After 70+ years of Arab apartheid — separation in camps; separate diminished treatment — deep political control and suppression (from Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/23/palestine-authorities-crush-dissent), this may be the beginning for the Palestinian People. No longer Jordanian; no longer Egyptian; no longer Ottoman; no longer anything that has been before but a part of everything that has crossed through the middle east, there’s definitely a population that has been in modern times isolated in time and space, i.e., A People!
Flip the baby over and let it be born and breath refreshed and new.
The Palestinian People may be so only as consequence of more than 70 years of Arab Apartheid, i.e., separation in the camps of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. They will learn that they have been duped as well by the PLO and, later, Hamas — and ultimately by Moscow.
The real revolution in the Middle East may be normalization — peaceful Palestinian democracy in Gaza and the West Bank; citizenship and inclusion with full return of state rights in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, albeit slowly to fade the Soviet Era’s poison from the system.
The Palestinians may be many people — they may be even a little bit of all of the people whose cultures and languages and lives have cross-crossed that small patch of earth for millennia.
One image which showed a schoolboy holding a rifle was captioned: “Hamas cubs, they are the next soldiers of Gaza and the next liberation army, god willing.”
Another picture of a toddler wearing a beret and holding a gun was captioned: “Generation after generation Hamas is increasing its enthusiasm, dignity, and power.”
When I spoke with a warlord ‘General’ about why he recruited children he said, ‘Children are abundant, stupid, they obey orders, don’t ask questions, and cost nothing. They are very cheap! They never desert, cannot go home and I can get as many as I want immediately.
Eid also criticized the education provided in UNRWA schools. “I worked in several UNRWA schools in the territories and in Jordan, and children aged 9-10 want to be killed and kill Jews and to release their people. “Who taught you that?” I asked. They said that was what they were learning in schools, and I asked teachers at UNRWA schools in Jordan if children were taught to blow themselves up and be killed. They said “of course. How else will they liberate the land from the Israeli occupation? ” UNRWA is aware of this, and the international community knows that all UNRWA studies are full of hate and incitement. The international community continues to inject funds because it is against Israel.”
According to the army, the young girl was spotted by soldiers as she approached the security fence. The troops, who were on the Israeli side, met the girl as she reached the fence, an army spokesperson said.
“When the IDF troops realized it was a girl, they picked her up and made sure that she could get back to her parents safely,” the army said. It did not say how it coordinated with girl’s parents on the Gaza side.
For some reason, we never hear any discussion of child soldiers in Palestine, but we all very clearly know they exist and that it is nothing new. The PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have for decades used children as fodder to throw rocks, fireworks and explosives at soldiers, as bombers, as lookouts and couriers. Hamas has been even more brazen, publicizing its recruitment of an army of child soldiers. In the current wave of terrorism in Israel and Palestine, we have seen attackers as young as 13 years old. These child soldiers have been called to action by Abu Mazen, The PA, and Hamas who then glorify them to encourage more children to commit attacks.
The curriculum also promotes the century-old paradigm of a ceaseless effort to destroy Israel in stages. A new generation of Palestinian children is methodically being educated in the spirit of the Ten-Point Program adopted by the Palestinian National Council ([PNC] (the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], at its twelfth meeting in Cairo June 8, 1974). The plan called for the establishment of a national authority “over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated” with the aim of “completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory”. The curriculum includes an uncompromising rejection of Israel and a combination of violence and international community pressure to accommodate Palestinian demands. What used to be the strategy of one extremist guerilla movement has now become the standard for all Palestinians students.
The Hamas campaign, entitled, “Vanguards of Liberation,” is aimed at recruiting young men whose ages range between 15 and 21.
So far, the Hamas recruitment program has attracted hundreds of youths from the Gaza Strip who, according to the movement, will form the nucleus for the new “Liberation Army.”
“Children’s Army of Hamas – short” – David Bedein, published to YouTube March 22, 2015.
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us” — Golda Meir, n.d.
