Prager:
They insist on ignoring the Jews’ ancient
roots in the Holy Land.
About
five years ago, I was invited by the Hoover Institution to lecture at Stanford
University over the course of a week. Coincidentally, Israel’s Independence Day
fell during that week, and so I was invited to speak at the celebration held by
pro-Israel students. In my talk, I noted that the crux of the problem in the
Palestinian–Israeli conflict was that most Palestinians wanted Israel to cease
to exist.
After
my talk, a woman walked over to me and introduced herself as a “peace
activist.” She told me that she could not agree with me, because Palestinians,
in her view, were quite willing to accept Israel’s existence.
As it
happened, about 50 feet behind the pro-Israel celebration was an anti-Israel
demonstration led by Palestinian students. So, I told the woman to go over and
introduce herself to the Palestinian students as a peace activist — that way
they would immediately trust her — and ask them if they were willing to
acknowledge the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. I told her that I
would bet her five dollars that they would not answer in the affirmative.
She
accepted the bet and went to the Palestinian students.
After
about ten minutes, she returned.
“So,” I
asked her, “who won the bet?”
“I
don’t know,” she responded.
“I
don’t understand,” I replied. “Didn’t they answer you?”
“They
asked me, ‘What do you mean?’” she answered.
I told
her she owed me five dollars, but that I wouldn’t collect.
Earlier
this month in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, I
interviewed Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian
Authority, and the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I asked
him the same question: Do the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish
state?
He was
more direct than the Palestinians students at Stanford.
His
long answer amounted to, “No.”
There
is no Jewish people, he told me, so how could there be a Jewish country? The
Palestinian position is that there is a religion called Judaism, but there is
no such thing as a Jewish people. (Interestingly, the Jews are only referred to
as a religion once in the entire Hebrew Bible — in the Book of Esther, by the
anti-Semite Haman.)
In
other words, Palestinians, a national group that never existed by that name
until well into the twentieth century, deny the existence of the oldest
continuous nation in the world, dating back over 3,000 years. Now, that’s chutzpah.
Indeed,
the Palestinians deny that the Jews ever lived in Israel. That is why Yasser
Arafat could not even admit that Jesus was a Jew; rather, according to Arafat,
“Jesus was a Palestinian.” To acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew would mean that
Jews lived in Israel thousands of years ago — in a Jewish state moreover — long
before Muslims existed, long before Arabs moved there, and millennia before
anyone called themselves Palestinian.
In the
Palestinian president’s speech to the United Nations last week, this denial of
Jewish history was reaffirmed. Thus, in a speech about Israel and the
Palestinians, he never once uttered the words “Jew” or “Jewish.”
Here is
an example of Abbas’s Jew-free view of the history of Israel/Palestine:
“I come
before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine
messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the
birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) . . . ”
No
mention of Jews. Apparently, only Christians (does Abbas know that Jesus was a
Jew?) and Muslims have lived in “the Holy Land.” And for Abbas, the Holy Land
is not Israel, it is Palestine. That it was the Jews who made that land Holy is
a fact of history denied by the Palestinians.
Israel,
in the Palestinian view, is an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.
As
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote in the Washington Post this past Friday
(emphasis added):
Two Israeli peace proposals, in 2000 and 2008 . . . met virtually all of the Palestinians’ demands for a sovereign state in the areas won by Israel in the 1967 war — in the West Bank, Gaza and even East Jerusalem. But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected the first offer and Mahmoud Abbas ignored the second, for the very same reason their predecessors spurned the 1947 Partition Plan. Each time, accepting a Palestinian State meant accepting the Jewish State, a concession the Palestinians were unwilling to make.
That is
the issue. Not settlements. Not boundaries. The Palestinians, like most of
their fellow Arabs and like many Muslims elsewhere, have never acknowledged
that the Jews came home to Israel because they have never acknowledged that the
Jews ever had a national home there. And they don’t even acknowledge that the
Jews are a people.
Do the
Palestinians want peace? I have no doubt that they do. Just not with the Jewish
state.
