The betrayal of the Palestinians
The aim of destroying Israel has been unrealistic for more than 50 years. The lie that it can be achieved is a betrayal of the Palestinian people. It is time for honesty and reality.
Iran’s missile attack on Israel was more than a military failure. It showed that Israel cannot be destroyed and replaced with a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea". The myth or lie that it can, has caused generations of Palestinian misery.
Calling for Israel’s destruction, besides being sickly genocidal, feeds the myth that it is possible. This betrays the Palestinians by encouraging them not to pursue peace.
The myth stems from frozen thinking. Arab states tried to destroy Israel at conception in 1948 and failed. This despicable act created the Palestinian refugee problem, but at least then, it was a militarily feasible goal. After losing the Second Arab-Israeli War in 1956, and being routed in the Six-Day War in 1967, the Arab world should have accepted reality. Any chance of wiping out Israel disappeared when it acquired nuclear weapons in 1967-68.
Fifty-plus years later, the Palestinians are still talking about a future Palestinian state in place of Israel. The rest of the Arab world, by contrast, increasingly accepts Israel as a reality. Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE recognize Israel. Even Saudi Arabia, which does not recognize the Jewish state, helped defend it from Iranian missiles. These states are in touch with reality.
Living in a parallel universe of lies, delusion, and nonsense, are Palestinian leaders, Iranian clerics, left-wing academics, and moronic students with their stupid “No peace on stolen land” chants and placards.
Hanging on to this myth that Israel can be wiped out has been destructive. It has shifted responsibility for Palestinians’ lack of statehood onto Israel, thereby abdicating responsibility and agency in their own self-determination. Building a state is difficult. Israel is a case in point. It is a successful state, but after 75 years it is far from a finished project. As debates over ultra-orthodox Jews serving in the military and what Arab Israeli national service should look like show, Israel has yet to resolve how to be Jewish and democratic.
A STATE WITHOUT A NATION
Despite the ahistorical propaganda, there has never been a Palestinian nation. Palestinians are Arabs, and there would have been no issues had they ended up being part of Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria, in the post-colonial shakeout.
Had there truly been a Palestinian nation, they would have achieved statehood long ago. The Kurds, by contrast, are a nation, so they grabbed the opportunity to gain self-governance in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. They would have preferred a state, and different borders, but they have not let that get in the way of advancing their nation.
Political theorists have written extensively about nations without states. The Palestinians want to have a state without being a nation. Building a nation will be impossible until the Palestinians stop defining themselves as being victims of Zionism, as being in a violent struggle with Jews, and believing that Israel’s demise is necessary for them to realize national expression. This definition makes Palestinian nationhood dependent on an impossible goal, annihilating Israel.
Theoretically, a Palestinian state should be just like the many constructed states that emerged from colonialism’s ashes, such as Jordan, Indonesia, and Singapore. These nations have worked, and are constantly working, on building national identities to strengthen their foundation. The Palestinians have not bothered. Palestinian factions divide their time between despising Israel and Jews and fighting with each other over who will rule a state that does not yet exist and how theocratic that state should be.
The war in 2007 between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Gaza showed how little sense of nationhood exists among Palestinians. It ended with Hamas dragging PA officials’ bodies through the streets in a characteristically macabre display. Even now, with Israel at war on many fronts, the PA is accusing Hamas of murdering aid workers to manufacture a food crisis in Gaza to secure supplies for itself and to sell on the black market.
REALITY CHECK
A positive could yet emerge from Iran’s direct attack on Israel. Had Iran’s missile barrage succeeded, it could have kept alive the myth that Israel can be annihilated, and that Iran might have the power to do it. However, that is clearly not the case.
Israel, with its allies, shot down 99 percent of Iran’s missiles and drones. Israel then retaliated with several drones and a high-tech missile that passed undetected through Iran’s most advanced defenses to destroy a radar system near its Isfahan’s air base, used to protect Iran’s nuclear sites. The missile is believed to have been fired far from Israeli or Iranian airspace. This shows Israel can protect itself from attack and can hit Iran with ease. Israel is not going anywhere, and the Palestinians need to face this fact.
Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan did not come about from their leaders undergoing therapy and emerging with a new outlook on life. Rather, Cairo and Aman realized that destroying Israel was impossible and the cost of trying to do so was too high.
Peace between Israel and the Palestinians requires many things. Deradicalization and building a Palestinian nation based on something other than destroying Israel are top of the list. They are related. Islamism feeds the genocidal lust.
Islamists also oppose nation-states and kingdoms in favor of a Caliphate, meaning that supporting Hamas is at odds with supporting a Palestinian state. Efforts, notably in Europe, to remove Hamas from lists of proscribed terror groups are, therefore, part of this wider betrayal. Seditious thugs at US universities offering jingoistic support for Hamas, intimidating Jews, and calling for “death to America” are also betrayers.
Leading the betrayal of Palestinians are their leaders, who are an overlapping mix of vile racists, insane Jihadists, vicious terrorists, and corrupt autocrats. They are entirely unsuited to building a nation or running a state, yet that is what most of the international community wants. It is blind madness.
If the Palestinians want the next 50 years to be better than the past 50 years, they should accept Israel, stop murdering people in terror attacks, cease their wicked Islamist indoctrination of children, and work on building a nation.
This is what pro-Palestinian supporters, in the streets and in Parliaments, would be calling for if they truly cared about the Palestinian people. By the looks of things, the betrayal is continuing.
The danger of false premises: Reporting news based on certain assumptions is sure path to biased and partisan journalism. Unfortunately, it is everywhere.
The colonialist imperialist lie: The idea that Israel is colonialist and imperialist is the most absurd of all the nonsensical lies perpetrated about the Jewish state.
Is the diaspora losing its liberal home? Israel is not the only Jewish homeland under attack, liberal democracy is the other.
Your analysis is a modern one but the PA and Hamas are stuck in 600AD. If they didn’t deflect all there thievery on Israel, they would be exposed as the garbage they are. Arafat a noble peace price winner, what a joke.