MIDEAST UPDATE: 9.22.18 - The Palestinian Victimhood Narrative No Longer Sells

The Palestinian Victimhood Narrative No Longer Sells - By Mitchell Bard - http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=2562

 

After decades of accepting the idea that Palestinians deserve American financial assistance without offering anything in return, President Trump has finally said, "Enough." Fed up with their lies and obduracy, he decided the Palestinians are not entitled to US taxpayer dollars to pay terrorists, support phony refugees, and line the pockets of corrupt leaders who enrich themselves, their families, and their cronies.

 

Cutting aid to UNRWA was long overdue because UNRWA is a poster child for the fraudulence of Palestinian claims. UNRWA has invented five million refugees and created a welfare system to guarantee their perpetual misery.

 

The refugee problem could have been solved decades ago, as UNRWA originally envisioned, if the leaders in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria gave the Palestinians citizenship, took them out of camps, and allowed them to assimilate into their societies, where they already shared a common language, religion, and culture.

 

And how can anyone justify the fact that Palestinian leaders keep their people confined to camps. After Israel evacuated Gaza, the Palestinians said that they would build housing for refugees on the rubble of the settlements, and received billions of dollars for the project. I don't think a single house was built for a single refugee.

 

Where did the money go?

 

To Hamas, for building rockets and tunnels, and taking care of themselves at the expense of the people. Perhaps one day the refugees will grow tired of uselessly railing against Israel, and protest their jailors from Fatah and Hamas.

 

The Palestinians' enablers immediately predicted the loss of US funding would create a humanitarian catastrophe in the territories. But where are the other 190 countries in the world that could fill the gap? Most of these countries declare their fealty to the Palestinian cause and vote for every UN resolution that feeds Palestinian fantasies.

 

Of course, casting a vote is easy, because it costs them nothing. If they really cared, do you really believe a coalition of states, or the EU alone, could not replace the few hundred million dollars the United States was providing? The Arab oil producers could fund the Palestinian Authority's annual budget out of a week's oil revenues.

 

What if all the groups and individuals promoting the antisemitic boycott of Israel gave money to help the Palestinians rather than spending their money on convincing artists not to perform in Israel, pushing propaganda on college campuses, or interfering with employment opportunities for Palestinians who want to work for Israelis? I'm sure Roger Waters, Viggo Mortensen, Penelope Cruz, and the other thousand or so celebrity BDS advocates could come up with enough money to take care of the people they claim to care for so much.

 

Come to think of it, why haven't the Palestinians, who love to copy the pro-Israel community's ideas, sold Palestine Bonds. Israel raises more than $1 billion from donors in the US alone. Surely all the supporters of JVP and SJP, CAIR, and the other groups professing concern for the Palestinians would rush to their brokers to buy Palestine Bonds.

 

But the PA has no money to repay the bondholders. Maybe if tens of millions of dollars were not going to pay terrorists in Israeli jails and the families of martyrs they could have a bond campaign. But, if they did raise money from bonds, would the corrupt Palestinian leaders just embezzle it and continue to pay the terrorists?

 

People complaining about Trump have forgotten that the Palestinians conceded nothing to Obama. To the contrary, the Palestinians grew more obstinate in reaction to Obama's sympathy for their cause. Mahmoud Abbas, who had been negotiating with Ehud Olmert before Obama took office, refused to negotiate with Benjamin Netanyahu for his entire term.

 

Obama followed the tired, cliched playbook that produced 70 years of failure in US diplomacy. Trump's team is blowing up the entire Arabist approach. Unlike their predecessors, they understand the Palestinians' negotiating strategy has been to secure Israeli compromises without making any of their own. They would then use the last Israeli position as the starting point for new talks, aimed at drawing further concessions from their interlocutors.

 

According to The New Yorker's Adam Entous, Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman compare the Palestinians' decision to reject Israel's previous offers to missing out on a chance to buy Google stock 20 years ago. Now it's too late to get the old price, and they must pay a lot more in return.

 

Equally important, Trump has smashed the sacred cows of the peace process -- Jerusalem and refugees. The Arabists believed that Israel needed to re-divide Jerusalem and predicted an apocalypse when Trump decided to take Jerusalem off the table by recognizing it as Israel's capital. Once again, they were wrong. Trump's move was critical to disabusing the Palestinians of their fantasies of solely claiming Jerusalem as their capital city.

