Jeff Jacoby writes A Palestinian state? Don’t count on it for the Boston Globe, 9/21/11.

Excerpts:

…the Arabs of Palestine have consistently said no when presented with the chance to build a state of their own. They said no in 1937, when the British government, which then ruled Palestine, proposed to divide the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. Arab leaders said no again in 1947, choosing to go to war rather than accept the UN’s decision to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations. When Israel in 1967 offered to relinquish the land it had acquired in exchange for peace with its neighbors, the Arab world’s response, issued at a summit in Khartoum, was not one no, but three: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

At Camp David in 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a sovereign state with shared control of Jerusalem and billions of dollars in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and returned to launch the deadly terror war known as the Second Intifada.

It is no mystery, however. The raison d’être of the Palestinian movement has never been the establishment and building-up of a sovereign Palestinian homeland. It has always been the negation of a sovereign Jewish homeland. That is why well-intended proposals for a “two-state solution” have never come to fruition, no matter how earnestly proposed by US presidents or UN secretaries-general. That is why the basic charter not just of Hamas but even of Abbas’s supposedly moderate Fatah vows to continue the “armed struggle” until “the Zionist state is demolished.” And that is why Abbas and other Palestinian leaders insist that a Palestinian state would be explicitly Arab and Muslim, but adamantly refuse to acknowledge that Israel is legitimately the Jewish state.

“Palestinian nationalism,” Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, “was based on driving all Israelis out.” Sadly, it still is.

It is this grotesque and bloody culture that Palestinian leaders want the UN to affirm as worthy of statehood. The wonder is not they make the request, but that anyone thinks it should be granted.

HKO Comment:

Could we have conceived of a state like Israel, or any other,  asking for admittance to the UN, WHILE denying the right of an member  state to exist?  It is not unusual for a new state to come about in the midst of blood shed, but it is unheard of to deny another of their right to exist as the major mission of their sovereign existence.  The Palestinians have inculcated a program of anti-Semitism that would have made the Hitler youth blush.  Israel is the only state in the UN facing a continuous existential crisis.  Any serious consideration of a Palestinian state at this juncture will prove that the current UN is as effective at preserving world peace as the League of Nations was at preventing WW II.

The special election in New York to replace Twitter pervert Anthony Weiner is proving interesting.  It is not surprising that in a heavily Democratic district in New York that the Jewish vote would come to play.  It may be surprising how much the Jewish vote there has turned against Obama.  In the Wall Street Journal,  9/13/11, Dan Senor writes Why Obama Is Losing the Jewish Vote.

The quick summary is that an accumulation of bad anti-Israel policies is having its effect:

Read the article to see a long list of public affronts to Israel.  Republican Robert Turner,  aided by a strong endorsement from Ed Koch,  is leading substantially in a district covering Queens and Brooklyn that Weiner easily carried,

This Rebel Yid was surprised that Obama got the strong Jewish support that he did, given his associations, but that is history.

Why is the Jewish vote so important to Obama? The Jewish influence in politics is not the result of sinister conspiracies, as many anti-Semitic theories contend.  There are three clear reasons.

1. Jews vote at twice the rate of most citizens.
2. Jews are concentrated in states with large  numbers of electoral votes.
3. Jews are engaged in politics and are more willing to work and fund their favorite candidates.

While Jews are only 2.2% of the population they are 8.4% of New York.  If they are twice as likely to vote than their fellow citizens then their impact in this state with substantial electoral votes is effectively 16%, quite a substantial block.  Jews also have above average representation in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Florida and California; all heavily blue states.  Florida may be the largest swing state. For Jewish voters by state see The Jewish Virtual Library.

Jews in red states tend to be less monolithic Democrats but are still less likely to vote GOP than the rest of the population.

While the Christian evangelists are also sensitive to Israel they largely vote Republican anyway.  A large swing of Jewish support away from key Democratic candidates, including the president, can have a serious impact on an election.

Bruce Thornton writes Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy, May 24, 2011, as posted at Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Papers.

