EN VERITE, QU'EST CE QUI PREOCCUPE LES PALESTINIENS?

Par David Solway, auteur de 25 livres primés de poésie, voyage, critique et théorie de l'éducation. Ecrit dans des magazines variés, the Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. Dernier livre: "Le grand mensonge: sur la terreur, l'antisémitisme et l'identité"
Paru le 15/12/08 à www.FrontPageMagazine.com
Traduit et adapté par Albert Soued pour www.nuitdorient.com

Eu égard à l'imbroglio en cours en Terre Sainte, on peut se demander à juste titre si l'histoire – mauvaise -- n'est pas en train de se réécrire.
Quand Haj Amin al Husseini, le Moufti de Jérusalem a cessé partiellement sa rébellion de 1936, suite à la promesse anglaise d'une Commission Royale, rien n'a été fait pour désarmer les insurgés. Et la période de calme relatif a été exploitée par le Moufti pour entraîner, unifier et réarmer ses forces. Rien ne change au Moyen Orient et ce qui était vrai du Moufti l'a été aussi de son descendant Yasser Arafat et continue à l'être des acteurs de la scène actuelle, Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashaal ou Ismail Hanyeh et leurs consorts.

Co-fondateur du Hamas, Abdel Rantissi définissait la "Houdna" ou cessez-le-feu tactique, comme "la 1ère phase d'un plan pour libérer notre terre". Comme il le disait "la houdna n'est pas un signe de reconnaissance de l'état d'Israël". Bien avant la récente éruption du conflit, les intentions des terroristes ont été bien clarifiées par Abou Moussaeb, le chef des Brigades d'Al Aqsa du nord de Gaza, lorsqu'il annonça que le cessez-le-feu du moment n'était que "le repos du guerrier, utilisé par les forces palestiniennes pour se réarmer, se regrouper et se renforcer… Quand le conflit reprendra, nous serons plus forts que jamais avant, avec de nouvelles méthodes et de nouvelles armes…" Je propose de le croire. Après tout, l'objectif de la "houdna" c'est bien de se battre dans de meilleures conditions.
Excepté dans l'esprit arabe, on ne peut pas appeler cela un processus pour trouver une solution.
En permanence, les antisionistes dénoncent Israël qui chercherait à créer "le Grand Israël". Mais l'ironie des faits c'est que les palestiniens revanchards travaillent par tous les moyens – les attentats terroristes ou les techniques plus subtiles de la propagande – pour installer la "Grande Palestine" à la place d'Israël. Leur porte parole Osama Hamdan l'a confirmé à la télévision libanaise le 02/04/07 "Nous, dans le gouvernement Hamas, nous n'accepterons aucune solution… qui dévierait de nos principes… Je n'accepterai pas d'accord qui dirait in fine que les villes de Haifa, Jaffa ou Acre sont Israéliennes… rechercher la paix est une perte de temps… la vraie solution mènera à la fin de l'existence de l'entité sioniste…". Le porte parole du Hamas Sami Abou Zahri ébauchait l'approche terroriste aux négociations, à Gaza le 13/06/05 au National Post, "Il n'y a aucun problème à la solution par étapes du conflit israélo-arabe. On peut accepter aujourd'hui Gaza et la Cisjordanie, et puis dans l'avenir, toute la Palestine". Est-ce clair?

Cela prendra plusieurs années avant que le jury ne donne son verdict dans ces négociations de paix qui n'en finissent pas. Etant donné la violence quotidienne dans la région, le processus semble irréaliste pour le moment. En fait l'Europe comme les Palestiniens cherchent à accélérer "la feuille de route", ou comme on l'appelle maintenant "l'horizon politique" et "l'accord dans l'armoire". Mais ce n'est qu'une tentative pour dépouiller Israël de son droit légitime et pour neutraliser ses atouts dans toute négociation. Ainsi on exhorte Israël à faire des concessions, comme si l'état palestinien, "holographique", qui n'existe nulle part sauf dans l'imaginaire, était un fait géopolitique tangible. Parce que les faits montrent que "Palestine" n'est qu'une fiction auto-construite dont la seule revendication évidente est d'avoir parfait son expertise dans la double technique du "terrorisme d'avant-garde" et l'"extorsion fiscale".

