Europe’s Refugee Crisis Isn’t About Economics—It’s About Culture. By Robert W. Merry.

Europe’s Refugee Crisis Isn’t about Economics—It’s about Culture. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 4, 2015.

Merry:

In discussions of immigration in America and Europe these days, the focus most often is on the economic impact. But fundamentally it is a question of culture, as it has been through history.

The New York Times featured a piece on November 3 by foreign correspondent Adam Nossiter, writing from Béziers, France. Béziers, Nossiter informs us, is the country’s “largest city under far-right control,” and he is intrigued by its mayor, Robert Ménard, once a “fearless defender of freedom of the press on four continents and a hero to free-speech advocates.” But now Ménard has turned against the influx of foreign immigrants flooding his city. He says he doesn’t want Béziers to become majority-Muslim, doesn’t want it to adopt a Muslim identity and doesn’t want it to lose its French heritage and sensibility. “This is a problem of numbers,” he says.

Given these sentiments, writes Nossiter, Ménard has become “a symbol of right-wing extremism in France.”

That’s a curious characterization, particularly in light of Nossiter’s suggestion elsewhere in his article that Ménard’s city is being watched by others throughout the country to determine if he represents a serious body of political sentiment. Nossiter quotes a university political scientist, who says that “Béziers could really become a political symbol.” In other words, Ménard’s anti-immigrant sensibility seems to be growing and could become a mainstream sentiment.

All this raises a question that doesn’t get asked without a bit of historical perspective and perhaps a commitment to evenhandedness. Nossiter doesn’t ask it. The question is: Why is it “right-wing extremism” when a person wants to preserve his cultural heritage, but not extremism when one wants to see it destroyed or is indifferent to its fate? What Nossiter’s piece lacks is any perspective on just what’s happening in Europe today, with a flood of immigrants that threatens to transform the continent and its Western heritage.

On the same day that Nossiter’s piece appeared, the Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined, “Tempted to close the doors: As migrant tide reaches a new high, pressure builds for Europe to seal its borders.” Included was a graph showing that 2015 migrant arrivals numbered 218,394, while arrivals thus far this year exceed 744,000. An official from tiny Slovenia reported, “We have received more than 100,000 migrants in just two weeks.” He explained that that number represented 5 percent of the country’s population.

But many of those migrants don’t want to stay in Slovenia, which is poor and where prospects for governmental largesse are small. They particularly want to get to Germany, which is rich and has a national leader (for now) who has laid down a welcome mat. Just in the last nine months, Germany has taken in 500,000 immigrants, according to the Post story. For the year, this will likely approach 700,000. A comparable influx into the United States would be nearly 2.8 million. Does anyone doubt that such an influx here in such a brief time would spur a major backlash?

Of course, the backlash would generate allegations of “right-wing extremism” and even racism from the country’s liberals. But is it really racism or extremism to want to protect your national borders, or prevent the societal and cultural chaos that ensues when the flows of immigration swamp a society’s absorption capacity? It seems that, for the nation’s elites, the answer to that question is yes. There doesn’t seem to be any level of immigration that raises concerns on the part of some of these people.

But the hinterland view is something else again. In the United States, the elite media can’t understand how such a crude figure as Donald Trump could be getting the poll numbers that, so far in the presidential campaign, have buoyed his candidacy. But part of the answer is that he has tapped into this concern on the part of people who don’t consider themselves racists or extremists and who resent being characterized as such.

They know instinctively what the elites wish to ignore—namely, that a very large part of world history is the story of invasions and migrations, and that it often isn’t so easy to tell the difference between them. It is also the story of resistance to invasions and migrations. Consider the Great Wall of China, built in various stages over centuries to protect the core Chinese civilization from massive numbers of nomadic tribesmen from the Eurasian Steppes.

Europe has been under serious threat from Islam on three occasions. The surge of religious fervor unleashed by Mohammed in the seventh century led to a territorial explosion in succeeding decades, as Islam took over the entire Middle East, then pushed up through Spain under Moorish auspices, and crossed into France by 732. That’s when a European force under Charles Martel defeated the Moors at the Battle of Tours and began a centuries-long pushback, culminating with the Moors being expelled from Spain in 1492.

It’s worth pondering: What would have been the fate of Western civilization had the Islamic forces defeated Charles and overrun the European heartland? What would have happened to the slow Western development through what Will Durant called the Age of Faith, then the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the emergence of capitalism and liberal democracy, flying buttresses of the Gothic cathedrals, the art of the Dutch Masters with their use of light and shadow to bust through space and time, the advent of soaring Western music, the Romantic poets and great novelists, the global expansion, and all the grand triumphs and tributes to the human experience that came also, inevitably, with the downside of abuse that always seems to be part of the human story?

Perhaps the answer is: Who cares? That seems to be the answer of many in the West these days. But that is not the sentiment of a healthy and robust civilization.

Eight centuries after Charles Martel’s victory saved Europe, the great Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna, in what many historians believe was part of a design to take Europe. Already the Ottomans had taken the Balkans and for a century had been moving up the Danube, conquering central Hungary and Transylvania. Suleiman’s failure to take Vienna in 1529 represented the Ottoman high point in Europe, and when a subsequent siege in 1683 also failed, that expansive empire began a slow, inexorable decline, culminating in the total Ottoman collapse with World War I.

But the impact upon Europeans was to last for centuries. “The Turks ruined the Balkans,” wrote Dame Rebecca West in her magisterial book on the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, “with a ruin so great that it has not yet been repaired.” The terrible bloodshed in the region during the 1990s can be traced back to the Ottoman disruptions upon European soil starting in the fourteenth century.

In discussions of immigration in America and Europe these days, the focus most often is on the economic impact, the question of whether there are enough schools, the burden upon the welfare state or whether wages will decline. Sometimes it turns to fears of crime attending the influx of people with no resources. But fundamentally it is a question of culture, as it has been through history.

For some reason, the elites of the West don’t want to see it that way, and they are well positioned to label those who do as extremists or racists. That’s essentially the Adam Nossiter outlook, as reflected in the tone and slant of his Times piece. But in Europe now, as likely in America some years from now, this represents a crisis of the first order. And the people will demand of their governments that the crisis be addressed. That’s the significance of Robert Ménard and his town of Béziers, France.

Donald Trump, American Nationalist. By Colin Dueck.

Donald Trump, American Nationalist. By Colin Dueck. The National Interest, November 3, 2015.

Dueck:

Donald Trump’s real niche, carved out in his own strange way, is simply American nationalism. And this is a powerful force among Republicans.

