sites at that time. In reference to these events, the editorial quotes "the Qatari daily Al-Raya" as saying, "What happened in Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem shows Israeli indifference to the sentiments of the Arab and Islamic worlds and disrespect for the people's culture and international laws."Since the "sentiments" of the Arab world in terms of it's past actions and current rhetoric are wholly hostile to Israel it is hard to understand why Israel would respect those "worlds".
That Al-Ahram editorial quotes another editorial in a United Arab Emirates daily Al-Bayan as writing that "...Israel is focused on igniting war in the region." How in the world anyone can believe that Israel or anyone else in the region in 2010 would actually desire war is hard to understand but this belief seems to be endemic to muslim attitudes about Israel since one hears it repeated over and over again. Understanding the nature of Islamic rhetoric towards Israel points towards the difficulties of finding an unbiased muslim attitude towards 60 years and more of events in the former territory of Palestine. No mention of a one time civil war in Palestine in current Islamic rhetoric, only Israeli aggression, oppression and occupation, as if the current status quo has no history in which the Palestinian Arabs took full part except in such remarks as Palestinian families "forced to flee their villages in Palestine after untold butchery by Zionist militants in 1948", this rather florid observation written by Ramzy Baroud, another Al-Ahram writer.
When one reads about how many of those in the Civil War American Southern Confederacy felt about their losing that war the bitterness and shame so evident is engendered precisely because it was a loss they knew they would have to accept and live with but not necessarily undeserved; there is none of that sense from the Palestinian Arabs but only a complete lack of acceptance of the fate that has overtaken them for all these decades and a nearly total disconnect from their own part in being brought to such a fate.
Spreading what amounts to mendacious propaganda amongst Palestinian Arabs and other muslims around the world may have a "feel good" effect but in fact, the Palestinian's unwillingness to accept their own true role and current position in this ongoing conflict only ensures a future of more suffering, privation, humiliation and death. It seems to me that the current goals of the majority of Palestinian Arabs are absolutely unobtainable. Israel holds the "high ground" in every way imaginable. The only hope for the Palestinian Arabs is for total philosophical capitulation to the reality in which they find themselves but more importantly to turn to peace as the means for obtaining their goal for a 2 state solution. Israel took over the West Bank during a time of war; like the Palestinian Arabs, Israel would like to continue to hold onto this territory and will only relinquish it for an absolutely guaranteed peace which currently is no where evident in the present mindset of the Palestinian Arabs.
Had the Palestinian Arabs accepted the unacceptable in 1947-8, namely the idea of a two state solution which embraced the admittedly harsh reality of that current situation, it would have been far preferable to the resultant failure of pushing the Jews out of Palestine entirely by military means; how ironic that the present Palestinians would now love to have a 2 state solution. Hindsight is 20/20 they say but this is not so in the case of how far too many Palestinian Arabs view the history of the conflict, which is a scenario where rich Jewish Europeans came to Palestine with the help of the Western powers to dispossess muslims of their land. If so, it's hard to imagine why Jews in Palestine started off by buying land, at least until they were curtailed in this by the British Mandate.
There is every reason to believe from a reading of history that the Jews would have and did accept the notion of a 2 state solution in 1947-8 in exchange for peace rather than a civil war they were by no means certain of winning. Forced into a conflict that was a near thing many times, the Palestinian Jews not only created their own nation, but one that was specifically Jewish. What has happened in subsequent decades insofar as the attitude of Palestinian Arabs smacks of sour grapes because they did decide to fight and had their chances to win
Instead of accepting the reality of the nature of that defeat which they have never done, the Palestinian Arabs have done such things as blame the United States for their defeat even though the U.S. was never involved. There are conspiracy claims such as that the United States knew and supported the idea as early as 1948 that the Palestinian Jews would eventually claim sovereignty over the entire region, squeezing out the Palestinian Arabs. To credit the U.S. with this type of foresight at a time when Israel was involved in a civil war in which they were outnumbered, barely armed and with the future prospect of the entry of Arab countries on the side of the Palestinian Arabs is simply an excuse to somehow involve the U.S. in the entire historical mythology of hate against the West and as an excuse for Arab defeats.
