A tale of Palestinian nonsense.
Original Thinking by Barry Shaw.
Mohamoud Zahar, the ugly Hamas spokesman with a wart on the
end of his nose, set everyone laughing at the beginning of 2012 with a nonsense
statement that Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from demonstrating
peacefully because there are no Jews in
Gaza to protest against. That is why, he explained, they have no choice but to
resort to violence. No, don’t laugh! He was being serious. You couldn’t make
this up. Not surprisingly, to those who follow and support the Palestinian
narrative, this insanity is perceived as a logical and reasonable argument. It
appeals to the Israel haters who accuse Israel of human rights abuses for “occupying”
Gaza from the outside rather than the inside. Don’t even try to figure this
out. You’ll only tie yourself up in a Gordian knot of maddening Palestinian
illogicality.
This endless nonsense is promoted by pro-Palestinian public
relations groupies with an inexhaustible amount of funding from wealthy
individuals, or from mindless European Governments for whom the mantra “Solve
Human Rights Abuses and you Save the World” is pre-eminent. Funding also
comes from malevolent sources, such as Arab
and Islamic regimes, who have transposed the “Arab-Israel War” into the
more appealing “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” This new definition
allows bleeding heart liberals to side with the underdog and lose sight of
reality.
Let’s be honest. The world has bought into the Palestinian
narrative of victimhood to the extent that, for decades, it has thrown billions
of dollars into a lie. Anyone with any legal sense will conclude that if you repeatedly
extract money from someone based on a falsehood you eventually risk being
dragged into court for fraud. And, if you add violence to your extortion, you
will, more than likely, be found guilty of both fraud and assault and be thrown
into the slammer. Not so with the
Palestinians. They can be as corrupt as they like, they literally get away with
murder. They are feted, patted, sympathized with, by an international community
that is so blind it cannot see past its tears to see the truth. The
Palestinians have been flavor of the month for decades while the rest of the
world’s genuine basketcases are ignored. The universal publicity machine endlessly
pumps out money for the Palestinian schnorrers. The rest go begging for scraps.
The world has bought into this nonsense so deeply and so
intensely that they cannot admit the truth any more. When the Hamas spokesman
(yes, the one with the wart) announced that Gaza was no longer “occupied”,
the United Nations persisted in declaring the Gaza Strip as still being under
Israeli occupation. They continue to perpetrate a lie that even Hamas denies.
In truth, the Palestinians control every aspect of their
society. Hamas, in Gaza, runs the courts, the police, the jails, the schools,
mosques, the media, and the social services. It has its own economy and
banking. It regulated its business activities. It levies taxes. It even imposes
Shariah law on its citizens. As Abraham Bell and Dov Shefi, two international
legal experts, wrote in a 2010 research paper, Hamas runs “a functioning and
fully independent local civil government, buttressed by armed forces.” The Palestinian Authority-controlled West
Bank is middle class and successful compared to many Arab regimes. Yet, the
world still accepts the victimhood fraud.
This tale of victimhood helps sell newspapers. It is the
stuff of poor and biased journalism. It keeps career diplomats in clover. Western
societies continue to pump money they don’t have, or can ill afford, into the
fiction mill. The Palestinians are building an industry on it. Many are getting wealthy on the false tale of
victimhood. They fly from one conference to another. They see the success of
this narrative. It serves them well. So well, in fact, that they don’t want to
change, don’t want to reach a solution. It’s rather like the guy who drives his
big car from his suburban home to the town center, parks his vehicle, takes out
a pair of crutches, limps into town, and starts begging and crying. The naïve and
sympathetic throw notes and coins into his lap until it’s time for him to drive
home and put his feet up at the end of a good days work.
Why should they change, these Palestinians? They’ve got it
down to a fine art, and it works for them. They are occupied, they are
oppressed and abused by a heartless, brutal, racist, Nazi, regime. Why spoil it
by being forced into a negotiating room in which they could end up with an
independent state and have to be truly accountable to their people?
Their fiction appeals to the heart, not to the head, and the
heart is not easily dissuaded, especially if you can knock up some emotive
pictures to strengthen your argument. Public opinion is easily swayed by a good
sob story.
Just as people, who abuse the social services of a welfare
state, lose the desire to find work and become productive citizens, so the
Palestinians are enjoying the status they have achieved as the world’s most
appreciated victim. They exploit their inferiority to the extent that they
cannot, or will not, escape their inferiority. It works for them; therefore
they are trapped in it. Nobody has demanded they become a more pragmatic, open,
liberal society, especially not the Western pragmatic, open, and liberal societies.
They are the ones who persevere with the nonsense of this false narrative. They
simply continue to throw their money at them as you do to a beggar on the
street. Nobody has conditioned their funding on the Palestinians discarding
their lies and get real, to make biting concessions and put an end to their
tale of discontent.
But how can they do that? To do so would put an end to the
lies they have spun to their own people. Lies like the holy duty to destroy
Israel, lies like how they will eventually possess all the land. To accept a
rump state alongside the Jewish state of Israel would be exposed as an ignoble
failure of leadership. It would force them to buckle down to real
nation-building, instead of looking with greed and envy at Israel’s flourishing
land.
The Palestinians and their supporters have taken the
nonsense of victimhood and have deliberately prevented progress. They have
wrapped the Islamic cloak around their victimhood. This enables them to play
both sides of the deck. They are both victim and hero. They glorify their most
heinous acts of terror. Their jihad allows them to turn the most inhumane acts
of murder into glorious tales of valor. Their narrative turns mass murder into
praiseworthy heroism to be rewarded in this life or the next. It produces a culture
twisted into a brutal and resentful society. They are trapped in their negative
stew of victimhood and brutality. It finds expression in the nonsensical
statements of people like Zahar, and those who accuse Israel of being an “Apartheid”
and “Nazi” state. Their nonsense, to them, makes sense. Sad tales have
their impact. The emotional tale of victimhood is their only power. They can
twist every expression they can find to make a point that drips with emotion
and useful sound bites, but they fail the test of truth every time.
Basically, the Palestinian narrative is a tale of nonsense.
Barry Shaw is the author of “Israel Reclaiming the
Narrative” www.israelnarrative.com
He is also the Special Consultant on
Delegitimization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue Center at Netanya Academic
College
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