Finally an Israeli government minister who stands up and tells the truth! In Paris last week, snubbed by a major Jewish organization, Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance of Israel, spoke before an audience gathered to pay tribute to a Likud activist, Jacques Kupfer, who died of cancer. In the course of his remarks Mr. Smotrich pointed out that the Palestinian people are an invention that is less than a hundred years old. He himself is more Palestinian than any member of those people in Judea, Samaria and Gaza who would lay claim to that appellation. His grandfather was a 13th generation Palestinian born in Jerusalem. His grandmother was born in Metula over a hundred years ago. This is more than most so-called Palestinians can claim. As to Palestinian Authority’s President Abbas’ claim that Palestinians have a history and culture stretching back thousands of years, there is simply no evidence for it. Of course, since we hear so much noise about the Palestinians these days, there must be something to them, or so the world thinks. There is, but not what the world thinks. And certainly not what western governments and most of their populations think, those same western governments and pundits that were quick to condemn Minister Smotrich’s remarks as racist, extremist, and not conducive to peace which they claim to seek. But of course, those western governments and pundits are not interested in truth or history. All that interests them is the pack of lies they tell themselves in their ignorance as they look in the mirror, hoping to see the reflection of their virtue. But like the wicked queen in Snow White, the truth will confirm neither their wisdom nor their virtue.
How tiresome is it to have to repeat what everyone should know from the public domain. That the Ottoman Empire which ruled the Middle East for centuries until 1917 never had a province called Palestine. The name resurfaced when the British conquered Jerusalem and Damascus toward the end of World War One and then divided up the Middle East with France, carving countries out of the territories that ultimately yielded Iraq, Syria, Transjordan and Mandate Palestine. The latter was destined to be the Jewish homeland, but the British progressively reneged on their promise, ultimately yielding to Arab blackmail led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the spiritual grandfather of the PLO. But even during the years leading up to partition and eventual declaration of Israel’s independence as the Jewish state, the Arab leadership in Mandate Palestine rested its policy on murder, assassination and intimidation, which it carried out not only against Jews but against dissidents within the Arab community. Their claims to the country ruled by the British consisted solely of their hostility to Jews and Jewish sovereignty, made manifest especially when they lobbied Britain to close Mandate Palestine’s doors to Jews while the Nazis carried out their policy of extermination. And how could it be otherwise, when the Arab population of Mandate Palestine only enjoyed an upsurge once the Jews started to develop the country?
Incipient Arab nationalism had no deep roots in what later became Israel and even the West Bank. Arabs infiltrated Mandate Palestine looking for employment, moving as they had for years when, under Ottoman rule, they could travel from province to province. Only with the creation of Arab states was such nomadic migration more problematic. It was the injection of Jewish capital and labor that made Mandate Palestine so attractive and led to the swelling, often illegal, of the Arab population. But since the increase of the Arab population had nothing to do with a return to an ancestral homeland, they were never going home as the Jews were. So tenuous was the Arab connection to the land that Arab absentee landowners in Lebanon had no compunction about selling their estates to Jewish purchasers. And so, when the British gave up its Palestine Mandate and the Jews proclaimed their independence as the country of Israel, the Arabs who lived in Mandate Palestine did not take up arms to combat them. Instead, the Palestinian High Command under the leadership of al-Husseini called on the Arab states which European colonialism had brought into being to fight on their behalf. All they told their “Palestinian brethren” was to flee their homes until the combined Arab armies of Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, and Egypt could wipe out the Jews in a massacre that the secretary-general of the Arab League described as one that would make the Crusades look like a Sunday-school picnic. But the Arab armies, though aided by the British, lost. An armistice was declared, leaving Israel with the territory the world has long considered its borders until the 1967 war and Jordan with the territory known as the West Bank. To Jews, however, the West Bank is known as Judea and Samaria and the heartland of its ancestral homeland.
In 1967, when Jordan joined with Syria and Egypt to attack Israel, Israeli forces succeeded in defeating them, reconquered Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Arabs who had lived there from 1947 to 1967 came under Israeli control. But instead of joining forces with Israel to see if the Arabs who lived in the West Bank could develop a state living side by side in peace and prosperity with Israel, the Arabs who lived in the West Bank allowed the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), formed in 1964, to speak on their behalf. And at the Khartoum conference of 1967 the PLO together with the Arab states formulated a policy of no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation with Israel. Nothing has changed since. And why should it be otherwise, since the very existence of the PLO only confirms the tenuous attachment to the land which the Arabs in the West Bank have? After all, if they were truly attached to the land, they would have understood the Jewish attachment to the land which stretches back thousands of years. If they were truly attached to the land, they would have seized the olive branch which Israel extended to them time and again, especially with the Oslo Accords of 1993, and established their own functioning state with economic links to Israel and made the desert truly flourish. But the PLO, which embodies the Palestinian people and monopolizes that embodiment, has maintained the rejectionist stance of Haj Amin al-Husseini and conducted the same policy of murder and intimidation against both Israeli civilians and its own population, all in the name of Palestinian nationalism. What they want, it turns out, is not two states living side by side, not their own state prosperous and democratic, but Israel, all of Israel, and the annihilation of the Jews who live there, which is what they mean by their slogan of a free Palestine from the river to the sea. For what lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River if not Israel?
