The Moral Vacuum at the Heart of Palestine

Peace and blood. It was symbolic that Vice President Joe Biden, a staunch friend of Israel, was close by when yet another Palestinian terrorist went on a killing rampage in the Israeli city of Jaffa. Biden was in Jerusalem talking pathways to peace with former President Shimon Peres. The terrorist’s heinous act of stabbing everyone within reach, which included Taylor Force, a West Point graduate who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was immediately condemned by the Palestinian leadership, which is what you would naturally expect a civilized society to do ... but of course the Palestinian leadership did nothing of the kind. Brutally to the contrary, it glorified the murderer. Hamas, whose charter dedicates it to kill all Jews, hailed the killer as a hero and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen were complicit by silence. We cannot forget that Palestinians were led prior to World War II by a Holocaust promoter, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and that Article 22 of the Hamas covenant claims the Nazi interpretation of history, that it was the Jewish conspiracy that started the war, and as such, they called for a program to eradicate the Jews.

Biden spoke very clearly for America and the civilized world: “The United States of America condemns these acts and condemns the failure to condemn these acts.” Forget the little contretemps at the same time over who was rude to whom over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s postponed meeting with President Barack Obama. As former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren writes in "Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide:" the important truth is that the “United States and Israel are bound by … values they commonly cherish and interests that they have come to share.” Not only are they both committed to democracy, but “in Israel, the United States has a stable, loyal and militarily proficient asset … a pro-American island in an often toxic sea.”

The wave of random killings by Palestinians, male and female terrorists, began last October with a typically hysterical falsehood that Israel planned to bar Muslims from the sacred Temple Mount. It was another demonstration of how the Palestinians are trapped by their own history, by the heritage – and daily practice – of incitement against Jews. The virulence of their indiscriminate hostility has a clear line to Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in the mandated territory of Palestine. He was, of course, the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937 and the ally of Adolf Hitler and his gang through World War II and the Holocaust. Even before the United Nations voted for Israeli independence, he polluted the well of Arab nationalism with the poison of anti-Semitism. In a 1943 speech, al-Husseini said: “It is the duty of [Muslims] in general and Arabs in particular ... to drive all Jews from Arab and Muhammadan countries. ... Germany ... has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that the Jews represent in the world.” A definitive – or final – solution: those are the words of the Holocaust and there is the image of the peddler into the Middle East of fascist anti-Semitism, paying homage to Hitler.

The collaboration has proved tragic for the Palestinian people. They could now be living peacefully and prosperously in their own state, alongside Israel, had they not absorbed the paranoia and refused to accept the right of the Jews to worship and live in Israel. Instead, Palestinians live miserably under occupation on the West Bank (by Israelis) and in Gaza (by Hamas), theoretically governed by an inept President Abbas whose four year term was supposed to end in 2009. The Canadian Muslim scholar Salim Mansur has bravely written that too many of his fellow Muslims “refuse to take responsibility for our role in history, [leading] to a pathological proclivity to blame others – especially the Jews – for misfortunes that are really of our own making.”

But the Palestinians have been betrayed, too, by a small group of Western academics who have carelessly fomented the genocidal anti-Semitic narrative of radical Islam. This malign influence on the Palestinian people, impressionable students and trendy leftist opinion, exemplified by the malevolent distortions of the so-called boycott and discrimination campaign, is well documented in “Global Anti-Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity” by Charles Asher Small, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy. He was the Koret Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which in this regard gave shame to the anti-Semitic aura of Yale University and the imbecilic posturing and intimidation increasingly evident on the anti-Semitic left on campuses across America and which has left a shameful stain on the humanitarian vision behind the founding of the City University of New York.

The American people have consistently shown more common sense than the pseudo-intellectuals. Gallup reports that over the past 15 years Americans have become more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians. A poll released on February 29 reports that 62 percent of Americans say their sympathies lie with the Israelis and 15 percent with the Palestinians. From the poll, it seems that all the Palestinians have been able to achieve by random murder and rockets from Gaza is to reduce American support for an independent Palestinian state. The 58 percent who favored that in 2004 have shrunk to 44 percent in February 2016; in 2004, 22 percent were opposed. Now that number is 37 percent opposed.

In Israel, Biden reaffirmed America’s commitment to that ideal. Netanyahu is accused of following a zig-zag course since his first acceptance of the concept almost seven years ago. He was the first Likud leader to come out publicly for the two-state solution. “In this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect,” he said in 2009. “Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government.” There was little appreciation that Netanyahu had broken with many decades of right-wing opposition to recognizing any Palestinian rights in the land of Israel, much less to statehood. Washington’s reaction was tepid at best. Since then, however strenuously U.S. officials try to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, all fail before the obduracy of the Palestinian leaders and their glorification of terrorists.

