Palestinians Want U.S. Cash, Not Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, May 28, 2013.
The Palestinian Excuse Machine. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, May 30, 2013.
Tobin (Cash, Not Peace):
While
this is another humiliating setback for Kerry, it’s actually far more
significant than that. It exposes the fallacy at the heart of most efforts to
create peace between Jews and Arabs for the last century.
Almost
from the beginning of the Jewish return to their ancient homeland, many
Zionists as well as their foreign friends thought the Arabs inside the country
as well as those in neighboring lands would be won over to the new reality once
they realized that the Jews brought development and prosperity with them. The
influx into the country created tremendous growth even as the conflict
escalated over the course of the first half of the 20th century. Throughout
this era, Labor Zionists who combined a desire to rebuild the Jewish presence
with socialist ideology believed Arab rejectionism was a function of the
exploitation of the masses by an elite that profited from conflict. They
thought once it was understood that all would benefit from peace and
reconciliation, Palestinian Arab workers and peasants would welcome the Jews.
Even hardheaded pragmatists like David Ben Gurion thought this way for a long
time. They were wrong.
The
Palestinian rejection of the Jews might have been exacerbated by the
displacement of some Arab peasants whose landlords sold to Jews but the
underlying animosity was always based in a refusal to accept the legitimacy of
the idea that Jews would now be equal partners, let alone have sovereignty over
part of the land. Only a few Jewish leaders, like Ben Gurion’s nationalist
rival, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky understood that the Arabs could not be bought
with prosperity. For them the conflict was about honor and religion, not money.
He predicted that only when they gave up their last hope that the Jews could be
pushed out or reduced to Dhimmi status would they ever make peace.
But the
naïve misconception that the Arabs would realize that coexistence would be good
for all persisted long after Israel was born in 1948 amid wars that would
continue for decades. Shimon Peres launched the effort that led to the Oslo
Peace Accords in large measure on the belief that an agreement would lead to a
“New Middle East” where Israel and its Arab neighbors would come to resemble a
Mediterranean version of the wealthy Benelux countries. But as Israelis who
greeted Oslo with euphoria learned to their sorrow, the Palestinians didn’t
care about becoming part of a new Benelux. They embraced terror because they
valued the campaign to destroy Israel over their own economic well-being and
even the lives of their children.
The
last and perhaps most pathetic proof that the conflict isn’t about money came
in 2005 when American philanthropists purchased the green houses of Israeli
settlers in Gaza at the time of Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from the strip in
order to hand them over to the Palestinians. But rather than become the new
owners of a prosperous agricultural infrastructure, the Palestinians destroyed
the green houses in a fit of anger that encapsulated their hatred for the Jews.
The
same spirit is very much alive today in the West Bank where Palestinian
reformer Salam Fayyad remains a man without a party or a constituency because
his people value the violence of Fatah and Hamas over his program of good
governance and development. Logically the Palestinians should have embraced
Kerry’s offer since it promises to boost Palestinian employment by two-thirds
and raise wages by 40 percent. But it remains a loser in a political culture in
which any plan that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter
where its borders would be drawn remains anathema.
The
moral of the story is that it doesn’t matter how high a priority either the
United States or Israel places on peace or how much an agreement would be to
the Palestinians material advantage. They continue to regard economic incentives
as merely yet another Western attempt to “buy” their birthright that they
reject. They might like the cash — which will hopefully not be wasted or go
into the pockets of the Fatah-run kleptocracy in the West Bank that has gobbled
so many billions donated to their people in the last 20 years. But it won’t
lead to peace. It’s a simple lesson but one which idealistic and foolish
Westerners and Jews have refused to learn.