Prompt: “How can we constantly ask to be accepted and understood without giving the same???”
The problem is the false Palestinian narrative, and the more sympathetic the attention given to it, the more the Palestinians suffer — and most of all at the hands of their own leaders (plus their “handlers” in Moscow and Tehran).
The Middle East Conflict is part of the hangover from WWII, and the only way it’s going to lose energy is to be honest with the Palestinians about what really happened, i.e., about what was done to them by the Soviets and the Arab dictators who had thought the refugees better off stuffed into camps and intellectually weaponized with the biggest lie of all: “The Jews stole YOUR land.” That idea was not true then; it is not true today; and it will never be true.
One thing that may be true today is that the Arab Apartheid demonstrated in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria (have a look at Yarmouk for how the Arab and Muslim worlds have actually regarded Palestinians), and Egypt has after 70+ years of consistent separation and abuse actually formed a new people — but they need to get out of the womb in hell — or be brought out of that suffocated space — and turned right-side up, and that starts with recognizing exactly the evil that set them up for misery.
We should never be kind to the cruel.
We should never be sympathetic with the misguided but rather firm with the western insistence on great integrity in support of bedrock truth.
Event: “Is a Sovereign Palestine Still Possible?” Sponsor: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Date: October 11, 2018 Note: Audio starts after 8:30, and the program runs about two hours.
What will the recent changes in U.S. policy—including recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, terminating assistance to Palestinians and UNRWA, and closing the Palestinian representative office in Washington—mean for the future of U.S.-Palestinian relations and the Palestinian national project? Will the accelerated pace of settlement construction and attempts to normalize Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory create irreversible realities with long-term ramifications for Palestinian self-determination and regional security?
Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt: Arab Apartheid.
Arab denial of political crimes and violent provocations summoning Israeli and western response: Shameful.
Corruption and political suppression associated with the PLO/PA and Hamas: Heinous.
“Palestinian People”: after 70+ years of Arab / Arab-Russian abuse by crude manipulation: yes, but in situ.
Any other people would both deserve and have obtained better governance for themselves.
At a point early in the program, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, claims the Jewish Israeli and ? Palestinian narratives equal on the basis of belief and absolute truth. However, the Palestinians have never been of one national or religious background: Christian, Muslim, Jordanian, Egyptian, wandering. What has fixed them in place and time has been Arab animus toward the (Majority) Jewish State of Israel, and it may be suggested that after 70+ years of punitive separation, the same may well have established themselves as another “people apart” — and perhaps ready to grow into new and better fit and more survivable shoes. The time has come to step out of what has become a worn out narrative serving only the self-serving.
While powerful mercenary, political, and religious forces sustain the Middle East Conflict (MEC), one may hope that nothing evil lasts forever. That is the one hope that should bridge what most divides Israelis and Palestinians ready to move on with their lives as well as the great wall that exists in time between the region of feudal absolute power and that of the modern democratic distribution of power, rule of law, and responsible and responsive governance.
In the course of a day — and just about every day — the editor of this blog visits the “camps” in which complaint and demonizations prompted by attacks, injuries, and deaths are par for conversation. Few, however, either side, take in the scope of the conflict in its post-WWII East v West / Moscow v Washington / Feudal v Modern aspect, so BackChannels tries (and tries and tries) to get to thought that is both short but broadening.
For the most part, the angered narrow their vision, speak their own truth, and summon their own choruses when it might prove more helpful to grasp the greater politics and the historic manipulation attending the same.
The end of the Cold War should have produced a Moscow different from the one that groomed Arafat, established the PLO, and introduced the world to airline hijacking (in association with the “Palestinian cause”).
It didn’t.
While the Communist Party Soviet Union (CPSU) found itself diminished and disfavored, the methods, relationships, and rhetoric survived the transition, and I think it’s those phantoms that continue cycling the Palestinians through the same old same old and go nowhere / get nowhere political habits supporting incitement. There’s dirty arms and narcotics money in the conflict also (Barack Obama’s $1 billion cocaine “grant” to Hezbollah — https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-drug-trafficking-investigation/ . It has paid “the other side”, which is larger than it first looks, to keep the Palestinians boiling with the Big Lie — “Israel stole your land” .