L'éventualité d'une paix juste et durable demeure mince et les Palestiniens y veillent. Personne n'a expliqué d'une manière satisfaisante pourquoi Israël doit conclure une paix pour satisfaire les exigences des terroristes ou se soumettre aux pressions des pays arabes environnants, pays qui ont eux-mêmes déclenché de nombreuses guerres qu'ils ont perdues. Depuis quand des perdants coupables imposent leurs conditions? Comme l'avait écrit feu Abba Eban, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères après la guerre de 1973 "C'est la 1ère guerre de l'histoire qui s'est terminée avec une partie victorieuse qui appelle à la paix et les vaincus qui lui demandent une reddition sans condition"
Existe-t-il un seul pays au monde qui abandonne des territoires conquis dans des guerres provoquées par l'adversaire ? Cette stratégie "folle" pourrait être pensable à la rigueur si des négociations pouvaient mener à un résultat satisfaisant et authentique, comme ce fut le cas en partie avec l'Egypte et le Sinaï -- retrait qu'aujourd'hui certains considèrent à juste titre comme irresponsable. On peut ajouter aussi le retrait du Liban qui a été gratifié d'un H'ezbollah armé et retranché à la frontière nord, avec des incursions où des soldats sont enlevés et avec des tirs de missiles ayant provoqué la 2ème Guerre du Liban. De même quand Israël s'est retiré de tout Gaza, il a été remercié par des tirs de mortiers et de roquettes sur les villes et villages du Néguev, jusqu'à ce jour (1).

Le territoire conquis dans une guerre défensive ne doit jamais être rendu à l'agresseur. Eu égard aux "territoires palestiniens", Israël cherche bizarrement à négocier leur rétrocession, alors qu'ils ont été capturés d'une façon légitime et qu'il peut les garder légalement.
Il faut savoir aussi qu'une petite minorité de ceux qui réclament la Cisjordanie et Israël peut être considérée comme indigène, la majorité de la population de Palestine venant des pays environnants au début du 20ème siècle. En effet ces populations ont été amenées par les Turcs de l'Empire Ottoman pour faire cesser les razzias des tribus Bédouines nomades. Ces "Syriens" ou ces "Egyptiens" se déclarent aujourd'hui Palestiniens, alors que la revendication juive se base sur une présence continue de plus de 3000 ans.
Durant le Mandat britannique (1923-1948), les Arabes ont afflué dans la Palestine côtière sans avoir à produire un quelconque document officiel, ni à craindre les autorités douanières qui les laissaient passer. Dans son livre "From the time immemorial" Joan Peters attire l'attention sur un document anglais qui donne aux nouveaux immigrants arabes le statut de "population indigène depuis des temps immémoriaux". Le but des Anglais était de modifier la structure de la population locale au détriment des Juifs qui étaient considérés comme une population déplacée. Les immigrants arabes d'après Balfour se transformaient du jour au lendemain en véritables autochtones. Les recensements truqués ultérieurs, le contrôle anglais sur le flux migratoire juif et sur les armes pour favoriser leurs clients arabes, le problème acide des réfugiés arabes, les guerres d'agression arabes ont contribué à fausser le jugement de la communauté internationale et l'objectivité des médias. Les revendications de la propagande arabe, les historiens révisionnistes juifs et la horde des universitaires anti-israéliens ainsi que les intellectuels et commentateurs politiquement corrects ont transformé la réalité qu'en grande partie les dits réfugiés palestiniens de la guerre d'indépendance de 1948 sont des Arabes revenus dans les pays d'où leurs parents venaient, sans que personne ne les y oblige. Même Sir John Glubb ou "Glubb Pasha" après sa conversion à l'Islam, le général anglais qui commandait la Légion arabe jordanienne et qui a mené une campagne de "nettoyage ethnique" contre l'état d'Israël naissant, a écrit dans le London Daily Mail le 12/08/1948 que "les civils arabes ont paniqué et se sont enfuis d'une façon ignominieuse. Les villages étaient abandonnés avant même d'être menacés par l'avancée de la guerre". Et Glubb Pasha était loin d'être un témoin amical, mais plutôt l'ennemi le plus implacable des Juifs.
De nombreuses personnalités arabes et les sources d'information de l'époque étaient unanimes sur le sujet. Ainsi Emile Ghoury, secrétaire du Haut Comité arabe pour la Palestine insistait dans une interview au Beirut Telegraf le 06/09/1948 "ces réfugiés sont la conséquence directe de l'action des pays arabes qui s'opposaient au partage de la Palestine".
La radio arabe pour le Moyen Orient qui diffusait de Chypre le 03/04/1949 disait "le Haut Comité Arabe a encouragé les réfugiés à fuir leurs maisons"
Le quotidien jordanien Falastine blâmait dans un article du 19/02/1949 "les pays arabes qui ont encouragé les Palestiniens à quitter leur foyer"
Le 1er ministre Syrien Khaled Al Azm confessait dans ses mémoires de 1973 que "c'est nous qui les avons fait fuir", parmi d'innombrables témoignages.

