Horovitz:
Op-ed: I don’t think you care about my people. But if you care about yours, you should tell them that suicidal stabbings are not the path to Paradise… or statehood.
President
Abbas, if you truly care about your people, you need to tell them to stop
stabbing us.
They’ve
killed about a dozen Israelis in the last month or so, and maybe three times
that number of Palestinians have died in the attempt — suicidal stabbers,
kamikaze knifers.
You’ve
not condemned them. In fact, you’ve encouraged them — while simultaneously
peddling the double-speak that we’ve been killing them in cold blood. You’ve
publicly declared that “every drop of blood that has been spilled for
Jerusalem” is clean and pure and blessed. You’ve reassured each new prospective
killer that “every martyr will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be
rewarded by Allah.”
You
obviously don’t care about our people, who have had the temerity to build a
thriving Jewish state in our historic homeland, and who you lie about and
incite against. But since your people understandably seek their own
independence, and to be freed from our rule, you need to tell them that trying
to kill us one at a time with knives and screwdrivers and whatever else comes
to hand is as counterproductive and doomed as the long series of previous
efforts to massacre and terrorize us into leaving — the conventional wars, and
the suicide bombings, and the rockets, and the car-rammings, and the relentless
effort to demonize and delegitimize and isolate us internationally.
The
path to the statehood and independence you seek is actually relatively
straightforward. It was wide open in 1947 — all your predecessors had to do for
a first-ever Palestine was accept a revived Israel. Instead, they opted for war
and futile, bloody, tragic self-sabotage. Today, it’s a case of convincing
Israel that it is safe for us to partner with you. Convincing us, to paraphrase
president Bill Clinton at the Rabin rally on Saturday night, that the risks of
peace are less severe than the risks of walking away.
Step
one in that process of persuasion: Stop trying to kill us. Stop the stabbings.
Stop the encouragement of the stabbings. Stop.
Here’s
the thing: Much of the world has been convinced that we’re the Goliath to your
David. That super-strong Israel, a regional superpower, should be eminently
capable of taking those US president-recommended risks for the cause of your
people’s statehood and our own legitimacy and tranquility.
Even
viewed in the narrow context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however,
that’s a short-sighted assessment. We all saw Hamas partially incapacitate this
country for 50 days last summer — and that was a Hamas restricted to Gaza and
arming itself through the cracks of our security blockade. A West
Bank-controlled Hamas would fully paralyze Israel.
And if
you look at the Goliath-David equation in the wider context — in the context of
tiny Israel on the western edge of the vicious, shifting, unpredictable and
weapons-filled Middle East — then it’s a frankly ridiculous misrepresentation.
Israel is not about to render itself still more vulnerable to extremism on
three sides, and with only the sea on the fourth. Better press coverage and
warm messages of support from the international community are somewhat
inadequate compensation for national suicide.
The
irony, President Abbas, is that most of us want to partner your people to
statehood. We don’t want to rule over you. We know it’s a dreadful way for you
to live. And imposing it corrodes us. We feel a resonant historical link to
biblical Judea and Samaria, but most of us would much rather have a smaller Israel
which boasts a Jewish majority and full equality than a larger Israel,
encompassing the West Bank, that loses its Jewish character, its democracy, or
both.
Yet
just like your duplicitous predecessor, you’re making it impossible for us to
attempt that partnership.
You may
think you’re making headway with the UN efforts and the international court
bids and all the other legal and diplomatic and media pressure to try to impose
your state upon us without negotiating viable modalities, but you’re not. Unfortunately,
quite the reverse.
We
tried the Oslo process, and were rewarded with terrorism. We tried
unilateralism, and were rewarded with rockets and tunnels. So now we’re hanging
tough — protecting ourselves as best we can, insistently maintaining that security
blockade on Gaza, and insistently maintaining the military presence in the West
Bank without which we would right now doubtless be facing another onslaught of
suicide bombers.
It’s
not that we adore and embrace the worldview of our endlessly serving prime
minister. We don’t, most of us, grimly accept his bleak reported assertion to
the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week that “Israel will
have to live by the sword forever.” We certainly will live by the sword for as
long as we must, but we’d much rather not. We’d much rather not send our
children to the front lines to protect us for generation after generation. We
feel, many of us, that there is more we could do to help begin to create a
climate in which peacemaking is less risky, to help begin the lengthy process
of reconciliation and tolerance that, maybe, one day, could enable us to
peacefully share this bloodied land. But unlike well-intentioned American
leaders of past and present, we do not have the luxury of blinding ourselves to
the consequences of taking ill-judged and premature risks in that supreme cause
of peace-making.
For all
your despicable false accusations against us, your advanced years, and your
weakness, you, President Abbas, still have more power than most anybody else to
help advance the gradual process of moderation that is crucial to realizing
your own people’s aspiration for statehood. You are best placed to tell your
people that the Jews have legitimacy here too. That the disputed land must be
shared. That Jerusalem is holy to all monotheistic religions. That despite your
rhetorical attempted land grab, the Old City — where Al-Aqsa sits, and the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher sits, and the Temple Mount and Western Wall sit —
is not yours and yours alone.
They
won’t like to hear it. Fed a relentless diet of lies for generations, they
won’t easily believe it. They won’t like you for telling them. But that’s
sometimes what leadership is about — taking your constituents, even against
their will, in a better direction for their own best interests.
You
should tell your people the inconvenient truth about the Jews and their history
in these parts. Far from encouraging them to stab us, you should tell them that
the sooner they stop, the sooner we can start the long process of building
trust — the necessary prerequisite to compromise and Palestinian independence.
Sadly,
I don’t for a second think you’re going to do this. I fear you’re going to be
remembered, just like your unlamented predecessor, as a Palestinian leader who
failed his people because he lacked the guts to tell them the hard,
inconvenient facts. And in so doing, pushed off their independence, and forced
us to live by the sword, for who knows how many more years.
No,
President Abbas, God does not reward those who spill the blood of innocents.
There are no killing fields on the path to Paradise. If you care about your
people, you should be telling them to preserve lives, not take them. Our lives
and theirs.
And
really, in what kind of a crazy world was it necessary for me to write this?
