You dare not say this
There they go again, those annoying Jews, stirring up trouble.
Um, wait. One dare not say that. One may think that but not say it. One must express the thought in more delicate, diplomatic terms.
It’s okay to say, therefore — as many are saying — “There go those annoying Israelis again, stirring up trouble by pressuring Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
This move, it’s said, disrupts what’s reverentially called “The Peace Process.” And never mind that Trump is only keeping a campaign promise he made — the same promise Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all made but chose not to keep.
Now right on cue there’s the rumbling of mob activity in the Middle East and in other spots where “antiSemitism” disguises itself as “anti-Zionism.” In such places “The Peace Process” predictably starts manifesting itself yet again in violent turmoil.
Actually, it’s more accurate to say that Trump has reanimated The Peace Process than to say he has disrupted it. For half a century or so, The Peace Process has consisted not so much of actual peace initiatives as it has of rioting, rocketry and other such forms of anti-Israel venting and counter efforts to mollify such outbursts.
Yet this Peace Process charade kept Bill Clinton fantasizing about a Nobel Peace Prize for eight years. And for the same length of time kept Barack Obama fantasizing about a second Peace Prize to top off the one he ridiculously received after just eight months in office. (His wasn’t the first Peace Prize absurdly awarded. Yasser Arafat, dean of Palestinian terrorism and boodler of millions of dollars in foreign aid, received one, too.)
No case is being made here that Israel is or ever has been an entirely faultless party. No nation is or ever has been. But The Peace Process has long been a ritual that seeks to appease and delude militant Arab Muslims. It does so by declining to level with them. By declining to tell them, simply: “C’mon, get real.”
For decade after decade, The Peace Process has refrained from speaking the plain, simple truth to anti-Israel militants and the demagogues who keep them riled up.
Here’s the plain, simple truth: Israel is not going to consent to demands that it cease to exist. Not without one helluva fight, anyway, a fight that would spell certain catastrophe for Palestinian Arabs.
Israel won’t ever sign off on its own demise. And, let’s face it, neither will its mighty ally, the United States.
The best that Palestinians can hope for if it ever comes to a showdown with Israel is a disastrous Pyrrhic “victory” for themselves. A showdown would be a fool’s errand for Palestinians, ending — at best — in celebration amid their own rubble and ruin.
Therefore, Israel’s adversaries should be told, bluntly: “Time to give up your pipe dreams. Allah is not, one day, going to hand over to his followers an Islamized “Greater Palestine, extending from river to sea” — that is, a Judenfrie region encompassing what was once Israel.
Not gonna happen. Ever. And the Palestinian Authority and Hamas should be told so. Told so again and again. In exactly those words. Until eventually, hopefully, the words sink in.
They should be told: “Time to relinquish your delusions. Time to make realistic accommodations. Time to get on with your lives. Only then will there ever be any chance of Palestinians’ finally improving their wretched lot.”
Israel is never going to consent to any measure that amounts to its own death warrant. This includes foremost a “right of return” to Israel of millions and millions of supposed Palestinian refugees. Such would wipe out the Jewish state by demographic means.
Israel’s current population of 8.3 million already accommodates 1.8 million Arabs, nearly 22 percent of the total population. (Contrast those figures with the constantly fussed-about 408,000 Jewish “settlers” on the West Bank, 11 percent of the Muslim population there.)
A United States mealymouthed diplomacy of moral equivalence is at fault for encouraging Palestinians to go on pursuing their chimera of a newly drawn Middle East map with Israel erased from it. This diplomacy — this kabuki dance called “The Peace Process” — pretends not to notice the truculence that’s long been rife among Israel’s contentious adversaries.
Throughout PA and Hamas bailiwicks, that truculence rears its ugly head in politics inflamed by religious triumphalism. It has long been apparent in school classrooms and textbooks, in political rhetoric, in the Palestinian media and in mosque sermons. The term “hate speech” grossly understates the tenor of the message that inundates Palestinians daily. If you doubt it, check out the Middle East Media Research Institutes’ translations of sermons, speeches, articles and broadcasts, MEMRI.org.
It’s instructive that the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, is widely regarded and even hailed as the “moderate” among Palestinian leadership. This is a man who holds a PhD from the old Soviet-funded Patrice Lumumba University. There he composed a doctoral thesis purporting to reveal that Zionists secretly plotted with Nazis. And the Holocaust? “Pffft,” says this “moderate.”
