Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 are here.
XI
On top of all the complexities of the Muslim identity, discussed earlier, the Muslim Israeli Arab grapples with multiple entangled conundrums. The dominant narrative holds that “Palestinian Israelis” are forced to have Israeli citizenship, not by the Israeli state — many Arabs resident in Israel refused Israeli citizenship when it was offered — but by the practicalities of life, or else they wouldn’t have it, of course, and when asked, this is what many Arab holders of Israeli passports would claim. Yet Druze Arabs and, overwhelmingly, Christian Arabs, appear not to be conflicted over their citizenship of the Jewish state; they are simply Arab Israelis, rather than Israeli Arabs or a species of adjectival “Palestinians.”
Clearly, the problem for Israeli Arabs lies not in being “Palestinian,” but in being Muslim. Being “Palestinian” does not shackle the Christian Arab or the Druze Arab, as it does the Muslim Arab. Non-Muslim Arabs get on with being productive members of a strong and prosperous Jewish state and willingly serve to defend that state on the same basis as their Jewish compatriots, extreme religious sects excepted. “[Druze Reda Mansour’s] father was a banker in Haifa and sent his three children to private schools. As a teenager, Mansour went to summer camps in the United States and Canada and involved himself in groups promoting dialogue between Arabs and Jews.” Israel is only an “apartheid state” to the extent that Muslims make it so, by their self-imposed segregation, by jihad and by Israel’s necessary defensive measures against that jihad.
But for the supremacist Muslim Arabs to have their five strongest armies, attacking simultaneously, so resoundingly defeated by a ragtag, poorly-armed dhimmi militia is a humiliation they will never live down, compounded as it is by their own leaders telling them to evacuate the land so the formidable Arab armies could make short business of clearing out the Jews for the Muslims to return home in safety, added to which are all the subsequent ignominious defeats and further loss of Muslim territory to the Jews!
This pattern of mounting territorial loss after each Arab military defeat found its reflection in ever-shrinking Israeli territorial offers to Muslim bad-faith negotiators, forcing them to start with less every time they revive the negotiation charade, except for those few instances when the Muslims were offered more of what they have no right to and kept rejecting these, too. The tragic Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas (or Abu Mazen, as Olmert prefers) more than 100% of Judea and Samaria, when Abbas walked out, yet the former Israeli Prime Minister insists “Abu Mazen did not say ‘No’,” and in any case, “What’s the alternative?” We remind Mr Olmert that only dhimmis have no alternative to the Muslim’s whim. The Palestinians’ only gain, Gaza, Israel will sooner or later have to take back, unless those Jews who, like Olmert, cannot imagine an alternative, manage to hand over even more of their National Home to their would-be future masters.
If anyone in Israel is entitled to complain about discrimination, it is not Israeli Arabs, but Ethiopian Israelis. Not only did they go to extraordinary (and heart-breaking) lengths to reach their National Home, but something much more important sets them apart from “Arab Palestinians.” According to Guy Ben-Porat, associate professor at Ben Gurion University, “Despite the fact that Ethiopians feel that they’re discriminated against and mistreated, they still have strong trust and faith in Israeli institutions, …We explain this paradox by the fact that they really want to belong. They really want to be part of the Jewish collective.” Is the Ethiopian Jews’ solid commitment to Israel not infinitely more worth nurturing and protecting than the quicksand allegiance of Israeli Arabs? The Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel from the harshest conditions in one of the poorest and most war-torn countries and are still amongst the poorest Israelis. “They really want to belong. They really want to be part of the Jewish collective,” yet they seem but a national asset waiting to be squandered.
Muslim Arabs in Israel complain about discrimination, poor education and economic stagnation, failing to notice Christian Arabs and Druze Arabs prospering, and that the economic problems they complain about equally afflict the other Israeli demographic that rejects their own country: the Haredim. This should be inducement enough for any people to seriously rethink their position. The fact that the suspicions, privations and discrimination visited upon Israeli Arabs in the wake of their brethrens’ infamous Intifadas, were not a wake-up call that they did not need this, could say something about the grip of Muslim social pressure. Such inertia, though, could equally point towards an apathetic identity that gets more mileage out of being perpetual victims, than from actually doing something constructive to improve their lives. But it could just as easily highlight the unlikelihood of Muslims accepting as rulers those their religion commands them to rule. It is curious that leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett are accused of racism for not putting up with Muslim supremacism and anti-Semitism.
