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The Rejection

(New Republic/Australia-Israel Review) - Benny Morris To judge by Palestinian opinion polls and street demonstrations, most Palestinians today do not seek only the liberation of the territories from Israel's occupation. They seek also the destruction of Israel. And the masses express their hatred of the Jewish state by supporting suicide bombings inside Israel proper, against buses, supermarkets, and restaurants. For the Palestinians, each suicide bombing represents a microcosmic assault on Israel's existence; and each street celebration following successful bombings testifies to the popularity of the method and the goal. Palestinian behavior during the past three years has provided the unhappy ground for a serious re-examination of my own political assumptions. I have spent the past twenty years studying the hundred years of Zionist-Palestinian conflict. I have come away from my examination of the history of the conflict with a sense of the instinctive rejectionism that runs like a dark thread through Palestinian history - a rejection, to the point of absurdity, of the history of the Jewish link to the land of Israel; a rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish claims to Palestine; a rejection of the right of the Jewish state to exist. And, worse, this rejectionism has over the decades been leavened by a healthy dose of antisemitism, a perception of the Jew as God's and humanity's unchosen. The Palestinian national movement, since its inception in the 1920s, has viewed the struggle against Zionism as a zero-sum game. Palestinian leaders and preachers, guided by history and religion, have traditionally seen the Jews as an inferior race whose proper place was as an abased minority in a Muslim polity; and the present situation, with an Arab minority under Jewish rule, is regarded as a perversion of nature and divine will. Nothing more revealing was said at the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 than Arafat's response to President Clinton's effort to persuade him to compromise over Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Arafat said: "What temple? The Jews had no temples there. It's a legend." Arafat - and this is common fare in sermons in the mosques of the West Bank and Gaza - was denying that the Jewish people had any historic connection to Jerusalem and, by extension, to Palestine.
2003-05-28 00:00:00
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