 

The Arabists bought into the Palestinian narrative about five million refugees expelled in the Nakba, and expected Israel to accept at least a limited "right of return," knowing that this was suicide for Israel as a Jewish state. Trump, however, refuses to accept the UNRWA definition of refugees and the administration is calculating a realistic figure for the actual number of refugees -- probably more like 150-200,000 -- that would be near the 100,000 number that Israel has long offered to accept on a humanitarian basis.

 

Israel will be expected to make concessions, including perhaps evacuating some settlements, but these will likely be consistent with past Israeli offers.

 

With the exception of the fanatics in Tehran who care about the Palestinians only to the extent that they can be used to advance Iranian interests and threaten Israel, most Arab and Muslim leaders have grown tired of the Palestinian issue. Arab leaders were said to fear the "Arab street" rising up against them if they dared abandon the Palestinian cause. It was always a myth. When the street did not react after the US recognized Jerusalem and moved its embassy, the lack of concern for the Palestinians became clearer than ever.

 

Trump's peace plan is unlikely to succeed, but this has nothing to do with the elements of the plan and everything to do with Palestinian irredentism. From an ideological, Islamic, psychological, and political standpoint, the Palestinians have no desire for peace with Israel.

 

Ideologically, the Palestinians are led by the old guard that has never been psychologically capable of abandoning the idea of liberating all of "Palestine," which means they are no more willing to give up Haifa than they are Jerusalem. From the Islamic standpoint, it is inconceivable that what the Palestinians consider Muslim land should be ruled by Jews or that dhimmis can rule over Muslims.

 

Psychologically, the Palestinians feel aggrieved, consider the establishment of Israel the "original sin," and need to feel their grievances (such as acknowledging the "right of return") are addressed. Politically, surveys indicate the Palestinian public has little interest in peace without Israeli capitulation -- and even if they felt differently, they have no say under their dictatorial leaders.

 

The Palestinians deserve better, but, as The Wall Street Journal editorialized, "If the Palestinians want to be treated with the respect of a peace partner, they have to first show a desire for peace." And it really has to start with the Palestinian people, who are suffering and discontented with the denial of their civil and human rights by their leaders, but have vented that frustration on Israel.

 

They will have to redirect their kites and rocks and bombs at the Muqata in Ramallah, and the headquarters of Hamas. They will have to demand control of their future and abandon the ideology, religious fanaticism, and politics of the past, and open themselves to new opportunities.

 

The Blood of Slain Israelis Stains Many Hands - By Melanie Phillips - http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=2572

 

It's often claimed by Western enemies of Israel that the military actions of the Israel Defense Forces against Hamas in Gaza are disproportionate because such actions kill Arabs while Hamas attacks don't kill Israelis.

 

That's apparently why the Western media ignore the thousands of rockets and aerial firebombs launched from Gaza to kill the residents of southern Israel, reporting instead IDF military action to stop such attacks as the wanton killing of civilians.

 

When an Israeli actually is murdered by an Arab in cold blood, however, this isn't reported as wanton killing of the innocent, if he happens to be the wrong sort of Israeli. Then it's suggested his murder is his own fault.

 

The killing of American-born Israeli Ari Fuld on Sept. 16 has caused an outpouring of grief in Israel. The impassioned eulogies to him poured out not just because his wife, four children, parents and the rest of his family have been so cruelly bereaved.

 

It's because he was a brave and outstanding fighter for Israel and the Jewish people, and admired even by his political opponents on account of his warm nature. He devoted his existence to fighting a great evil to which he has now lost his own life.

 

The Western media, however, don't count Ari Fuld as a victim at all because, as a resident of the Judean town of Efrat, he was a "settler."

 

The murder of other Israeli residents of the disputed territories is similarly shrugged off or unreported by the Western media. For them, "settlers" are dehumanized and their lives reckoned as of no account. Thus their murder is, in effect, justified and condoned.

 

This revolting attitude is all of a piece with the moral depravity of much of the West over the Arab war against Israel. Parroting the misleading mantra of a "two-state solution," they deny the truths of history and law and ignore the real Arab agenda of colonial conquest and the extermination of Jewish nationhood.