Mr. Syed in the article already quoted in this essay further writes: "Israel's ultimate goal is total subjugation of and victory over the Palestinians and Arabs. Greater Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is the ultimate objective of the Zionists. And they wouldn't stop at that. They seek total control and dominance over the entire Middle East and wouldn't tolerate anyone who can remotely look like a challenger to this supremacy. This was why Iraq was neutered and destroyed. And this is why Iran is now in it's sights."
In the Arab world it is extremely popular to depict the American invasion of Iraq as done at the behest of Israel. How in the world can one combat such unrealistic fantasies? Mr. Syed is only revealing what he wants to believe rather than any "truth" and so his bigoted and arguably anti-Semitic rhetoric presented as some type of evenhanded commentary only adds to the problem. And the problem is that such rhetoric is present every single day throughout the Arab world. If you believe that words kill then it is just such a distorted re-writing of history and events and the West's true place in them that surely fueled the 9/11 terrorists and continue to partly fuel the benighted actions of Hizbullah, Hamas, the Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood among others.
To overcome the mistakes of their own past should be the goal of the Palestinians Arabs rather than painting themselves as wholly innocent victims during the course of these last 60 years; it is the wrong path for the Japanese to follow in regards to the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it is the wrong path for the Palestinian Arabs to follow as it leads to a place where there is no mature acknowledgement, no closure to put them on a path they will not repeat. Instead, what you have among the Arab Palestinians' is a philosophical intransigence that is a form of madness guaranteeing only that the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again and that their own oppression will continue. Wikipeida quotes from Pappe's preface to "The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine" the following, which refers to Israel's denial of their oppression of the Palestinian Arabs; Pappe writes, "such a painful journey into the past is the only way forward if we want to create a better future for us all." The Palestinian Arabs themselves might take such advice to heart as well as Islam in general since it seems to be utterly determined to re-write it's own history in a way that is decidedly in favor of themselves.
Palestinian Arabs and their advocates must stop dishonestly portraying what Israel does as if it happens in a vacuum totally divorced from their own actions; Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews are inseparably tied together in a dance where their roles are, simply put, that of the losers and winners of a civil war. Palestinian Arabs may just have to bite the same bullet that cultures conquered by Islam had to bite and accept their fate, homeland or no, unless you believe there is a "solution" to losing a civil war. Palestinian Arabs may not perhaps be able to control the actions of others but they can certainly control their own attitudes and actions. This is the only way I see in which the Palestinians Arabs can perhaps come out of this situation with some small degree of recompense. The alternative is to continue down the same sorry path which has led them to nothing but sorrow these past 60 years; any "solution" must involve the Palestinian Arabs of Israel philosophically acknowledging and accepting their participation and defeat in the civil war with Palestinian Jews in the most profound way possible rather than continuing to behave as wide-eyed innocents caught up in events beyond their control or desire.
Palestinian Arabs were only too ready to expel Palestinian Jews from the Palestinian Territories at the point of a gun in the 1940's and beyond and having failed to do so must stand up like adults and acknowledge that participation and failure so the real issue of their present plight can be dealt with in a manner in which both parties can move on. In Israel the past is a closed book and events can never be set back to the way they were and so one must take what crumbs one can because that is reality and there is no other. Istanbul will never again be Constantinople and Mexico City never again Tenochtitlan and that bitter lesson has yet to be learned by Israel's Arabs. Once that lesson is learned and accepted the Arabs living under Israeli rule will have a chance at their own state but they will have to swallow their pride in order to achieve this Palestinian State and that is something Arabs in Israel have shown no signs of doing. In the end the Palestinian Arabs will end up with a state smaller than the size of the state they might have had had they originally agreed to share Palestine with the Jews and that is a small price to pay for losing a civil war and some might even call it a victory compared to the present state of Palestinian Arabs.
In pre-Columbian America, Aztecs and native Americans in general beings human beings, were all too willing to steal land or engage in empire building against their fellow native-Americans; it was only with subsequent military defeats at the hands of a superior European technology together with a ensuing willingness to revise the military context of their own history that native-Americans found war "immoral" or "unethical". Again, as in the middle east and the Palestinian question, we have a scenario where military means are hypocritically scorned by those who have had no success at it though it is not for their lack of trying; the scorn in fact is engendered by the pre-Columbians lack of military success against Europeans and not by any moral or ethical considerations. In like measure, the rule of law is now embraced by muslims in the middle east in regards to the Palestinians living in Israel only because of military failure and not because of a love of justice or rule of law.