In the Republican presidential race, while Donald Trump’s star has faded a little , he continues to lead nationally in most polls. To be sure, he is not going to be president. Trump is more of a circus barker than a plausible commander-in-chief. But his continued polling success should indicate something about his appeal that observers from both parties would best understand. And partly, believe it or not, this has to do with U.S. foreign policy.

Trump has staked out a combination of foreign policy positions that leave him with a distinct niche, however unwelcome to elite opinion. He opposes free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and favors draconian punishments for illegal immigrants. He says it’s time to get tough with China and Japan on trade—and “beat Mexico,” while we’re at it. He supports a strong U.S. military, including increased defense spending. He claims to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He declares that America has little to show for its years of intervention within the Middle East, and suggests that if Vladimir Putin wants to engage more deeply in Syria, he’s welcome to it. In fact Trump says he could get along very well with the Russian leader. At the same time, Trump favors a much more aggressive U.S.-backed campaign against the Islamic State.

Obviously Trump is neither a liberal internationalist nor a conservative one. His critics call him an isolationist, but that’s not quite right either. Genuine isolationists on both left and right, however wrong-headed, tend to be more high-minded, principled and pristine than The Donald. Trump’s real niche, carved out in his own strange way, is simply American nationalism. And this is a powerful force among Republicans.

As I describe in my book The Obama Doctrine, the Republican Party is today divided between three main foreign policy impulses. The first is conservative internationalism, the belief that the United States should be active and engaged overseas, militarily, economically and diplomatically. The second is conservative or libertarian isolationism, favoring strict avoidance of foreign wars, reductions in defense spending and cuts in U.S. bases and alliances overseas. The third impulse is conservative nationalism—and this is where Trump has found his not inconsiderable niche.

Conservative nationalists in the Obama era are deeply skeptical regarding the benefits of U.S. foreign aid, nation-building and multilateral humanitarian interventions. At the same time, GOP nationalists continue to favor bolstered armed forces and an unyielding stance toward America’s adversaries overseas. They oppose diplomatic concessions to hostile dictatorships and favor robust counterterrorism. Internationally, they favor sticks, not carrots.

Historically, conservative nationalists used to vote Democrat. Based in the Southern, Western and Greater Appalachian white working class, these anti-establishment voters were drawn to FDR’s economic populism, even as they backed muscular foreign policies under his Democratic successors, from Truman to LBJ. The left turn taken by the Democrats on cultural, fiscal and national security issues by the 1970s alienated this constituency and encouraged them to become Reagan Democrats. Now, after seven years of Barack Obama, they are simply Republican—and while often derided as a shrinking demographic nationwide, in fact, within the GOP they’re as important as ever.

After 9/11, conservative nationalists were entirely on board for the war on terror announced by President George W. Bush, and they remained staunch supporters of his to the end. In the Obama era, however, they became far more skeptical of the benefits of well-intended pro-democracy interventions within the Middle East. When convinced of a real security threat, as with ISIS, conservative nationalists are still as ready to fight as anyone. They believe that reputation matters, and that weakness invites aggression. In a word, they are hawks. But where the case for intervention seems abstract or convoluted, they have become considerably more cautious.

Conservative nationalists matter in 2016, especially in the coming GOP primaries, because they form something like a plurality among Republican voters today. The numerical weight of strict non-interventionists at the grassroots level is often overestimated by outsiders, and has certainly been reduced over the last year or so as international threats appear to gather. Conservative internationalists, for their part, have historically taken the lead in Republican foreign policy, and their numbers by comparison are often underestimated. But it is the third group, conservative nationalists, that form the median within the GOP today on the issue of foreign policy, and they will certainly help to determine the next Republican nominee. So it might be worth at least listening to what conservative nationalists have to say, even though they are sometimes mistaken, because they can smell elite disrespect from a mile away—and will punish it.

Which brings us back to The Donald. To say that Trump is a flawed representative of the conservative nationalist persuasion would be a gross understatement. For one thing, there is nothing in his background to suggest he’s even a genuine conservative, or that he has any principled commitment to limited government as a governing philosophy. Where most candidates try to offer at least some semblance of a program, The Donald simply offers… himself. Just put him in charge, he winks, and all your problems will be solved. This is not any kind of true conservatism. It’s Tom Sawyer, trying to get the other kids to paint the fence while paying him for the privilege.

Trump’s foreign policy statements are a similar collection of trickeries, as soon as you get into any detail. If you watch him during TV debates or interviews, it soon becomes obvious that much of the time he literally does not know what he’s talking about. His idea of foreign policy preparation is apparently to read through press clippings regarding himself. He blurts out applause lines with enough force to cheer his supporters, and taps into deep resentments with considerable showmanship. But when asked to go beyond the most superficial one-liners, he becomes hostile, defensive, contradictory and confused. It’s the political equivalent of Tourette syndrome: instead of serious conversation from The Donald, we get explosive tics.

Even if Trump offered intelligent, well-informed ideas on foreign policy issues from his chosen position, the conservative nationalist impulse would still not be adequate in itself. Strict nationalists tend, for example, to underestimate the value of America’s unparalleled alliance system. The great need today isn’t to “beat” core allies such as Mexico and Japan, while working with Vladimir Putin. On the contrary, the urgent need is to constrain aggressors such as Putin, while supporting core U.S. allies like Mexico and Japan. Nationalists also tend to underestimate the utility of U.S. foreign policy carrots such as foreign aid and trade agreements. If the United States is going to engage overseas, as it sometimes must, then it really will need to utilize non-military foreign policy instruments more effectively than Obama has done. Trump offers no plausible proposals on any of these matters. His protectionist, anti-immigrant stance, combined with his own sheer ignorance on the issues, takes a flawed foreign policy strain and makes it even worse.

Historically, the GOP’s nationalist impulse has been most effective and beneficial when integrated into a broader Republican coalition under conservative leadership that is fundamentally constructive, forward-looking and prepared to actually govern this country. The obvious example is Ronald Reagan. Today however, the party’s nationalist strain has turned in a sour, cramped and defeatist direction, describing the United States of America—in Trump’s exact words—as a “hellhole.” Trump compares himself to Ronald Reagan, but it is impossible to imagine Reagan talking or thinking in this way.

It should go without saying that if nominated, which is very unlikely, the obnoxious, unwelcoming, and adolescent posture struck by Trump would be defeated by Hillary Clinton next fall, and badly. The ultimate loser would then be conservatives, since Clinton would be empowered to implement another four years of liberal policies following on Obama’s.

