Losing is the risk you take when you start a war.
Losing is the risk you take when you start a war.
Avoiding accountability is the Palestinian national trait, to the extent one can call a cluster of Islamist terrorists a nation. And the broader "international community" enables this. It must stop.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The current Israel-Hamas war follows a depressingly familiar pattern: The Palestinians declare war or commit heinous acts, then pretend that they are innocent victims when faced with the consequences.
This refusal to accept responsibility is why the Palestinians have nothing to show for their 80 years of conflict with Israel.
In 1948, mere hours after Israel declared independence, five Arab states (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq) declared war on Israel — and lost. Both Israel and the Arabs gained and lost territory in this war and the borders of British Mandatory Palestine were redrawn.
It is in the fighting that about 700,000 Arabs, not yet calling themselves Palestinians, fled and could not return because the Arabs lost the war they started. This is the so-called “Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the Palestinian founding myth.
Some of these Arabs escaped to flee the fighting, and some were displaced, but the vast majority fled on Arab leaders’ instruction. They were told to flee and that they could return after the Arab armies had massacred the Jews and killed the nascent Jewish state, which, of course, did not happen.
The Arabs caused the Palestinian refugee crisis, first by telling them to flee and then, when they lost the war, by putting them in refugee camps rather than granting them citizenship (unlike Israel, which absorbed the 800,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries in an act of actual ethnic cleansing).
Israel subsequently made the Arabs in its state citizens, while Jordan ethnically cleansed Jews from Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and East Jerusalem in a nasty piece of history that no one ever talks about because facts are so passe and the world does not mind crimes against Jews.
If the Arabs had not attacked Israel, there would have been no Palestinian refugees.
The Arabs have never taken responsibility for this. Instead, they built a fictional narrative worthy of Tolkien that Israel’s creation displaced them. They have been nurturing this lie for eight decades and got most of the world to believe it.
There was never a Palestinian nation, or people, just Arabs who just happened to live in British Mandatory Palestine. As those who get their knowledge from history books and not TikTok know, they never started calling themselves Palestinians until around 1968. This was when, having failed to defeat Israel at war, they developed a new strategy of pretending they were an occupied and dispossessed people.
It is fair to say that there exists today a group of people called the Palestinians, but what defines them? What makes them distinct from the people of Syria and Egypt, from where they mostly hail?
What binds them is their hatred of Israel, their desire to eradicate it, their refusal to acknowledge what really happened in 1948, and — above all else — their refusal to take responsibility for their plight since. A lack of sense of agency may be the defining Palestinian characteristic.
While 1948 marked the beginning of this national character flaw, they have built upon it with dispiriting regularity.
The 1967 Six-Day War is another example. The region’s Arab armies again tried to eradicate Israel and got trounced in six days as Israel achieved one of history’s greatest military victories.
In this war, Israel took Judea and Samaria back from Jordan, which — for those averse to history books — had illegally occupied and annexed the region after the 1948 war. If a country starts a war, and then loses land that it was illegally occupying, that is too bad.
Losing is the risk you take when you start a war (one with genocidal rather than territorial gains at that). My sympathy for genocidal warmongers is in short supply. In a morally sane universe, so would everyone else’s.
The Palestinians — in a delusion worthy of a psychotherapy conference — somehow decided that they were the victims of Israeli occupying Judea and Samaria. They have steadfastly refused to accept that their plight is mostly their fault. Much of the world has enabled this delusion by agreeing that Israel is occupying Judea and Samaria illegally. Indeed, the Jews are not.
Anyone who does not know what actually happened should stop basking in their ignorance and invest in a new pair of reading glasses.
Unable to destroy Israel in war, the Palestinians turned to terror. So convinced of their own victimhood, they launched an intifada (“uprising”), a bloodthirsty six years from 1987 to 1991. This prompted Israel to deploy 80,000 troops to quell the terrorist and violent unrest, about which the Palestinians then complained.
Yet again the Palestinians unleashed violence on Israel, refused to accept responsibility for it, then cried to the credulous international community that they were the victims of Israeli military aggression and occupation.