It is said that it is the winners of wars who write history. This is not true today; winners make history while the defeated languish under occupation or on reservations or refugee camps if they are lucky enough to still be alive. Both sides write history and it speaks to the quality of a culture as to how willing it is to tell the truth of that history no matter how good or bad a picture it paints because that view of history becomes a portrait of how they view themselves. In the case of the Palestinian allies and their regional allies the history they are writing leaves out their own military adventurism and cultural bigotry. Perhaps it is human nature that the victors find it easy to be magnanimous and so have a view of themselves with all their human frailties intact while the losers whine and complain and re-write history until it is all but unrecognizable. Say what you will about American culture but it does not shy away from writing unflattering and accurate histories of it's own mistakes, a quality that is wholly lacking in the middle east and particularly among Palestinian Arabs.
Alexander Werth in his "Russia At War, 1941-1945", refers to Benno Zieser's German biographical book, "The Road To Stalingrad" as an "odious little novel". Read some histories on how Syria and Egypt view their conflicts with Israel; if you didn't know better you would think they had come out on top. Read what you can in middle eastern newspapers and read Palestinian rhetoric about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. My own conclusion is that there is a nearly total disconnect from reality in the Arab world when it comes to this issue; there is a profound feeling of squirming discomfort in reading account after account that is hopelessly biased and bigoted. Winners and losers both write history but the accounts from muslims on the losing end of conflicts with Israel smacks of madness and a type of dishonesty that the writers are deeply unaware of; difficult to feel compassion in these instances as I am reminded again and again of Soviet habits of disinformation and Orwell's "Doublespeak". The entire tone of Islam's view of it's own history remind me of "odious little novels".
In taking sides in the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict there is a profound difference in the way in which Americans think of these things and of how muslims do. I do not claim to speak for Americans but it is with a sense of profound dishonesty with which I view muslim accounts on the matter. Read the Hamas Founding Charter; it's hard to imagine a document that would alienate Americans any more if one tried; it simply goes against the grain of how we Americans look at our relationships with the world and with the concept of truth. If I didn't know any better, I would think it had been written by an insane 8 year old; when it comes to history, the truth of the matter is of seemingly no consequence. It's simply hard for me to imagine a sane human being writing such a document.
Any solution that comes about between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs now lies in the hands of the latter since at this point in time the Israelis, convinced of Palestinian Arab intransigence by decades of experience are content to sit back and react. Those more hard-line Israelis use the status quo to squeeze the Palestinian Arab presence and identity from parts of Israel. Until the Palestinian Arabs turn their back on violence fueled by hate filled and dishonest rhetoric Israel will continue to sit back and react. The more radical in Israeli society will continue to quietly allow settlements to be built on the West Bank as moderates lose credibility. The Palestinian Arabs continue to shoot themselves in the foot with no strategy for the future other than some vague never say die rhetoric with nothing to back it up other than fervent anti-Semitism, ignorance and fanaticism.
Israel can be brought to the peace table because many Jews are profoundly sick of the conflict and how it is eating away at their own society. However peace will never come about until Palestinian factions and grass roots elements totally eschew the use of violence and come to accept the reality of the defeat that is now several generations behind them. I wrote part of this essay during a 2 month stay in Egypt in 2010 and believe me when I say that there is an air of unreality about how muslims view the history of the Palestinian/Jewish conflict and it is that strong sense of unreality that oppresses the Palestinian Arabs as much as their physical humiliation since infantile anti-Jewish fantasies give no scope for solutions. That unreality is the thread that runs through and undercuts anti-Israeli positions, from tribunals and United Nations declarations of international law to rhetoric in editorials and books. That thread is the singular lack of context concerning the link between the present plight of the Palestinian Arabs and how they came to that plight. For reasons best known to themselves, Israel's detractors present a one-sided view of the history of hostility between the Jews and Arabs in the one-time territory of Palestine. Palestinian oppression is invariably couched in terms of naked colonialism and apartheid on the part of Israel with no reference whatsoever to how the 2 sides came to occupy their respective positions.
