The roots of conflict

Editorial

The National Post reported last Saturday that a Hamas-controlled TV station is running a music video depicting the daughter of the late Reem Riyashi, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, preparing to follow her mother's footsteps into martyrdom and glorifying the concept of killing Jews.

This report may have stunned the naïve and innocent, but it was irritating to anyone who has been wondering for at least seven years how the world has ignored this sort of incitement, which constitutes the news, weather and sports in Palestinian society.

If the world's overwhelming sympathy for the Palestinian cause and lack of empathy for the Israeli predicament can be traced to a single phenomenon, it is that the accepted narrative imagines Israel as the aggressor and the Palestinians as the innocent oppressed.

This simplistic dichotomy is easy to purvey for two reasons. First, millennia of anti-Jewish stereotypes predispose the Western imagination to believe that the Jewish state is a grasping, greedy, self-interested entity. Second, the world has been able to ignore the reality that the violence that has engulfed the region since 2000 and, in fact, since 1948, is a result of a total rejection of a Jewish presence in the region and a comprehensive system of indoctrination and incitement. The most recent Post report contains a breathless account of the hate that is being perpetrated, which glorifies violence, depicts murderers as martyrs and encourages young Palestinians to kill themselves and others.

The fact is, this is not news. Or, it shouldn't be. The call to kill has come since 2000 at the latest, not from the periphery of Palestinian society, but from its recognized international leadership. Yasser Arafat, official PA television and radio, the elected and appointed officials who run the government – not just Hamas but Fatah, as well – have been calling repeatedly and in the clearest possible language on children and young adults to kill themselves in suicide attacks. The documentation is all over the Internet and has been reported in every major news source at some point in the past seven years. Indeed, curbing this incitement was one of the very few responsibilities placed on the Palestinians as part of the peace process but, of course, this, like the other minor demands made of the Palestinians in exchange for sovereignty, was rejected by this intifada because the end goal of the Palestinian nationalist movement is not mutual co-existence but the final elimination of Jews in the Middle East.

How has the Palestinian narrative been able to depict Israeli accidents and exceptional incidents of abused power as the norm, while the world continues to believe that teaching terror, as reported in the Post, is exceptional? Through repetition.

The Palestinian narrative is founded on the premise that a lie becomes fact through repetition. And why wouldn't it? Europeans and North Americans have accepted this narrative with hardly a whisper of doubt.

Case by case, Israel's defenders have scrupulously responded, trying to correct the most outrageous libels, to little avail. The public imagination has heard so many perverse allegations against Israel that some of them have to stick. When spokespeople come forward to illuminate the truth in the aftermath of the latest assertions, Israel's enemies conclude that, as was the case in Jenin, if Israel did not murder hundreds of civilians and bury them in mass graves, they've done something equally horrific. Again, this could only have traction in a world that presupposes the very worst about Jews.

Correcting misrepresentations and outright falsehoods has little or no effect in a world predetermined to hate Israel. What we must do is recast this discussion so that the world understands what is truly at the root of this conflict.

The exhortations to violence that are found in Arab school books, on television and radio, in mosques and throughout Palestinian society is by far the main fuel for this conflict.

It has an effect. Opinion polls indicate that a small majority of Palestinians believe that killing Israeli civilians is a better tactic than negotiation. A larger majority believes it's OK to kill Jews who live in the West Bank and a huge majority believe Israeli soldiers are fair game. Negotiation and compromise are for the weak-kneed.

The settlements, the security barrier, the various "humiliations" of the Palestinians – these are red herrings. If violence ceased, all of the challenges that remain would be negotiated to at least mutual compromise. But compromise is not something the Palestinians will accept, as proven by the fact that the intifada was the result of Israel ceding 97 per cent of what the Palestinians demanded. Meanwhile, every facet of Palestinian society is poisoned with Jew-hatred and intolerance to the extent that those who kill Jews are celebrated with schools, parks, playgrounds, soccer fields and kindergartens named in their honor. The heroes of Palestinian society are Jew-killers.

This is the real root of this conflict – and it needs to be repeated as often as the Palestinian lies.

^TOP