Having said all this, Trump isn’t wrong about absolutely everything, and neither are his supporters.

For one thing, he seems to be having a good time. Policy wonks tend to miss the attraction of this. Voters don’t want a candidate who views their support as a tiresome obligation.

More importantly, by whatever route, Trump has bluntly expressed a few key truths about American foreign policy today, and his supporters know it. When Trump says that the U.S. doesn’t seem to win wars anymore, that we need to rebuild our military, that we’re not defeating ISIS, that the Iran nuclear deal is a disaster and that America is less respected by its adversaries under President Obama, he’s not wrong. Nor is he wrong to point out the painfully half-baked nature of so many U.S. interventions during recent years. These views are all shared by conservative nationalists, and they’re an accurate description of international realities in the Obama era.

The GOP’s conservative nationalists may be wrong to undervalue foreign policy carrots, but they’re right to say we need sticks. Any serious national security policy will utilize and integrate the two better than Obama has done.

The Republican candidate that can best recognize, incorporate and articulate what’s right about conservative nationalism, while leaving behind what’s currently wrong with it, will not only win the Republican nomination: they will deserve to win it.

It just won’t be Donald Trump.

What the Palestinians Think Matters. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

What the Palestinians Think Matters. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 2, 2015.

What Do Palestinians Want? By Daniel Polisar. Mosaic, November 2, 2015.


Tobin:

On Saturday night, speaking at the memorial for Yitzhak Rabin twenty years after his murder, Bill Clinton challenged Israelis by telling them “it is up to you” to decide whether there would be peace with the Palestinians. As I noted yesterday, this was a remarkably obtuse statement from the former president. He has spent the last 15 years complaining that it was Yasir Arafat that robbed him of a Nobel Peace Prize by refusing an Israeli offer of statehood and peace. Nowhere in his speech or in the remarks delivered by President Obama via a video was there a mention of the fact that it had been the decisions of the Palestinians that blocked each attempt to broker a compromise over the course of the last century. Indeed, most of those who speak about the conflict never even consider what it is that the Palestinians are thinking as they focus solely on attempts to try and force Israel to make concessions that might enable peace.

The dynamic of the process has always been like this as, in effect, Israel has tried with a predictable lack of success to make peace by itself. An answer to the sort of tunnel vision that Clinton exhibited would be if someone sought to clarify exactly what it is that the Palestinians think about peace, terrorism, or Israel and the Jews in order to see whether the concessions demanded of Israel would solve the problem

But now someone has done just that. Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar has written an analysis of Palestinian public opinion for Mosaic Magazine. He studied over 330 surveys taken of Palestinians by the four major Palestinian research institutes over the course of the last two decades. As he notes, the four bodies have different points of view and are independent of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas as well as that of Israel. Taken as a whole, their results provide a statistically significant sample of Palestinian beliefs on key issues about the peace process. As such, his findings published today ought to be must-reading for anyone who cares about the future of the Middle East. More to the point, the results should inform the policy decisions being made by the United States as the Obama administration prepares for what may be a final drive for a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Some elements of this study are, to a certain extent, understandable. After a century of conflict, nobody should expect the Palestinians to love Jews or Israel. Nor is it particularly surprising that they tend to blame Israel for all their problems, even those that are the function of internal politics and disputes, such as those between the Fatah that runs the PA in the West Bank and the Hamas rulers of Gaza. Though it is disconcerting, it should also not shock anyone that Palestinians tend to think of Israel as always being in the wrong or that it starts wars and deliberately targets civilians, even if the demonstrable truth is just the opposite. The willingness to see the enemy in a war as always in the wrong is not an exclusively Palestinian trait.

But when it comes to specifics and general attitudes toward Jews and Israel, Palestinian opinion goes further than that. Indeed, among the most puzzling of Polisar’s findings are those that require the Palestinians to ignore obvious political facts about Israel that they are in a position to know are not true.

For example, survey after survey shows that Palestinians think most Israelis oppose a two-state solution when, if they are paying any attention to Israeli TV, to which many, if not most of them have access, they would know that just the opposite is true. The same goes for the dispute about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the issue that has been the focus of recent violence. Only a tiny minority of Palestinians thinks Israel will preserve the status quo there that discriminates against Jews visiting Judaism’s holiest spot even though Israel has not changed it and has preserved it for 48 years.

Even crazier is the finding that shows that at least three out of five Palestinians actually think Israelis plan to annex all of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza and then expel their Arab inhabitants as well as the nearly 20 percent of the Israeli population that is Arab. Were they paying the least attention to the Israelis, they would know that such views are the preserve of a tiny minority of Israeli Jews and that those who advocate it are not allowed in the Knesset.

Basic attitudes about Jews that come through in polls of Palestinians are sobering. Large majorities think Jews are violent, clever, and untrustworthy; a compilation of nasty beliefs that match up with traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes.

That is unfortunate, but Palestinians might be able to compromise with Jews even if they didn’t like them. The surveys also show how their beliefs serve, however, as the foundations of a conflict that may not be solved by a rational deal.

As Polisar writes, more than 70 percent of Palestinians deny any historic ties between the Jews and any part of the country, let alone Jerusalem. No survey ever taken of Palestinian opinion has ever shown that a majority of respondents accepted a division of Jerusalem that would allow them to claim a part of it as their capital. Since that is the concessions that most of the world believes must be forced on the Israelis, it’s not hard to see why Israelis who see these results would think such a move wouldn’t bring peace.

Indeed, taken in aggregate, the polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians believe Jews have no right to any part of the country, inside or outside the 1967 lines. A two-state solution seems like the rational response to this situation. But once we understand that Palestinians would view even the most generous partition as an injustice, there is no reason to believe such a deal would end the conflict.

Faith in the efficacy of a two-state solution is also undermined when you read that three-quarters of Palestinians think Israel will disappear in the next 30 to 40 years. That is a belief that is inextricably tied to the notion that they will continue the war for its destruction even after a theoretical peace deal is signed.

Nor can peace advocates take any comfort from the fact that overwhelming majorities of Palestinians believe that violence against Israelis is not only necessary but praiseworthy in virtually every circumstance. Indeed, not even the most despicable of crimes aimed deliberately at innocent civilians — such as the suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv in 2002 that killed 21 young Israelis out dancing — can even be called terrorism. Just as bad is the fact that Palestinians don’t just avoid condemning such acts but find them praiseworthy. Huge majorities think terrorists who kill Jews are heroes worthy of great honor, a stance that is validated by the actions of the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority.