Quant à la situation actuelle, comment peut-on encore l'appeler "occupation"? Gaza est une entité autonome contrôlée à 100% par le Hamas et le Fatah contrôle 94% de la Cisjordanie. Ainsi la Palestine n'est pas occupée par Israël, mais par ses propres milices terroristes, qui empêchent la création d'un état véritable, cherchant plutôt à détruire son voisin, Israël. La situation économique désastreuse est le reflet de régimes autocratiques, gouvernés par des tyrans et des kleptocrates, dont l'archétype était déjà Haj Amine al Husseini. Quand Israël occupait réellement Gaza et la Cisjordanie, l'économie était florissante; aujourd'hui ces territoires ne peuvent survivre sans l'aide internationale.
Ainsi il faut faire attention à la terminologie "occupation" et la situer dans son contexte véritable. Et ce contexte est même plus complexe. Le comédien américano-palestinien Ray Hanania vient de faire un tour en Cisjordanie. Selon lui, les Palestiniens souffrent d'une autre "occupation", en fait "d'un immobilisme intérieur", d'une fixation sur le passé et cette "occupation psychique" les empêche de voir la réalité et de se projeter dans l'avenir. Il dit : "les Palestiniens souffrent de nombreux niveaux d'occupation et ils se sont imposées l'un d'eux, qui est devenu l'excuse pour expliquer leurs échecs, un désir non pas de faire la paix, mais de revanche, et la non capacité d'accepter la blessure faite à leur orgueil, qu'exigerait tout compromis. Les chefs de toutes les factions palestiniennes sont opposés à toute solution qui les sortirait de cette prison intérieure qu'ils ont édifiée, et c'est cela qui les rend incapables de construire un état"
D'après lui, les Palestiniens se sont englués dans cet esclavage mental qui est la seule barrière au mouvement et à la vie….ils sont dans une impasse qu'ils ont eux-mêmes creusée, et à l'extérieur, ceux qui souhaitent les aider, sont entrés dans la même nasse de l'"occupation".

En attendant, cherchant à rendre illégitimes les positions d'Israël, les médias mondiaux poussent à reconnaître le pseudo état du Hamas à Gaza, invoquant la terrible densité de population, autour de 4000 hab/km2, et la nécessaire compassion politique et économique qu'on devrait éprouver à son égard, au détriment d'Israël. Chiffre sans doute élevé, mais il faut le rapprocher de la densité du 11ème arr. de Paris, soit 41 053 hab/km2 et Kowloon, soit 1,9 million hab/km2, pour avoir une meilleure perspective. Ma propre ville, Montréal, couvre une superficie moitié inférieure à celle de Gaza, soit 185 km2, et sa population est supérieure à celle de Gaza de plusieurs centaines de milliers d'habitants. Aux dernières nouvelles, Paris11, Kowloon et Montréal se débrouillent bien.

Le statut de Jérusalem reste un problème crucial. Israël est accusé de construire des logements aux environs de Har H'oma, au sud-est de la ville, qui est la capitale d'Israël, sur une terre qui appartient à 75% aux Juifs. Les 25% restants appartiennent à des Palestiniens à qui on a offert des compensations, selon une réglementation considérée comme normale dans tous les pays démocratiques, et même au Québec où on a procédé de la même manière pour construire l'aéroport Mirabel. Certes Har H'oma est au-delà de la ligne verte, mais c'est une frontière d'armistice, sujette à ajustement, 40 ans après…

Les OGN, les groupes de "droits sociaux" ont pris le train de l'anti-israélisme, manifestant une parfaite ignorance de l'histoire et de la rectitude éthique et s'alignant sur l'extrémisme radical des organisations islamiques, comme CAIR aux Etats-Unis ou la Campagne de Solidarité Palestinienne an Grande Bretagne….