My own view is this: the reason such a one-sided view against Israel is so consistently advanced by it's critic's is that history and the truth of that history get in the way. Israel's Western critics put forward the idea that past history is of no relevance because of the present condition of the Palestinian Arabs in an emotionless and academic manner that does not take into account the fear, trauma and blood that has been shed by Israel in coming into their predominance.
As I've shown, the muslim press commonly puts forward the idea that Israel has designs on the land of other muslim countries without one shred of evidence that such is the case. In instances where people put forward ideas as truth that have no basis in reality one can only come to the conclusion that they believe such things because they want to believe them. This brings us to the question of why muslims would wish to believe the worst of Israel with no apparent reason other than Israeli military success against Islamic armies since the only crime Israel had ever committed was to come out on top of the Arabs in a civil war for supremacy. Does virulent muslim anti-Semitism need any factual reasons really? Isn't the sting of humiliation in their perception of coming out as 2nd fiddle against a people they hate in itself enough to account for Islamic attitudes against Israel? Hate has it's own truths and dispassionate history books only get in the way of that. In Al-Ahram Weekly for April, 8-14, 2010, a column by Ashraf El-Bayoumi has a different take on any claims of anti-Semitism emanating from the middle east: "During the Nasser era, Egyptians were accustomed to making a clear distinction between Jews and Zionists. That distinction is now blurred and opposition or even criticism of Israel is conveniently equated with hatred for the Jews and falls in the category of anti-Semitism!"
As to why international bodies pass resolutions and cite violations of international law critical of Israel the motivations may be as complex as they are varied. Hearts may be in the right place but may also reside in a land of legal academia or anti-Israeli agendas. For such people law begins when wars end because war by definition represent chaos, the Geneva Convention notwithstanding. For this reason what is held to a international legal standard tends to be post-bellum and academic. Fear, revenge and hate are not legal terms and do not fit easily into a legal framework. In international law losing a civil war seems to be entirely disconnected from the intent of wanting to have won that war and freely participating in it. How else can one explain scenarios in international law where Palestinian Arabs are portrayed as being on the same level as the victims of apartheid in South Africa without reference to the Arabs own part in their current extremity? Only without that reference can the term apartheid be used in regard to Palestinian Arabs but that reference is the whole ball of wax.
International law says very little when it comes to rocket attacks into Israel or suicide bombings on civilian busses because there is no state to prosecute but such incidents are no less real to Israeli's for all that. For this reason, to me, international legal views on the dilemma of the Palestinian Arabs ring hollow and lack any kind of flexibility that would bring legal matters into the real world.
Is there an international law about willingly engaging in civil war? Would such a law mitigate the rights of the loser of such a war to cavil about the "appropriation of property" mentioned in the Geneva Convention and the "Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict" such as in the Hague Convention? Is the winner of such a conflict then legally obligated to exhibit largesse? Apparently so since the entire moral onus for returning to the status quo of pre-1967 has been placed on Israel. To me, not taking Egypt, Syria and Jordan to task for their own part in the plight of the Palestinian Arabs is unfair. Certainly Israel believes this to be so. In international law the winner wins nothing and the loser who gambled and lost loses nothing. Unfortunately international conventions seem to take little into account when it comes to the true nature of a gamble when one's very survival is at stake. It is not like being asked to give back the winnings in a poker game. Life itself was at stake in the Palestinian Arab-Jewish civil war and to give back one's winnings without a guarantee of the right of Israeli's to live in peace runs the risk of Israel being the enablers of a backsliding into more violence. Certainly the continued violence of certain sectors of the Palestinian Arabs towards Israel is evidence that the Arabs are not yet willing to accept the totality of what has encompassed them which was a winner-take-all war. Violence on the part of the Palestinian Arabs towards Israel in the name of resistance is a foolhardy notion. In such a conflict as has occurred in the former territory of Palestine for decades one does not easily give up one's advantage and Israel will not do so.
