The Palestinian Politics of Envy
It is a strategy that provides Palestinian leaders with a cover for their rampant kleptocracy, plus an easy-to-sell narrative that nefariously generates billions of dollars in international aid.
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In trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the main arguments that many people, both inside and outside of Israel, make is economic: If only the Palestinians had more economic opportunities, they would desire peace with Israel.
This might be true for some Palestinians who are capitalism-oriented, but at least 98 percent of Palestinians are Muslim, which means money (and with it, “opportunity”) is not their religion (like it is for many in the West).
Hence why programs that Israel has green-lighted, such as allowing day-working Palestinians into Israel from both Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank so they can earn higher wages than they would in the Palestinian Territories, do not really produce the intended outcomes, on a mass scale, that one might predict of collaboration, opportunity, socioeconomic upward mobility, and so forth.
In fact, one could make the argument that these programs do more harm than good to Israel — and it has nothing to do with Israel.
You see, Palestinian leaders have long told their people, dating back to at least 1948 (and likely prior), that Jews “stole” their land and the Palestinians are therefore afforded a forever, expiration-free claim of “the right of return.” Until Palestinians can return to “their land,” they must resist Israel at all costs, including their (the Palestinians’) own lives.
The historical reality with regard to Jews “stealing” Palestinian land is highly nuanced. In many cases, Jews purchased the land from its owners. In other cases, lands were confiscated as a result of war (which, oftentimes, the Palestinians and/or their Arab neighbors started). This is typically what happens all over the world when one side launches a war and loses; they relinquish land.
After the State of Israel was established in 1948, the Israeli government, citing security reasons, reappropriated certain lands historically inhabited by Arabs (who became Israeli citizens that year). It is hard to argue against this strategy — considering that five Arab countries ignited a genocidal war against the nascent State of Israel within a few hours after declaring its independence.
A country has to do what it has to do to prevent future attacks, no less while existing in a region that has from day one been violently, even lethally opposed to having a minuscule Jewish state, boasting a population of no more than two percent of the entire region, somewhere in the corner of its geographic area.
Within Palestinian society, however, this highly nuanced historical reality is almost always portrayed as the blackest black and whitest white: The Jews “stole” our land, which makes us (the Palestinians) invariably good and the Jews endlessly evil. Now go kill as many Jews as possible (or support those who do).
Thus, when Palestinians legally enter Israel to perform day-jobs, many of them do not look around the Jewish state on their way to work and feel grateful for the “opportunity” to earn significantly higher wages. Quite the opposite: They are resentful (envious, in a malicious way) for what the Jews built on “their land.”
Meanwhile, in the Palestinian Territories, both the Palestinian Authority in the Palestinian West Bank and Hamas in Gaza manipulate these resentments to make them more profound and profuse.
The Palestinian Authority, for instance, refuses to use its considerable international aid to relocate more than 100,000 Palestinians from Palestinian-controlled refugee camps to residential locations in the territories, preferring to leave them confined under extremely unpleasant conditions — and then blame Israel for their self-inflicted unpleasant conditions because, you know, f*ck the Jews.
All this while leaked records from a Panamanian law firm showed that 19-year Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons went on to use power and influence to control the two major Palestinian economic boards and built a West Bank economic empire worth more than $300 million.
In Gaza, the situation is even worse. When Israel completely withdrew from the Strip in 2005, the Israelis left valuable infrastructure, including greenhouses. Instead of using it to provide for their people, Hamas destroyed all of this infrastructure in a display of anti-Jewish-everything, and perhaps as a preview for what they aspire to do to all of Israel one day.
To add insult to injury, Hamas takes a major cut of all the goods entering Gaza, limits their flow, blows up pipes that bring fuel into the Strip, and bombs the border crossings through which aid and aid workers pass — to keep the population angry and dependent.
If you want to know why some Gazans lack access to good water, a Hamas propaganda video shows the terror group bragging about their “ingenuity” by literally cutting water pipes, donated by Europe, out of the ground. Why? You know, to manufacture more rockets.
Yet, despite all of the misery Hamas has inflicted on the Gazan population, it has “remained exceedingly popular among the people,” according to Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “Unlike the corrupt and ‘collaborationist’ Palestinian Authority, Hamas championed the armed struggle against Israel and upheld Islamic law.”1
Here we circle back to the Islamic aspects of Palestinian society — aspects that supersede economic and financial incentives like we have in the West and other Western-inclined societies such as Israel.
What many Westerners do not realize is that Islam is both a religion and a political doctrine. In this regard, Islam teaches its followers that it cannot live in true, lasting peace with non-Muslims, because Muslims firmly believe they are substantially superior to non-Muslims.
There is a saying among Muslims: “First we take care of Saturday, then we take care of Sunday.” By this, they mean the Jews (whose sabbath is Saturday) and then the Christians (whose sabbath is Sunday).
Many Muslims will have you believe that followers of Islam respect everyone on Earth, Muslim or not. Some of these Muslims might, having already moderated themselves, subscribe to this belief, but fundamentalist Muslims (and there are many) make this claim as a malicious form of deception.
For example, when Israel and the Palestinians engaged in the Oslo Accords peace process in the 1990s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (then the Palestinians’ main entity) recognized Israel as a Jewish state.