They have forfeited any entitlement to agreements based on mutual trust. In the meantime, as opportunities slip by, Netanyahu builds settlements which make the boundaries of a new state more complex – and that’s about all that rouses attention. The Obama administration has seen settlement building as the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not. The removal of all 21 settlements in Gaza has not brought peace to Israel. Instead, as Oren notes, it has brought thousands of Hamas rockets. This administration does not understand that in the Middle East one-sided concessions don’t build trust, they simply build a demand for more concessions.

The brutal fact is that the Palestinians have been their own worst enemy. They have been seduced by the fantasy that they can get rid of Israel and every Jew so they have missed chance after chance to end the hated occupation. The fundamental reality that evokes the admiration and sympathy of Americans is that Israel is a Jewish state surrounded by vastly larger forces determined to destroy it. As Oren notes, ”the Arab world fought Zionism for 50 years before the first Israeli settlers even broke ground.” They launched an immediate war. For tiny, fledgling Israel and its Jews, who had somehow survived World War II, the invasions by all the Arab states was a war of national survival in which Israelis could not surrender, because most of those who did were butchered. Of those “areas of Palestine conquered by Arab forces, not a single Jew remained. By contrast, all of the Arabs who stayed in Israel – nearly 160,000 – became citizens. They and their descendants now constituted 20 percent of Israel’s population,” Oren writes.

Over the years, focusing on Israel and its relationship with the United States, I have realized that long-term strategic interests binding the two countries include facing the same enemies in radical, genocidal Islam now led by Iran, the defeat of which requires the closest U.S.-Israeli cooperation. That is why it has been heartbreaking for Israel to find President Obama putting them at greater risk than ever by his trust in the ayatollahs. What is he saying to those mythical moderates among Iran’s leaders about the launch of test missiles that have the range to reach Israel? Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry took a risk when they insisted against tying the lifting of sanctions to Iran abandoning its ballistic missile program. The Iranian excuse is that their missiles cannot carry nuclear warheads but they emblazoned an unmistakable message on them – in Hebrew: “Israel must be wiped out.”

Israel was celebrated after the Six-Day War, but since then it has become the focus of escalating media critiques as many news outlets faulted Israel for frustrating Palestinian aspirations. As Oren notes, the newish question became: What has Israel done to the Palestinians to drive them to such desperation? But the other question is: Why are terrorists targeting the Jewish state?

In October 1994, I was on the stage as the Israeli prime minister and King Hussein of Jordan warmly shook hands in the realization of Israeli-Jordanian peace. But this was followed by suicide bombings in greater numbers that rendered the dovish Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s platforms of peace and security increasingly violent and almost incompatible.

In September 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who had recently met with U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David, turned down their offer, which included Palestinian statehood in Gaza, nearly all of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem.

Then when Ariel Sharon visited Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, holy to both Jews and Muslims, Arafat and other Palestinian leaders exploited this to mount a second intifada that resulted in ambushes and suicide bombers that eventually killed a thousand Israelis.

In September 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to create a Palestinian state in Gaza in almost all of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem. The plan gained the support of the Quartet, the consortium created by President George W. Bush and composed of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. But Abbas never bothered to respond – silent then on the most politically adventurous Israeli initiative, and silent again on the knifings sanctioned by a moral vacuum at the heart of Palestine.

To no one’s surprise, Hamas is inciting violence. The Israel Defense Forces found that Hamas co-founder Hassan Yousef is “actively instigating and inciting terrorism and publicly encouraging and praising the execution of attacks against Israelis.” And here is what Abbas said at the start of the latest wave of violence: “The Al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours. ... They have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. ... We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing.”

“What kind of responsible leader could make such violent and anti-Semitic statements?” writes Palestinian human rights leader Bassem Eid.

Both the United States and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced this rhetoric. But, as Eid notes, Abbas comes from a party, Fatah, which has already “claimed responsibility for one of the early acts of terror in this wave of violence. The Abdel Qader al-Husseini brigades, a group affiliated with [Fatah’s radical arm], stated ‘With Allah’s help and in keeping with our right for resistance and our duty to sacred jihad, our forces ... carried out a necessary action in which they fired on a car of occupying settlers’ … The incitement does not stop in the Palestinian territories. Even Arab representatives at the Israeli parliament (Knesset) are inciting Palestinians to engage in violence... Nazareth Mayor Ali Salem, an Israeli Arab, denounced them by saying, 'I blame the leaders; they are destroying our future, they are destroying coexistence. ... We need to find a way to live together. ... We cannot fight like this. We are damaging ourselves.’”

As Eid put it, “only cooperation and peaceful coexistence will help our goal of economic prosperity and self-determination.” Leaders are supposed to have a vision for the future rather than encouraging actions that hurt everybody in the long term. As Eid writes, “When there is failure at the top, it is time for the people to lead the way.”