Excerpt:

Likewise, just as the Romans named the land after a people that no longer existed, so too calling the current Arab inhabitants “Palestinians” perpetuates a similar historical fraud. What constitutes a people are a shared language, culture, customs, traditions, and history distinct enough to set them apart from others. By these criteria, there is no such thing as “Palestinians.” The average Arab living in Israel or the West Bank is no more significantly distinct from one living in Syria, Jordan, or Egypt than a resident from California is significantly distinct from a resident of Arizona or Nevada. Whatever differences that do exist do not trump the more important similarities, and reflect rather the refusal of surrounding Arab nations to integrate their Arab brothers into their own countries, instead constructing a Palestinian identity based on victimhood, humiliation, and failure.

HKO comments:

The word refugee has also been perverted.  There has been a Muslim, Jewish and Christian presence in Israel/ Palestine for a very long time.  Some Jews emigrated to Israel from Europe under the Palestinian Mandate administered by Great Britain for the League of Nations. Many Jews were accepted into Israel after being exiled from the Arab nations after 1948. (No UN resolution was ever forthcoming about that ethnic cleansing.) And many of the Arabs in Israel prior to statehood came from neighboring Arab states.  The word refugee was stretched in many instances to include people who were not originally from Palestine.

The population and status of Israel and the Palestinians is very complicated.  Migrations from the last 100 years cannot be undone, and Israel is certainly not the only nation whose existence is owed to numerous complicated factors.

From this less than perfect set of circumstances and an offer made by the UN to both the Israelis and the Arabs in 1947 by the UN, the Israelis took one course and the Arabs (now called  Palestinians) took a very different path.

60 years later the Israelis have a nation they are proud of.  At what point do the Palestinians accept the failure of their chosen path, regardless of its justification, and change course?

During the turmoil that gave birth to the state of Israel in 1947 and 1948 over 700,000 Jews were ejected from the Arab states from Libya to Iraq.  Jews had lived in those countries for thousands of years. All of their property was confiscated.

Void of resources the new state of Israel absorbed those refugees and quickly made them citizens. Helen Thomas’s blindingly ignorant statement that the Jews in the Middle East should go back to Germany ignores not only the many Jews that had lived in the Arab world but the Jews that have had a presence in Israel for 3,000 years.

I do not believe that one UN resolution condemned the ethnic cleansing of the Jews in the Arab world in 1948, and this was so soon after the Holocaust that the ashes were still smoldering.

Many of the Palestinian refugees that cause such anguish amongst their supporters left in the anticipation of returning after the Arab armies extinguished the Jewish state.  Some were driven out by the fears and fortunes of war.   Many Arabs stayed in Israel and remain there today with rights of citizenship. It was not until the overwhelming Israeli victory in 1967 and the failure of the Arab invasion in 1973 that the idea of returning began to dim.

It was around that time that the idea of a Palestinian state and a Palestinian people took root.  In the early days of the British Mandate the Jews in Israel as well as the Arabs of the area were referred to as Palestinian.

As the Palestinians under the leadership of Arafat and the PLO became a distinct entity, they tried to exercise political power in Jordan.  After using Jordan as a base for terrorist activities including a few attempts on Jordan’s King Hussein’s life, the Jordanian army expelled the PLO from their country.  Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed by the Jordanian army during this expulsion in a period known as Black September. This became the name of a terrorist sub group of the PLO.

I do not recall any UN resolution condemning the Jordanians for their action against the Palestinians.  I do not know of any Israeli operation that has killed as many  Palestinians in such a short period of time.

The Palestinians took root in Lebanon, inciting a civil war in what was largely a Christian Arab state. After using Lebanon as a base to attack Israel, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to defend their northern border and to support the Lebanese Christians in their opposition to the Palestinians.  After a brief incursion from the United States under Reagan (we quickly withdrew  in 1983 after 241 Marines and servicemen were killed in a suicide bombing of their barracks) and world outrage precipitated an Israeli withdrawal, Lebanon was transformed from the peaceful nation it was to the Hezbollah hell hole and terrorist base it has become.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian were working in Kuwait when Iraq invaded that sovereign kingdom.  The Palestinians largely supported Saddam Hussein, and Saddam offered $25,000 incentives to Palestinian suicide bombers.   After Desert Storm removed Hussein from Kuwait, almost all of the Palestinian workers in Kuwait were ejected.

I do not recall any UN resolution protesting this action.

The suffering of the Palestinians has been largely the result of their own leadership and their fellow Arab nations.  They are the victims of a culture of death that places more value on killing Israelis than building their own civilized society.  They are the victims of enablers that do not hold them accountable for their own dysfunctional society, and who perpetuate their myth that their problem is the intransience of Israel and that any amount of land will satisfy their blood lust.