On the surface, this sequence of events seemed positive and promising, but then-Palestinian leader (and colossal terrorist) Yasser Arafat later admitted that he did not consider the Oslo Accords as anything more than the agreement which had been signed between the Muslim prophet Muhammad and the Quraish, a group of Arab clans that historically inhabited and controlled the holy city of Mecca.
“And you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and considered it ‘Sulha Dania’ (a despicable truce),” said Arafat. “But Muhammad had accepted it and we are accepting now this peace accord.”2
In other words, Arafat compared the Oslo Accords with a 10-year truce between Muhammad and the Quraish, which Muhammad broke two years later when he attacked them and conquered Mecca.
“I am entering Palestine through the door of Oslo, despite all my reservations, in order to return the Palestine Liberation Organization and the resistance to it, and I promise you that you will see the Jews fleeing from Palestine like mice fleeing from a sinking ship. This will not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen in your lifetime,” Arafat told a young journalist.
Fittingly, in 1998, Israel was celebrating its 50th anniversary, Arafat invented “Nakba Day” — “Nakba” being a code-word for the oversimplified idea that Jews “stole” Palestinian lands in and around 1948. From his West Bank headquarters, Arafat read out marching orders for the day over Palestinian Authority radio stations and public loudspeakers:
“The ‘Nakba’ has thrown us out of our homes and dispersed us around the globe. Historians may search, but they will not find any nation subjugated to as much torture as ours. We are not asking for a lot. We are not asking for the moon. We are asking to close the chapter of ‘Nakba’ once and for all, for the refugees to return and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land, our land, our land, just like other peoples.”
Arafat, who rose to Palestinian power in 1969, did not coin the term “Nakba” — but he did change the definition of it. Politically, it made sense for him to do so. His version, which is still promoted by Palestinian leaders and their supporters to this day, assigns exclusive blame for Palestinian refugees circa 1948 to the Jews, while proposing an absurd solution (“the right of return”) that would mean suicide for the Jewish state.
When Arafat invented “Nakba Day” in 1998, the Oslo Accords peace process remained in force and still offered an opportunity to achieve a true, lasting, mutually beneficial solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet Arafat decided to weaponize the Palestinian narrative into a declaration of permanent war against Israel.
The key element of his “Nakba Day” speech was his claim that there were five million Palestinian refugees who had a sacred “right of return” to their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and dozens of other places in Israel. (In reality, it is estimated that there are some 30,000 actual Palestinian refugees still living today.)
Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are just as adamant that the conflict must go on until all Palestinian “refugees” are granted “the right to return” to their former homes — long, long ago — in what is today the State of Israel. In other words, they want to dismantle Israel. Unlike Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, folks like Abbas are just more passive-aggressive about saying it.
Still, Abbas offered an updated version of the “Nakba” in 2022 when he publicly declared, in Germany of all places (haha), that the Palestinians had suffered the equivalent of “50 Holocausts” at the hands of the Jews. Nothing says gaslighting like using one of the Jewish People’s most horrific episodes against them, but I digress.
The “Nakba” has even entered the institutions of liberal Western democracies through political resolutions, academic lore, and pop culture causes. Countless politicians, diplomats, educators, activists, and influencers seem bizarrely ignorant of the deadly implications of the “Nakba” narrative — to avoid the shame of being accused as insensitive to another people’s suffering.
What’s more, Israel’s supporters are often asked to prove their morality by acknowledging the “Nakba.” Again, gaslighting at its finest.
If “Nakba” merely means catastrophe, the term is perfectly suitable. There is no question that many Palestinians suffered a serious tragedy in 1948. No one (or at least no one I know) is pretending that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were not made refugees during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 (which, oh by the way, the Arabs started).
The question is what to do with all these refugees, and the answer should have been found in precisely how every other refugee catastrophe after World War Two (including a total of 13 million refugees in Europe alone) was solved: They should have been resettled in new housing in other countries — and compensated for their losses — long ago.
The Jews, who endured far greater and more expansive evil at the hands of the Nazis, and far less support from others leading up to and during the Holocaust, followed this blueprint to its tee.
Instead, Palestinian leaders manipulate the “Nakba” to guarantee that their constituents will remain trapped as “refugees” until they get what they want: the death and destruction of the Jewish state.
For Palestinian leaders, there are many benefits to perpetuating the “Nakba” and its undertones, such as “the right of return,” which is a truly impossible dream so long as there are Jews living in our indigenous homeland.
“Nakba” provides Palestinian leaders with a cover — never-ending victimhood — for their rampant kleptocracy, plus an easy-to-sell narrative, both to their people and to the world, nefariously resulting in billions of dollars worth of international aid every year that only perpetuates “refugee” status.
And despite the Palestinians’ ever-changing fables — or what today’s cool kids call “alternative facts” — it holds the Palestinian story together, giving the whole quasi-fairy tale a sense of purpose: the disingenuous and deceiving politics of envy.
Oren, Michael. “Why the Body Cams?” Clarity with Michael Oren. October 31, 2023. Substack.
“The Oslo deception: New evidence.” JNS.
Interesting how the evil ones always accuse others of Exactly what they are doing . Arafat yemach shmo's "marching orders for Nakba" that you quote here is an example of this. Same as the democrats'accusations against their enemies
Thank you Joshua for another thoughtful and well researched discussion. The Palestinians are clever and evil. How anyone would think there could be a two state solution is beyond surprising.