Another reason international legal bodies come down against Israel is because they are sometimes agenda driven. This is why the United States refuses to be a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Besides the fact that the US has it's own justice system to punish crimes by it's citizens, the US wants to avoid an agenda driven prosecution for it's military presence around the middle east simply because individuals within international legal organizations disagree with US policies.
Asking Israel to take itself to task for possible war crimes over the last 40-60 years may be asking a little much because Israel views all it's policies with regard to it's treatment of the Palestinian Arabs as having been done in self-defense and there is a lot to be said for that view; Israel won a civil war but the other side has refused at any time to entirely disarm. No doubt that Israel's policies have gotten out of hand but this is the nature of what can happen in what is a de facto civil war no matter how slow motion it's nature. In war, things get out of hand and people suffer and die, there is no question of this; expecting some notion of justice and "just" policies to naturally arise out of such a situation is foolhardy.
It should be said here that Jews in history have lived in cultures in which they were forbidden to own land, locked into ghettos, forced to practice usury and then condemned for it and also forced to display something identifying them as Jews and not just in Nazi Germany and there is a parallel in how Arab Palestinians are living in their own land. Both Arabs and Jews in Israel should remember this, maybe for different reasons but for reasons that will bring them to the same place and perhaps to some kind of peace. There is more than enough blame to go all around when it comes to the issue of Israel, the Palestinian Arabs and the regional wars between Jew and Arab.
Only by looking to the future can any hope of reconciliation be attained. To me the difference between the West and the middle east when it comes to viewing it's cultural path is that the West lives with one foot in the future and Islam one in the past. For Islam all that it pulls from it's past are old feuds and insults real or imagined together with cultural arrogance and disappointment based on past glory and preeminence. Combine all this with a cultural zeitgeist incapable of imagining the concept of it's own guilt and you have a culture in denial and subsequently in turmoil. It is not Islam's religious precepts and values that truly cause it to clash with the West but rather the question of it's honor and self-esteem or lack thereof.
These factors helped cause the Palestinian Arabs to be stateless persons and without a seachange in attitude no watershed moment for those Arabs can take place. Palestinian Arabs and muslims in general may be guilty of projecting their own assumptions of how they would be treated in a multicultural society onto others because of the way they themselves have treated those among them in the past. If true this directly contributed to the idea that Palestine was a region not to be shared with others if it could be helped. If true the Palestinian Arabs then must have feared the Palestinian Jews because they were looking into a kind of a mirror; this would account for Islam's penchant for self-fulfilling prophecy in that it sees and expects the worst in other societies. Muslims have a disturbingly unrepublican tendency to not play well with others when they decide to obsess in calculating their odds of preeminence or lack of it in any given scenario of a shared society. Not setting itself on a collision course with other cultures is a quality Islam had better learn to cultivate because the muslim world is close to overplaying its hand against the West as did the Palestinian Arabs versus the Palestinian Jews and look what it cost them. It is not fundamentalist muslims that are the enemy of the West. They are merely the expression of the fundamental Islamic belief that they are better than everyone else in the world and that is the problem because this cultural bigotry bears no relation to reality. In any event, constantly assessing one's stature against another is neither a healthy or necessary way to go through life. Taking all this as a given, without a fundamental shift in attitude, it would seem as if the No State solution looms large in the Palestinian Arabs future. Though there is not a history of anti-Semitism in Islam there is a history of racial and cultural superiority and this history is interfering with any process that could lead to a Palestinian state. Muslim rhetoric which demonizes Israel and exaggerates what it has done is similarly unproductive.
All hatreds aside, in order for there to be peace in the former Palestine a 2 state solution must be put into place. In order for this to happen the Palestinian Arabs must formally offer a surrender, utterly renounce violence and ferret out and control those among them who commit violent attacks. Secondly, the Palestinian Arabs must come to grips with the extent and nature of the disaster that has overtaken them and come to accept it because it is a fait accompli. Thirdly, the Palestinian Arabs must elicit international support by further renouncing Islamic fundamentalist ideology and seek to accomplish their aims through peaceful demonstrations by following the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Doing these things will morally undercut Israel's position in the eyes of the international community and give credibility to those in Israel who have a less harsh view to the Palestinian Arabs and are tired of the conflict. In short, the Palestinian Arabs need a powerful and charismatic leader who can take the violent among them in hand, unite the Arabs and lead them to their promised homeland.
