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Misplaced Liberal Compassion for Palestinian "Cause"
Liberals of all stripes, in Europe and North America,
share one opinion with the Muslim world: that the Palestinians are victims of
oppression by Israel and that terrorist groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al
Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are simply desperate fighters for the liberation of their
people. The most recent example of a liberal argument along these lines,
which was particularly careless with the historical facts, was written by Bill
Maxwell in the Aug. 10, 2003 edition of the St. Petersburg Times (click
here for the full text of his argument).
Among the indefensible positions he takes are the
following:
- All people - even Palestinians - need a victory at least one time in
their existence. At some point, all people need to be affirmed in their
positive aspirations. It is not clear to me that the Palestinian
people have any collective aspirations that can be considered positive.
The clearest aspiration they (and their Arab supporters) express daily in
their schools and mosques is to destroy Israel and ethnically cleanse
Palestine of Jews. That is a negative aspiration, and if that is the
definition of victory, then it would be an evil event that would bring it
about for them.
- The Palestinians have legitimate claims to much of the land that
Israelis now call their home. The only basis for a "legitimate
claim" by Palestinian Arabs on the Holy Land is that their ancestors occupied
parts of it when the Jews were systematically pushed out and denied return for
two millennia. Does the Palestinians' claim have more legitimacy because
it has been longer since the Jews were expelled? That's a poor criterion
for legitimacy. The only quasi-legal ruling on the question was given by
the U.N. in 1947 when it created a partition plan that gave both Israel and a
Palestinian state rights to exist. Israel accepted that plan, but the
Palestinians, perhaps duped by the allied neighboring Arab states, never
accepted the plan, since compromise was not among their aspirations.
They gambled on a collective Arab invasion of Israel, which ultimately failed
in its goal to eliminate Israel altogether; the territories to which the
Palestinians supposedly have some "legitimate claims"--Gaza and the West Bank
(along with the Golan Heights), were occupied without any legitimate authority
by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. Since there is no Palestinian state, and
none of those nations (or any other) has any claim on those territories, they
have no legal status in the world. They are essentially unclaimed land.
So it would be no more or less just for Jordan, Egypt, or Syria to occupy them
than for Israel to occupy them.
- From the beginning, with the creation of the nation of Israel,
Palestinians have been the victims of Israel's determination to keep them
virtually powerless. Since 1948, successive U.S. administrations, citing
Israel's need for security, have given the Jewish state carte blanche to
implement undemocratic policies that dehumanize Palestinians. American would
not tolerate such policies anywhere else in the world. The
Palestinians were and are victims of their faith in and reliance on their Arab
"champions", who led or allowed them to believe in 1948 that they didn't have
to accept compromise: that they would soon be the masters of all of Palestine,
and the Jews would be eradicated. They are powerless because they have
been abandoned by their champions, whose assurances were false, and who failed
repeatedly to destroy Israel, but each time made their own positions, and the
position of the Palestinians, more tenuous. The Arab aggressors used
Palestinian territory as a staging ground for attempted conquest, which is why
the land must now be occupied by Israel in order to guarantee its own
security. Anyone who knows anything about the Cuban Missile Crisis knows
that no nation is expected to tolerate its enemies using nearby lands as
staging ground for attack. U.S. votes in favor of U.N. Security Council
resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw are hypocritical, since we would
never leave ourselves so defenseless, or allow the Security Council to require
us to do so. We should have vetoed those resolutions.
- The most troubling result of this dynamic - America's unblinking
alliance with Israel - is the birth and maturation of Palestinian
organizations that use terror as their means of protest. First of
all, terror is not a means of protest: it is a means of attack.
Furthermore, if the U.S. had such an "unblinking alliance with Israel", its
agents would have vetoed the resolutions calling for Israeli withdrawal.
The U.S. has struggled to maintain a moderate stance, but that is
extraordinarily difficult when one side, Israel, has always been open to
compromises that would not threaten its security, while the other side, the
Palestinians and their Arab "champions", have always advocated privately, and
often even publicly, the total destruction of Israel, while the hardest-line
Israelis in positions of power have advocated compromises that preserve their
own security, including recently even an agreement in principle that the
Palestinians should have their own state.
- Following the original Oslo accords, Arafat kept the lid on violence by
developing a truce with terrorists. Slowly, though, the Israeli
government itself undermined Arafat's authority in several ways. One was
the unabated construction of settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza.
The Oslo accords made it clear that settlements were an issue to be addressed
in the next phase. Israel implemented several steps required by the Oslo
Accords, including giving the new Palestinian Authority governing powers in
much of the so-called occupied territories. They did so.
