Pity the Palestinians? Count Me Out. By Norman Podhoretz. The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2014. Also here.
Podhoretz:
Thousands of Arabs are dying in Syria and
South Sudan. Where’s the outrage on behalf of those truly suffering?
Provoked
by the predictable collapse of the farcical negotiations forced by Secretary of
State John Kerry on the Palestinians and the Israelis, I wish to make a
confession: I have no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians. Furthermore, I do not
believe they deserve any.
This,
of course, puts me at daggers drawn with the enlightened opinion that goes
forth from the familiar triumvirate of the universities, the mainstream media
and the entertainment industry. For everyone in that world is so busy weeping
over the allegedly incomparable sufferings of the Palestinians that hardly a
tear is left for the tribulations of other peoples. And so all-consuming is the
universal rage over the supposedly monumental injustice that has been done to
the Palestinians that virtually no indignation is available for any other
claimant to unwarranted mistreatment.
In my
unenlightened opinion, this picture of the Palestinian plight is nothing short
of grotesquely disproportionate. Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live
in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as
Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in
any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli
occupation on the West Bank.
Well,
to judge by the most significant measure and applying it only to two instances
of what is going on at this very moment: In Syria, untold thousands of fellow
Arabs are starving, while according to the United Nations official on the scene
in South Sudan, 3.7 million people, amounting to one-third of the population,
are now facing imminent death by starvation.
And the
Palestinians? True, when they wish to go from the West Bank into Israel proper,
they are forced to stop at checkpoints and subjected to searches for suicide
vests or other weapons in the terrorist arsenal. Once, when she was secretary
of state, Condoleezza Rice bemoaned the great inconvenience and humiliation
inflicted by such things on the poor Palestinians. Yet she had nothing to say
about Palestinians dying of starvation on the West Bank, for the simple reason
that there were none to be found.
Nor did
anyone starve to death in Gaza when it too was under Israeli occupation. And
despite propaganda to the contrary, neither is anyone facing the same fate in
Gaza today because of the blockade the Israelis have set up to prevent
clandestine shipments of arms intended for use against them.
Speaking
of Gaza, it can serve as a case study of the extent to which the plight of the
Palestinians has been self-inflicted. Thus when every last Israeli was pulled
out of Gaza in 2005, some well-wishers expected that the Palestinians, now in
complete control, would dedicate themselves to turning it into a free and
prosperous country. Instead, they turned it into a haven for terrorism and a
base for firing rockets into Israel.
Meanwhile
little or nothing of the billions in aid being poured into Gaza—some of it from
wealthy American Jewish donors—went to improving the living conditions of the
general populace. Which did not prevent a majority of those ordinary
Palestinians from supporting Hamas, under whose leadership this order of
priorities was more faithfully followed than it was under Fatah, its slightly
less militant rival.
As for
the monumental injustice supposedly done to the Palestinians, it consists
largely of losing territory in the war they themselves provoked in 1967, and
the refusal of their demand that every inch of it be returned to them by the
Israeli victors in that war. Such demands have always been known and
universally denounced as revanchism or irredentism, most recently over the
Russian seizure of Crimea. But where Israel is concerned, everything goes
topsy-turvy, so that Palestinian irredentism is universally supported.
The
accompanying and equally great injustice allegedly suffered by the Palestinians
is that they have been denied a state of their own. But this hardly qualifies
as unique, given that dozens of other ethnic groups—the Kurds being the most
prominent—are in the same boat.
In any
event, this “injustice” is also self-inflicted, since three times in the past
15 years the Palestinians have refused offers of a state on most of the
territory taken by Israel in 1967 and with Jerusalem as its capital. They have
justified these refusals by one pretext or another, but as anyone willing to
look can see, what they truly want is not a state of their own living side by
side with Israel but a state that replaces Israel altogether.
With
this we come to the main reason I believe that the Palestinians do not deserve
any sympathy, let alone the astonishing degree of it they do receive (and not
least from many of my fellow Jews). It is that ever since the day of Israel’s
birth in 1948, they have never ceased declaring that their goal is to wipe it
off the map. In all other contexts, this would be called by its rightful name
of genocide and condemned by all decent people. Yet—here we go topsy-turvy
again—for any and every step Israel takes to defend itself against so
shamelessly evil an intent, it is the Israelis who are obsessively condemned at
the U.N. and by the increasingly strident propagators of what calls itself “anti-Zionism”
but is also increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.
Nor,
alas, is it only the leaders of the Palestinians who harbor this evil intent.
As revealed by poll after poll, as well as by the elections that led the way
for Hamas to take power in Gaza, a decisive majority of the Palestinian people
does so as well. No doubt this is the fruit of relentless indoctrination from
above, but the damage has been done, and the end result is what it is.
Indeed,
the best that can be said of both Palestinian leaders and led is that many of
them no longer imagine—as did Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former president of
Egypt—that they have the power to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea.
Therefore they are now willing to give up pursuing the goal of genocide and to
settle for the more modest objective of politicide—that is, to get rid of the
Jewish state by transforming it, through various “peaceful” means like the “right
of return,” into a state with a Palestinian majority.
I for
one pray that a day will come when the Palestinians finally let go of the evil
intent toward Israel that keeps me from having any sympathy for them, and that
they will make their own inner peace with the existence of a Jewish state in
their immediate neighborhood. But until that day arrives, the “peace process”
will go on being as futile as it has been so many times before and as it has
just proved once again to be. Another thing that never changes: When John Kerry
testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it was the Israelis he blamed for this
latest diplomatic fiasco.