Israel has the military strength to no longer have to fear being pushed into the sea by Arab armies. Israel's possession of nuclear weapons guarantees this cannot happen as in any kind of extremity Israel would simply wipe out the capitals of any coalition of nations that was about to overwhelm them militarily. The only thing Israel has to worry about with the creation of a Palestinian state is to what extent that state would be hostile to Israel in terms of terrorism; trading land for peace is one thing and land for further hostility another. The Palestinian Arabs and their regional supporters must forever give up the idea of the former Palestine ever again being wholly muslim and come to grips with the accomplished fact that is the state of Israel. In short, recognizing they are in a de facto state of war, the Palestinian Arabs must make a peace movement that is so strong it sweeps aside all opposition. As the losers of that war, the Palestinian Arab leadership must come to the negotiating table with their hats in their hands or else risk losing everything.
The end game for the Palestinian Arabs as I see it must be based on the protocols established for the treatment of the Japanese and German governments at the end of World War II: First, the Palestinian Arabs must elect a leadership that will speak for all Palestinian Arabs with one voice and that leadership must in turn convince those Palestinian Arabs which constitute the larger population to go the way of peace, every last one of them in turn speaking with one voice. The past must be put aside.
Secondly: The Palestinian Arab leadership must offer a formal surrender in the de facto civil war that has gone on since 1947 and this surrender must be backed by a referendum among the Palestinian Arabs that reflects their willingness to do this. A peace movement based on the reality of the Palestinian position and not what they wish that position to be must take root.
Third: The Palestinian Arabs must agree to completely disarm themselves and to agree that not one single weapon, not one bullet will be held by anyone but a small police force. At this time it will be considered whether a multi-national police force with real teeth unlike the U.N. will be put in place to help implement and back up the needed reforms. This will depend on the surrender referendum which will need a 75% majority to pass the surrender act and 90% to avoid a multi-national force with the option of the part of the Palestinian leadership to invite such a force if they wish it in a case of suspected insincere voting. There will be no third party arbitration. The goal of an independant state of Palestine will be the overriding consideration and based on the reality of the military superiority of Israel and not on concepts of fairness and justice except as agreed to by the 2 parties. This will expedite the formation of the state of Palestine.
Fourth: In the new state of Palestine, it must be made illegal for anyone to privately own a weapon.
Fifth: Anti-Israeli and anti-Western rhetoric must be considered as hate speech and liable to prosecution as libel and defamation and any groups like Hamas outlawed. Revisionist histories of the civil war presented in either the media, text books or history books must be similarly subjected to special libel laws that are at the same time sensitive to freedom of speech.
Sixth: The Palestinian Arabs and the most involved Arab nations must agree to recognize the State of Israel and it's right to exist and every single former combatant state must sign a peace treaty which at the same time settles all territorial disputes. All Palestinian Arab refugee camps in any country must be shut down and the inhabitants either offered citizenship in the countries in which they are located or offered citizenship in Palestine.
Seventh: All claims regarding such things as the right of return, the status of Jerusalem, land claims, compensation, right to worship and all other issues having taken place during the entirety of the civil war must be negotiated by the 2 sides and laid to rest before the State of Palestine is formally constituted and must be permanently binding and put aside forever in good faith and not in the spirit of reopening old wounds once the State of Palestine is established. Palestinian Arabs will negotiate with an unconditional surrendered nation status - as such, a time limit of 60 days will be set in order to expedite long standing claims with the understanding that if this time limit is violated the issue of the State of Palestine will not be revisited for 5 years. This will impress upon both sides the urgency of the situation as well as bring home to the Palestinian Arabs the reality of their lack of a true negotiating position. The position of the Palestinian Arabs must be one of good faith and not intransigence. The opportunity for it's own state must take absolute precendence over all other considerations.
Eighth: Israel and all other interested parties will form a type of "Marshall Plan" to help get the new state of Palestine on it's feet with attendant aid in building a modern infrastructure, housing, economic treaties and favored nation trading status.
