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Heaven On Earth
Category Archives: Palestinian Culture
Palestinian Statehood: The Cognitive Egocentrist’s Dream Solution
Working on my book, I have not had time to post at the blog (or to respond to some of the more interesting threads). So I post this piece, partly because it’s so important, partly because I don’t have the time to fisk the deeply dishonest piece it refers to, by Malley and Agha, which reeks of condescension both for the readers of the NYRB and for the Palestinians whose childish reasoning they present without a hint of criticism… all of which disguises their demopathic agenda.
They don’t want a state
Sever Plocker
Published: 07.08.09, 17:54 / Israel OpinionResearchers increasingly argue that Palestinians uninterested in statehood
Do the Palestinians want a state? This question sounds like a provocative one. Isn’t it patently clear that the Palestinian national movement aspires to realize its goals by establishing a Palestinian state? Isn’t it patently clear that the ethos of political sovereignty has guided the dreams and struggles of the Palestinian people for ages?
Well, no. It’s not patently clear.
More and more Mideast affairs researchers are today willing to respond to the question about whether the Palestinians want a state with a “no.” Some of them offer a hesitant “no,” while others offer a resounding “no.”
In a June 11 New York Review of Books article, written by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, they two prominent experts argue the following: “Unlike Zionism, for whom statehood was the central objective, the Palestinian fight was primarily about other matters…Today, the idea of Palestinian statehood is alive, but mainly outside of Palestine…A small fraction of Palestinians, mainly members of the Palestinian Authority’s elite, saw the point of building state institutions, had an interest in doing so, and went to work. For the majority, this kind of project could not have strayed further from their original political concerns…”
This inverts my understanding. (Please, readers, correct me if I’m wrong.) Many inhabitants of both the WB and the GS wanted statehood and peace; the leadership never did. When Arafat said “no” at Camp David, the younger members of his delegation wept (Dennis Ross anecdote). Arafat never used his militant credentials to sell the idea of a two-state solution to his people (really to his honor-group of Palestinian and Arab alpha males), but to reassure them that this was the two-phased solution to wiping out Israel.
The two experts sum up by arguing that the notion of a Palestinian state is perceived as a foreign import, and as a convenient outlet for foreign elements who interfere with the Palestinian people’s independent wishes. They point to the “transformation of the concept of Palestinian statehood from among the more revolutionary to the more conservative.” Moreover, Agha and Malley argue that in the past, when Yasser Arafat seemingly endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state and even threatened to declare its establishment, he did not adopt an unequivocal stance and did not make his intentions clear. Since Arafat’s death, the notion of statehood lost the remaining popular support it enjoyed.
So it’s the West’s fault for wishing the Palestinians well that the two-state solution has failed. Agha and Malley are channeling the Dominating Cognitive Egocentrist‘s projections: “I assume “they” are plotting to destroy and enslave me, because that’s what I’m doing to them.”
Studies in Demopathy: Inside the Haifa U. Muslim Apartheid Speech
I have often written here about the problem of demopaths” — people who have no respect for the human rights of others, but complain bitterly about others not respecting their human rights. Recently a the head of the radical Islamic Movement‘s northern branch spoke at Haifa University at the bequest of the Muslim students there.
Sheikh Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement’s northern branch.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
In order to prevent violence, Jewish students were excluded from the talk.
One student, however, slipped in unnoticed and reported back to the rest of the world. With his permission, I post his remarks. (HT: Steve Antler)
A Case for Democracy
Nir MeitalOne of my father’s favorite jokes is the following. A man is driving down highway number one, when his wife calls and says in great concern, “darling, the news channel has reported that there is a crazy maniac driving in the wrong direction on highway One!” The man laughs and answers, “One maniac? I see at least a hundred!”
Listening to the ongoing criticism about Israel, I sometimes feel like the man on highway number one. While attempting to drive with its fellow nations down the road leading west, all Israel can see looking out the window in its warm and humid middleastern highway, is the license plates of countries racing by, turning their backs on every western value imaginable, and honking their horn towards the one country that at present time rejects the tendency in the Middle East to shoot protestors to death on the street or insist that women travel with a male guardian.
Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic movement’s extreme northern branch spoke at the University of Haifa today, and toyed with this rather worn out mantra. The University that has learned its lesson from previous Jewish-Arab riots has raised concerns for the safety and peace of its students, and thus decided to separate the two camps. I must note that after witnessing the heated spirits on both sides, I found myself grateful for this rather superficial and seemingly absurd separation.
The result of the separation was the following. A large corridor filled with members of every political group from within the Jewish student body, waving flags, pounding on the floor and making every effort to disturb the speakers in the downstairs hall. One protestor told me, that if Salah has achieved one good thing in his speech, it was the momentary “shalom Bait”, peace and unity, between the Jews. Any other day, this student body would be divided into camps and parties identifying with Yisrael Beitenu to Chadash, and anything in between. Today they stood united. Amazing how far a slight delegitimization of one’s right to sovereignty can go.
Flushing out the Honor Madness: Palestinian Leadership responds to Netanyahu’s Speech
I recently had a conversation with a friend about the Jews in a major city in the southern USA. He told me that by and large what they got in Sunday school was the classic AIPAC-style narrative: “The Arabs won’t accept Israel and want to destroy it; Israel’s efforts to make peace fail because the only thing they understand is strength, and if you make concessions they’ll interpret it as weakness and press for more.” After a moment of silence in which, presumably, I was supposed to cluck at the hopeless backwardness of such a “narrative” (which as readers of this blog know I call the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm and consider fairly accurate), I asked, “So where do you find this narrative inaccurate.”
His response was so perfect that I wrote it down to use in my book.
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The vast of majority everywhere want a roof over their heads, to sleep peacefully at night, enjoy their families, food in their bellies and to say good morning to their neighbors and spouses.
Now how was this a response to my question? It had nothing to do with real data from the Arab world, nothing from the various responses of Arab leaders to various concessions Israel has engaged in since 1993. It’s his liberal cognitive egocentrism, raised to the level of an axiom of human nature (confusing human and humane), and then applied as a negation of any evidence to the contrary. If all people are like this, then the Arabs can’t be like that narrative. QED. PCP. The whole world is like us.
I cited for him the comment of one of the Arab rioters in 1936 to the Peel Commission’s question about why he so hated the Jews, if the Zionists have made the land far more prosperous than it had been before they came:
“You say we are better off: you say my house has been enriched by the strangers who have entered it. But it is my house, and I did not invite the strangers in, or ask them to enrich it, and I do not care how poor it is if I am only master of it” (Weathered by Miracles, p. 207).
He responded: “Do you think they all think like that?”
Good question. I say yes, I sound like a bigot. If I say no, then where are we?
Do they all think that way? Or is this irredentism “merely” an expression of the male mafia, the alpha males who crave vengeance, the political/religious leadership, “the Arab street”? What about the “vast, silent majority.” I’m not sure. I think that many… most… maybe even the vast majority would accept my friend’s lovely depiction of a prosperous and peaceful life. (It is, after all, at the core of the messianic promise.)
What I do know is that as long as honor-shame culture, with its demanded solidarity — asabiyyah — prevails, and as long as it’s enforced with such vicious brutality, whatever your “average Palestinian” thinks, he or she will have no ability to change the dynamic of the HSJP narrative. And when mothers can be driven to killing their daughters by a merciless community that demands it for the sake of family honor, then it can’t just be a problem of elites.
I give this anecdote as a preface to the following post on Palestinian reaction to Netanyahu’s speech, because so much of the dynamics we disagreed upon show up in unvarnished form. Netanyahu clearly struck on honor-shame chord.
