The Palestinians enjoy wallowing in their own self-inflicted misery.
When visiting English-speaking countries like Canada, England, and Australia, I have felt that they are similar to the U.S. but still different. Beyond changes in currencies and driving at times on the wrong side of the road, they have a different vibe than the U.S. One can see it in the massive wealth of America and the power of her military and economic strength. Still, overall, one can feel a certain kinship with the citizens of these countries and their way of life, even while being grateful for having an American passport.
Now, let’s move over to my neighborhood here in the Middle East. As it’s May, that means it’s Israel Independence/Palestinian Nakba time. The first half obviously reflects the Jewish leadership’s decision to declare a state when the official British mandate for Palestine ended. The Arabs responded with terror and war. Five Arab nations descended on the fledgling Jewish state. The Jews won, and for 80 years, much of the Arab world has never forgiven them. But what of the supposed “Palestinian Arabs” who, for the most part, were not indigenous. Rather, they or their immediate forefathers came to the area as the Jews were building up barren wastelands. They came for work. When the war started, Ben-Gurion and other Jewish officials begged the Arab residents to stay. They promised equal rights in the new country (which has been upheld) and asked them not to leave. On the other side, the Arab armies exhorted local Arabs to get out so as to make their war-fighting easier. The best analysis I have ever seen, from a former Harvard professor of mine, had half of the 720,000 Arabs who left doing so under fellow Arab instruction, with the remaining 360,000 being actively driven out by the victorious Jewish forces. The Jews declared an independent new state while the Palestinians screamed Nakba—or disaster.
When I was growing up, it was not so hard to find Holocaust survivors. My parents fled Germany as children, and though they technically were labeled as such, they were out of the Fatherland before the war started. One could go to Skokie or the local synagogue and see older people with the Nazi tattoos from the camps still on their arms. One might hear about so-and-so and how he lost all of his family at Auschwitz. These were not one-off stories but rather the tale of many Jews who survived the war and started afresh in Israel or the West. And while every person and community mourned the loss of their loved ones, they learned to move on. Sure, one could find a person whose life was so destroyed by the Holocaust that he could no longer function as a human being. But the vast majority who arrived in America with a few bucks in their pockets decided, as the Torah declares, “to choose life.”
They came to live and not mope around and endlessly say, “Look what they did to us!” And by all rights, they could have done so. Each had a story worse than that of his friend. Each could describe outrunning death or losing close relatives by the direction of Mengele’s hand upon reaching Auschwitz. Instead, they took their new names given to them at Ellis Island and began to become Americans. Many left Orthodox Judaism so as to make a living, but all of them chose to move forward. They worked endless hours. Some opened stores and businesses. Their children went to American schools and then became doctors, lawyers, and successful business owners. Israel also could have spent 80 years mourning those killed in Europe and the additional Jews killed through war and terror. There are days for such remembrances, but they are confined so as to allow the living to live. One can choose life or he can choose perpetual Nakba.
And the Palestinians chose and continue to live Nakba because they like to wallow in self-pity. Is there suffering greater than the rabbi who lost his wife and nine children in the camps and survived to revive European Jewry and build a massive Chassidic dynasty? The Palestinians were offered a state by the U.N., and they rejected the offer. They tried to destroy the nascent Jewish state and lost. They chose terror and war for decades rather than make peace. Even today, Hamas is revered among Palestinians for the massive bloodletting it initiated two and a half years ago. The Palestinians, given a choice between killing Jews or making a successful state, will choose the former every single time. They have no interest in building new hospitals or better schools. Their whole purpose is to kill Jews and destroy Israel. They don’t care about a brighter future or less violence. They want blood, and for them, Nakba is their excuse for trying to get more. It’s like the three-year-old who goes on for days saying that daddy called him a fat pig. They can’t let go of the Nakba because they would have to replace it with the reality that they were offered a state on several occasions, and each time they said no. They don’t want a state that would leave a continued presence and existence of the Jewish people anywhere nearby. You think that if Israel shut shop and moved to New York, the Palestinians would not then focus all of their efforts to eradicate all of those Jews in New York? They have nothing but Jew hate, and for that reason, they have no state.
If Jews are physical matter, then the Palestinians and their friends in Tehran and Beirut are anti-matter. There is nothing positive about their program or their religion’s views of Jews or the West. Their only existence is grievance and shouts for revenge. For nearly three years, Muslims and their lefty friends in the West have not screamed for two states or denounced Palestinian violence. Nope. They demand “intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea”: no Israel, no Jews. The Palestinians wouldn’t know what to do with themselves without hating Jews and Israel. Nobody mentions Palestinians who are treated in Israeli hospitals or the numerous Palestinians who worked in Israel and made a good living while doing so. They don’t have “thank you” in their lexicon. When one Gazan woman had her son treated for a serious disease in Tel Aviv, she told the press that she hoped the boy grows up to become a “shaheed” – martyr in the name of Islam.
Sometimes in the family, there is a child who drags the whole family backward. He is belligerent, negative, and unpleasant to be around. The parents realize they need to isolate him in order for the rest of the family to live normally. There will be no peace with the Palestinians, the ersatz people used by the Western left as a sword against the Jews. Israel can only protect herself from them and periodically weaken them when they threaten to attack Israelis for their only “sin” of being Jewish. The Palestinians can wallow in their “they took our land” canard, but the Jews, during Ottoman and British rule, bought and developed land; the rest was taken during defensive wars, including in 1967, when Nasser made it clear that he planned to wipe the Jewish state off of the map. The UAE is a breath of fresh air not only for making peace with Israel but for actually not being embarrassed by its relations with the Jewish state. As to the rest, protect your backside and realize that they will never change. They call the day of Israel’s founding “Nakba”; they themselves are the Nakba because they stopped the calendar and refuse to move toward a better and more prosperous future.