Yet, sad to say, among Palestinian leaders, Abbas likely is, indeed, the “moderate” — comparatively speaking. You don’t have to take Israel’s word for it that Hamas and the PA harbor, and succor, hostile ambitions that mock The Peace Process. All you have to do is read the charters of the two. Both charters speak of the “liberation of Palestine” by force of arms. And they envision Palestine as an Arab Muslim land extending from and Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — i.e., over the area that now constitutes Israel.
“Armed liberation is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy, not a tactic,” declares the PA charter. The charter adds that the PA “rejects every solution that is a substitute for a complete liberation of Palestine...” Note the modifier “complete.”
As for Hamas (the name stands for “Islamic Resistance”), its charter also declares Palestine to be, from river to sea, an “Islamic land” — the “heart of the Islamic Ummah (community).”
“There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity,” i.e., of Israel, adds the charter.
And this is the “reformed” Hamas charter — the one that grudgingly jettisoned some of the worst of the old charter’s harsh, Nazi-style diatribes against Judaism.
The Zionists’ idea of creating a new state called Israel grew out of the long, grotesque history of anti-Jewish pogroms culminating in the horror of the Holocaust.
Yes, Zionism’s idealistic vision of establishing a safe, Jewish ancestral homeland in the biblical land of Canaan clearly entailed, and still does, problematical practicalities regarding Arab Muslims who are in the region now and were there in 1948 when Israel was created by the United Nations.
Palestinians also claim Jerusalem as their capital. The city’s population numbers some 550,000 Jews and 300,000 Muslims. This volatile cauldron of religious tradition includes sites holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Jerusalem’s City of David section dates to the 4th Century BCE, the Islamic Dome of the Rock to 691 CE. Israel has pledged to protect all religious shrines and assure access to them by worshippers of their respective faiths.
The PA and Hamas insist — unconvincingly — that their beef is strictly with Zionism — a “racist” and “imperialist” excrescence, they say — and not with Judaism.
As is often observed, however, although not all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, all anti-Semites are anti-Zionists. And the two blend together in the PA and Hamas, with the mixture taking on the coloration of the more toxic ingredient.
Since its founding nearly seven decades ago, Israel — whatever its various flaws — has distinguished itself as a prospering, rule-of-law democracy. And this amid a Middle East miasma of unstable, poverty-blighted, authoritarian benightedness.
Per capita income numbers dramatically illustrate the story. And the in the process, the numbers surely reveal envy as a major component of the regional enmity toward Israel: Syria, $1,114; Egypt, $2,658; Libya, $3,208; Jordan, $4,684; Iran, $6,114. And then Israel: $38,127.
More to the point of the need to disabuse Palestinian demagoguery of its delusions is this additional plain fact: Israel is a redoubtable military force. Benjamin Netanyahu keeps on his office wall a photo of Israeli fighter jets swooping low over the old Auschwitz site.
How much oxygen is consumed, how much carbon dioxide emitted in international councils condemning this little dot on the map, Israel, this place smaller in land mass and population than New Jersey?
Its outsized, disproportionate role as global ogre — yes, as global scapegoat — speaks volumes. Speaks libraries filled with volumes.
Resolutions denouncing Israel have become grist for the malarkey mill of the United Nations, a rabble assemblage with a vocal bloc of nations run by authoritarian regimes.
The more rigid among this bloc include openly declared Islam-uber-alles theocracies. Iran, for example. Or de facto Islam-uber-alles theocracies, such as Saudi Arabia. Or, nations where desecularization is cracking open the door to Islam-uberalles theocracy, such as the seat of the old Ottoman Empire, Turkey.
If Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital does in fact derail what’s long been preposterously mislabeled “The Peace Process,” that surely will be the best news for actual prospects of peace in many decades.
However, given the hostile extent and influence of those inclined to think otherwise — including the many in international councils, in the media, in academia and in the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself — Trump would be wise not to start daydreaming just yet about a Peace Prize.
Dave Neese grew up on a Midwest farm, received a degree in Slavic Studies (Russian lit), Indiana U., did stints in the U.S. Army and in various news and other jobs from New Hampshire to California. At The Trentonian he covered the Statehouse and was editorial page editor. He won N.J. Press Association awards in numerous categories. Email: davidneese@verizon.net