This is not to ignore violence that the Israelis have committed against Palestinians.  It is hard to avoid civilian casualties when they are used as fodder to control a narrative.  I am sure there are actions the Israelis wish they could undo.  I  doubt that the Palestinians feel the same.

The Palestinians were offered a state in 1948, and in 1967 and ever since.  It has been continuously rejected.  To consider borders from 1967, before the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, before the rise of the Iranian theocracy, and thousands of other changes is as ludicrous as considering that the United States return to the southern borders of 1848 to solve the problem of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The rise of the State of Israel came at a cost not only to the Israelis but to the people displaced by a half century of conflict.  Sixty years later Israel is now a fact on the ground.  The biggest obstacle remaining to a Palestinian state is the Palestinians themselves.

I confess that I do not count myself among the Thomas Friedman sycophants.  I have read some of his books and I just find him trying so hard to be “intellectually balanced” that he often ignores the obvious and the reality all together.  It belies an attitude that there is a truth that only he possesses and the rest of us are intellectually primitive ideologues not to see the obvious road he so generously bestows on us in his New York Times columns.

His column from the New York Times on 5/24/11, “Lessons from Tahrir Square” is a prime example of an attempt to disregard the obvious in order to make a balanced argument.

when it comes to ossified, unimaginative, oxygen-deprived governments, the Israelis and Palestinians are right up there with pre-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia. I mean, is there anything less relevant than the prime minister of Israel going to the U.S. Congress for applause and the leader of the Palestinians going to the U.N. — instead of to each other?

As for Bibi, his Tahrir lesson is obvious: Sir, you are well on your way to becoming the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process. The time to make big decisions in life is when you have all the leverage on your side.

This idea of drawing an equivalency between Israel and the Palestinian efforts toward peace is absurd.  Not to discount counterproductive actions taken by the Israelis there is no equivalency.  Start with the results.  Israel by any objective observance has built a nation; a modern productive, democratic nation.  The Palestinians have turned down the opportunity to have a nation for 50 years.  Israel has built hospitals, schools, industry, museums and a vibrant culture. The world has spent more money on the Palestinians that they spent to rebuild Europe after WWII and what do they have to show for it?

The Israelis do not parade school children around in suicide vests and take pride in teenage suicide bombers. Those who commit such atrocities, which are rare,  are not heralded as heroes but cause a deep shame for the nation.  There is no call to wipe out the Palestinians.  Claims of “genocide” against the Palestinians are laughable.  Populations do not grow during genocides.

Israelis do not rain down rockets on civilian population. When combat operations do require engagement in civilian areas, which is often given how the Palestinians will use civilians as fodder to create a misleading narrative  of oppression, the Israeli troops take great effort to avoid and minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has a Muslim minority with rights of citizenship. They vote, sit in the Knesset, own property and enjoy religious freedom.  You can hear their call to prayers loudly broadcast from a PA system in the Temple Mount right next to the Jews’ holiest site; the western wall.  In discussions of a Palestinian state it is assumed to be ‘Juden free’.   Jews are expected to be uprooted.

The comparison with Mubarak’s role escapes any sense of reality.  Unlike Mubarak, Netanyahu was freely elected. The Knesset debates with an intensity that makes our Congress look like they have been lobotomized.  Israel has provided a home for the Jews who were thrown out of Egypt in 1948; what have the Egyptians done for the Palestinians?  There is no need to riot in Israel; they can just vote.  Illiteracy and the resulting unemployment is absent in Israel, and this is while being in a semi-permanent state of war.

To even suggest that Bibi has all the leverage on his side is incomprehensible.  Yes they have a strong military, but honestly Thomas, have you looked at the fucking map? Have you read the press about Israel in Europe or even that paper that you call home?  Have you noticed how the UN has treated Israel?  Is there any other nation that faces an existential threat that is unchallenged on the floor of the UN?  To suggest that they should unilaterally forfeit any semblance of security to satisfy your retarded sense of equivalency is ridiculous.

So called intellectuals like Friedman think that such equivalency is a sign of a superior thought process.   The inability to distinguish right from wrong or the unwillingness to support a side that supports the freedom of its citizens and its right to defend itself is not a sign of a higher intellect.  Moral equivalency does not make you smarter; it makes you a coward and a fool.