And lest Americans think this bloodthirsty attitude is restricted to Israeli Jews, they should also note that Polisar finds that a majority of Palestinians also think the 9/11 attacks were not terrorism. A solid 60 percent also thinks attacks on Americans are justified anywhere.

What conclusions can we draw from Polisar’s work?

The fact that Palestinians feel this way doesn’t mean that peace is not a laudable goal. Moreover, even when advocates of Israeli concessions admit that the Palestinians have turned down peace and continue to support hate, they still think Israel can change their minds with sufficient kindness.

But the numbers pour cold water on the nonsensical optimism of the peace processers who keep telling us compromise is possible. As much as it would be nice to think it was so, Palestinians attitudes toward peace, terrorism, and the existence of Israel have not changed for the better in the last generation. More importantly, nothing Israel has done, whether it was signing Oslo and granting the PA control of much of the territories or even the complete withdrawal from Gaza, convinced them that Israel wanted peace.

As Polisar points out, the Temple Mount dispute is a case in point. For 48 years, the Israelis have tried appeasement of Muslim sensibilities there, even to the point of enforcing rules against Jewish prayer on the Mount. But Palestinians, whipped up by hate speech and incitement from their leaders who have played the same cynical game for generations, still believe the worst of the Jews.

To the contrary, such actions seem to have only solidified Palestinian belief in Israel’s eventual destruction. That majorities of Israelis have always supported compromise only seems to convince them that the Jews lack conviction and will eventually be defeated.

Polisar’s study shows that those who think Israel can decide on peace are not paying attention to the Palestinians. Only when their attitudes shift will peace be possible. Though I doubt President Obama will take Mosaic’s findings to heart, anyone who thinks seriously about the peace process should read them.

Message to Abbas. By David Horovitz.

President Abbas, tell your people to stop stabbing us. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, November 1, 2015.

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?

Palestinian Journalist Nasser al-Laham: The Jews Will Enjoy Security Only Under Arab Rule.

Palestinian News Agency Editor-in-Chief Nasser Al-Laham: The Jews Will Enjoy Security Only under Arab Rule. Video. MEMRI TV, Clip No. 5140, October 28, 2015. YouTube.








Transcript:

Palestinian journalist Dr. Nasser Al-Laham, editor-in-chief of the Maan News Agency, recently said: “The Jews have never had a golden age except under an Arab and Islamic state.” He further said: “they have always had and always will have security only under the protection of an Arab state.” His statements were posted on the Maan Network Online on October 28, 2015.

The Jews wandered in the Sinai desert for 40 years, and it seems that they are wandering even today north of Sinai, that is, in Palestine. They have been wandering for a thousand years.

The Jews never had a golden age except under an Arab and Islamic state. Every time the Arabs were ousted, the Jews would be exiled from their homes and would be beaten senseless.

Nebuchadnezzar took them as slaves to Baghdad. The Crusaders turned them into servants under their shoes, and the Byzantines deported them and cursed them in all their books. The (Jews) kept crying until their eyes bled, until Saladin came and treated them justly, providing them with security in their homes and synagogues.

In Europe they were burned in (gas) chambers, and in America they made an example out of them. The (Jews) did not dare to reveal their true religion. In Russia they were presented as an exemplar of evil, and they were the worst villains in the books of Gogol and the ancient poets.

When Europe placed them in the ghetto prisons 150 years ago, they fled to Palestine. The Palestinians allowed them to build the kibbutzim and the moshavim. They lived under the protection of Sultan Abdul Hamid and Hajj Amin al-Husseini. They then fled as refugees in boats from Europe to the Jaffa port. They came like locusts, and we fed them oranges and gave them fresh water, until they bit the hand that was extended to help them, and perpetrated massacres against their hosts.

They came as guests, hungry and naked. They were sick with scabies, typhoid, measles, and malaria. We treated them, and gave them refuge near our children, but “they hamstrung her, so their lord destroyed them for their sin and leveled them. He feared not the consequences.” (Quran 91: 14-15). In the words of the poet, “the mud forgot that it is nothing but lowly mud, and got arrogantly out of control.”

Now, they want to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to build a false temple, so they prepared nine red cows, four calves, a rabbi, a Maimonides, stolen gold, and a scabies-stricken goat, and said that they were looking for the Messiah’s donkey. They have turned the stables of our horses into a (wailing) wall for their tears.

Another wandering generation of Jews seeking an identity, seeking a savior, and searching in our homes and under our feet for the remains of the shattered Menorah. They burned the olive trees in the village of Qusra, a child in Duma, and an icon in Beit Jala, but they got no security and no safety.

They have always had and always will have this security only under the protection of an Arab state. They tried and will try to establish a state for the Jews, and to hide behind the Wall, but in the words of the poet, “life of eternity is unfeasible.”

China Takes Over the Sea and “Bamlet” Dithers — Again. By Ralph Peters.

China takes over the sea and “Bamlet” dithers — again. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, November 1, 2015.

Peters:

If your neighbor’s house catches fire, is it wiser to call the fire department or to trust the good will of the flames to put themselves out? Faced with strategic conflagrations scorching much of the globe, President Obama’s approach is to delay as long as possible then to attempt to negotiate with the blaze.

If forced to act at last, he responds to wildfires with a water pistol.

In the administration’s latest weak-loined response to a swelling crisis, Obama belatedly allowed one US Navy destroyer to enter South China Sea waters illegally claimed by Beijing. The intrusion was brief, but China’s senior admiral threatened war. (Don’t worry: We’ll back down.)

What’s at stake? China constructed at least seven artificial islands atop reefs far from its mainland, in waters on which other countries have stronger claims. It’s a hostile takeover of some of the most important sea lanes on the planet, vital in peace and war. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Japan and Taiwan looked to us for leadership.

For years, China built and Obama dithered. For months, he avoided a decision about sending a single ship into the disputed waters to assert our support for freedom of navigation.

At last, Obama chose the mildest response that might serve as a pretense of action — and only to preserve his trade agenda. Our president’s afraid. And the dogs of war smell fear across oceans and continents.

The time to stop China was before they finished building the islands. Now they are entrenched, adding runways and artillery. Only military action could dislodge them now.

This situation has even greater resonance because it fits the Obama pattern of denial, delay, disarmament and defeat. Of those four stages, “disarmament” is the one routinely missed by analysts, who think of disarmament solely in terms of weapons cuts. But the “strategic disarmament” this White House pursues, the refusal ever to use military force in a timely, effective manner for even the most pressing purposes, is even worse than sharply reducing our forces.

It doesn’t matter if we have the world’s finest military on paper if the commander in chief employs it too little too late and under such draconian restrictions that it’s impossible for our troops to accomplish their missions.