I don’t know if there’s too much money in war.
What happens beneath the table produces a lot of heat — defense R&D, manufacturing, trade — on the surface. I believe — or would like to believe — that Moscow benefits more from the sustained conflict than Washington. Be the truth as it may be, the “Phantoms of the Soviet” have rather cooked down their own interests: Assad has pretty much destroyed his own state; irksome Hamas appears not to want another war; Abbas with his KGB record has turned into an old man rattling on about “resistance” without any place to take it.
Should the Middle East Conflict remain a reliable focal point for “east-west competition” with feudal structures and criminality on one side and constructive democratic features and the semblance of order on the other?
After 70+ years — and 26 years past the end of the Cold War — the MEC has to come down, but Palestinian political “cadre” and the main base susceptible to last century’s messaging and propaganda need help figuring out how they’ve been used — and they need to wake to the idea that peace would serve them (and everyone else) much, much better than a continued and mindless “resistance” based on the myth of their own myth founded on simple face-saving misdirection.
Funny thing about “the truth”: all the small parts fit — the contributions of events and personalities add up — and the whole right image of the past grows stronger with time.
Now wish-listed in my Amazon account, it would be a good book to own; however, the bookcases have been filled, and there’s even now a box full of books with bookmarks in them, the desktop having become more my platform than the sofa.
Purpose: replace strident untrue (Soviet Era malarkey) narratives 🙂 with a broad, common, empathetic, high-integrity telling of history — because history may not be “written by the victors” but in the greater course of time by the decent and earnest among the world’s scholars — that might then provide a firm base of knowledge for all.
The issue: the symmetrical treatment of history such that Israelis and Palestinians should teach both “The Holocaust” and “The Nakba”.
Rubbish.
Israelis and Palestinians would do well to research and teach history in the direction of nonpartisan and well substantiated truth.
The idea that “history is written by the victors” should be today an artifact of the medieval world, i.e., the world of “absolute power” and thuggish personalities.
In the modern world — and should it wish to be a good one — scholarly integrity should matter most of all (and Muhammad himself is reputed to have said, “One scholar is worth more against the devil than one thousands worshippers”).
The barbarism known to history — medieval rape and rapine, ethnic cleansing, genocide — need not be known to the future, but as much becomes the province of those alive today. If Muslim Fulani gangs and war parties wish to continue their program of razing Christian farming villages — and kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering the residents — that is really up to them, there being no sufficient power (yet) to stop them where they roam, plan, and execute foul deeds.
Integrity, rightness, and righteousness should have qualities that transcend small interests. As often as we may find that not true, we may hope that one day as much will be true.
In the Soviet Era, the KGB groomed Arafat and installed the PLO as a block and goad holding the then communist and Russian line against the expansion of western liberalism. Mahmoud Abbas has also his KGB record, and he too has sustained the Palestinian “People’s Liberation” mythology in service to an Orwellian model of political power, and combination of feudal power as guided by “secret” police (to get back to the promotion of Russian anti-Semitic political mechanics, go back to the Okhrana at the end of the Russian Imperial period).
Abbas essentially serves Moscow while trying to sustain a patronage system funded by obligations diplomatic and practice met by the west. Neither Abbas nor the Soviet / post-Soviet political “vision” he represents have any place to go. He’s an old man; the old Soviet bloc has been largely ruined in the middle east. However, Putin has chosen to support the older politics and related alignment to either the point of war, which I feel is near, or some bitter end afterward. I suspect Israel, the United States, and NATO and others would have preferred a diplomatic transition to archaic medieval destruction (as witnessed in Syria), but here we are with another Soviet-type dinosaur in power in the opposition and we’re dealing with primitive but effective fire-bearing kites and balloons from Gaza, which seems a sight both ridiculous and surreal.