If it were a chess game, Netanyahu’s speech would be a “?!.” “?” because if the Palestinians had responded intelligently — even while retaining their desire to destroy Israel — they could have said, “Fine. Let’s get on with it.” Then, when they got their demilitarized state, they could go ahead and militarize and no one could stop them. It’s a “!” because, true to form, Palestinian “pride” trumps (what we define as rational) self-interest at every turn. As a result we have the spectacle of unvarnished zero-sum Arab irredentism in response to a speech that called for basic mutuality — two states for two religious communities. Short of everything, it’s Palestinian suffering.
Below are a series of responses from Palestinian leaders that display all the elements of an honor-shame culture under conditions of humiliation which needs to be fixed by shedding blood — at once childishly violent in rhetoric, and violently malevolent in intent.
There are two questions here: 1) Is this the real reaction, or posturing? Even as posturing, it’s significant. Why take these mad postures? As bargaining tools? Possibly.
2) Is the West listening and registering this? And if so, do they have the wisdom and foresight to tell the Palestinian leadership to grow up and, as Obama might put it: “join the 21st century.”
Palestinian Reactions to Netanyahu’s Speech
‘Akin to a Declaration of War’; ‘Netanyahu is a Liar and a Crook’; ‘The Speech is Worthless and Warrants a Determined Response’; ‘Not In a Thousand Years… Would [He] Find a Single Palestinian’ to Agree to His ConditionsIsraeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s June 14, 2009 speech was met with hostility by all Palestinian factions. The Palestinians called Netanyahu “a liar and a crook,” stated that the only purpose of his “hollow” speech was to placate U.S. President Barack Obama, and claimed that he was effectively ruining the chances for peace. Senior Palestinian Authority officials called on theU.S. to force Israel to implement the two-state solution, and on the PA to toughen its positions. Hamas called on PA to stop security coordination and to reassess their position on negotiations with Israel.
Following are excerpts from reactions in the PA press to the speech:
PA: Netanyahu’s Speech Has Ruined the Chance for Peace
Palestinian Authority negotiations department head Saeb ‘Ariqat stated: “The peace process can be compared to a turtle, and now that Netanyahu has turned it over, it’s lying on its back. Not in a thousand years will Netanyahu find a single Palestinian who would agree to the conditions stipulated in his speech. The speech is a unilateral declaration ending the political negotiations on permanent status issues.” [1]
This is an eloquent expression of the arrogance of prime divider elites. They will speak for their people without the slightest hesitation. Essentially, ‘Ariqat [also known as Erakat], the main expounder of the Jenin Massacre in 2002, is condemning his people to decades if not generations of suffering, but he not only doesn’t care, he makes no room for the slightest dissent. No proud Palestinian would stand for this (and I guess, by implication, no one shameful enough to accept the deal, is a Palestinian). So Erakat’s implicit answer to my friend’s query is: “Yes! Every Palestinian thinks this way.” (NB: Erakat’s considered a moderate, not a racist who demeans Palestinians by thinking they’re all war- and hate-mongers.)
The Two-State To Nowhere: Another Futile Attempt At Appeasement
Every once in a while it’s useful to consult a historian with a memory that goes beyond the “so fifteen minutes ago” of the current ADD generation. Here Alex Grobman explains why Netanyahu’s speech touched a nerve in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians. It’s not the Politically-correct Paradigm PCP — let’s compromise and get on with our lives in a spirit of mutuality — it’s the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm HSJP — we can only breathe if you die. Or, as Yasser Arafat put it so delicately:
“We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel…. For us it is shame and injustice. We shall fight on to victory. Even for decades, for generations, if necessary.”
And, suprise! they’re still fighting.
The passages Grobman cites — all expressions of the honor-shame world of Arab irredentism when it comes to Israel — shed a particularly revealing light on President Obama’s (falsely) empathic remark about Palestinian suffering being intolerable. If it were “intolerable” they would do something about it. Instead they scream foul at Netanyahu’s speech and dig in for more suffering. Obama’s inability to understand this — and I think it is an incomprehensibility that pervades Western culture which is why I’m writing my current book — is at the heart of the dysfunctional relationship we have with the Arab world. “Suffering? You pussies ain’t seem nothing yet. We can take it, and you better be ready to take it. And if you protect yourself from our misery… we’ll call you apartheid racists.”
The Two-State To Nowhere: Another Futile Attempt At Appeasement
“There is reason to believe that [the president] cherished the illusion that presumably he, and he alone, as head of the United States, could bring about a settlement – if not a reconciliation — between Arabs and Jews. I remember muttering to myself as I left the White House after hearing the President discourse in rambling fashion about Middle Eastern Affairs, ‘I‘ve read of men who thought they might be King of the Jews and other men who thought they might be King of the Arabs, but this is the first time I ‘ve listened to a man who dreamt of being King of both the Jews and Arabs.’”1 Herbert Feis, a State Department economic advisor, did not say this about President Obama’s address in Cairo in June 2009, but after Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, King of Saudi Arabia, in February 1945. Roosevelt wanted the Arabs to allow thousands of Jews from Europe to immigrate to Palestine to which Ibn Saud responded, “Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to Jews.”2
George Antonius, an Arab nationalist, reiterated this point when he said, “no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.”3
Attempts to solve the Arab/Israeli conflict regularly fail because of the refusal to acknowledge that this dispute has never been about borders, territory or settlements, but about the Arabs refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. “The struggle with the Zionist enemy is not a matter of borders, but touches on the very existence of the Zionist entity,” declared an Arab spokesman.4
Unlike the Nazis who carefully concealed the Final Solution, Hamas and the Palestine Authority openly avow their intentions in their Charter and Covenant and in the Arab media which is available in English on the Internet on MEMRI and the Palestinian Media Watch.
For Hamas liberating all of Palestine to establish an Islamic state requires a holy war against Israel. Anyone daring to sign away even “a grain of sand in Palestine in favor of the enemies of God…who have seized the blessed land” should have their “hand be cut off.”5
The Problem is the Settlements: The Lack of Palestinian Ones
President Obama has fingered the settlements as his first item of business, a strategy of dubious merit except insofar as it uses the issue as a pawn sacrifice. As for the ways the Palestinians need to “belly up to the bar,” it’s fairly vague. Israelis, of course (and, I’d argue, anyone who’s paying attention), are worried that despite the Arabs’ extraordinary ability to position themselves as the proponents of the “two-state solution,” are not at all committed to what Western PCPers assume — i.e., that they accept Israel as a Jewish state with a right to live in peace.
On the contrary, too much evidence suggests that they are committed, one way or another, to the destruction of the state of Israel, and that the “two-state solution” is just another term for the “Phased Plan” for eliminating Israel.
I’d like to propose something that can test Palestinian intentions in concrete terms that will not only reassure Israelis profoundly, but benefit the Palestinian refugees. To my mind, the greatest sign that the Palestinian Authority had no intention of pursuing Oslo as a way to achieve peace, but as a Trojan Horse, is the fact that, once they had control of significant tracts of land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they never made the slightest move to get Palestinian refugees out of the camps and into real housing. The scandal of how the Arab and Palestinian leadership have treated their refugees is the most revealing story in the long and allegedly complex conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis.
I suggest that President Obama demand, publicly, and in the same strong terms with which he addresses the Israelis, that the PA begin immediately building settlements for Palestinian refugees on the lands available to them in the West Bank, so that they can begin living decent lives. This would be an enormous boon to the Palestinian economy, it would mobilize the significant talents the Palestinians have in the building industry, and would signal to the Israelis that the “right of return” — i.e., the demand that Israel commit demographic suicide — is not lurking in the background of the “Arab Peace Plan.”
Nothing prevents the Palestinians from doing this. They would surely get a great deal of (Western) funding to do it. And it would embody President Obama’s call for Arab governments that are “by the people and for the people.”