Our military should, indeed, only be deployed as a last resort. But when we send in our troops, we should fight to win. The greatest immorality isn’t an accidental strike on a dubious hospital used as a headquarters by barbarian enemies. The greatest immorality is to lose.

So as the president nervously dips a toe in the South China Sea, he’s already abandoned plans to retaliate for China’s cyberattacks. Instead, he welcomed China’s gloating president to a White House tribute of the sort desperate princes used to stage for the emperor they feared.

Obama drew red lines in Syria — in disappearing ink. He denied that Islamic State terrorists were a threat. In Libya, he acted at last — but without a plan for the aftermath (goaded on by a secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who so despises our military that she preferred to trust local militias for security).

When Putin invaded Crimea, the president and his paladins insisted it “would not stand.” Today, Crimea’s been gobbled whole by Russia. When Putin invaded eastern Ukraine, that, too, was not to be tolerated. But our president found it tolerable, after all, refusing to provide Ukraine basic weapons essential for self-defense.

After Iran-backed Iraqi militias murdered hundreds and mutilated thousands of American troops in Iraq, Obama’s top priority became a worthless deal on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program that will only enrich Tehran. Today, Iran has replaced the US as the dominant foreign power in Iraq (where we control nothing beyond our lavish embassy); Tehran supports the Assad regime’s religious cleansing of Sunni Muslims in Syria, intentionally creating refugees in the millions; and our feckless president has not even gotten the release of a single American hostage held by Iran — instead, Iran just arrested another American-passport holder. And Iran is now a full participant in Secretary John Kerry’s Vienna gabfest about Syria’s future.

Never before — never — in our history has a president behaved with such self-absorption, self-delusion, fecklessness and irrefutable cowardice. To find a “president” who did more damage to our country, you’d have to include Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America. Of course, the comparison is unfair, since Davis was willing to fight for his beliefs, however misguided.

The best comparison of all is to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. For act after hand-wringing act, Hamlet won’t lift a finger (except to drive a hapless girl to suicide). He’s a classic intellectual, forever asking, “To be, or not to be?” Even when the opportunity arises to avenge his father’s murder in a stroke, Hamlet reasons himself out of taking action.

The result? When Hamlet acts at last, it’s far too late. And every principal character dies miserably. Even Mom.

In strategic affairs, some mistakes can be repaired, if at great cost. But time is unforgiving. As with that fire in the house next door, the best time to put it out is right away. A President Hamlet, forever seeing only risks and never opportunities, ends up in a bloodier, more expensive mess than a sober and decisive man of action.

The president is a prisoner of his fears and of vanity that can never admit an error. He’s captive to an ideology that distrusts the United States, and he’s crippled by a deep disdain for our military. He’s the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, and our country will need decades to extinguish the strategic fires he’s allowed to burn out of control.

Bill Maher Interviews Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

Bill Maher Interviews Tulsi Gabbard on Real Time. Video. Bill Maher, October 31, 2015. YouTube. Also here.






Bill Maher Goes Off, Asks Dem Rep. Why Obama Won’t Say “Islamic Extremism.” By Josh Feldman. Mediaite, October 30, 2015.

Bill Maher’s nasty new Islamophobia recruit: “Real Time” turns ugly on “barbaric” Muslim beliefs. By Sarah Burris. Salon, October 31, 2015.

Burris:

Gabbard says it is “crazy” and simplifies aid as giving someone a house and a skateboard which won't fix violence.

Bill Maher hates religion, but he really hates Islam. On Friday evening’s “Real Time,” the host spoke to Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii about their shared quest against Muslims.

Gabbard told Maher she believes it is “crazy” that Secretary of State John Kerry says that extremism comes from poverty — and that President Obama won’t say “Islamic extremism” instead using the words “violent extremism.” She thinks it’s important to “identify our enemy so that we can defeat them.” Secretary Kerry’s comments are particularly absurd to her because she thinks that giving someone a house to live in and a skateboard isn’t going to solve the problems of violence abroad.

Maher went on to attack liberals for what he says is a refusal to discuss the “barbaric” beliefs by some Islamic people in the west and Gabbard agreed. She thinks liberal philosophy “gets in the way” of being able to address it. Apparently, when Gabbard went to Iraq she was tasked to train the Kuwaiti army on counterterrorism, women weren’t even allowed on the base.

Gabbard went on to say “words mean things” which is presumably why the liberals she is attacking refuse to paint an entire group of people as the same.

Military Strike in Syria a Mistake. By Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The Huffington Post, September 10, 2013.

Ralph Peters: Sending Special Ops Forces to Syria Is an Act of Desperation.

Sending special ops to Syria and act of desperation? Ralph Peters interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Video. Hannity. Fox News, October 30, 2015. YouTube.

Losing Palestine. By Haviv Rettig Gur.

Palestinian girls sit in front of the Dome of the Rock in the Temple Mount compound on October 23, 2015. AFP/Ahmad Gharabli.

Losing Palestine. By Haviv Rettig Gur. The Times of Israel, October 27, 2015.

Gur:

The terrorism of the past month is not a new surge in Palestinian opposition to Israel, but a howl against the pervasive Palestinian sense that resistance has failed.

Even four weeks into this latest surge in violence, in the fast succession of stabbings and protests and funerals and pronouncements, it can be hard to figure out exactly what this round of terror attacks is actually about.

There is no shortage of explanations, of course, but they usually say more about the explainer than the phenomenon they are explaining.

Many pundits sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight have said the killings are driven by economic or political “frustration” — a statement the attackers themselves, along with their most passionate supporters in Palestinian politics, often seem to contradict when they insist they are motivated by devotion to God, Islam or the vision of a redeemed Palestine.

Those who sympathize with the Israelis blame Palestinian “fanaticism” and point to the attackers’ own rhetoric as proof. Yet that rhetoric, for all its rejectionism, does not explain this specific outburst, since it does not mark a change from the past. The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel has been warning for decades that the Jews are trying to “steal” Al-Aqsa. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been extolling the “martyrs” — among them the killers of Israeli schoolchildren — for years, to the consternation of Israelis and the complete disinterest of everyone else.

Neither “fanaticism” — the term itself is a judgment, not a description — nor “frustration” really encapsulate what the attacks mean in the cultural and political context that spawned them, and to which they are speaking: the Palestinian collective consciousness.