Ninth: The State of Palestine will be a democratic republic and forbidden to form an army. Palestine will exert total sovereign control over its borders and air space with no outside interference of any kind. The State of Palestine will agree to make no treaties or open embassies with any state that is in any way hostile to the state of Israel or allows anti-Israeli or anti-Western groups to operate on it's soil, even if democratically allowed by the host country as is Hizbollah in Lebanon.
Tenth: No international legal body will exert any jurisdiction over the proceedings and will furthermore abolish and abrogate all rights to enact or enforce penalties against Israel. Upon the formation of the State of Palestine Israel will recommend that the United Nations recognize said state.
Unfortunately, any Palestinian leader who comes forward and supports these 10 points will predictably be branded a collaborator for recognizing Israel since to do so would be to endorse that state's so-called racist and colonialist agenda. Indeed, the optimistically titled Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has proposed to honor some of these points and been branded a traitor in some quarters of his own constituency and the larger Arab world. The problem with people who would criticize "collaboration" is that they have absolutely no alternative to offer. Apparently an eternal battle with Israel over its right to have ever existed in the first place is somehow it's own reward in the confused world that is Islamic politics. As that confusion and hate continues to dominate the dialogue the prospective state of Palestine will grow ever smaller in size, therefore less acceptible, more prone to rejection and so it goes. Without a grass roots peace movement among the Palestinian Arabs themselves no peace process will ever take hold. The problem with the Arabs of the middle east is that any solution based on anything less than equality between the Israeli's and Palestinian Arabs will be unacceptable but that is the one thing that cannot happen since it is not a reflection of the respective roles of the two sides; there is no wiggle room in that scenario. Truly, when one takes into consideration the violence and hears all the opinions from all sides the entire affair smacks of willful madness. The particular madness on the side of the Palestinian Arabs is that they absolutely refuse to acknowledge any peace based on a partition of the land that comprised the British Mandate of Palestine when in fact that reality has been in place since 1948. Where in the world does one go from there? Utter bias in favor of the Palestinian Arabs from all over the Islamic world only deepens the lack of a place to go since it gives the Palestinian Arabs a false sense of support that in fact does not exist other than in the form of words and encourages intransigence.
The Palestinian Arabs must decide whether to maintain a stubborn pride and some status of negotiation they do not have to salve that pride and attain goals beyond their reach or give in to the harsh reality of their situation and have their own country. Israel holds all the cards, every one of them and do not need to give up one meter of ground in the West Bank should they choose to go that way. In fact, the longer the conflict is dragged out the greater the eventual chance that Israel will someday exert sovereignty over the whole of the West Bank and expel it's inhabitants. The risk is all on the side of the Palestinian Arabs and they have the most to lose on top of what they have already lost. For the Palestinian Arabs to organize themselves into some kind of polity that can speak with one voice and "endure the unendurable" is the only way for the Palestinians to walk into their future nation. Unfortunately, it seems that is the one single thing the Palestinian Arabs are completely unable or unwilling to accomplish. In some circles of the Palestinian Arab culture it is considered as treason to even treat with Israel. I started off this essay by asking if the Palestinian Arabs and their mindset are their own worst enemies. You decide. But to see what with bankrupt eyes Israel is viewed by its detractors consider this: if a policeman has to shoot someone brandishing a gun it is not fair to paint that policeman as violent or the polity he works for as an oppressive or violent regime. That's just doublespeak and Israel is getting it with both barrels from certain quarters. If anyone has any better way for Israel to surpress violence from the Palestinian Arabs with Israel simpy folding its tents and going away then people should come up with suggestions for Israel rather than simply painting them as some kind of eager apartheidists'.
Can anyone in their right mind even believe that the issue of whether a nation that has existed for 60 years should be "recognized"? Israel exists and Islam will not see it. This shows the extent to which the Palestinian Arabs and greater Islam simply refuse to deal with reality even when it has stared them in the face for 6 long decades. Confusing ideology and pragmatism is an attempt to portray Israel as a racist regime rather than the winners of a civil war in which their opponents have never surrendered and continued to violently resist the outcome of that war. What can one say about the Palestinian Arabs not even knowing they lost a civil war 60 years after the outcome was decided?