The Palestinians are popular on the left in part because they always play the victim. And people who play the victim may enjoy the pity and gifts, but in the end, they will never succeed or progress. For the Palestinians, if that’s the price for killing Jews, then they’re fine with it.
Our behavior generally reflects who we are and not necessarily what we have. There are very wealthy people who act like misers. One hyper-wealthy athlete famously left the tab for others when they went out for drinks. On the other hand, there are people with almost nothing but when there are guests or special occasions, their tables are filled like those of kings. In Judaism, there are concepts of a “wealth mentality” and a “poverty mentality” completely divorced from the actual conditions in which a person lives.
Today’s left values victims, real or imagined. How many fake blacks, Indians, and the like have been outed; they played their role because they understood that on the left, victimhood is the currency of the realm. If you can attach as many victim classes to your person—black, woman, trans—then the more important you are in the hierarchy. The problem is that people who see themselves as victims generally never go anywhere in life. They don’t see themselves as successful and they live their lives as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Clarence Thomas was dirt poor in the racist deep South, but because he never bought into being a victim, he pushed his life towards the success of being a Supreme Court justice.
Someone said after the destruction of European Jewry, in which one-third of the worldwide Jewish population was wiped out, that the only thing left was to say Kaddish (the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning) for Judaism. The Jews left in Europe were driven from their former homes, kept in Displaced Person camps, or arrested by the British in their desperate attempts to get to British Mandate Palestine. That person, if he had lived until today, would probably have been shocked. There are fewer Jews today than in 1938 but there are thousands of Jewish schools, thriving Jewish communities on every continent, and a growing Orthodox community worldwide. Chabad opens a new synagogue, school, or the like on average every four days. Jews don’t give up. Yes, maybe an individual Jew might, but as a people, Jews went through the destruction of two Temples and the Babylonian and Roman exiles and kept going. Where are those Babylonians? Romans? Inquisitors? Nazis? Soviets? They have faded into history while the Jews just keep going because that is a central part of the Jewish ethos.
This can-do or must-do attitude is one of the many strands joining the US and Israel. Israel often seems to invent incredible technologies, and virtually every major tech company has an office between Haifa and Tel Aviv. The US, in creating the atom bomb, getting to the moon and back and flying at over Mach 3 with the B-70 and SR-71, also likes to go “where no man has gone before.” Risk-taking is rewarded. Failure is part of the process.
Between Israel’s founding and its stunning victory in the Six Day War, Israel was seen in the US and the rest of the West as a plucky David against the combined Arab Goliath. After 1967, one of Yasir Arafat’s greatest successes was to flip the script. He created in the mind of Western liberals the concept that the Palestinians were the underdog and that Israel was a colonial superpower. And this impression has stuck in many circles. Barack Obama demanded from Israel concessions to the Palestinians on the belief that Israel is so powerful that it can take risks for peace. The Israelis see those risks, such as giving up control of the West Bank to armed Palestinian terrorists, as essentially an invitation to suicide.
Since the Palestinians started seeing themselves as the victims, they have never stopped. The Palestinians are the only people in history whose descendants are also counted by the UN as refugees. My parents were definitely German refugees as they fled Germany prior to the war; nobody in his right mind would count me or my brother or our families as refugees. Not so with the Palestinians—they are victims, so their great, great grandchildren will be counted as refugees for the sole purpose of expanding the number of people who need redress from Israel. Billions given to Arafat and later Abbas have vanished, with Arafat’s wife famously living large in Europe and shopping at the best stores. Humanitarian aid for Gaza has gone for hundreds of miles of well-equipped, air-conditioned Hamas tunnels. The Palestinians are neighbors of the Israelis yet they have no hi-tech, no gas rigs sending natural gas to Egypt, Jordan and Europe. They wallow in being victims, and there are no victims without victimizers. If you can stomach it, watch the interrogations of the Hamas barbarians from 10/7. They raped, murdered, tortured, plundered, kidnapped, and in their interviews, they put their heads down and talk in soft voices like a kid who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. They don’t show bravado, they don’t say that they are proud of killing so many Jews; no, they act like….victims.
If you have been to Israel, you know that it is a dynamic country. Twenty percent of the country is Arab, with a large Christian population (the only one growing in the Middle East) and Jews from virtually every country in the world. I have never met a Saudi Jew but have met plenty from Yemen (my wife’s family), South America, Australia, Russia and converts from China and Japan. The Palestinians have no industry. They were offered a state twice after Oslo and turned it down twice. They started to look for gas off of Gaza’s coast and then stopped. They were handed hot-houses that generated millions annually in bug-free organic greens; they tore them apart within days of the Jews being pulled out of Gaza. These are a people who have no interest in progressing. Their only desire is to destroy Israel, and any Palestinian advantage that does not help to do that is of no interest to their leaders and a large part of their population. Seventy-five percent of the Palestinians support the 10/7 slaughter, though it has effectively killed the two-state solution and is turning Gazan buildings into multi-story Swiss cheese.
Probably the biggest single stumbling block to peace is that Westerners think that Arabs, including the Palestinians, think like them. They do not. They do not want to make a deal. They do not want to progress. Sure, the smarter ones leave and find jobs in Europe or the US. But these people would rather kill Jews than have a state, destroy Israel even if it meant that they were destroyed with it. In short, the Palestinians will always be losers.
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