What if people saw Palestinian and Israeli lives as equal?
Actually, the more accurate question is: What if Palestinians saw Israeli lives as equal?
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In 2023, Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson published a book titled “The Wall Between” — about a metaphorical wall that exists between Jewish and Palestinian communities in the diaspora.
Distrust, enmity, and hate are common currencies, the authors claimed, manifesting within university campuses, schools and school boards, political events, social media, and academic circles.
Never mind that Khouri is a Lebanese-born Canadian who has little in common with “the Palestinians” — and Wilkinson, an American Jew, seems to have amplified what many Diaspora Jews do with Israel: an attempt at imposing their own sociopolitical worldviews on the Jewish state, as if Israelis ought to not be afforded the agency and respect to decide what is best for them and their country.
In their book, Khouri and Wilkinson describe two “meta-narratives” of Jews and Palestinians: the Holocaust and the Nakba, respectively.
But there is one “small” (haha) difference between the two: The Holocaust actually happened as we learn about it in history books, films, and museums — while the Nakba is a sugarcoated (that is, made superficially attractive) episode in modern Middle Eastern history, leveraged by nefarious actors to justify rampant antisemitism and violence against the Jewish state in the Jews’ indigenous homeland.
If you are new to this game, the “Nakba” is the Arabic name for the displacement and voluntary departure of approximately 750,000 Arabs during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, also known as the Israeli War of Independence. The war started when forces from Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt invaded Israel immediately after Israel declared independence on May 14th, 1948.
As professor Paul Finlayson, one of our guest writers (who is not Jewish), put it:
“The Nakba uses the definite article ‘the’ in its description to heighten its sense of loss and humiliation; this 76-year-old Palestinian grievance is still as bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword.”
“While the humiliation of the Nakba may be the still beating but wounded heart of the body of Palestinian grievances, it is a wound that never heals and demands constant attention.”
“Indeed, in comparing it to other grand displacements, the Nakba distinguishes itself not by the number of people displaced, the unique relationship to the land, the violence, or the material loss of the dispossessed. It is unique as a catastrophe because its people decided, while cheered on by a grand cast of willing enablers, to make their loss an idol to be worshipped, a grievance that demanded their enduring obeisance.”
As with most wars, hundreds of thousands of refugees emanated from the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but a variety of historical records show that many Palestinians were encouraged to leave their homes by Arab media and Arab leaders, who pompously promised a Jewish defeat and the subsequent Palestinian return to their homes (both of which never ended up happening).
Who made such promises? Leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, who declared: “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.”
The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem — following the March 8th, 1948 instructions of the Arab Higher Committee — ordered women, children, and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes, saying: “Any opposition to this order is an obstacle to the holy war and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.”
The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: “This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country.”
In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave, writing: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.”
Even Jordan’s King Abdullah blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:
“The tragedy of Palestinian Arabs was most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue.”
And current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said: “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.”
Hence, the Palestinian “meta-narrative” overemphasizes the Nakba and thus is built on a combination of wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, and bold-faced lying. To add insult to injury, this “meta-narrative” is a double negative, because it drives incitement and terrorism against the Jewish state, which drives a strong Israeli response, and the cycle gets exponentially worse for everyone involved.
By and large, Israelis do not deny Palestinian existence, justice, or self-determination. We have no problem acknowledging that Palestinian refugees were created in the pursuit of Jewish self-sovereignty, even though it was the Arabs who started that 1948 war. And still, history is not a perfect science.
But when your “meta-narrative” is based on some post-modernism ideological supremacy where “truths” go beyond objective realities, it becomes a bit much as “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.
Never mind that the term “Nakba” has, in and of itself, undergone quite the evolution. Originally it was used to refer to the mistake that many Palestinians made when they listened to the advice of others and left their homes, instead of staying put and being the “fifth column” against Israel in its war of independence.
The meaning of the Nakba was then changed after perennial terrorist Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004, rose to power. Politically, it made sense for him to modify the definition. His version, which is still promoted by Palestinian leaders and their supporters to this day, assigns exclusive blame for the 1948 catastrophe to the Jews, while proposing an absurd solution (“the right of return”) that would mean suicide for the Jewish state.
The brainwashing runs deep, and frankly is at the core of this issue. One side rewrote history and has a “program” to manipulatively refute the Jewish narrative in order to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Jewish People. When you realize this reality, you can quickly see through many of the Palestinians’ obscene grievances, such as but certainly not limited to:
Israel launches vengeful and preemptive wars.
