By Vic Rosenthal
Moshe Elad wrote:
When Palestinian intellectuals in the US are seriously asked to explain how after 60 years of conflict, Israel has a space satellite, a series of Nobel Prize laureates for significant scientific achievements and an economy that thrives even during wartime, while the only Palestinian scientific achievement is the Qassam rocket, they respond: “Give us a state and we’ll be able to do the same.”
There are lots of reasons for the contrast, but one of the important ones is this: the Jews were always obsessed with the Jewish people, their survival, their culture, and their development. So were the Palestinians.
The US and Israel tried to give them a state in 2000, but they wouldn’t take it. Creating a state is slow, difficult work. Taking one away from somebody else is easier.
One of the mistakes made by some of the early Zionists was not to pay enough attention to the Arabs. The Arabs always paid attention to the Jews. The Palestinians like to talk about Palestinian culture and enterprise, but really all they care about is Jews: what they possess and how it can be taken from them. How everything originally belonged to them and how the Jews took it away. How to humiliate the Jews, how to hate them, and how to kill them.
That’s it. That’s Palestinian ‘culture’. A culture that can make heroes for children out of people that are willing to die themselves to kill Jews. Some Palestinians have big dreams, like blowing themselves up in a market, killing tens of Jews. Others have to be content with stealing Jewish cars.
In Gaza you have all these Palestinians cooped up together with no Jews to kill. They do their best, firing rockets into Sderot, trying to blow themselves up at crossings, shooting at electrical workers on poles, planting bombs near the border fence, tunneling under the border to plant explosives under Israeli military posts, torturing Israelis by kidnapping their children and dangling hope in front of them for months and sometimes years. But there’s all this untapped Palestinian creativity, of a type that is almost unique in the world, and it’s bottled up. So they have to fight each other, Hamas, Fatah, the clan two streets over.
When Jews were trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, they published newspapers and journals, created works of art, played music, engaged in every imaginable form of economic activity — all this while they were being shipped out to extermination. The Palestinians fight, bomb internet cafes and coffee shops, assassinate rivals, kidnap friendly journalists, and try to kill Jews. The Palestinians are not imprisoned by the Jews, who would happily coexist with them, but by their mass psychosis about needing to kill Jews.
Is it something genetic that makes them like this? I don’t think so. They have a moral sense — there were great outcries of shame and horror when Fatah and Hamas started having their pitched battles in the streets. It just doesn’t extend to Jews.
I think Haj Amin al-Husseini, the fanatically antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat, my candidate for worst ‘human being’ of the 20th century had something to do with it. Both of these Palestinian leaders, much beloved by their people, always put killing Jews first among their priorities (Hitler did too). Arafat’s first task on his return to ‘Palestine’ in 1993 was to start building an educational system designed to create Jew-killers. Someone who was in the first grade in 1993 would be 20 years old today.
Today (Tuesday), 15 Gazans have been killed in inter-militia fighting, and 18 Israelis in Sderot wounded by Qassam rockets fired from Gaza, some seriously. Happy Nakba (catastrophe) day!
Technorati Tags: Palestinians, Jews
Umm, I see.
By Vic Rosenthal