UPDATE: Noam, from the Blog Promised Land posted the following on my suggestion:
This idea is somewhat disconnected from the reality of the West Bank, let alone Gaza: one can’t really build anything – certainly not a city for hundreds of thousands of people – without Israel’s consent, and Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinians to do any significant work outside the major cities (which are overcrowded as it is). And in Gaza, Israel doesn’t allow any sort of building material in – amongst many other things, from books to pumpkins – so that the Palestinians there can’t even rebuild the houses that were destroyed during operation Cast Lead.
But if we leave all that aside, what is Prof. Landes really asking? The way I see it, he demands from the Palestinians to give up one of their major claims before Israel has even considered to end the occupation, and just in order to prove that their heart is pure. Why should they agree? I don’t support a return of all the 48′ refugees, but I do understand the Palestinian demand to solve this issue on the negotiating table, much in the same way Israel refuses to define its borders until its security concerns are dealt with.
(Having said this, I agree that from a humanitarian point of view, the refugees problem should be solved ASAP, but we are discussing here the political implications of the issue).
As for the “demographic suicide” – well, Israelis should certainly be worried about that, but not because of the Palestinian refugees, but due to the possibility that the ideas of those who oppose the two-state solution – like Prof. Landes – will prevail, and Israelis will be left with the entire land from the sea to the Jordan river, but also with the choice between an Apartheid state and a non-Jewish one.
To which I responded with the following comment:
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Thanks for the post on my suggestion.
Altho you do have a “humanitarian concession” clause, I find your position on Palestinian refiugees as “bargaining chips” to be fairly horrific. Should Israel have kept their 800,000 refugees from 1948 in refugee camps for the last 60 years as a counter-bargaining chip?
The Palestinian and Arab leadership’s treatment of their refugees — the camps are really prison camps — is nothing short of scandalous. It’s index of their malevolence: the misery of their own people is a weapon aimed at destroying Israel. it shows the Palestinian people as the sacrificial victim on the altar of Arab hatred.
So i don’t think it’s “giving up one of their major claims” to start settling the refugees, i think it’s renouncing one of their most heinous policies. It doesn’t prove their heart is pure, it just proves its not black as night, it proves they’ve stopped the revolting practice of inflicting misery on their own people in order to attack Israel and plan her destruction.
I think if Israel were to engage in anything even remotely similar to this — say not building shelters in Sderot so they could point to children killed by gaza qassams for international sympathy — you’d be outraged. So what I suspect is going on here is an example of a fairly widespread unconscious progressive racism in which the Palestinians are not expected to behave decently even towards their own people, much less Israel. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations: just as you don’t scold your cat for catching a mouse, you don’t scold the Palestinians for abusing their own people.
In the final analysis, getting rid of the refugee problem is not a bargaining chip, its an anti-bargaining chip. If the Palestinians renounced the claim to return, they would bring peace much closer, by reassuring Israel they were serious about real peace.
Finally, on the subject of the two-state solution — I’m not against the idea, I’m against it now (i’m a member of peace-when, not peace-now). Eventually, when Palestinian leadership show signs of willingness to be a civil polity rather than a rogue and malignant state, I’m all in favor. (And this is something they can start doing right away.)
Now, “two-states” is not a “solution” but a recipe for war. Does that matter to you, in your support of the ‘two-state “solution”‘?
His response is interesting. I encourage readers here to go to his blog and respond — respectfully. I don’t think the way to argue is to call names. His response to my almost calling him names shows a good capacity for self-criticism.
Flirting with Reality: Goldberg reviews Morris on Palestinian Irredentism
Nietzsche once remarked that thinking is like diving into an icy pond, going to the bottom and grasping a stone from the depths. Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, gets his feet wet and comes running out.
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Published: May 20, 2009In March, Muhammad Dahlan, a former chief of one of thePalestinian Authority’s multifarious secret police organizations, and once a tacit ally of the C.I.A., defended Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, from the charge, made by Hamas, that it had previously recognized Israel’s right to exist.
ONE STATE, TWO STATES
Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
By Benny Morris
240 pp. Yale University Press. $26
First Chapter: ‘One State, Two States’ (May 24, 2009)“They say that Fatah has asked them to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and this is a big deception,” Dahlan said. “For the 1,000th time, I want to reaffirm that we are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Rather we are asking Hamas not to do so, because Fatah never recognized Israel’s right to exist.”
This was not a helpful statement, at least not to the peace-processors in Washington and in Europe, and to their diminishing band of confederates in Israel and the Palestinian territories. But Dahlan’s comment helps buttress the main argument of Benny Morris’s new book, “One State, Two States.” Morris, a professor of history at Ben- Gurion University in Israel, argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state comprised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.
Nice beginning, especially when speaking to an audience of self-selecting liberal cognitive egocentrists.
Morris is equally dismissive of those who believe that a so-called one-state solution might work in place of a two-state solution. Muslim anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide that separates Arab from Jew, among other realities, make this notion a fantasy. In this short book Morris asserts there is no one-state solution to the Middle East crisis, and no two-state solution. Morris does promote the possibility of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, but he makes the case anemically and cursorily.
This is not to say that Morris isn’t convincing at times, for instance when he says that one-staters, like the constitutional scholar Daniel Lazar and the historian Tony Judt, who envision a utopian post-Zionist future, in fact are calling for Israel to be eliminated.
Yet Morris, like Judt, has an almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state. The difference is that Morris does not believe that Israel’s mistakes — even the settlement movement that colonized the West Bank — are what might doom it. The culprit is the implacable fanaticism of Arab Islamists, who are unwilling to accept a Jewish national presence in what is thought of as Arab land, a position that hasn’t changed since the meeting of the third Palestine Arab Congress, in 1920, which rejected Jewish claims to the land since “Palestine is the holy land of the two Christian and Muslim worlds.” Subsequent events that seemingly contradict this belief — most notably, the P.L.O.’s ostensible recognition of Israel in 1988 — have been staged for the benefit of gullible Westerners, Morris writes.
Most people still think that the PLO changed their charter. They voted to change their charter at some point in the future, and people like Hanan Ashrawi voted against it. Part of the reason we don’t know about it is that both the media , authors like Graham Usher (chaps. 10-11), and the proponents of the Oslo Process like President Clinton were so eager to move on that they pretended that it had already happened. Details and extensive references here.
When on journalist reported on Ashrawi’s no-vote — on the basis of good honor-shame concerns (“This will appear to be a succumbing to Israeli dictate.”) — she was told by her editor that that can’t be true because, “Ashrawi is a moderate.”
On the Power of Statelessness: Why Palestinians prefer not to have a state according to Robert Kaplan
In a mediocre article, replete with logical non-sequiturs (especially at the end), Robert Kaplan, national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, tries to spin off from more substantive article by Jakub Grygiel (“The Power of Statelessness: the Withering Appeal of Governing”). Although the analysis is superficial and the policy suggestions at odds with the analysis, it’s worth looking at for both what it occasionally says that’s valuable, and as an example of how hard it is, even for smart people, to think clearly about the Arab-Israeli conflict. (HT/YP)
Do the Palestinians Really Want a State?
Why landlessness may be its own source of power
by Robert D. KaplanThe statelessness of Palestinian Arabs has been a principal feature of world politics for more than half a century. It is the signature issue of our time. The inability of Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord of mutual recognition and land-for-peace has helped infect the globe with violence and radicalism—and has long been a bane of American foreign policy. While the problems of the Middle East cannot be substantially blamed on the injustice done to Palestinians, that injustice has nonetheless played a role in weakening America’s position in the region.
Obviously, part of the problem has been Israeli intransigence. Despite seeming to submit to territorial concessions, one Israeli government after another has quietly continued to bolster illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The new Israeli government may be the worst yet: Its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, is so extreme in his anti-Arab views that he makes the right-wing Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appear like the centrist he isn’t. The prospects for peace under this government are fundamentally bleak.