Israel imposes an inhumane blockade on the two million people, mostly “refugees,” in Gaza.
Israel is “an army with a country attached.”
Israel has the world powers on its side, with the United States in its pocket, Europe behind it, and the Arab regimes sucking up to it.
The Palestinians have a historic and cultural belonging to “Palestine” (even though they never, ever had sovereignty over it).
Zionism has had to manufacture belonging to the land in order to entice Jews into becoming colonial settlers.
Israel has long resorted to theology and mythology to justify its existence.
This hogwash explains why recent polling showed that 75 percent of Palestinians were only open to solving the conflict with Israel by implementing “The River to the Sea” solution, one in which their “Palestine” would encompass the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and Israel would be no more. Just 17 percent of Palestinians were open to a two-state solution.
Meanwhile, the majority of Israelis’ view on the Palestinians is not one of hatred, more one of ambivalence, as in: “We tried to make peace with you folks for decades. You obviously weren’t that interested, so we moved on.”
But the Palestinians have too much pride to accept that Israel has moved on from them. They would rather feel like they are hated than feel like they are irrelevant, because that gives them and their quasi-political movements purpose. The Hamas-led massacres and abductions on October 7th was as much a “reminder that we’re still here” as it was anything else.
Yet even after learning about all the devastating horrors that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists executed on October 7th, more than half of Israelis oppose annexing the Gaza Strip and reestablishing settlements uprooted during Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the enclave, according to a recent poll from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Translation: “We (Israelis) want nothing to do with you (the Palestinians).”
Why? Because quite frankly, the relationship with the Palestinians has been one of psychological and emotional abuse. It is a relationship that no other country would tolerate on its border because of its deep roots in lies, distortions, gaslighting, hatred, and violence.
Every group has its own history, I get it, but the Palestinians have systematically duped themselves into some crazed “worldview” that even the most fanatical writers in Hollywood would have a hard time piecing together. Heck, one of their own, Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, acknowledged that the Palestinians “have failed as much on the level of narrative as anything.”1
This is because the Palestinian position is not one flossed with historical facts, but with selective memory that dangerously confuses recollection with history. Thus, it eventually becomes impossible to divide the two from becoming entwined in the remaking of past events.
Yet people in their proverbial ivory towers like to posture that the “obvious” answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to acknowledge and respect “the Other.” That sort of rationale makes for a nice children’s book or Disney movie, but amidst the harsh conditions of the Middle East, the reality is that Palestinians do not see Palestinian and Israeli lives as equal.
For example — and there are many — Palestinians jail, torture, and kill their own for “collaborating with the enemy (Israel)” and proudly incentivize the killing and kidnapping of Israelis. The worst the attack, the more Palestinian governments dole out in cold hard cash to the families of “martyrs” as a matter of formal policy.
Of course there are “good” Palestinians and “evil” Israelis; nothing exists in totalities. But when you look closely at Palestinian society and Israeli society, it is overwhelmingly clear that one does not see “the Other” as equal.
“Palestine’s Struggle to Create Its Unique Narrative.” Governing.
Once I talked with an educated Syrian, and asked him why this hatred against Israel in the Arab world. He told me, it's not about land, they have more than enough. It's not even antisemitism per se: they don't really care about Jews, and if any, they rather respect Judaism. No. It's humiliation. Bruised collective ego. "We see ourselves as strong dominating knights, and we get badly beaten each time against them". Israel is a big dorn in their self-esteem, according to this guy. I told him, Germany got over the loss of Prussia and Bohemia, Finland got over the loss of Karelia, Mexico also basically got over the loss of half its territory, why can't the Arabs take their loss, turn the page and write a new one? "We don't think like Europeans at all". All this narrative they push in the West about the poor Palestinians victims of the Nakba and of the overwhelming Israeli war machine oppressing them, that's for western public in order to get western support. Their real motivation is apparently an inextinguishible burning sense of humiliation in their heart, that wants to crush Israel to restore their pride. Oslo accord, peaceful two-state solution etc., that's all bullshit for them. It won't quench their thurst for revenge.
When I read the title I immediately thought of the constant ads I get on Facebook for UNICEF donations for the poor Palestinians. Where is the U.N., UNICEF, the Red Cross -- anybody! -- for the hostages and Israelis who have had to evacuate thir homes because of Hezbollah's constant rockets? I'm tired of it. And while I'm on the hostages, how is it that the U.S. says and does nothing for American hostages! Since when do we behave like this? The whole thing is baffling.