The Missing Intifada

The First Intifada, beginning in 1987, was a genuinely popular effort supported by broad swaths of Palestinian society. Its intent was thus more amorphous and more authentic than any specific strategy adopted later on, authentic enough to lead to fundamental shifts in how many Israelis perceived the moral claim the Palestinians had on the Jewish state. The Second Intifada of 2000, with its clear and oft-stated strategy — to cause enough pain and fear in the Israelis that they will choose of their own accord to leave the land – was not born in the grassroots, but at the very least enjoyed the apparent mobilization of Palestinian elites.

The latest wave of terrorism has broad support neither among the people nor among the elites.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable facts about the stabbings and protests that so dominate the headlines of the past few weeks is how few Palestinians are actually participating in them: a few hundred, and at moments of dramatic mobilization — such as the occasional “days of rage” called by Arab leaders — perhaps a few thousand.

This absence is a fact that television news or viral Internet videos fail to convey, since they are ill-equipped to tell a story they cannot show on video. Yet the simple arithmetic is undeniable: the Palestinian people are not lashing out at the Israelis. They are staying home. The elites, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the “martyrs” — the PA’s lip service can be rabid, to be sure, openly celebrating the stabbing of children or offering anti-Semitic blood libels in official media — but are simultaneously acting with determination on the ground to disrupt and stop the attacks against Israelis, and even, more rarely, to offer arguments against them.

In this absence of the people and the elites from the fighting, in the quiet, desperate effort to end the violence alongside the public need to affirm its legitimacy, a deeper message emerges. These youths — the average age of the attackers hovers at around 20 — who are killing Israelis, and often dying almost instantly in the attempt, are lauded as martyrs among Palestinians not so much because Palestinians believe their deaths have meaning, but because it is too agonizing to admit publicly that they do not. In their refusal to recognize Palestinian authorities outside their own online networks, in their appeals to religion and each other rather than the old heroes of the Palestinian “resistance” that lend their names to the more established armed groups, they are making a passionate plea to their own society to reclaim a vision that their society has largely abandoned.

They are resisting more than the Israeli occupation (we are describing the terrorists’ narrative for the moment; most Israelis believe the occupation persists because of the violence, not the other way around). They are battling, too, the growing Palestinian realization that their national movement has no answers, no narrative or political vision that offers a way forward to better days. These young killers are striving, in their kamikaze fervor, to rekindle the idea among Palestinians that straightforward victory remains possible, if only because the alternative – the possibility that Israel cannot be dislodged, that the nostalgic vision of an undivided, unfettered Palestine cannot be reclaimed — is simply too monstrous to accept.

So it is significant that their actions are loudly celebrated and quietly regretted. Unlike in the Second Intifada, when many Palestinians believed the suicide bombings, for all their brutality, could at least be justified by the hope that they might produce real results, few Palestinians now expect or even seriously fantasize that any sort of victory might flow from these new suicides. The deaths of these young killers, who proclaim their brutal acts are a reclamation of Palestinian self-respect, only deepen the despair and sense of indignity among the countrymen they leave behind.

Losing the Thread

The Palestinian national movement once had a coherent narrative. The Israeli polity, it claimed, was a political construct resting on force of arms and doomed to collapse under the weight of its own injustice, taking with it back to the colonialist, imperialist West the millions of Jews it dragged into this land. This narrative formed the underlying logic of Palestinian terrorism. Brutality was lionized precisely because in this analysis of the Israeli enemy, exacting a high cost for Israel’s continued existence hastened the day of its collapse, of its succumbing to its inherent weaknesses.

This narrative drove Palestinian politics for generations. It was believed by moderates and extremists alike. Its essential premise, that the Jews of Israel are not a rights-bearing nation with nowhere else to go, but rather a colonialist ideological construct imposed on this land by foreigners, has become a pillar of more than Palestinian politics; it lies at the root of Palestinian identity, of what Palestinian nationhood has come to mean. Palestine, an identity that had no political expression until Zionism came into being, is for Palestinians, at least in part, that cultural and social reality delineated by the experience of being pushed back by the invading imperialism of the Jews.

None of that takes away from the Palestinians either their nationhood or their history. Such identities and narratives can only be given to a nation by itself. Indeed, Palestinian intellectuals usually agree that the challenge of Zionism coalesced Palestinian national feeling to resist the newcomer.

Yet this vision of the Jewish state has a glaring problem: it has failed monstrously to predict events. Israel, that supposedly hollow shell, that artificial ideological construct, has failed to collapse under its own weight. Indeed, it is the Arab world that has collapsed around it while the Jewish state continues, maddeningly, unjustly, to flourish. The promise of Israel’s inner weakness, offered to the Palestinians as often by Jewish activists as by Palestinian ideologues, has betrayed them. The Jews have failed to leave, and despite the rallying of a handful of radical Jewish intellectuals to the cause, won’t even acknowledge that their national identity is something less than authentic.

Imperiled Al-Aqsa

A comprehensive and startlingly deep September poll of Palestinian public opinion lays out in painful detail the Palestinians’ current despondency.

“For the first time since we started asking, a majority [of Palestinians, 53%,] now demands the dissolution” of the Palestinian Authority, explains the report, produced by the well-regarded Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.

The main reason: Palestinians feel defenseless against a looming, threatening Israel. Fully 81% of Palestinians polled said they worried “that they would be hurt by Israel or that their land would be confiscated or homes demolished,” the study found.

This figure would surprise most Israelis, who continue to view both the violence of extremist Jews and the legal battles over housing construction and land ownership in the West Bank as essentially peripheral phenomena. Whatever their statistical scope – as with most things, Israeli and Palestinian officials offer different figures – the effect of these experiences on Palestinians’ willingness to trust Israel is decisive.

Thus we find that over two-thirds (68%) of Palestinians said in the Shikaki poll that protecting them from extremist Jewish attacks is not the responsibility of the Israel Defense Forces, but of the Palestinian Authority that ostensibly represents them. A nearly identical number, 67%, said the PA was not doing all it could to fulfill that responsibility – not that it was failing to protect them, but that it wasn’t meaningfully trying.

Nearly half of West Bank residents (48%) even said they would volunteer for unarmed civil guard units in their towns and villages to defend against Israeli violence, if the chance were offered to them.

This sense of the failure of their national institutions doesn’t end with their security. Palestinians feel actively oppressed by their leaders and ideologues.

In Hamas-ruled Gaza, where the regime scarcely pretends to offer individual or civil rights, just 19% say their media is free and only 29% say they can criticize their government without fear (a number actually lower than the 34% who say they support Hamas). It is commonly thought that the Palestinian experience in Gaza is somehow fundamentally different from that in the West Bank. When asked to describe their leaders, however, the dismal figures are nearly the same in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas. Only 23% in the West Bank say their press is free, and 29% – identical to those under Hamas rule – say they can criticize their government.

