The Real Reasons ‘Palestine’ Does Not Exist
It is time that everyone knows loud and clear: The Palestinians do not have a state because of the Palestinians.
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So many people across the world are rooting for the Palestinians, for a fictional place called Palestine.
Just last week, I reposted something on Instagram that said:
“You cannot free something that never existed before, so even the words ‘Free Palestine’ are a massive lie, designed to fool you and make you hate Israel. ‘Establish Palestine,’ sure. ‘Create Palestine,’ fine. But ‘Free Palestine,’ nope.”1
A young woman from California saw this post and told me that we cannot be friends because she believes “in freeing Palestine.”
Fair enough, I guess, but why are the Palestinians not attempting to “free” themselves? They have two territories in Gaza and the West Bank. They have received and continue to receive billions in annual humanitarian aid. They have millions of people living in the Palestinian territories, and millions more living across the world. They have 22 Arab states and 49 Muslim-majority countries that are presumably their great friends.
What could possibly be holding them back?
Surely it cannot be that they refuse to give up their so-called “right of return” — an “inalienable right” to go back to their homes and property from which they were displaced because of the 1948 Israeli-Arab War (which the Arabs started).
And according to the Palestinians’ most outspoken cheerleaders, the United Nations, at least 100 million people around the world have fled war, persecution, and instability in their home countries for uncertain futures in others, yet none of these non-Palestinian refugees have an “inalienable right” to return to wherever they came from just because they said so.
Surely it cannot be because establishing a Palestinian state would mean the end of their manipulative claims of forever-refugee status for the initial Palestinian refugees (of which there are approximately 30,000 still living) and all of their descendants — again, something no other refugee group in the world is afforded.
Of course, there is a financial play here, since UNRWA, the world’s only refugee agency set up for a specific group (the Palestinians), boasts a billion-dollar annual operating budget, and it seems that a Palestinian state would ultimately terminate the need for UNRWA’s robust services.
Surely it cannot be because so many of the Palestinians’ desires to annihilate the State of Israel and eradicate Jews from the Middle East would not disappear with the formation of a Palestinian state, which would land them a seat in the defense chair at the World Court for attempted genocide. After all, such a precedent suddenly exists.
Surely it cannot be because whomever are the leaders of the new Palestinian state will have a death threat hanging over their heads in the never-ending power struggle of who should lead the Palestinians.
In 2018, for example, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas accused Hamas of orchestrating an “assassination attempt” on then-Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah as his convoy entered the Gaza Strip. Analysts said the attack was intended to put a strain on a Hamas-Palestinian Authority reconciliation agreement signed the previous year, which was supposed to end a decade of division between two parallel governments operating in Gaza and the West Bank.
In response to Abbas’ accusations of an assassination attempt, Hamas called for general elections, including presidential, parliamentary, and national council elections, “so that the Palestinian people can choose their leadership.”
Both parties agreed in 2020 to new elections, but they were postponed “indefinitely” by Abbas. While the Palestinian Authority cited Israeli restrictions on Jerusalem residents voting as the cause for this delay, many surmise that it was more due to Abbas’ low popularity in recent polls, with challenges not only from Hamas, but also from two splinter groups in Fatah (Abbas’ party).
Surely it cannot be because the Palestinians are overly obsessed with Jerusalem, which has never been in their control. And Jerusalem is, at most, the third-holiest site in Islam. Even then, this overstates its significance in Islamic history.
History, it turns out, makes the issue of who should control Jerusalem very simple. When Jordan controlled Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967, no Jews could visit the Western Wall — for 19 years. Not one Jew allowed at the holiest site in Judaism.
And of the 58 synagogues in Jerusalem’s Old City as of 1948, three were converted to stables, as in: for horses. The other 55 were completely destroyed. And the Western Wall was where Jordan dumped trash, turning Judaism’s holiest site into a garbage disposal.
When the Jewish state reclaimed its eternal capital of Jerusalem, what happened? Not a single mosque was destroyed. And since 1967, Israel has preserved the right of Muslims to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount — directly above the very Western Wall where Jews were prohibited from praying for 19 years.
As Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli scholar of Arab culture and a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, said:
“The place is ours, the city is ours, this is the site of our Temple, you are welcome to come here but just take care that you don’t make a mess. Whoever makes a mess, we will kick him out, why? Because ‘you are our guests.’”
“The moment you say ‘you are our guests,’ those who say ‘I don’t want to be your guest’ won’t come,” since many of the Muslims in the region believe it is forbidden to even visit Israel so long as it is under Jewish rule. “Many will not come to not give us the pleasure of hosting them, and that’s fine.”2
There are also many Arabs and Muslims who are thankful to be Israeli citizens, particularly those who live in East Jerusalem. Last year, in May, there was even a decline in the percentage of East Jerusalem residents who would prefer to hold Palestinian citizenship in a permanent peace agreement, and an increase in the preference for holding Israeli citizenship.3
The survey also found that, among these residents, satisfaction with the services provided by Israel and the Jerusalem Municipality has increased, while concerns about living conditions in any future Palestinian state have also increased.
Surely it cannot be that, by founding their own state, Palestinians would have to come to terms with the fact that they have lost war after war in their unrelenting desire to eliminate the Jews from this region. This matters because approximately 60 percent of Palestinians see the armed struggle as the most effective tool in the struggle against Israel, and a Palestinian state would mean that they would have to accept their Jewish neighbors and act diplomatically, if we can even call it that.
Surely it cannot be that, by founding a Palestinian state, Palestinian terror groups would no longer have a “get out of jail free card” to use their people as human shields, to hide weapons and other terrorism infrastructure in civilian areas, and to use humanitarian aid to fund more terrorism.
You see, the problem with the Palestinians is not that Palestine never existed as a sovereign state, or that they have been manipulated by the Arabs as part of a much larger geopolitical game, or that they are undeserving of self-determination or self-sovereignty.
The problem with the Palestinians is that, by giving them or enabling them to achieve statehood, you are effectively asking the Palestinians to be something they are not and have never been, to magically erase the vast majority of their Jew-hating, terrorism-oriented, anti-democracy history.
The tall task is not in founding a Palestinian state, but in freeing the Palestinians from much of their perverse, poisonous culture rooted in hate, vitriol, lies, and the politics of envy. (“Look what the Jews have done with your parents’ and grandparents’ land,” Palestinian leaders effectively tell their people. “That should be yours.”)
How one frees a society of their pernicious tendencies is above my pay grade, but if we expect the Palestinians to do so themselves, especially in a matter of weeks or months, we are even more foolish than them.
The.Second.Instafada on Instagram
“Al-Aqsa tensions are a political, not a security issue - expert.” The Jerusalem Post.
“What do eastern Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents want for the future?” The Jerusalem Post.
I would add one thing to the part about their relentless Jew hatred. That is that the hatred is rooted in and supported by the death cult they call a religion.
Fantastic! This is a really important one.