Abba Eban once said the Palestinians never miss a chance to miss a chance. But there is a reason for that. The Palestinians do not want a state. They want to destroy Israel. That is why there is no peace in the land. As the founder of the PLO said, everyone knows Palestine is nothing but southern Syria. And a later Palestinian leader, echoing him, said Palestinians do not seek a state for themselves, but aim to conquer Israel so they can then fold it into the wider Arab Ummah which they seek to re-establish. Little wonder that the king of Jordan bears the PLO no love, whatever lip service he may pay them. With pan-Arab nationalism also in tatters, the PLO has nothing to build on but their blood lust and crazy dreams, neither of which is functional for nation-building. As Minister Smotrich said so accurately, they have no culture and no history, and so they invent one. But the invention is all lies, typical of a political movement hell-bent on destruction.
Little wonder then that Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, claims that Palestinians have been in the land for thousands of years when there is not a coin, not a relic, not an architectural vestige of Palestinian sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. Not ever. Little wonder he claims for the Palestinians a culture for which there is no historical evidence. Little wonder that his imams spew out sermons in mosques claiming Moses was a Muslim and Jesus a Palestinian, as if a lie repeated often enough will gain credence among people ignorant enough to believe anything. Since the PLO inception of Palestinian peoplehood Palestinian culture has produced nothing but terrorist massacres and airplane hijackings, suicide bombers and child sacrifice. This innovative contribution to modern culture has been accompanied by the lethal combination of terror and ideology learned in Berlin and Moscow, yoked in turn to Islamic theology that has seeped into the psyche of the Palestinian population. Poll after poll shows that the inhabitants of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority have no desire for peace with Israel. Terrorist attack after terrorist attack indicates that the IDF can provide no deterrence to a culture steeped in Jew hatred, whose schools and mosques inculcate shaheed longing in the youngest of the young. Lone wolf attacks are the result, but the lone wolves have imbibed their homicidal urges through every pore of Palestinian nationalism. The result is a totally dysfunctional society in which no amount of confidence building measures organized by idiots from the US State Department or the EU Foreign Ministry can make a dent. Mr. Smotrich knows this full well and had the temerity to say this out loud, for which he and his government were called in on the carpet by these same idiots. For those who still doubt, there is always Palestinian Media Watch where they can see for themselves evidence of what passes for Palestinian culture in this regard.
Of course, the woke ignoramuses of western culture, including the many Jewish adherents to this false ideology of critical social justice, will ascribe this Palestinian dysfunctional behaviour to Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid. Not only is such moral turpitude historically inaccurate; its underlying premise is intellectually false. System theory in both psychology and sociology directs our attention to the responsibility the internal elements of any system have for the maintenance or collapse of that system. But our intellectual pygmies do not like systems theory precisely for that reason. They prefer to ascribe the most egregiously horrible behaviour to the uneven power relations that course through human history, and which they believe erroneously to govern and explain behaviour in modern democracies. Thus do they give a pass to the Palestinians, whose lies they ignore over and over and whose responsibility for the blocked peace process they excuse and overlook. For Israel to do so is tantamount to national suicide. The left in Israel clearly is ready to do this in the battle over judicial reform, reminding us that this self-defeating tendency in Jewish history stretching back millennia is alive and well despite the widely shared mantra that the restoration of the third Jewish commonwealth had put this tendency to eternal rest.
At the risk of tiring both my readers and myself, let me repeat. As far back as the Exodus from Egypt which we are soon to celebrate again at Passover, the Jews have been ambiguous about the covenant that signalled their birth as a nation. No sooner delivered from Egyptian slavery they turned on Moses and harkened to return. Not once, but five times at least before they reached the foot of Sinai where the true purpose of their Exodus was revealed: to conquer the land God had promised to their forefathers and there to establish a nation governed by the rule of law. At the foot of Sinai the Jews told Moses they will do and they will listen, so eager were they to follow and obey as if the Ten Commandments were so much noise. But when Moses tarried on the mountain top they went and built a golden calf, breaking the first commandment from which flowed all the rest, transgressing the covenant they had so recently signed on to. The rabbis like to blame the erev rav, the mixed multitude that had joined the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt. But systems theory no less than the Torah tells us that the fault was that of the Jews themselves, just as the current debacle in Israel is the fault of the Israeli left, its mistaken when not treasonous policy of the past thirty years starting with Oslo, and its willingness to indulge their western “friends” and Palestinian enemies. No good can come of this. As Mr. Smotrich courageously stated, the truth will out in the end, but by that time Israel may no longer exist. And by that time, never again will be shown to have been the empty slogan it has already become.
Brilliant...Packed with understand history so necessary to understand where we are today. It's very tough to be a Jew no matter what time in history.