No matter what the Palestinian Authority is offered – money, concessions and even steps toward statehood– the response is always “no.” Media, academic “experts” and governments seem to find this amazing phenomenon very hard to understand.The answer is simple, but a lot of the people paid to deal with this stuff don’t get it. So let me elucidate: The Palestinian Authority (PA) wants everything.
The PA wants an independent state on all the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem with no restrictions, no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, no serious security guarantees, no limits on militarization, no agreement that this means an end to the conflict, no insistence that Palestinian refugees be resettled in the state of Palestine, and nothing to prevent them from pursuing a second stage of wiping Israel off the map entirely.
What is most sickening about the non-existent "peace process" is that Israel keeps agreeing to various concessions and to two-states for two peoples under a negotiated settlement, the Palestinians always say "no," and then western liberals turn around and blame us for the problem.
They blame Israeli Jews for the behavior of Arabs and they blame diaspora Jews for supporting Israeli Jews.
The Jews of the Middle East just spent the last 1,400 hundred years living under the boot of Muslim imperialism and now, when they agree to a Palestinian state on their land, and the Palestinians say "NO," as they always do, the progressive-left blames the Jews and does so in the most horrendous terms possible.
Apartheid?
Ethnic Cleansing?
Genocide?
Really?
Every single generation the Jews are told how horrific we are. In this generation the people calling us out for our alleged immorality, our alleged crimes, are "progressives" who actually fancy themselves anti-racists.
How's that for the very height of irony?
Rubin continues:
There will be no peace process, no Palestinian state. No “progress” will be made. You can read this article in two or three years and it will still be completely up to date. If you don’t understand the points made above you simply cannot understand the Middle East. There will be thousands of emails, hundreds of articles, scores of expensive conferences, dozens of foundation grants and tens of peace initiatives that are all meaningless, because they are based on false premises.
This is not left-wing or right-wing but merely an explanation as to why all the schemes and theories of those who do not see these facts never actually take wing. It may not be politically correct, but it is most definitely factually correct.
You should go and give that article a nice, long, slow read, because the thing is, Rubin is right.
There will be no peace any time soon because the Arabs want victory, not a state for the Palestinians. Furthermore, the Palestinians know that however intransigent they remain and however much they promote violence and hatred toward Jews, they will still get financial support from western governments and propaganda support from the western left in their ongoing efforts to murder the Jews of the Middle East.
And we're supposed to make Israel do some little dance so that there will be peace?
I feel bad for liberal-left peace-processing Jews because they continue to think that if only Israel would do this, that, or the other, then there will be peace.
They still seem to think that there must be some magic key that will get the Palestinians to finally accept a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one.
They honestly want us to believe that if only Israel ethnically cleanses hundreds of thousands of Jews out of Judea, then the Palestinians, whose forbears supported the Nazis, no less, will be persuaded to accept their freedom and autonomy. They've even accepted the notion that after 1,400 years of dhimmitude... after 1,400 years of getting our collective ass kicked... that the Arabs are the victims.
Jews who think like this suffer from the Palestinian colonization of the Jewish mind.
Meanwhile we are constantly on our hands and knees practically begging the Palestinians to accept their freedom and potential for prosperity.
The irony is just so thick that it's hard not to laugh, actually.
Well, I have to say, none of us are crazy about the status quo, but it can continue on and on and on into the future if the Palestinians continue refusing to end the conflict, but it is they who will do most of the suffering. It is their children who will be raised mainly in poverty and within an atmosphere of genocidal Jew hatred.
Meanwhile Israel will continue cranking out life saving medical procedures and devices, high tech computer programs and hardware, and sending Natalie Portmans out into the world to do whatever the hell it is that she does.
Cheers!
Rubin has incredible insight and of course though he is a liberal, he gets labelled a right winger because of that insight. Neat little game Israel's enemies have going.
ReplyDeleteNo one really wants to talk about that biggest elephant in the room...Arab/Muslim hatred; yet, it must be addressed. Do they think it is just going to go away after being groomed so many decades in the Middle East? That's the kind of magical thinking that pervades way too much of the Progressive Left. Still, they insist, they have a grip on reality. Obviously they don't. Remember the uproar when some of us tried to address the brainwashing of Palestinian children with the antisemitic, hate filled cartoons? We were thrashed as right wing bigots.
I remember Deaniac, or someone, posting a video from Palestinian television with the anti-Semitic Mickey Mouse.
ReplyDeleteAnd people yelled at him and downrated the comment and called him a racist and on and on and on.
And he kept saying, but it's right there! We have it on tape! Here is the evidence!
It was unbelievable.
As for professor Rubin, I once made a comment on this blog, around the time that I started this joint up, claiming that he was somewhere to my right and I actually got an email from the guy.
He told me that he supported Labour.
Not Likud. Not Kadima.
Labour.
I like Rubin also, even though he can come off a bit too sure of himself. But that is really a quibble.
ReplyDeleteThe blind and deaf are incapable to acknowledge no matter what is presented. It's the open minded who can and should be persuaded, with hard, but fair presentation of information.
The problem, as I see it, from the Right is that it demonizes the Left and turns of those who don't want to see the extracurricular.
He may be arrogant but he is smart and prolific as hell.
ReplyDeleteBesides, he's a liberal critic of the left.
And you gotta like that.
http://yaacovlozowick.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/the-flight-of-the-intellectuals/
ReplyDeleteGood review of a good book. This part especially caught my interest
"Only at one point does Berman shy away from saying explicitly what he seems to be saying. He notes that his Western intellectual adversaries are unfazed by the antisemitism and animosity towards Israel of people like Ramadan and Qaradawi. To me, it seems that this isn’t an oversight but rather the essence of the matter: too many left-wing Western intellectuals can’t see the fascist aspects of the Islamist animosity towards Jews, because they agree with it, especially when it’s directed at Israel. Why mark Ramadan as a dangerous reactionary when one shares his distaste of Israel?
That’s where we’re at, at the moment. It’s not a good place to be."