Nevertheless, the Palestinians were not interested in continuing down the
"road map" provided by the Oslo Accords. Arafat rejected the offer of a
Palestinian state, and waited for the "provocation" of a visit by Ariel Sharon
to a site that is holy to Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam to provoke
renewed violence, which destroyed the Oslo Accords once and for all. The
sticking point? They still want the "Right of Return" so they can
destroy Israel after the final peace is made.
- Each time Arafat met with U.S. and Israeli officials to talk peace, the
Palestinian Authority leader was given a plan that did nothing to halt the
Israeli land grab. That issue was to be taken up in the next stage,
so this objection is irrelevant. If Arafat had accepted the state
offered him in 2000, the "land grab" would have been halted.
- The truth is that Arafat was never handed a good agreement, one that
considered the plight of the Palestinian diaspora. This is a
childish rhetorical trick, comparing Palestinians who fled a war they brought
upon themselves by refusing the U.N. compromise and appealing to their Arab
"champions" to destroy Israel, to Jews, who were driven out of Palestine for
daring to try to maintain their independence from Greek and Roman hegemony and
then by Christian and Muslim religious intolerance. The "good agreement"
Bill Maxwell refers to here is impossible: it would allow the Palestinians to
occupy and then destroy the state of Israel by allowing all Palestinians who
fled their defeat in 1948, and anyone who claims to be a descendant of one of
them, to return to Israel and be made citizens. Their goal in pressing
for this is to destroy Israel from within. The proposed agreement is,
therefore, evil, and must never be made.
- Now, Israel is playing the same game with new Palestinian Prime
Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Propped up as a man of peace - the un-Arafat - by
Israel and the United States, Abbas is now being handed empty agreements that
will undermine his authority and transform him into an untrustworthy partner
in peace. So far, he has not kept any bargain he has made in any
agreement. There is hardly any point in making agreements with people
who don't keep their side of the bargain.
- Then, we have the fence (wall) that is snaking its way through
Palestinian territory, that is turning some villages and towns into ghettos.
The fence will stop the tide of killing by the Palestinian fascists.
Israel has never agreed not to defend itself, nor should it.
- What kind of credibility will [Abbas] have with terrorists if he
accepts a so-called road map that includes a wall that subverts Palestinian
hopes of statehood? The fence has no connection to the potential
state. All it does is tie the hands of terrorists. They cannot
accept that, not because they want a state, but because they want to kill
Israeli children. If the Palestinians don't want a fence put up, they
should stop sending killers across the open desert. If Abbas can't get
them to buy into that, then he is incapable of leading them to peace.
SoothSeeker believes he is incapable of leading the Palestinians to a real
peace settlement because they have been so heavily indoctrinated into the goal
of eradication of (as opposed to coexistence with) Israel that they cannot be
led in that direction while the fascists continue to exert their influence.
The fence will make it impossible for them to exert terror on Israel, and then
someone might be able to convince them to accept an agreement to coexist
peacefully.
- Even as Abbas talked to Israeli officials the other day about
eliminating terrorism, Sharon was approving the construction of nearly two
dozen more upscale settlements in the occupied territories. The
nature of negotiations requires that each side make moves. Sharon has
pulled back troops and dismantled some existing settlements. Abbas must
now end the terror. Then Sharon will make moves to cut back new
settlements. But since Abbas has not yet stopped terror, it is not time
for the next step on Sharon's part.
- If honest brokering does not enter the process on the U.S. and Israeli
side, the chosen people will continue to prevail over the cursed Palestinians.
Justice favors the just. Currently the Israelis are clearly more
justified in their actions and positions than the Palestinians. Until
the Palestinians adopt civilized and just aspirations, they should continue to
be frustrated in achieving any of them.
The long and short of it is that the Palestinians had a
chance to make a legitimate claim on the so-called occupied territories in 1948,
and they chose instead to exert an illegitimate claim through an illegal
invasion. They have never acted to rectify that foolish and evil choice,
but they kept their wagon hitched to the Arab horse, which failed on several
other occasions (esp. 1967 and 1973) to destroy Israel, and then finally
abandoned their Palestinian pawns when they realized they could not prevail.
Now the Palestinians depend on terrorism and the world's misguided liberal
sympathy to exert pressure on Israel to give up its security in exchange for a
short-term peace.
Their goal, as is made clear by their own rhetoric, is to
assert the "Right of Return" so that they can bring millions of people into
Israel who never lived there a day in their lives, become citizens, vote the
Jews out of the government, and thus destroy Israel from within, replacing it
with a Palestinian dictatorship. This negative aspiration makes anyone who
subscribes to it worthy of permanent exile. Until the Palestinians change
their attitude, they don't deserve a state of their own, much less a refugee
camp anywhere in the world which serves as a breeding ground for murderers of
children. They are not freedom fighters because they are not fighting for
freedom. They are fascists because they are fighting for totalitarianism
and ethnic purity. That is not something the U.S. would tolerate anywhere
else in the world.
09/10/2004
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