It is impossible to understand Palestinian claims that Israel seeks to rob them of al-Aqsa, claims that underlie the latest violence, without first grasping this pervasive sense of vulnerability and abandonment.

According to the poll, the vast majority of Palestinians believe that Israel seeks to change the situation at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in its favor. Fully half — 50% — of Palestinians say they believe Israel intends to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine and replace them with a Jewish Third Temple. Another 21% say Israel intends to split the Temple Mount plateau and build a synagogue alongside the Muslim sites. A further 10% — the total is now 81% — said Israel wants to change the five-decade-old status quo that allows only Muslims to pray there. Just 12% said Israel seeks to maintain the status quo.

Of course, this widespread acceptance of claims to Israeli perfidy should not surprise those familiar with past polls, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally. But Shikaki followed up this question with another, and respondents’ answers to this next question are astonishing.

Will Israel succeed with its nefarious plans, he asked.

Fully half, 50%, of Palestinians said yes.

The root of what the Israelis sometimes call the Palestinians’ “Big Lie” – essentially, that the Jews are plotting to take Al-Aqsa away from them – is not really very difficult for Israelis to understand after all. Vulnerability, Israelis know well, can dramatically change your view of the enemy.

It hardly matters whether any particular Israeli leader actually wants to change the status quo on the Temple Mount at any particular moment. The simple fact that they could do so if they wished – as vast numbers of Palestinians openly believe – brings into agonizingly sharp relief the helplessness and failure of Palestinian aspirations. The beating heart of Palestinian identity and geography, the shrine that constitutes their claim to a seat of honor in Islam, is in the iron grip of the enemy.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly insists that Israel has only good intentions for the Temple Mount, saying his government will ensure Palestinian rights and access to Al-Aqsa just as previous governments have for five decades.

Palestinians do not believe these assurances for several reasons: just as Israelis do not see nuance among Palestinians, missing the general Palestinian despondency amid the loud, violent terrorism of the stabbings, so Palestinians do not bother distinguishing between the activism of Yehudah Glick or Uri Ariel and the longstanding commitments of Israeli governments and the public to a peaceful status quo at the site.

Palestinian unfamiliarity with Israelis, despite the intimate closeness in which we all live, also means they project onto Israel some measure of their own politics. There is little doubt among most Palestinians that if the disparity of power were reversed at the Temple Mount, as it was before 1967, Muslims would deny to Jews what they believe Israel plans to deny to them; it is hard to really trust that the Jews genuinely do not intend to do the same.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Netanyahu does not seem to grasp that his reassurances are themselves galling, since they highlight the intolerable fact that Al-Aqsa’s fate really is ultimately dependent on him and his cabinet.

Last Stands

At least two distinct Palestinian visions have emerged for helping the Palestinian national movement to regain its footing.

One was perhaps best articulated by the well-known Palestinian journalist Mohammed Daraghmeh, who also serves as a Ramallah-based writer for AP. In a remarkable column last week largely but not entirely ignored by Israelis, Daraghmeh spoke directly to the young Palestinian attackers – and to their missing-in-action leaders.

“After the Second Intifada ended, we stood as one and said: We were wrong here, mistaken there,” he wrote on the Palestinian news site al-Hadath. Yet this belated self-criticism was ultimately cowardly, he implied, since Palestinian intellectuals and leaders did not have the courage to speak out while the intifada raged.

Today, too, “the politicians are fearful for their popularity. But the intellectuals charged with safeguarding the spirit of the nation – they must not be afraid. They must shout in the loudest voice: Where are we going?”

According to Daraghmeh, the only power the Palestinians can wield against the overwhelming force of the Israeli occupier lies in the fact that “Palestine is an international issue. [The issue] won’t be decided in a flurry of knives or acts of martyrdom [suicide attacks], or in protests or demonstrations. It will end only when the world understands it has a duty to intervene and to draw borders and lines, as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Kosovo… One might ask: How long? And I say: The day will come. … One might ask: Did the peaceful struggle bring about the end of the occupation? And I say: Did the military and armed struggle do so? …. Only the world can bring the solution. But it won’t do so if we are silent, or if we commit suicide. It will [come to our rescue] if we stay on the humane path of our national struggle…. Our children grab kitchen knives in a wave of emotion…. We must stand before them and say to them: You are destroying your lives and ours — Palestine needs you alive.”

Such sentiments are easy to admire in the context of Palestinian discourse (Israelis might be less moved; they won’t find here any moral qualms over the actual act of stabbing innocent Israelis). Daraghmeh published his warning in a relatively popular news outlet, one whose Facebook page boasts over 230,000 “likes.” Indeed, his views reflect the essential strategy of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in recent years: internationalize the conflict, rope a basically sympathetic world into the equation in order to force the Israelis to retreat.

Yet this most moderate of Palestinian strategies suffers from the same weakness as the more violent ones: it does not address hard strategic realities.

Daraghmeh fails to note that the Bosnian and Kosovar conflicts were ended by the blunt expedient of aerial bombardment. Is it really reasonable to expect what he calls the “world” — US-led NATO, to be exact – to bomb Israel out of the West Bank? Or less cartoonishly, can an Israeli public that consistently tells pollsters it believes a West Bank withdrawal will result in vastly larger and bloodier versions of the Gaza wars of recent years, with rockets targeting Israel’s population centers and subsequent Israeli incursions dealing far worse agony to Palestinians than the current occupation – can a voting public that sees such risks in withdrawal be swayed by economic boycott, UN Human Rights Council resolutions or the snubs of indignant NGOs to carry it out?

Then there is the second Palestinian vision, which amounts to a denial that the past strategies have failed. In Gaza, Hamas has spent the past four weeks loudly cheering on the violence in the West Bank.

Yet ironically, this triumphalism, not the self-criticism of Daraghmeh, brings the Palestinian strategic collapse into sharpest relief. Hamas has praised and sung the glory of the stabbing attacks – while clamping down tightly on sympathetic rocket attacks from Gaza out of fear that Israeli reprisals against the coastal strip could further increase the cost Gazans believe they are paying for Hamas’s strategy of perpetual struggle. (It is not an accident that Hamas’s support in Gaza – 34% in September – marks a five-point drop from Shikaki’s last poll in June.)

Worse, Palestinian leaders do not seem to understand that Hamas’s support for violence fatally undermines Abbas’s nonviolent internationalism, shoring up Israelis’ determination to resist withdrawal because they do not believe Abbas can really hold out against Hamas if Israel pulls out.