Alright, so Kaplan’s not the sharpest pencil in the box when it comes to Israeli politics. But all this is really just a set-up. In the meantime, I think it worth noting that if the “moderate” Abbas were an Israeli politician, whose views in his native tongue were duly translated and broadcast globally by the likes of Ha-Aretz, then he’d appear as a far-right, ultra-nationalist, racist, intransigent, war-monger. It’s only the skew of comparing politicians from a civil polity with those from a prime divider society that permits the kind of cheap throw-away lines such as that used by Kaplan above. Indeed, my guess is that if any Israeli politician were to say in Hebrew the kinds of things Abbas says in Arabic, he’d be debounced as an intransigent and banned as a racist.
And yet this Israeli government faithfully represents the Israeli electorate, which is in utter despair over the impossibility of finding credible partners on the Palestinian side with which to negotiate. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. President Mahmoud Abbas’s more moderate Fatah movement may be willing to live in peace with Israel, but it has insufficient political legitimacy among Palestinians to negotiate such a deal. With Fatah and Hamas facing off against each other, the Palestinians are simply too divided to plausibly meet Israel across the table. And because the Palestinians are unable to cut a deal, a majority of Israelis, as shown by the recent election results, have apparently given up any hope for peace.
Well that’s quite a feat. The despair of the Israeli electorate is not just over the present “stalemate,” but about the repeated failure of concessions to ameliorate the situation. Oslo “Peace” Process (1993-2000), leaving Lebanon (2000), leaving Gaza (2005), all have led to more aggression, including suicide bombing. It’s this ferocious and relentless will to aggress on the part of the Palestinians, fed by a media that constantly incites to genocidal hatreds, that has them worried.
But there is a deeper structural and philosophical reason why the Palestinians remain stateless—a reason more profound than the political narrative would indicate.
It’s nice of Kaplan to recognize that (his and the consensually accepted) “political narrative” doesn’t get to the point. But instead of going to matters of honor and shame, he goes to an interesting, but largely “rational” analysis of the strategic advantages of statelessness.
It is best explained by associate Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel, in his brilliant essay, “The Power of Statelessness: the Withering Appeal of Governing” (Policy Review April/May 2009). In it, Grygiel does not discuss the Palestinians in particular, but rather the attitude of stateless people in general.
Statehood is no longer a goal, he writes. Many stateless groups “do not aspire to have a state,” for they are more capable of achieving their objectives without one. Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power.
Interesting point, except that it ignores the past. At no point in this process have any Palestinian leaders showed any real desire for statehood. The “now” is an a-historical attempt to describe a “new” development.
New communication technologies allow people to achieve virtual unity without a state, even as new military technologies give stateless groups a lethal capacity that in former decades could be attained only by states. Grygiel explains that it is now “highly desirable” not to have a state—for a state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action. A group like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the author notes, could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Why would it want responsibility for providing safety and services to all Lebanese? Why would it want to provide the Israelis with so many tempting targets of reprisal? Statelessness offers a level of “impunity” from retaliation.
But the most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space.
And of course, if the world is willing to dump on Israel for its inherent messiness as a state, and give the stateless a free ride, why not?
Grygiel raises a challenging proposition. If his theory is correct, then the Palestinians may never have a state, because at a deep psychological level, enough of them—or at least the groups that speak in their name—may not really want one. Statehood would mean openly compromising with Israel, and, because of the dictates of geography, living in an intimate political and economic relationship with it. Better the glory of victimhood, combined with the power of radical abstractions! As a stateless people, Palestinians can lob rockets into Israel, but not be wholly blamed in the eyes of the international community. Statehood would, perforce, put an end to such license.
The closest that Israelis and Palestinians ever came to peace was at the end of the Clinton Administration in 2000, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the center-left Labor Party offered a slew of concessions to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat—only to have Arafat reject them. Arafat’s epitaph was that he remained loyal to the cause of his people, that he never compromised, and that he was steadfast to the bitter end. He may have seen that as a more morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion to a life of statelessness than that of making the unenchanting concessions associated with achieving statehood.
Even if Grygiel’s theory is right, the United States should apply ample pressure on the new Israeli government to compromise with the Palestinians—ratcheting up the rhetoric and slowing down arms deliveries if necessary. It should do this because it is the right thing to do, and because it will help the U.S. to reestablish credibility in the Muslim world. But the U.S. should also brace itself for an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that may never end, because the Palestinians may already have what they want.
Now there’s a brilliant ending to an otherwise interesting article. It’s as if he says, “ignore what I just said and act as if the prevailing paradigm — force Israeli concessions in the hopes of bringing out Palestinian moderation — were still good. Because it’s “the right thing to do.” By whose standards?
Does this man even believe what he says? Or is he just bowing to the “conventional wisdom”? And one wonders how phenomena like the “emperor’s new clothes” can happen.
In any case, what a pedestrian conclusion: wake up and go back to sleep.
The Pregnant War Correspondent and Her Buddies: “Only in Israel…”
Yogi Berra was famous for his revealing bloopers. Someone once said to him, “Yogi, did you know that the Lord Mayor of Dublin is Jewish?” “Only in America…” he responded without missing a beat.
And where, asks Stephanie Gutman in her critical study, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Battle for Media Supremacy, can one be a pregnant war correspondent. Only in Israel.
Now, with a variant on the theme, Stephen King (not the famous author, I think), has a piece in the Irish Times (i.e., from the land whose capital is the Dublin of Yogi Berra fame) that explores why, with seventy conflicts worldwide, almost all of which have higher casualty counts, is the Arab-Israeli conflict the obsession of the Western MSM.
There are 70 conflicts worldwide, so why do we focus on just one?
By Stephen King
Irish Examiner Wednesday, May 13, 2009Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a “Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam” march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia?
I OWE Micheál Martin an apology of sorts. I admit that when I read media reports of his discussions with Ban Ki-moon in New York at the weekend my eyes rolled up to the heavens.
The country’s most senior representative to the rest of the world has a rare opportunity to raise Ireland’s issues with the UN secretary-general and what’s his top priority? Yes, you guessed it – Gaza.
It’s not that Gaza isn’t an important issue facing the world. It is. What Gaza is not, though, is an issue where Europe, let alone Ireland, can wield much positive influence. Gaza will only be sorted when the Arab states, the US and Israel – probably in that order – decide it should be sorted.
Probably not in that order. It’ll get sorted out when the rest of the world tells the Palestinians that they need to get their act together, shed the maniacs of Hamas, stop poisoning their youth with blood libels, and get on with their lives. This one is not for the outside to decide.
But I was wrong. I had swallowed the media line. Yes, Micheál Martin and Ban Ki-moon did talk about Gaza, but it was just one subject among others.
In fact, when you look at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) press release, the first item of discussion listed was one where Ireland has a very direct interest, namely Chad.
So what caused my blood pressure to rise? Was Gaza the topic the DFA’s spindoctors were pushing? Possibly. Was the position on Gaza the most objectively newsworthy? Again, possibly: the Pope is in the region and Ireland tends to be at one end of the European spectrum of opinion on anything to do with Israel.
The third possibility, and the one that seems to me most likely, is that the media has a fixation on Israel (and its supposed crimes) which is, for want of a better word, disproportionate. That’s why the line about Gaza led several media reports of Minister Martin’s meeting.
“For want of a better word”?! It’s magnificently apt. Just as the media criticizes Israel for disproportionate use of force, the media stands guilty of disproportionate use of both coverage and criticism. If the media used the same standards of sensitivity that they apply to Israel on any of the 70 other conflicts, their (moral) equipment would blow its fuses.