Cinq armées arabes ont été incapables en 1948 de rayer Israël de la carte. Trois armées arabes ont été écrasées en 1967 par une armée de défense faite de réservistes et il en a été de même en 1973 contre les forces combinées de l'Egypte et de la Syrie. Ayant échoué militairement, malgré l'attitude conciliante et myope de l'Occident et d'Israël, les Arabes ont adopté une stratégie plus efficace, du nom "accords d'Oslo". En échange d'un retrait territorial, Arafat et l'OlP se sont engagés à mettre fin à leurs activités terroristes. Ces accords ont été aussitôt dénoncés dans la Déclaration de Principes en septembre 1993, dans l'accord Gaza-Jéricho d'abord de mai 1994, dans l'accord intérimaire de septembre 1995 et l'accord d'Hébron de janvier 1997, tout en acceptant les retraits israéliens "gratuits" de Gaza et de 7 villes palestiniennes.
Les échecs du sommet de Camp David et de son clone d'Annapolis ne doivent pas surprendre… Un Hadith 4/52-176 reflète bien une certaine mentalité: "Tu combattras les Juifs jusqu'à ce que certains d'entre eux se cachent derrière un rocher, et le rocher dira alors "O Abdallah, il y a un Juif qui se cache derrière moi". Alors tu iras le tuer"…
Ne vous faîtes aucune illusion, le processus de négociation n'est qu'un subterfuge pour réduire les dimensions d'Israël et ses frontières, le laissant vulnérable à de simples roquettes de courte portée. C'est aussi un moyen d'acquérir un nouveau territoire à partit duquel lancer des attaques plus coordonnées et plus meurtrières. L'état palestinien n'est qu'un moyen enfanté par la diplomatie arabe pour détruire par étapes l'état d'Israël. Il en est de même de la revendication des réfugiés et de l'insistance sur "le droit du retour" (h'aq al a'wda). L'objectif fondamental est toujours le même. Les Arabes n'ont jamais été intéressés par une Palestine, mais par un "cheval de Troie" qui grignoterait petit à petit de l'intérieur les frontières d'Israël, sous l'appellation de "négociation de paix". La Palestine est devenue depuis 60 ans la feinte et la tactique préférée des Arabes pour se débarrasser de l'état Juif, quel qu'en soit le coût pour les Palestiniens, trompés ou de connivence…
"Etat palestinien" est devenu ainsi le leitmotiv de tout le monde, quand on parle du Moyen Orient.

Je ne sais pas si cette stratégie réussira à long terme. Mais à court terme, elle va faire souffrir inutilement les Israéliens. Dans un poème intitulé "état de siège", le poète national palestinien Mahmoud Darwish décrivait Israël comme l'image d'un vieil état enseveli sous les ruines de la future Troie. Il est probable que cette ancienne épopée historique ait une conclusion différente et que les nouveaux Troyens réussiront à chasser les envahisseurs. En attendant les feux brûleront dans la cité.


Note de la Traduction
(1) On peut imaginer que pour alimenter à nouveau un processus de négociation il faille occuper des territoires au Liban, en Syrie, et peut-être même en Egypte et en Jordanie. Mais il est difficile de faire revivre le passé. Pourtant il existera toujours de nouvelles opportunités qui permettraient de conquérir un territoire afin d'alimenter une négociation. En 2006, l'opportunité du Liban sud n'a pas été saisie par Israël.


Truth Be Told: The Palestinian Preoccupation

By David Solway, the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as the Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. His most recent book is The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity.
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, December 15, 2008

