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Nothing Is Ever the Palestinians' Fault

(National Review) Mike Cote - The Palestinian cause has one defining feature: the refusal of its champions to accept any responsibility for the situation they've made for themselves. In the pro-Palestinian narrative, things simply happen to the Palestinian people, entirely caused by outside forces. Everyone else, but particularly Israel and the Jewish people writ large, is to blame for the woes of the Palestinian people. In reality, however, the self-abnegation of their agency is a tactic meant to camouflage consistently poor choices and overwhelming hatred of Jews. In their telling, the disaster of 1948, which they call the "nakba," simply befell the Palestinian people. Yet in the historical record, it is clear that these events were driven primarily by the Palestinian Arabs themselves. The UN Partition Plan, which would have created a Jewish state alongside an Arab one in British Mandatory Palestine, was accepted by the Jewish population. The Palestinian Arabs, however, refused the partition and launched a war of extermination against the nascent State of Israel. The Palestinian people, en masse, have embraced a near-religious devotion to the idea that they will be able to recapture the prewar status quo from before 1948, returning to their homes and undoing the State of Israel. Today, the refugee camps are not tent cities but large-scale, concrete apartment blocks that look no different from any other residential neighborhoods of the region. And they're paid for by international relief dollars. The enormous flow of funds through the UN and its NGO partners enriches the Palestinian leadership, provides jobs for large swaths of Palestinian society, and funds the terrorism meant to destroy Israel. It pays the families of terrorists, provides construction dollars for building tunnel networks, and funds salaries for Hamas cadres. No wonder the refugee issue hasn't been resolved; it's entirely within Palestinian interests to keep the scam going indefinitely. The failure of Palestinians to achieve statehood is depicted as being stymied by Israel. This flies in the face of reality. Every time statehood has been offered to the Palestinian leadership, it has been rejected. Instead of choosing the arduous task of state-building and governance, Palestinian leadership has chosen terrorism, eliminationism, and statelessness - a choice that has been repeatedly ratified by the people they lead. Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza precisely because it is a terror organization. It was not expected to govern but to carry out terror attacks against Israel. In this, it seems as though the Palestinians care less about gaining their own state than they do about destroying someone else's. Sovereignty entails responsibility. Palestinians need to learn that their choices are their own and have consequences that they must live with. Blaming everything on external forces outside of their control has created a version of learned helplessness among the Palestinian population, one that speaks poorly of their ability to run a successful nation-state.
2024-06-02 00:00:00
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