If I were Jewish, I would be told I’m paranoid for thinking the world and its media are out to get me. After all, the fact that Israel is the world’s one and only Jewish state – amidst a vast ocean of Muslim states – inevitably makes many Jewish people think it’s them, and not Israel as such, which is in the media’s sights. But I’m not Jewish. Besides, just because people are paranoid doesn’t mean others aren’t out to get them.
It’s one of the nastiest pieces of criticism when people get this condescending, “why are you so paranoid” attitude, which, alas, many hyper-self-critical Jews embrace (and therefore get interviewed on NPR).
Halevi vs. Shaheen: Civilian Casualties in Gaza
TNR has run an article on the civilian casualty controversy from Operation Cast Lead. It not only ignores the lively discussion in the blogosphere which I’ve tried to keep updated here, but it also lacks a certain punch. The story is almost studiously presented as a “he said… she said,” with no assessment of the relative merit of the arguments.
Perhaps that’s just the difference between the MSM and the blogosphere, the “hands-off” impartiality of the former, and that may be to the good. But with the exception of seriously informed readers — and one can expect many of TNR’s readership to be that informed — many of the implications of what this dispute reveals would (and will) remain obscure. Notes below.
Numbers Game
by Simona Weinglass
How many civilians were killed in Gaza? Meet the people who do the counting.
Post Date Wednesday, May 06, 2009On December 27, the first morning of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead offensive in the Gaza Strip, Khalil Shaheen was driving in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City when he spotted a friend and got out of his car to say hello. Suddenly, an Israeli F-16 appeared in the sky and dropped a bomb on a building 200 feet up the road–one of many such bombings part of the IDF’s 22-day effort to stop Hamas rocket and mortar attacks on southern Israel.
The building, which Shaheen identified as a Hamas internal security headquarters, immediately collapsed, sending an observation tower flying 100 feet, hitting a woman. Pandemonium broke out on the street, where Shaheen says hundreds of schoolchildren and adults were shouting and running from the blast. Predicting the F-16′s next target, Shaheen tried to restrain a group of children from running to the street’s west side. A minute later, the plane dropped four missiles on “the ex-prisoners museum,” a community center and exhibition space for former inmates of Israeli jails. During that particular bombing, says Shaheen, no Hamas fighters were killed, just a woman in a nearby apartment building, a man in his shop, and two young girls leaving school.
Though Shaheen is not a Hamas soldier, he is on the front lines of a different battle: the P.R. war that has erupted since the end of hostilities.
I certainly hope that the author doesn’t think that this battle only erupted since the end of hostilities. It’s been going on for decades, and the misinformation from “Palestinian Sources” dominates the Western media.
On the meaning of “secular” in Arab discourse: Benny Morris and Palestinian identity
One of the most dangerous mistakes that Europeans — and more broadly, the gatekeepers of the public sphere in the West — made in late 2000 was to view the Intifada as a nationalist uprising against Israeli oppression, a cry of despair at the oppression of occupation. In so doing, they operated from certain basic axiomatic principles that had no real support in reality (independent evidence) and only appeared within the rhetorical world of Palestinian discourse tailored for Western audiences. Among the most dangerous of these axioms was the idea that Palestinians wanted their own independent state, to be, as the Israeli national anthem puts it, “free people in our own land.”
And the key corollary to this nationalist assumption was that such a nation would be a secular one, that it would separate “mosque and state” and grant everyone freedom of religion.
Nothing better illustrates liberal cognitive egocentrism, and the easy assumption that others share such liberal perspectives than this willingness to believe that Arab culture shares our commitment to separating “church and state.”
Benny Morris wrote a book on the War of Independence, 1948, during the research for which, much to his surprise, he found that it was not a “nationalist” war between Israel and Palestine, but, in the Arabs’ eyes, a Jihad, a religious war. Not only was the “secular discourse” a late phenomenon (under the influence of Soviet propaganda techniques), but never seriously held among Arab Muslims.
This came as something of an unwelcome surprise to his publishers who did not like the idea of spreading such awful and anomalous evidence to the public. They refused the book and it was only after that that Morris found the Yale University Press willing to publish it. If the gatekeepers had their way, we wouldn’t know about Jihad.
So when the Intifada broke out in 2000, the Europeans in particular were eager to believe that this was a) a local conflict between two nationalist movements, and b) by siding with the Palestinians, they would curry favor with their Muslim populations. Instead, it was the beginning of a new stage of global Jihad which targeted the Europeans as much (if slightly later) than the Israelis, and by siding with the Palestinians (actually the Jihadis) the Europeans showed just how cowardly and feckless they were — attacking their friends/allies and siding with their enemies. As a result they speeded up the process of weaponizing their own immigrant Muslim populations against them.
Benny Morris: The myth of a secular Palestine
Posted: May 13, 2009, 7:02 AM by NP EditorExcerpted from One State, Two States by Benny Morris. Published by Yale University Press. © 2009 by Benny Morris. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine — a one-state “solution” — and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, and as a corollary, al-Husseini, the Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and 1940s; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the national movement from the 1960s to Yasser Arafat’s death in November, 2004; and Hamas today — all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine.
Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in another version, to limit it to those 50,000-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.
The Palestinian vision was never — as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to Western journalists — of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (though it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power.
Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi has written that “in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, replacing Israel.” And Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: “The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance.”
This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council (PNC) never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was “a secular democratic state in Palestine.” The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a “secular, democratic Palestine.”
The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” — that is, 1917.
True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, “freedom of worship and of visit” to holy sites to all, “without discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.” And, no doubt, this was music to liberal Western ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently?
Morris makes a critical distinction here between what people say and what they do. The track record of Arabs in democratic experiments is abysmal, and believing that they will do what they say when it’s about democratic promises of, say, religious tolerance, offers us a virtual definition of what it means to be a dupe of demopaths.
Studies in Demopathy II: The Pope and Tamimi
In my second of a series on demopathy, illuminated by Nonie Darwish’s book, Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law I want to look at the remarks made by Shiekh Tayseer Tamimi, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority at what was billed as a “dialogue” and at which Tamimi, probably because of his earlier performance before Pope John Paul II in 2000, was not invited to speak.
As a preliminary, let me quote some of Darwish’s book on the issue of Muslim views of the “other” (courtesy of my Kindle):
In Islam, my religion at that time, we looked at ourselves and others very differently. “They are sinners…. Non-Muslims are sinners…. We are Muslims.” They are guilty, but we are innocent. Muslims and non-Muslims were never considered as equals in anything, not even in our imperfections as human beings. The Qur’an and the Hadith were consumed with the idea of kaffir (non-Muslim) representing “evil” and Muslim representing “good,” which caused a split in how human beings were perceived-as good and bad, superior and inferior, human and sub-human. Our Islamic education stressed the inequality between Muslims and kaffir. Kaffir is the dreaded word used against others and also against Muslims who deviate or do not follow Allah’s commands to the letter. Kaffir means “infidel,” or a person who goes astray.
She then goes on to quote both the interview with Choudary that I featured in the previous post and another with Imam Abdul Makin in an East London mosque, who, asked why Allah would tell Muslims to kill and rape innocent non-Muslims, replied, “Because non-Muslims are never innocent. They are guilty of denying Allah and his prophet.”
Darwish continues:
As to Muslims who disagree with the above views, they are also considered kuffar. On March 15, 2008, two Saudi writers, Abdullah bin Bejad al-Otaibi and Yousef Aba al-Khail, each called for a reconsideration of the Wahabi notion that all non-Muslims are kuffar, prompting a top religious figure, Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, to call for their deaths in a fatwa published on his Web site.