With respect to the ongoing imbroglio in the Holy Land, one may plausibly wonder whether bad history may not be rewriting itself. When Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, put the Palestinian rebellion of 1936 on partial hold following the British promise of a Royal Commission, no effort was made to disarm his guerrillas and the period of relative calm was exploited by the Mufti to train, reorganize, unify and rearm his forces. Nothing much changes in the Middle East and what was true of the Mufti was also true of his lineal descendant Yasser Arafat and continues to be true of the current players on the scene, Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashaal, Ismail Haniyeh and their proxies.
Co-founder of Hamas, Abdul al-Rantisi, defined a hudna, or tactical cease-fire, as the first phase in the plan “to liberate all our land.” As he put it, “the hudna would however not signal a recognition of the state of Israel.” Even before the recent eruption of the conflict, the terrorists’ intentions were made abundantly clear by Abu Musaeb, rais of the Northern Gaza al-Aqsa Brigades, when he announced that the cease-fire of the moment was “nothing but the fighter’s repose, used by Palestinian forces to rearm, regroup, regain strength…When the conflict is renewed, we’ll return fortified as never before, with new methods and new weapons.” I suggest we believe him. Future conflict under improved conditions, after all, is the purpose of a hudna.
This cannot be described as a process of arbitration—except, perhaps, in the Arab mind. Anti-Zionists routinely denounce Israel for labouring to create a “Greater Israel,” but the ironic fact is that the revanchist Palestinian parties are working by every possible means, from outright terrorist sorties to subtle propaganda techniques, to establish a Greater Palestine, aka Israel. “We in the Hamas government,” confirmed spokeman Osama Hamdan on Lebanese television on April 2, 2007, “will not accept any solution that would…detract from our principles…I will not accept an agreement saying that at the end of the day, Haifa, Jaffa and Acre are Israeli cities…Seeking peace is a waste of time…a true solution will lead to an end to the existence of this [Zionist] entity.”
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zahri, in a Gaza City interview with the National Post for June 13, 2005, adumbrated the terrorists’ approach to negotiations: “There’s no problem with a step-by-step solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict,” Zahri confided. “We can now accept Gaza and the West Bank and in the future, all of Palestine.” As the popular expression has it, go figure!
It will take several years before the jury returns its verdict on the on-again off-again peace negotiations; at the moment, given the fragmentation and ongoing violence in the region, the process is ahead of the curve of its premises. This is obvious with respect to the original Palestinian and European desire to “fast-track” the road map—the new buzzwords are “political horizon” and “shelf agreement”—which is nothing but a transparent attempt to override Israel’s legitimate concerns and neutralize its bargaining counters. Israel is exhorted to continue making concessions as if a holographic Palestinian state which exists nowhere but in the projection machine were an actual national entity in geopolitical fact. For it is moot whether “Palestine” is anything more than a self-constructed fiction whose only real claim to our attention is its expertise in perfecting the twin techniques of modern terrorism and fiscal extortion.
The likelihood of a just and lasting peace remains slender: the Palestinians will see to that. Neither has it ever been satisfactorily explained why Israel must conclude a peace on terrorist terms or submit to the pressures of the surrounding Arab states which launched the wars they subsequently lost. Since when do culpable losers call the shots? As the late Abba Eban, former Foreign Minister of Israel, wrote after the war of 1973, “This is the first war in history which has ended with the victors suing for peace and the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender.”
Is there a single country in the world which moves to return territory taken in wars started by another country? This strategy of folly might be thinkable only if negotiations could be expected to bear genuine fruit, as was to some limited extent initially the case with Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula—a reversion now considered in many quarters, and for good reason, as irresponsible. Recall, too, that Israel withdrew from Lebanon and was rewarded with an armed Hizbullah entrenched on its northern borders and conducting regular incursions, kidnappings and shellings, eventually provoking the war of summer 2006. When Israel withdrew from Gaza, it reaped a continuous barrage of rocket and mortar attacks on its southern villages and cities, continuing to this very day. Land captured in a defensive war does not usually revert to the aggressor, yet with respect to the “Palestinian territories” Israel is constantly seeking for a way to enact this peculiar transaction and to give up the overwhelming measure of that which, in the circumstances, it has legitimately captured and may legally retain.
More to the point, only a minority of the present Palestinian population claiming title to segments (or all) of Israeli territory and to the West Bank may be considered as indigenous, the majority having arrived from the neighbouring districts and countries during the early part of the last century, with many of these immigrants having been vilayetted by the Ottoman Turks as a bulwark against raiding Bedouin tribes, to be tallied in future as local inhabitants. But the tenurial claim of the Jewish people is an indefeasible one, based on a founding scripture, a three thousand year hereditament and a continuous presence.