The irony is perhaps best encapsulated in last Monday’s comments by Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau based in Qatar, who proclaimed that “the heroes of Palestine” have managed to place a “blockade” on the occupier with only knives and handguns. To Israel’s actual blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza the group has found an answer by rhetorically padding the achievements of these (mostly non-Hamas) killers into a comparable — and thus, the pretense goes, deterrence-producing — response.

Similarly, one of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar, said last week that the images of IDF soldiers fleeing a Palestinian shooter who opened fire on them at Beersheba’s central bus station prove that Israeli soldiers are unfit even to direct traffic. He did not seem to notice that such claims about the IDF’s frailty might raise questions about Hamas’s inability to effectively puncture the Israeli defensive line in the four wars it has fought with Israel since Israel left the Gaza Strip.

When Hamas decides to effectively sit out a major Palestinian assault on Israel while proclaiming that the very same assault constitutes a force multiplier that somehow balances the power of the sides, when it proclaims Israeli soldiers are feeble while policing Gaza’s border to prevent Palestinians from clashing with those soldiers and eliciting their response, one may safely conclude that even Hamas isn’t quite sure how to move the Palestinian cause forward from this nadir.

There is, of course, one more voice: that of the attackers themselves. Here, too, the strategic impasse soon becomes evident. Their self-proclaimed “Jerusalem awakening,” at once an appeal to the sanctity of Al-Aqsa and an admonition at the galling vacuum of powerlessness that Jerusalem has come to represent, is no awakening at all. In their rejection of existing Palestinian authorities, these “digital natives,” at home in the anarchic internet and partly shaped by its narcissistic tendencies, are in search of a new cultural and political wellspring of resistance that is not tainted by the failures of Fatah and Hamas.

Israeli security officials have told the cabinet in recent weeks that the stabbings are largely the work of “lone wolves” who lack the sort of organizational infrastructure that would make them vulnerable to easy disruption by Israeli intelligence. The diffuse nature of this sort of online grassroots activity may make them harder to intercept (at least until Israel’s security services sufficiently penetrate Palestinian social media) but it also leaves them unable to escalate the assault to the level that might drive real panic among Israelis – the sort of panic that terrorism as a strategy fundamentally requires. Online activism only really matters if it inspires a critical mass of real-world activism. In the long list of painful ironies for the Palestinians, then, this is yet another: the very thing that gives these young, decidedly modern attackers their tactical advantage ensures their strategic defeat. Israelis who ultimately brushed off the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada through the simple expedient of continuing with their daily lives will not be cowed by stabbings in the street.

This simple truth is not lost on the attackers. It is one reason that they do not discuss goals or strategy in any serious way. The video games, cartoons and music videos they share are essentially devoid of a narrative. These artifacts of the present state of Palestinian “popular resistance” are mostly focused not on a discernible path to national redemption, but on the promise of personal satisfaction. The message is simple: stab the Jews, watch them scream, prove to yourself in that instant that they are mortal, vulnerable. For that brief moment – so the online campaign implicitly claims – Palestinian dignity is restored.

Yet the real-world attacks that flow from this promise, the moments of frantic scuffling with Israelis, the quick deaths the attackers meet time and again, even when facing unarmed Israeli civilians, only bring the collapse of Palestinian solutions and self-respect – and Israeli unflappability – into sharper relief.

Necessary Failure?

None of this is a moral argument. Whether the Palestinians’ essential claims are right or wrong, or the Israelis’ skepticism of withdrawal moral or immoral – indeed, whether any of this is good or bad for ostensibly victorious Israel – are separate issues to the simple fact of the Palestinians’ growing realization that they can no longer articulate meaningful options, violent or otherwise, for reclaiming control of their fate.

Yet in the very admission of failure, as always, lies a hint at a possible path that leads in a different direction.

The Palestinian national movement has paid a monstrous price for its misreading of the Jews — for failing to understand that Israeli Jews are largely the descendants of refugees who had nowhere else to go in the brutalities of the 20th century, and thus could not be driven away with terrorism as scattered European colonialists, far from their distant homelands but never estranged from them, emphatically could. The Jews’ resilience to Arab violence lies not in historical realities, but in psychological ones; the Jews believe that they are a people defending themselves, and that is enough to inoculate them to terrorism. Terrorism, after all, is an attempt to exact a cost from a certain behavior; it depends heavily on the victims perceiving a viable alternative to their present behavior.

Yet by this analysis, the Israeli victory is exceedingly limited. It is not rooted in any wise Israeli policy, but in unconscious processes of Israeli identity. Similarly, this victory cannot “solve” the essential challenge. No one has yet suggested a plausible means by which either people might be forced out of this land. So the Israelis and Palestinians remain stuck, whether in failure or success, in coexistence or wild brutality, with the hard reality of each other’s existence as self-proclaimed nations.

It’s not hard to understand why the Palestinians have struggled to come to terms with the Jewish presence in this sense. The barriers to recognition are immense. If the Jews can’t be made to leave, if the foundational strategy of scaring them off wasn’t rooted in an understanding of what that might entail – that is, of how the alternatives to this homeland might appear in the Jews’ collective psyche – then what is the value of Palestinian sacrifices made on the altar of this misbegotten strategy?

Indeed, if the Jews of “colonialist” Israel cannot be dislodged, does that mean they are not like other colonial projects that could be made to collapse? If they are not colonists who can be pushed back to Germany or Russia or Iraq or Morocco from whence they came, what are they? What is to be done with the fact of the enemy’s implacable claims to nationhood, which clash so directly with Palestinian claims?

Nations have rights, and do not lose these rights when they err. That is why Palestinian leaders are so fearful of acquiescing to Israel’s demand that they recognize Jewish nationhood; among their arguments against the demand, one is paramount: it amounts to recognition of Jewish national rights, a vastly more profound concession than Palestinian moderates’ acknowledgment of Jewish power.

Failure has not yet led to any serious consideration that the premise at the heart of the Palestinian strategy may be wrong. No Palestinian who matters, who shapes opinion or controls militias, is willing to be the first to acknowledge defeat.

And so even as Palestinian public opinion grows weary of the pointlessness of the current struggle, Palestinian politics remain trapped in the lingering uncertainty, an uncertainty that is Hamas’s lifeblood and validation: What if we are giving up too soon? What if a little more pain, a little more sacrifice, will yet redeem and restore all that has been lost?

Few really believe that anymore in Palestine, but none are yet willing to seek another path.