That is the great divide – the notion of innocence and guilt, sinners and non-sinners, Muslim and non-Muslim-that every Muslim is commanded to believe and act upon. It is how we were trained to perceive others and explains why the majority of Muslims today are silent about Islamic terrorism. The Muslim outlook regarding the rest of humanity shapes how Muslim society thinks and acts politically and culturally at all levels. That is why the two Egyptian Christian boys Mario and Andrew together with the Christian minority in Egypt have suffered for fourteen hundred years. And that is also why almost all Egyptian Muslims have been stripped of their empathy for and support of Christian Egyptians and therefore fail to stand up for their basic kaffir human rights.
With this profoundly illiberal mindset in mind, let’s look at Tamimi’s behavior and remarks.
Muslim cleric slams Israel to pope, raising anger
11 May 2009 18:27:07 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Alastair MacdonaldJERUSALEM, May 11 (Reuters) – A senior Palestinian Muslim cleric fiercely denounced Israeli policy in Jerusalem in the presence of Pope Benedict on Monday and appealed to the pope to help end what he called the “crimes” of the Jewish state.
The speech, at the end of a meeting between the pope and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy engaged in contacts among the three main religions in Jerusalem, angered both the Vatican and Israel’s chief rabbinate, which said it would boycott the dialogue forum until the Palestinians barred the cleric.
Referring to Palestinian Muslims and Christians, Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi said: “We struggle together and suffer together from the oppression of the Israeli occupation.
“We look forward together to liberation and independence and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”
The incident further marred the start of the German-born pope’s five-day tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories, after criticism by some Jews that a speech at a Holocaust memorial did not go far enough to mend Catholic-Jewish rifts.
What Do I Think of the Arab-Israeli Conflict? Answers to a Questionnaire
I was recently asked by some students from a Christian private school in Lexington to answer some questions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I post them here, just in case any readers have suggestions to make in the future when I deal with these issues.
What do you think is the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
On one level, it’s a conflict between two different people for the same territory. But there are plenty of such conflicts that have been resolved, including ones where the damages in lives destroyed and uprooted have been far more terrible than what the Palestinians refer to as the Naqba. In India and Pakistan the division created tens of millions of refugees and over a million people were slaughtered by both sides. In Cyprus, tens of thousands were uprooted to divide the island in two. so the issue is not what happened, but why this conflict, more than any other, is so impossible to solve.
Here, I think the only viable explanation is to understand the blow to Arab/Muslim honor at the creation of a free and independent state run by non-Muslims in Dar-al-Islam. (For a larger discussion of this, see here.) As the Athenians explained to the Melians: “It’s not so terrible to be conquered by those who should rule (like the Spartans, or in this case the Christians), but it is unbearable to be defeated by those who should be subject (like the Melians or, in this case, the Jews).”
If you don’t know about the Muslim principles of Dar-al-Islam (the realm of submission where Muslims rule) and Dar-al-Harb (the land of the sword, with which Muslims are at war), you can’t possibly understand either the permanent hostility of the Arabs to Israel (including their refusal to recognize her), or the willingness of the Arabs to keep the Palestinians suffering in refugee camps so that they can be used as a weapon against Israel.
By Muslim standards, the very existence of Israel is a theological blasphemy and an unbearable affront to their honor. That’s what the Naqba is about. If it were about the terrible suffering of the Palestinians who had to flee as a result of the war (which is what the “pro-”Palestinian would have us believe), then the Arabs and Palestinian leaders would have done something to make their lives better (including using a tiny fraction of the trillions of petrodollars Arab countries have taken in in the last half-century). Instead they confined them to permanent refugee camps (no cement floors allowed, they had to live in tents and the mud for years).
It’s striking that during the Oslo peace process, when the Palestinian authority had control of both refugee camps and territory, they didn’t take one refugee family out of those camps. Indeed, the problem of Oslo was not too many Israeli settlements, but of too few Palestinian settlements. The PA did not behave as if they wanted a state, but as if they wanted to destroy the Israeli state.
What solutions would you offer to solve this problem?
Even when they lie, they support (belated) Israeli claims: PCHR publishes list of Casualties
Elder of Zion has an important analysis of the casualty figures just published by PCHR, the premier, UN-accredited Human Rights organization in the Gaza Strip. Not only do they transparently misrepresent Hamas and Islamic Jihad “activists” as civilians, but, when you do the math, they support the Israeli claims that only 12 people died near the Jabalya school. For the full post with links, go to the original posting.
PCHR lies about “civilians” and agrees with IDF about Jabalya
PCHR finally came out with the English translation of their list of victims of the Gaza operation, and already a number of things merit attention.
PTWatch, in the comments, quickly looked at Hamas’ list of “martyrs” from Gaza on its Al Qassam website and immediately found four people who Hamas happily claimed as members of their terrorist group – and who PCHR called “civilians.”
#576 Ayman Mohammed Mohammed ‘Afana
PCHR -> civilian
AlQassam -> martyr & fighter
#959 Amir Yousif Mahmoud al-Mansi
PCHR -> civilian
AlQassam -> martyr & fighter
#406 Ali Zuheir Mahmoud al-Houbi
PCHR -> civilian
AlQassam -> martyr & fighter
#133 Mohammed Salah Hassan al-Sawaf
PCHR -> civilian
AlQassam -> martyr & fighter
To this list you can add #257, Ayman Fou’ad Eid al-Nahhal, whom PCHR identifies as a “policeman/civilian.”
And Hamas clearly isn’t publicizing the names of all of its members. These are just the ones on their website that they admit were killed. Both parties are lying.
There are other terrorists listed as “civilians,” such as #864, Tareq Mohammed Nemer Abu ‘Amsha, who CAMERA noted that Ma’an listed as a member of Islamic Jihad al-Quds Brigades.
Intriguingly, some of the terrorists that CAMERA mentioned, who were listed in the weekly PCHR casualty reports, are mysteriously missing from the final report. Is PCHR protecting itself from listing too many dead terrorists? Were they never killed to begin with? It is something that people should be asking PCHR.
One other relevant part of the report: PCHR lists people who were killed “near” and “opposite” the al-Fakhoura School in the Jabalya camp on January 6th. You may recall that the UNRWA told me explicitly that they stood by the casualty figures of 30-50 dead at the school even after the IDF claimed that only 12 were killed. The PCHR itself claimed at the time that 27 civilians were killed instantly at the school.
Latest Poll of Palestinians Illustrates the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism
The latest polls raise troubling issues which, at the hands of Michael Bar-Zohar’s analysis, sounds a lot like the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism. But then again, how reliable are polls of Palestinians (or anyone). The very tone and context in which the questions are asked can have a huge impact on the answers one gets in any circumstance, a fortiori, in an honor-shame culture.
Comments welcome.
A tragedy of misconceptions
By MICHAEL BAR-ZOHAR
Jerusalem Post, Mar 2, 2009 21:03 | Updated Mar 3, 2009 20:34A survey published on February 5 by the prestigious Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian polling institute, indicates that 46.7 percent of the Palestinians believe that Hamas defeated Israel in the recent fighting in Gaza; 50.8% (compared to 39.3% last April) believe that the rocket attacks should continue, and only 20.8% believe that they are harmful to Palestinian interests. Finally, 55% are convinced that terrorist acts should continue.
These figures illustrate a major aspect of the confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians and, on a wider scope, of the West and the Arab world: a tragedy of misconceptions, a confrontation of two societies that do not understand each other and naively believe that people on the other side have the same way of thinking and reasoning as them. As long as both sides persist in this erroneous perception of each other, there is going to be no peace in the Middle East.
In 1997 the Four Mothers organization was founded. Its goal was the full pullout of the IDF from south Lebanon. Every year, Four Mothers said, we are losing 25 to 30 soldiers in the battle with Hizbullah. Isn’t it a pity to sacrifice these young lives? Let’s pull out of Lebanon, and the Lebanese will leave us in peace. The Four Mothers won and in 2000 prime minister Ehud Barak evacuated every single inch of Lebanese territory.