The record clearly indicates that during the British Mandatory dispensation, Arab migrating tribes were pouring into Western Palestine from the surrounding Arab countries without having to produce passports and visas and without having much to fear from the operation of border controls. Quoting prolifically from British internal documents and chancellory correspondence, Joan Peters in her groundbreaking book, From Time Immemorial, draws our attention to a memorandum which specifies that these newcomers were to acquire, in the words of this document, the status of “indigenous native population since time immemorial.” The official intent was twofold: to give a blatantly false idea of population densities and to misrepresent the Jews as displacers when the opposite was the case. The post-Balfour Arab intruders were transformed overnight into pre-Common Era householders.
Moreover, the historical facts—the rigged population censuses over the years, the British control of both arms and immigration flow to favour their Arab clients and harm the Jews, the yeasted-up refugee problem, the Arab wars of aggression—put the Palestinian brief in serious question as they do the probity of the international community and the objectivity of the media. Indeed, the claim bruited by Arab propagandists, Israeli revisionist historians and the anti-Israeli contingent of academics, political commentators and public intellectuals today that the Palestinian refugees were driven out by Israeli forces during the War of Independence is more than likely invalid.
Even Sir John Glubb of “Glubb Pasha” fame, the British general of the Arab Legion who conducted a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the newborn Jewish state, wrote in the London Daily Mail for August 12, 1948 that “The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” And Glubb cannot be described as a friendly witness; he was one of Israel’s most devoted enemies.
Many Arab public figures and news sources of the time were equally scathing; for example, Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, interviewed in the Beirut Telegraph for September 6, 1948, stressed that “these refugees [are] the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state,” the Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station in Cyprus reminded its listeners on April 3, 1949 that “the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes,” the Jordanian daily Falastin in an article for February 19, 1949 blamed the “Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes,” and the Syrian prime minister at the time, Khaled el-Azm, confessed in his 1973 memoirs that “it is we who made them leave,” among a surfeit of such affidavits.
As for the current situation, this hardly qualifies as an “occupation.” Gaza is an autonomous statelet under Hamas, and Fatah presently controls 94% of the West Bank. In the most fundamental sense “Palestine” is not occupied by Israel but by its own terror organizations, which under Arafat actually impeded the formation of an independent state, opting not to build a country but to destroy another. The devastated economy of the Palestinian area is owing directly to the autocratic rule of its leaders. Kleptocrats and tyrants whose archetype was Haj Amin al-Husseini, they have thoroughly indoctrinated their people through the state-run media and curricula, imposing their war aims upon their subjects while reaping the benefits of brute power and the opportunities for stanchless embezzlement which it affords. Relatively speaking, the Palestinian economy flourished when Israel was in control of the territories. Now that it is occupied by its own rulers and their servant militias, “Palestine” can survive only on international life support.
The term “occupation” is thus a multivalent one and, in reality, signifies something far different than does its current acceptation. But the situation is even more complex. According to Palestinian-American comedian Ray Hanania, Palestinians suffer from yet another form of “occupation,” which may be described as a condition of inner immobilization, a cathexis on the past that amounts to a kind of psychological occupation that prevents them from coming to terms with things as they are. Returning from a tour of the West Bank and reflecting on his experience, Hanania said that “Palestinians are suffering from several layers of occupation, and one of them is a self-imposed oppression that has become an excuse for their failings,” a desire not for peace but for revenge and an inability to “accept the damage to their pride that compromise would entail.” Palestinian leaders from all factions “are against anything that might allow Palestinians to start thinking outside of their self-imposed imprisonment,” and it is this which erodes their capacity to form their own state.
For Hanania, the real barrier that curtails Palestinian life and movement is the “mental bondage” in which they are enmeshed; the real fence that inhibits their liberty is “the wall of ignorance constructed by their own foolish failure to see through the rhetoric and the hatred of the past to the reality of today.” The word “occupation” clearly has more than one valence. The Palestinians are imprisoned in a deadlock of their own making; the irony is that those from outside Palestine who would alleviate the situation are imprisoned in the Palestinians’ own imprisonment.
