Jerusalem Post writer Herb Keinon is right on target:
What do the murders and, even more so, the reactions to them or the fact that one-third of Palestinians, according to a Palestinian poll, support the Itamar attack, indicate about the Palestinian zeitgeist, that nation’s cultural, intellectual, spiritual and political climate? Is this a statehood-ready zeitgeist?
There are a few other little issues that Rich Richman recently noted:
Not to put too fine a point on it: if you can’t finish drafting your constitution; if your “president†is in the seventh year of his four-year term; if you have no functioning legislature and cannot hold parliamentary elections; if half your putative state is occupied by terrorists; if your education system is a cesspool of anti-Semitism; if you insist upon dedicating public squares to those who massacred civilians; if your ruling party is corroded by corruption; if you have no free press or independent judiciary; if you cannot implement anything in negotiations that you refuse to conduct in any event; and if you haven’t finished Phase I of the Roadmap . . . well, you might not be ready for a state.
Or, in the words spoken by J Street co-founder Daniel Levy about a different Mideastern nation,
Maybe … [Palestine] really ain’t a good idea.
No, it ain’t. But Oslo Syndrome sufferers — the Syndrome is endemic among Israeli intellectuals, artists and media people — continue to publicly act out their delusional psychosis, believing that only meeting all the demands of the Arab antisemites will purify Israel of its original sin:
JERUSALEM (Ethan Bronner, NY Times) — Dozens of Israel’s most honored intellectuals and artists have signed a declaration endorsing a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 lines and asserting that an end to Israel’s occupation “will liberate the two peoples and open the way to a lasting peace.†…
Of the more than 60 who signed by Tuesday, about 20 were winners of the Israel Prize and a number of others were awarded the Emet Prize, given by the prime minister for excellence in science, art and culture. Signatures were still being collected.
“The land of Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people where its identity was shaped,†the statement begins. “The land of Palestine is the birthplace of the Palestinian people where its identity was formed.†It goes on to say that now is the time to live up to the commitment expressed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence by its founders to “extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness.â€
The Land of Israel is indeed the birthplace of the Jewish people, more than 3,000 years ago. The Land of Israel is also the birthplace of the ‘Palestinian people’, who defined themselves into being in opposition to the Jewish people a bit more than 30 years ago. There was only a ‘land of Palestine’ twice that I can think of: once when the Romans renamed Judea Syria Palaestina after they crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 132 CE, and once when the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate over a chunk of the former Ottoman Empire, where a Jewish National Home was to be established (the Brits turned out to be about as friendly to Jewish national aspirations as the Romans had been).
We started hearing about a ‘Palestinian people’ in the 1960’s, but before that they were just ‘Arabs’, much like other Arabs living in neighboring lands. I can’t guess whether an accommodation would eventually have been reached between them and Israel, because in 1993 Israeli leaders made the fateful mistake that would give a name to the system of delusions that rendered them blind to reality: they signed the Oslo agreements.
They agreed that the PLO, the same people that gave us the Munich Massacre, the Ma’alot Massacre, the Achille Lauro hijacking, the Bus of Blood and more, the terrorist organization that killed more Jews than any other, the group headed by the duplicitous murderer Yasser Arafat, would be “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Then they formed the governing authority for Palestinian Arabs, the Palestinian National Authority (PA) from the PLO, with Arafat as President. And they committed themselves to ultimately cede control of territory captured in 1967 for an Arab state that would grow out of the PA.
The first thing that Arafat did was to take control of the systems of education, media and state religion and turn them into one massive tool for indoctrination. While the Israeli educational system was being changed (by Oslo Syndrome addled left-wing politicians) to de-emphasize the history of the Jewish people and to replace nationalism with universalism, while the media worked to convince the worried public that increasing terrorism was the result only of ‘extremists’ who were ‘against peace’, Arafat’s constituency was taught to hate.
They were taught that all of ‘Palestine’, from the river to the sea, belonged to them, and that they would get it back through violent ‘resistance’. They were taught that martyrdom for the Palestinian cause was the highest honor that a Palestinian could achieve. They were taught that Jews were evil and corrupt. They wrote poetry about killing Jews and gave it to children to recite on television. They learned all the traditional antisemitic themes.
A unique national culture was created among the Arabs, melding them together in the fire of their hatred, the culture that gave birth to the monsters that butchered the Fogel family, the culture that helped, protected and justified the crime of those monsters.
Arafat made no secret of any of this, calling for Jihad in Arabic while telling Israeli and American leaders in English that he wanted peace. Arafat inspired terrorists and paid them for their work, all the while pretending to cooperate in peace negotiations. Evidence of his duplicity was everywhere, but Oslo Syndrome victims were unable to see it.
Even when Arafat torpedoed negotiations in 2000 and began a vicious war in which more than a thousand Israelis were to die, stubborn cases of Oslo Syndrome persisted.
And so the intellectuals, artists, etc. who signed this declaration honestly but pathologically believe that the reason that there isn’t peace between Arabs and Israelis in the Land of Israel is that they, the Jews, haven’t tried hard enough. Nothing, of course, is expected of the Arabs, because it is all the Jews’ fault. If only the Jews would become better people and make up for the original sin of establishing a Jewish state in their historical homeland by giving in to all Arab demands, then there would be peace.
So take a group of people that is boiling with hatred, a group that has very little else in the their arts, literature, drama and politics except expressions of hatred, a group that has taken no practical steps toward building the infrastructure of a state — why would they need, for example, a free press or independent judiciary when the only immediate objective they have is to kill and drive out the hated Jews from ‘their’ land? — and give them a sovereign platform from which to realize their genocidal intentions.
Do this in the name of peace, they ask. How could this be a bad idea?
Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs, Herb Keinon, Rich Richman
This is the best and most concise article I have ever read on the reason(s) the so-called “Palestinians” should not be given a state of their own. There has never been a more pathological, sociopathic “people” in the history of the world.
This declaration is truly a shameful and irresponsible action. It supports an enemy which refuses to negotiate with it. It contributes to the delegitimization campaign. It calls for indefensible borders for Israel.