But the result was the opposite. Nobody in the Arab world believed that Israel had pulled out of Lebanon because of its concern for 25 casualties a year. The retreat was perceived in the Arab world as a victory by Hizbullah over the IDF, and the logical conclusion of Hizbullah and other extremist organizations was that they should continue fighting till Israel’s final defeat. The late Faisal Husseini, a respected Palestinian leader, once told me openly: “Michael, if you don’t agree to our demands [about Jerusalem], we’ll talk to you in Lebanese.” Even the sophisticated Husseini thought that the Hizbullah formula was the one that brought results.
The Child, Death, and the Truth: Esther Schapira Weighs in Again
Esther Schapira, whose groundbreaking work on al Durah represented the earliest reconsideration outside Israel, and whose material I used extensively (with her generous permission) in my own documentaries, has now come out with a new study. Given how much (she has subsequently admitted), intimidation played a role in her modest conclusions last time (“the Israelis didn’t do it,” but nothing on what did happen), this claim of staging is an important stage in the al Durah critique.
As soon as I can, I’ll put up a translation.
The Folly of Generosity: David Pryce-Jones comments on Taba Donors Meeting
David Pryce-Jones, author of The Closed Circle, one of the better books on Arab Honor-Shame culture, has a piece at NRO on the 4.5 billion promised to the Palestinians of Gaza, rewarded for electing an vicious government that has brought disaster on them. Nothing like making sure history will repeat itself. Dan Pipes has asked if the donor nations — especially the Western ones, but even the Arab ones, can be so stupid, and concludes they have to be dishonest. Pryce-Jones elucidates on this madness.
The Rentier Population
David Pryce Jones
NRO
Wednesday, March 04, 2009$4.5 billion: That’s what a conference of donors has just decided to give to Gaza, and that’s in addition to the hundreds of millions already paid out by United Nations agencies. True, about half the new money is due to come from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, and they rarely deliver what they promise. According to Mrs. Clinton, the United States is in for almost a billion, and she seems to think this is fine. A rentier is someone who lives off the labour of others by simply cashing dividends, and this cascade of dollars makes the Gazans a unique example of an entire rentier population. No other people in the history of the world have ever lived at the expense of others on this scale.
Of course, rentiers are generally well-off aristocrats. Here we have an impoverished, dramatically unproductive society as rentiers. Another way of putting this is that the Gazans have become the first rentier welfare nation in history. What’s worth asking is, why, if anyone can claim the title of rentire welfare state, why the Gazans, whose addiction to self-destructive violence will, in any future, honest historiography, become legendary in the annals of nationhood?
And what did they do to deserve their rentier dividends? Easy. They elected Hamas to govern them, in the certain knowledge that Hamas as good Islamists are bound to declare jihad with the purpose of wiping out Israel. Sure enough. Hamas duly fired daily barrages of rockets and mortars into Israel. Polls show that large percentages of the Gazans approved. A day came earlier this year when Israel had had enough, and went to war.
The number of pundits who have explained to their Western audiences that the Gazans chose Hamas because Fatah was corrupt is legion. But if that were the case, they could have voted for more liberal parties, dedicated to “transparency.” Instead, they chose the people who promised them, as Muslim Arabs, the return of their honor, the destruction of Israel.
Puzzled in Gaza… Not if you know about Pallywood
A devastating account of an eye-witness to the scene in Gaza which contradicts every impression the Western MSM gave, from the high civilian casualties, the infrastructure devastation, the intensification of support for Hamas, the humanitarian crisis. Yvonne Green, a poetess, may have been puzzled on viewing a largely intact Gaza Strip of inhabitants terrorized by rather than supportive of Hamas, but those who paid close attention, are not. (H/T: MHB)
Mar 2, 2009 20:58 | Updated Mar 2, 2009 21:10
Puzzled in Gaza
By YVONNE GREENI’m a poet, an English Jew and a frequent visitor to Israel. Deeply disturbed by the reports of wanton slaughter and destruction during Operation Cast Lead, I felt I had to see for myself. I flew to Tel Aviv and on Wednesday, January 28, using my press card to cross the Erez checkpoint, I walked across the border into Gaza where I was met by my guide, a Palestinian journalist. He asked if I wanted to meet with Hamas officials. I explained that I’d come to bear witness to the damage and civilian suffering, not to talk politics.
A Palestinian man holds bags of rice before their distribution to Palestinians at a United Nations food distribution center in Sha’ati refugee camp in Gaza City.
What I saw was that there had been precision attacks made on all of Hamas’ infrastructure. Does UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon criticize the surgical destruction of the explosives cache in the Imad Akhel Mosque, of the National Forces compound, of the Shi Jaya police station, of the Ministry of Prisoners? The Gazans I met weren’t mourning the police state. Neither were they radicalized. As Hamas blackshirts menaced the street corners, I witnessed how passersby ignored them.
THERE WERE empty beds at Shifa Hospital and a threatening atmosphere. Hamas is reduced to wielding its unchallengeable authority from extensive air raid shelters which, together with the hospital, were built by Israel 30 years ago. Terrorized Gazans used doublespeak when they told me most of the alleged 5,500 wounded were being treated in Egypt and Jordan. They want it known that the figure is a lie, and showed me that the wounded weren’t in Gaza. No evidence exists of their presence in foreign hospitals, or of how they might have gotten there.
From the mansions of the Abu Ayida family at Jebala Rayes to Tallel Howa (Gaza City’s densest residential area), Gazans contradicted allegations that Israel had murderously attacked civilians. They told me again and again that both civilians and Hamas fighters had evacuated safely from areas of Hamas activity in response to Israeli telephone calls, leaflets and megaphone warnings.
Seeing Al-Fakhora made it impossible to understand how UN and press reports could ever have alleged that the UNWRA school had been hit by Israeli shells. The school, like most of Gaza, was visibly intact. I was shown where Hamas had been firing from nearby, and the Israeli missile’s marks on the road outside the school were unmistakeable. When I met Mona al-Ashkor, one of the 40 people injured running toward Al-Fakhora – rather than inside it as widely and persistently reported – I was told that Israel had warned people not to take shelter in the school because Hamas was operating in the area, and that some people had ignored the warning because UNWRA previously told them that the school would be safe. Press reports that fatalities numbered 40 were denied.
I WAS TOLD stories at Samouni Street which contradicted each other, what I saw and later media accounts. Examples of these inconsistencies are that 24, 31, 34 or more members of the Fatah Samouni family had died. That all the deaths occurred when Israel bombed the safe building it had told 160 family members to shelter in; the safe building was pointed out to me but looked externally intact and washing was still hanging on a line on one of its balconies. That some left the safe building and were shot in another house. That one was shot when outside collecting firewood. That there was no resistance – but the top right hand window of the safe building (which appears in a BBC Panorama film Out of the Ruins” aired February 8) has a black mark above it – a sign I was shown all day of weaponry having been fired from inside. That victims were left bleeding for two or three days.
Note that this incident is the one cited by Bill Moyers in defense of his anti-Semitic remarks about violence against the Palestinian- Canaanites being in the DNA of Judaism. Even at the time, it had the Pallywood signature. And of course, the folks on the “Palestinian side” eagerly believed it all.
Redefining a Vampire: Europundit’s spoof on the death of Sheikh Yassin
On the 22 of March 2004, the Israelis assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a targeted killing. The Israelis struck at this man because he was the spiritual advocate of the vicious Hamas strategy of suicide terror, which had attempted to turn all of Israel into a hell of fear and grief. The strike killed its target, two of his body guards and nine bystanders, including two of Yassin’s sons. The world was swept with an outpouring of outrage at the Israelis, and sympathy for the “poor, blind, parapalegic, spiritual figurehead” of Hamas. Indeed — mind you, this is 2004! — some worried that the assassination might harm the peace process.