Meanwhile, in seeking to delegitimate Israel, media outlets around the world strive to garner our support for the new Hamas pseudo-state by insisting that, at between 3,823 and 4,118 inhabitants per square kilometer (estimates vary), Gaza is the most densely populated region on the planet, thereby deserving of political and economic compassion at the expense of Israel. While this is certainly an alarming figure, we might recall that Paris’ 11th arrondissement gives us 41,053 and Kowloon (the former Hong Kong) 1,900,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, which may put comparative densities in a more sober perspective. Indeed, my own home town, the city of Montreal proper, comprises half the total land area of the Gaza Strip (185 as opposed to 370 square kilometers) but its population exceeds that of the Strip by several hundred thousand residents. At last report, Paris, Kowloon and Montreal were doing rather well.
The status of Jerusalem, of course, remains an especial sticking point. At this moment of writing, Israel stands accused of jeopardizing the current round of peace talks by constructing additional housing units in the Har Homa neighbourhood in the southeastern part of the city, that is to say, of building in the city which is the actual capital of the country and on land which is 75% owned by Jews. The Palestinian owners of the remaining 25% were offered compensation under the law of eminent domain—a law invoked by many other democratic countries and, indeed, even in my home province of Quebec in which an area of privately owned farmland approximately equivalent to the size of the entire Gaza Strip was expropriated to build Mirabel International Airport. Har Homa, it is true, stands just over the Green Line; the latter, however, was never considered a border demarcation but an armistice line subject to eventual adjustment, now more than forty years overdue. (The folk etymology of the term “green line” can be discerned by glancing at a satellite image of the Holy Land: where the green ends is Israel, where the ochre begins is Arab-controlled.)
Various religious denominations, NGOs and “social rights” groups have also jumped on the anti-Israeli bandwagon, parlaying their ignorance of history as ethical rectitude and aligning their efforts with radical Muslim organizations, such as CAIR in the United States and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in the U.K. Rooted in moral pharisaism and political illiteracy, the charade gives no sign of ever tapering off. Thus the historical delusion is maintained, the real facts airbrushed out of the picture, the fabricated Palestinian identity reinforced, Arab guilt in exploiting their “Palestinian brothers” for political purposes banished from the record, the complicity of Western political institutions as well as the United Nations in perpetuating the ignominy resolutely ignored or effaced from public documentation, and the prospect of war or prolonged disquiet rendered more or less inevitable.
Five Arab armies in 1948 were unable to obliterate the fledgling Jewish state. Three Arab armies in 1967 were also crushed by a chiefly reservist army as were the combined forces of Egypt and Syria in 1973. Having failed militarily, the Arab side of the dispute (with Israel’s and the West’s myopic compliance) decided upon a new and presumably more effective strategy, which goes by the name of the Oslo Accords. In exchange for territorial withdrawals, Arafat and the PLO pledged to put an end to terrorist activities, but subsequently reneged on the Declaration of Principles (September 1993), the Gaza-Jericho Agreement (May 1994), the Interim Agreement (September 1995) and the Hebron Agreement (January 1997) while accepting cost-free Israeli withdrawals from most of Gaza and seven West Bank cities.
The failure of the Camp David summit and its tepid Annapolis clone, then, should have come as no surprise. For the mentality in question, sharing is not a viable outcome. Rather, the motivating factor is a famous hadith from the Bukhari collection, regarded as the most authentic Islamic book absenting the Koran itself. Hadith 4:52:176 reads: “Allah’s apostle said, You will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide begind stones. The stones will give them away saying, O Abdullah, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come, kill him.”
There should be no mistake about this. Whether the “negotiation process” is merely a subterfuge intended to whittle away at Israel’s borders, leaving it vulnerable to even short-range rocket attack, or an actual effort to establish a secure territorial base from which to launch a protracted and coordinated assault on the country, the proposed creation of a Palestinian state is the brainchild of Arab diplomacy in its never-abandoned plan to destroy Israel. The same is true, as we have seen, of the controversial refugee issue and the Palestinian insistence on the Haq al-Awda or “right of return,” which would lead in short order to the demographic subversion of Israel as well as posing the imminent threat of its being simply voted out of existence.
The fundamental issue is clear. The Arabs are not interested in Palestine as such and never were, but in the Trojan Horse it can wheel up to Israel’s borders under the pretext of a “peaceful,” intercessory solution to the problem. Ultimately, Palestine is, and has been since the second half of the last century, the preferred Arab feint and gambit for bringing down Israel, at whatever cost to the Palestinians themselves, deluded or collusive as they may be. Truth be told, it is this which explains the endless preoccupation with Palestine on the part of the Muslim world, the United Nations, the NGOs, the so-called peace movements, the liberal press and many Western governments.
I do not know if this strategy will work in the long run, but in the short term it will undoubtedly cause the Israelis immense and unnecessary suffering. In a poem entitled “State of Siege,” Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish described Israel as a speciously “old state/beneath the ruins of a future Troy.” Perhaps the current historical epic will have a different conclusion and the new Trojans will succeed in expelling the invaders. But fires will burn in the city.