 

For the supposed "settlers" are not in these lands illegally. They are entitled to be there. In the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, the international community gave the Jews alone the right to settle what is now Israel, the "West Bank" and Gaza in recognition of the unique right of the Jews to recreate their ancient national homeland.

 

The real occupiers are the Arabs. Over the centuries, they were among the waves of conquerors of the land of Israel, including Romans, Greeks, Selucids, Fatimids, Crusaders, Mongol tribes, Tartars, Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks.

 

Those who today have invented for themselves a fictional "Palestinian" identity may not even have descended from the original Arab imperialists. Some may be the heirs of those who flooded into Palestine, many illegally, from neighboring Arab states on the back of the returning Jews in the early years of the last century.

 

The historian William Ziff noted that the serial occupiers of Israel themselves brought in many other cultures. Ziff described the people of the land as a "human patch-work of Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kalmucks, Persians, Crusaders, Tartars, Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Turks, Mongols, Romans, Kharmazians, Greeks, pilgrims, wanderers, ne'er-do-wells and adventurers, invaders, slaves."

 

To add to their historical and legal illiteracy, those shrugging aside the murder of Israeli "settlers" also turn a blind eye to the complicity in these crimes by the people they champion: the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

 

Through its educational materials and other media, the P.A. routinely incites hatred of Jews and the murder of Israelis, teaching its children that "all Israelis deserve to be killed and that dying while committing a terror attack is 'the path to excellence and greatness ... the great victory.' "

 

The Arab writer Bassam Tawil has specifically blamed the murder of Ari Fuld by 17-year-old Khalil Jabarin on incitement by Abbas. According to Palestinian terrorist groups, Jabarin decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli "crimes" against the Al-Aqsa mosque and other Islamic holy sites.

 

Two days earlier, in a speech to the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah widely reported in Arab media, Abbas had repeated the lie that Israel was planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.

 

No mention of any of this in Western media. Nor the fact that the P.A. immediately said it would pay the Jabarin family 1,400 shekels per month (nearly $400) for the next three years as a reward for Ari Fuld's murder. According to the P.A.'s finance ministry, its total "pay-for-slay" budget amounts to 1.2 billion shekels ($335 million) this year and last.

 

Until now, the West as a bloc has been complicit in Arab violence against Israelis. Over the years, it has thrown money at the "Palestinians" in the pious hope that it would help build their society and thus promote peace. In fact, it has been used to help promulgate hatred and incite mass murder.

 

Now, U.S. President Donald Trump has called time on this appalling charade. The United States has cut its funding to the "West Bank" and Gaza, closed the PLO office in Washington, and set in train moves to abolish the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's definition of Palestinian refugees.

 

By defining that status as uniquely inheritable, UNRWA has ludicrously multiplied the number of "Palestinian refugees" down through the decades.

 

The definition turned these "refugees" into a weapon of war deployed against Israel by the Arab world, which has used them as pawns to incite hatred and violence, and gain the backing of the credulous and Jew-hating West.

 

Responsibility for them rests therefore not with Israel but with the Arab world itself, which must now be forced to deal with them.

 

Britain and Europe, however, remain complicit in the murderous attacks on Israelis because they continue to fund UNRWA and the P.A. rather than holding them to account for their behavior.

 

Now Abbas is to visit Ireland, which is virulently hostile to Israel. The Irish leader, Leon Varadkar, has promised to raise with Abbas the violation of human rights by the P.A. and Hamas. His priority is "the fact that homosexuality has yet to be decriminalized in Gaza."

 

Varadkar doesn't even seem to know that Abbas has nothing to do with Gaza, which is ruled instead by Hamas. And while gays are certainly persecuted throughout "Palestinian" society, Varadkar seems not to grasp there are no human rights there for anyone, and the Palestine he is so keen to establish would be a police state.

 

Such Israel-bashers don't care about the welfare of the "Palestinians." They don't care about truth. They most certainly don't care about the Jewish people. They are driven by, at best, indifference to the Jews and, at worst, something much darker.

 

Ari Fuld and the thousands of other Israeli victims of Arab attacks (including those who weren't even Jewish) were murdered out of a fathomless hatred of Jews and Jewish nationhood, aided and abetted in the West by the ignorant, the ideological and the bigoted.

 

Abbas has Israeli blood on his hands--but Britain, Ireland and Europe are continuing to help plunge them in it.