The obituaries for this man were cloying at best, idiotic at worst. And they were everywhere. Except, of course, Nelson Ascher whose stealth obituary I reproduce below:
A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
Indignation took hold of the whole world as soon as news transpired of the cold-blooded murder of Transylvania’s spiritual leader, Count Dracula. The militant and founder of the local anti-imperialist movement was a victim of what both human right organizations and specialists in International Law called an “extra-judicial execution”. The UK government took responsibility for the action, justifying it as a legitimate reprisal against an open enemy in a context of war. Diplomatic sources, on the condition of anonymity, disclosed that the aristocrat has been killed by members of the SAS under the command of the notorious Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
The count, better known among his many friends as Vlad Tepes (Vlad, the Impaler) founded and has been leading for over 500 years the MLT (Movement for the Liberation of Transylvania). Though nobody disputed his popularity in the region, a popularity made obvious by the thousands of protesters who took immediately to the streets of Timisoara, Oradea, Cluj-Napoca and Tirgu Mures, his enemies insisted that he was nothing but a “vampire”, something his followers deny, claiming that “one man’s vampire is another man’s freedom fighter”.
The spiritual leader of the Transylvanians was finally found out by his killers yesterday in the crypt of his castle in Bran, 20 miles from Brasov, in the Central Carpathians. His spokesperson, Mr. Renfield, told our reporters that, cowardly caught during his morning nap while he was resting in his coffin, the defenseless old man had no chance to react against the high-tech wooden stakes with which the Americans supply abundantly the British army. He also assured us that “there are no vampires: they’re but an excuse to deprive us criminally of our lands and to justify this illegal occupation”.
Rachel Neuwirth Compiles the Evidence for Israel’s Operation Cast Lead and the Damage to Civilians
(Somehow this post was prepared a while ago and I forgot to post it. It’s late, but not too late.)
Rachel Neuwirth has an excellent and well-documented collection of imformation on the accusations against Israel, and their validity. Please add any additional references you think worthwhile.
I personally don’t go for the dichotomy “the Lie… the Truth”; I prefer, “the claims… the evidence.” But that’s just my pomo peculiarties.
“War Crimes” Propaganda Against Israel
by Rachel Neuwirth
www.opednews.com
Most of the American and European media have accused Israel of having committed “war crimes” in its recent “assault” on Gaza, and of waging war indiscriminately on its civilian population. Israel is said to have damaged schools, hospitals, ambulances and mosques and to have inflicted an immense number of deaths and injuries on innocent civilians. The same accusations have been hurled at Israel by the United Nations, by many of the world’s governments, and by numerous pseudo-do-gooder “Non-governmental organizations” (or “NGOs”), such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The International Criminal Court in the Hague is considering whether to file war crimes charges against Israeli military and political leaders, and the nations of the European Community are debating amongst themselves
But when we probe into the matter a little deeper by looking at the reports of journalists who did some independent investigating, and who interviewed Gaza civilians who agreed to talk with them (anonymously or using nicknames, for fear of Hamas reprisals), we get a completely different picture: Israel took great care to avoid hurting innocent people, while Hamas deliberately tried to cause as many casualties among the Gazan people as possible.
Let’s go through some of the biggest media lies one by one, and then expose the truth.
The Lie: Israel waged war on Gaza’s civilian population; it deliberately killed innocent civilians.
The truth: Israel exerted more care than any other country in history to avoid inflicting casualties on civilians, even at considerable cost to the effectiveness of its military operations.
Israel’s Minister of Welfare and Social Services Isaac Herzog, who is coordinating Israel’s humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, has pointed out that “[The IDF] made 250,000 phone calls], it has sent text messages and delivered leaflets by air. It has [made] broadcasts on television and on radio and asked people to move away. It did whatever it could to prevent human suffering[2].”
250,000 phone calls? That is virtually every single individual household in Gaza! (total population 1.4 million, with many large families). There is no precedent in history for an army calling up each individual household in enemy territory to warn them in advance to take shelter from bombing or shelling by the army. The Israelis even went so far as to call up leading terrorists 45 minutes in advance of bombing their houses, which were used for storing weapons and ammunition and for concealing terrorist tunnels and bunkers in their basements, in order to give the terrorists and their innocent families time to escape unharmed.
When Israeli planes tracked trucks carrying weapons and ammunition to Hamas, they sometimes deflected the missiles in mid-flight, causing them to fall harmlessly in open spaces, if the trucks happened to pass by civilians on a crowded street. In deflecting their own missiles by remote control, the Israeli pilots and ground controllers passed up the opportunity to destroy enemy weapons and ammunition, solely in order to protect Arab civilians. These humanitarian measures by the Israeli forces have been abundantly documented by “live” video cameras, and the resulting video records have been broadcast by the IDF on YouTube.[3]
These unprecedented humanitarian precautions in time of full-scale war must have enabled thousands of terrorists to escape from Israeli bombing and shelling attacks by forewarning them. Israel was willing to undermine the effectiveness of its anti-terrorist operation solely in order to save the lives of “innocent” (and in some cases not-so-innocent) civilians. No other army — not the Americans, nor the British, nor French or much the less the Russian ,Chinese, Japanese or German armies — has ever exercised even comparable restraint and care to protect noncombatants on the “enemy” side of a war zone as the Israel Defense Forces routinely does. [4]
The Lie: Israel killed six hundred or more civilians in Gaza. More than half of those killed by Israel were innocent civilians.
Republishing an Obituary of Edward Saïd: The evil is too oft interred with their bones…
One of my newer but valuable commentators has posted in the comment section an obituary on Edward Saïd which he wrote in Portuguese for Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil). I think it deserves its own post. He prefaced it with the following remarks:
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When in 2003 I wrote Said’s obituary for my newspaper, maybe the only negative text on him to be published in the country’s press, 187 of our most famous intellectuals, writers and artists sent the paper not an answer, but a protest where, besides calling me a warmonger and a racist, they basically asked my boss to fire me (he didn’t). Even in such a far away place as my country, Said became a saint and whatever he wrote is holy writ, above criticism.
It’s a devastating obituary, and, I think, quite accurate. Amazing the editor allowed it, and stood by the author. Not amazing that a bunch of besotted intellectuals got indignant. Interesting that it solicited accusations like “racist,” and “warmonger.” There’s nothing of either sort in the obituary… just a (well-deserved) lack of polite respect for the dead.
EDWARD SAID (1935-2003)
The leukemia that a couple of days ago killed Edward Said lasted long enough for the polemicist and political activist who had settled in the US to watch his projects and hopes crumble.
Said owes his fame to having become the most articulate apologist for the « Palestinian cause », something that wasn’t all that difficult when one considers that most of his rivals in this field, whenever they’re not too busy blowing up school buses and pizza parlours, satisfy themselves spreading anti-Semitic forgeries like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even so, although his prose reminds one of a post-modern English version of a deconstructionist French translation of the Germanic ravings of some Heidegger epigone, his academic dance of the seven veils with successive layers of Marxist, anti-imperialist and post-colonial jargon never hid the fact that his goals were fundamentally the same.
A large part of his so-called moral authority came from Said presenting himself as a refugee from a Palestinian homeland. In spite of having been put in doubt by his adversaries, the truth or falsity of this claim isn’t too important. The internal borders of the Arab world are all artificial and, half a century ago, loyalties there were established in relation to clans, families, cities or villages and religious sects, not countries or nations, an European import that has had no time to grow deep roots in the Middle East. The Palestinian nationality as a distinct identity has not begun to be developed before the 60s.