the face of Evil
by Michael Freund

Hamas, Hizbullah and the Iranian regime are ideologically committed to the Jewish state's destruction.



"Sometimes," Blaise Pascal once noted, "we learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good." The great philosopher's pithy observation took on new resonance last week, as Israelis were given ample opportunity to catch a glimpse of what sheer, unadulterated wickedness truly looks like.

In Beirut, it took the form of Hizbullah thug-in-chief Hassan Nasrallah. Speaking on Saturday to a crowd of tens of thousands of cheering supporters, the bearded and bespectacled terror boss delivered one of the most chilling speeches in recent memory.

"O Zionists," he declared, "your army has left the body parts of your soldiers in our villages and fields. Our mujahadeen fought these Zionists, killing them and collecting their body parts."

For Nasrallah to gloat about mutilation and dismemberment is simply inhuman.

As if that weren't gruesome enough, Nasrallah went on to provide still more macabre detail. "I am not talking about regular body parts," he said. "I tell the Israelis, we have the heads of your soldiers, we have hands, we have legs ... there is even a near-complete body, a half or three-quarters of a body, from head, to chest to the torso."

Even for the Middle East, it was an exceptional demonstration of callousness and cruelty. For Nasrallah to gloat about mutilation and dismemberment is simply inhuman. Adjectives such as depraved and degenerate fail to do this cretin justice.

But the evil on display last week was not confined merely to our northern borders. To the east, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was boasting in an interview with Al-Jazeera that Israel is "doomed to collapse," in the process repeating one of his favorite mantras that Zionists are "enemies of mankind." Backing up his rhetoric with deeds, the tyrant of Teheran took delivery of another 11 tons of nuclear fuel from Russia as he races ahead with plans to produce atomic weapons. And we all know just where those warheads will be pointed, should he succeed with his nefarious schemes.

Then, to the south of us lies Hamas-controlled Gaza. In recent days, Palestinian terrorists have fired more than 160 Kassam rockets and 70 mortar shells from the Strip at Israeli towns and villages throughout the Negev, indiscriminately targeting innocent civilians.

The result has been that thousands of Israelis are being terrorized daily by the shrill sound of sirens and the piercing whistle of potentially-lethal projectiles hurtling at them through the air.

Not surprisingly, a new study released by the Israel Center for Victims of Terror and War found that over 75 percent of the children in Sderot exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

And so, an entire generation in that battered southern town is growing up with extensive psychological and emotional wounds.

What are we to make of all this? What does this hatred mean? While this question might seem tantalizingly simple, or even simplistic, the answer to this query is in fact what lies at the root of Israel's foreign and defense policies.

For some, the encirclement of Israel by hostile forces is what underlies their determination to reach a final deal as quickly as possible with Mahmoud Abbas.

Resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they say, will sap the hostility directed at Israel throughout the Arab world, thereby securing the Jewish state's place in the region.

But such an approach amounts to little more than wishful thinking, as our brief little survey of the region clearly indicates. The enmity we face is not merely political, but fundamentally theological too.

For Hamas, Hizbullah and the Iranian regime, which together constitute an arc of hate surrounding Israel, are ideologically committed to the Jewish state's destruction, regardless of whether a settlement of one sort or another is reached.

Addressing the political demands of our foes, while ignoring their deep-seated sense of sacred duty to erase the Jewish presence in this region, is an act of potentially lethal self-delusion.

Like all human beings, we Israelis are uncomfortable staring evil directly in the face. It strikes at our own historical and existential anxieties, and goes against our basic human need to be loved and appreciated.

But psycho-babble aside, we need to come to terms with the reality of our situation, which boils down to fighting back or being ejected from the ring.

Israel is engaged in a titanic, life-and-death struggle between good and evil.

The arc of hate is growing ever more bold, and it is only a matter of time before they seize upon the sense of weakness that our current leaders are projecting and ready themselves to pounce.

These recent events should serve as a jolting reminder to us all that Israel is engaged in a titanic, life-and-death struggle between good and evil. This is not about a misunderstanding over boundary lines, water rights or even refugees. It is a momentous, ongoing war of annihilation that our foes have been waging against us for over a century. Simply put, it is a struggle against evil.

And the critical component necessary for our survival and our success is maintaining an unwavering sense of faith, and never losing sight of the justness of our cause. The moment we do so is the moment when the battle will be lost.

Twenty-five years ago, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, US president Ronald Reagan said, "I've always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith."

Those words are equally applicable today. The evil is staring us right in the face, whether in the guise of Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad or Khaled Mashaal.

Our task is to stare it back down and defeat it, plain and simple. Like it or not, averting our eyes or making dangerous concessions simply won't make it go away.


This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.