This led to the Oslo Accords in 1993, a series of agreements aimed at providing Palestinian self-determination and a pathway to a Palestinian state — the so-called two-state solution.
Naturally, the Palestinians went on to reject this because it did not give them what they wanted, which was Israel’s annihilation. The Palestinians then launched the homicidal Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, producing a fierce Israeli response, after which the Palestinians again complained about Israeli military occupation.
For the slow people in the class, Israel’s military occupation is a response to Palestinian terror, not the cause of it. The Palestinians and their dim-witted supporters in the West do not accept this because avoiding accountability is the Palestinian national trait, to the extent one can call a cluster of Islamist terrorists a nation.
Following this were 20 years of rocket attacks on Israel from the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, terror attacks in Judea and Samaria endorsed by the corrupt and crony-ridden Palestinian Authority, as well as attacks from Hezbollah, another Iranian terror proxy in the failed state of Lebanon.
This culminated in Hamas’ unspeakably evil attack on Israel on October 7th — the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in the most sadistic and psychologically disturbed ways possible — which Hezbollah joined just a day later, sparking the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war.
True to form, the Palestinians — supported by many morally stunted governments and activists terror supporters in the West — have again managed to convince themselves that they are the victims of Israeli aggression, a precise inversion of the truth.
This is does not remotely touch the surface of a comprehensive list of Arab and Palestinian abdication of any and all responsibility. There was the Second Arab-Israeli War, the Yom Kippur War, the two Lebanon wars — every one of which the Arabs started — and far too many terror attacks to mention.
Even since the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian Authority gained day-to-day government of much of Judea and Samaria and Gaza, the Palestinians have messed it up and blamed the Jews. Already in 1973, legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously quipped: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Hamas took over Gaza and turned it into a Jihadist terror state, while the Palestinian Authority built a kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria and continues to fund and carry out terror as a matter of government policy. Even as these Palestinians have been self-governing, they continue to blame Israel for their woes.
It is complete moral abandonment.
Imagine what would have happened if the Palestinians, instead of building the world’s most extensive and sophisticated terror network, had put their efforts into state-building and bettering the lives of Palestinians.
I jest, of course. It is almost impossible to imagine such a thing because of the Palestinians’ refusal to accept any responsibility for the mess they have made, or for cleaning it up.
The obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians have nothing to do with borders, states, or constitutional arrangements. It is the Palestinians’ refusal to live with Jews, and their pathological dishonesty about the starring role they have played in their own demise.
Western countries bear significant responsibility, too, as does the wider Arab and Muslim worlds. They have never asked the Palestinians to stand up and take responsibility for their own destiny, and they have joined them in blaming all their woes on Israel.
The West has betrayed the Palestinians with the bigotry of low expectations. Through ill-monitored aid and infirm foreign policy, they have enabled Palestinian uselessness and contributed to Palestinian misery.
If Israelis and Palestinians are ever to find peace, a Palestinian cultural upheavel is needed. They must be willing to live with Jews, abandon their professional victimhood, and start taking responsibility for their own future.
It would help if the West recognized this, too, but it will not. The Western world is overwhelmingly consumed by its own antisemitism (often disguised as “anti-Zionism”), itself a sick feature of Western culture, to see what has really gone on for far too long.
The Jewish People built Israel. We could have wallowed in Victim culture after The Holocaust. But we did not. We built Israel.
Excellent account of where we are and how we got here. Really, very well recounted. My one suggestion involves what is happening in the US right now with the unwillingness of the liberal order to confront its own antisemitism and shut down the wave of antisemitic violence that is occurring.
The problem isn't just that certain leaders on the liberal side are giving in to their own antisemitism. It is also an unwillingness to say the quiet part out loud. Simply put, a calculus has been employed whereby since the Jews are a tiny minority and the vote of large groups of antisemitic individuals is critical to Harris' election, a decision has been made to let the Jews suffer the wrath of those who hate them for the sake of political convenience.
The idea that we would let mobs roam our streets and campuses targeting blacks, gays or other minorities while hiding behind free speech is ridiculous. And yet, that is where officialdom is right now vis a via antisemitism. That is simply the deal, like it or not.