The Mood on the Israeli street

Mike L.

Israelis have had it.

The Israeli left is dead, killed off by the Palestinians and by the international left which tends to despise Israel anyway.

The comment below cannot be considered typical because Israel is 8 million people with a huge ideological diversity.

Nonetheless, there is an element within Jewish Israel that is moving ever rightward and that has simply had it with the never-ending Arab war against them.

There are three main elements of significance to what "Sarah B" has written below.

The first is the insistence that the "Palestinians" are a sort-of made-up people without any genuine distinction between themselves and other regional Arabs.  I think that we can agree that in some measure nationalities are, in the words of Professor Benedict Anderson, "imagined communities."   The difference is that the "Palestinians" are the newest arrivals into the community of nations and emerged specifically as a force designed to destroy the Jewish national project.  Having only arrived upon the scene in the mid-1960s, with a little help from Yassir Arafat and the Soviet Union, Palestinian identity is primarily an Arab weapon against the Jewish people.  While Palestinian-Arab nationalism, as a movement, precedes this by a number of decades it was only with the rise of the PLO, and following the 6 Day War, that a majority of the local Arab population came to see themselves as "Palestinian," a designation that formerly referred to the Jews of the region.

In this way the emergence of Palestinian national identity is something akin to replacement theology.

The second element is the insistence on Palestinian-Arab responsibility for the predictable outcome of their own behavior.  Unlike racist progressives who, because they consider Arabs inferior, refuse to hold "Palestinians" responsible for anything, Sarah B is reminding us of Palestinian-Arab violence and their strident rejections of a peaceful resolution of hostilities.

Finally, Sarah B asserts that Israel will annex the entirety of Judea and Samaria and will push the Palestinian-Arabs across the river into the state of Jordan because so many of them refuse to stop trying to murder Jews.  I find such an eventuality highly unlikely.

The mood on the Israeli street seems to be moving rightward, but I would doubt that it is moving that far rightward.  What this really shows is that people like Sarah B have simply had it.  They do not believe that the Palestinian-Arabs want a country for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one and they feel unjustly persecuted not only by the Arab world, but by the international left which increasingly blames the Jews in the Middle East for the Arab hostility against them.

The piece that Sarah B is responding to is an article in Y-Net by a pro-Palestinian advocate warning of the possibility of a third terror war against the Jews if Palestinian demands are not met.

Oh, cry me a river  

The author forgets seven decades of terror in which the ersatz "Palestinians" have engaged, visited against both Jews in the State of Israel and Jews in the Diaspora. The author forgets that it was the ersatz "Palestinians" who rejected partition in 1947, choosing to go to war instead. They lost. Oh, boo, hoo, hoo.  

They lost five more wars, each of which were started by the Arabs. The author also forgets that the ersatz "Palestinians" walked away from a deal which would have awarded them 96 percent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a capital. They chose to start the second intifada instead. That didn't work out terribly well for them, but that is scarcely Israel's fault. Forgive us if we choose to put down violent riots.  

The author is clearly unaware that Israelis have grown tired of ersatz "Palestinian" threats, ersatz "Palestinian" violence, ersatz "Palestinian" deliberate desecration of Jewish holy sites; ersatz "Palestinian" deliberate desecration of Moslem and Christian holy sites (for which they promptly blame the Jewish people and which the world stupidly accepts as gospel truth); ersatz "Palestinian" deliberate destruction of their own olive groves (again pointing the finger at the Jewish people) .... hey, basically, it is safe to say that the Israeli people have grown tired of the ersatz "Palestinians."  

We are going to annex Judea and Samaria and send the ersatz "Palestinians" to Jordan, country of their citizenship (they are not, as the author contends, stateless; they are citizens of Jordan, courtesy of Jordan's 1954 Citizenship Law). They can rename Jordan "Palestine" and rename Amman "Al Quds," for all I care. At least we will be rid of their endless violence, hand-wringing, obfuscation, lies, deception and -- blissfully -- their whining.  

Sarah B , U.S.A. / Israel (01.11.13)

If you think that Sarah B's usage of ersatz "Palestinians" is insulting I would suggest to you that it is meant to be and that, perhaps, there is good reason for that.  The Jews, after all, are a tiny minority in the Middle East and they are surrounded by a much, much larger majority that contains significant numbers of people who scream to the hillsides about their desire to kill us for religious reasons.

For every Sarah B that is out there insulting the ersatz "Palestinians" there are maybe a hundred mullahs calling for the genocide of the Jews.

Perhaps when we start seeing Palestinian-Arabs objecting to such calls for the slaughter of the Jewish people then I will concern myself with not hurting their feelings.

Please let me know when that happens.