A position of strength

Editorial

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has announced that he will not cede one inch of the West Bank. Israeli leaders have assumed that, when it came to negotiations, they could trade off some Jewish-majority areas in the West Bank for some Arab-majority areas in Israel proper. No go, says Abbas. This firm statement is not standard from diplomats in a negotiation. But then, the Palestinian leadership has never been very diplomatic.

Normally this sort of intransigence is limited to those bargaining from a position of strength. Bargaining from a position of strength usually requires some form of military victory or, at least, the assumption of military superiority or ... something.

In the case of the Palestinians, their strength comes from their weakness. The weaker they appear to be, the more the world's ill-informed but well-intentioned flock to their cause. People from around the world, some of them of good will, have come to the defence of the Palestinians because they see the horrific conditions in which they are forced to exist. In their ignorance of history, these people seek the easiest and most obvious perpetrator to blame and find Israel.

A true reading of history demonstrates that the Palestinian people have been the wedge tragically used by the Arab world to attack and vilify Israel. Israel has been put in untenable situations, forced to act in ways that bring international criticism, precisely because the Arab world, and even the Palestinian leadership, ensures that, for the cost of a few hundred Palestinian lives, global PR will be overwhelmingly on the Palestinian side. Ignorance, anti-Semitism and short attention spans nurtured by a half-century of television help.

The Palestinians will not win by blowing themselves up, but it at least prevents Israelis from winning or, for that matter, living in peace. At the same time, the world's reaction is counterintuitive, to the benefit of the Palestinians. As long as the situation remains unresolved, giving Palestinian terrorists an excuse to blow up Jews, the world will continue to tsk-tsk, but conclude that the Palestinians will stop blowing up Jews when the Jews stop doing whatever it is that makes Palestinians want to blow them up. Israel kills Palestinian terrorists and Israel is to blame. Palestinian terrorists kill Israelis and, well, Israel is still to blame.

It is often said, deplorably and by people with an inadequate grasp of history, that the creation of Israel represented the Palestinian people paying for the sins of Europeans. This is wrong (morally and empirically) in several ways. The Europeans who perpetrated the Holocaust – and those who, in this narrative, gave the Jews a homeland as recompense – did not do anyone any favors. Inasmuch as Europeans helped in any way to ensure the creation of Israel, it was primarily so that they themselves would not have to deal with the ragged remnants of this people liberated from the death camps of Europe. Moreover, a fair reading of history also demonstrates that Europe really did little to nothing to ensure the creation of Israel. After the United Nations partition resolution, the Jews were once again utterly alone. When the amassed armies of the combined neighboring Arab states invaded Israel at the moment of her birth – determined to strangle this infant state as it emerged – the Jews were as abandoned as ever in history. To suggest that Israel is a product of European guilt is far too generous to Europeans.

In reality, the Palestinians could hardly have hoped for a better enemy. Not only is Israel arguably the most ethical adherent to what laws and codes govern combat in situations that no other country, thankfully, has ever faced. But also, in the Jews, the Arabs have found an enemy about whom a large proportion of the world's population are predisposed to believe even the most egregious lies.

Were their enemy not a Jewish state, it is doubtful that the Palestinian cause would have a fragment of the global empathy it has elicited. But then, the only reason there is a conflict with Israel in the first place is that it is a state of Jews. Remember, there is no question as to the legitimacy of the other states in the region that were carved out in the 20th century from the old Ottoman Empire.

It is only because Israel is a Jewish state that the Palestinian prime minister can stand against compromise, against reason and against peace and still enjoy the overwhelming support of the world's "progressive," "peace-loving" millions. Because, as weak as their position is, as illegitimate as their claims are to the mantle of peace, as egregious an abandonment of the principles of civilized negotiation that their intifadas represent, their enemies are the Jews.

This is why the Palestinians can make outrageous demands from a position of strength and have the world take them seriously.

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