Loyalty to Islam, Muslim Arab racism towards Jews, and the Islamic injunction that no matter how bad a Muslim leader, his subjects must acquiesce in their own oppression, all conspire to ensure that under Islam, there is no way out for the Palestinians. All Muslims appeal to Allah, no matter who screws them and how miserable their lives. A young Gazan boy who has had his hands and feet amputated in order to save his life, has his own view on this fatalism.
“Why did they take my arms and legs?”
“Pardon?”
“Why did they cut off my fingers? Why did they do that? Why, grandpa? Why did they cut off my fingers?”
“It was Allah’s will.”
“He’s a monster.”
“That is a sin!”
The poor boy, confined to a hospital in Israel, is clearly missing out on a proper Muslim upbringing of loving Allah and hating Jews. More than seventy years on and the “Palestinians” still think the Jews are their problem and they still invoke their Allah in every second sentence. As monsters go, there is none more monstrous than Allah. Ask any little Muslim boy who’s had his hands and feet cut off and didn’t get to go to madrassa.
The mentality of Muslim Arabs makes easy pickings for the likes of Mansour Abbas and his Islamic Movement colleagues. That the majority of Jewish Israelis are secular, that there are Arabs who are happy Israeli citizens and that they prosper, and that the only non-Arabs as miserable as the Muslim Arabs are the Jews who, like them, reject Israeli society, should long ago have brought home to them that Islam is a miserable dead-end street. But then it is Islam; a dead-end street with no end in sight.
It would be unreasonable to expect Israeli Arabs, if and when they should ever become Arab Israelis, to connect to the Holocaust in quite the same way as their Jewish compatriots do. It was not their experience; it is not their memory. But it would be reasonable to expect that they will not usurp that experience and not abuse that memory to annihilate their own country and to exterminate their fellow countrymen and women.
This essay opened with the “Palestinians’” out-of-hand rejection of President Trump’s Peace to Prosperity plan as soon as they got wind of it. If anyone still clung to the hopeless notion of peace with the Palestinians, their instant, contemptuous rejection of such an insanely generous proposal should have set off major alarm bells that there is no plan the Palestinians would ever accept. “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.” On this all “religious Muslims,” such as Mansour Abbas, agree. Since the Palestinians’ only response to endless invitations to engage has been deceit, intemperate outbursts and yet more attempts on the lives of Jews, the many other stakeholders to the plan proceeded without them.
The only opportunity the Palestinians ever saw in peace plans was the opportunity to reject it — or to bog it down in never-ending “negotiations” to extract whatever they could — which amounts to the same thing. They do not refuse to negotiate because they are Arab or Palestinian, but because they are Muslim. Negotiation means compromise, and supremacists, by their nature, can never compromise. Muslims consider themselves entitled to everything. The same mind-set frames their legendary ingratitude.
While the world credited the Muslim Arabs with a genuine interest in finding peace, they wielded that trump card to steadily push the Jews out of their National Home. If they were too weak to “Drive them out from where they drove you out,” as their Allah commands, then doing so inch-by-inch through Hudaybiyya treaties, aided by unwitting Jewish collusion in the form of “land for peace,” would have to do. And for so long as the “land-for-peace” advocates did not grasp that by that route, peace would only be attained when there was no land left to give, the Palestinians were getting exactly what they want: the inch-by-inch elimination of Israel.
By offering them exactly what they have always claimed they wanted, a “two states for two peoples,” the Peace to Prosperity plan has called their bluff. This, together with the fact that the Palestinians can no longer abandon the Oslo Accords at a moment of their choosing, explains their otherwise baffling reaction to a plan they had not yet seen, and their petulant pre-emptive cancellation of the Oslo Accords and all other agreements with Israel before anyone had done anything. They know that they’ve been trapped — by Jews! By their reaction they have freed Israel’s hand to do exactly as it wants. Israel can now act unilaterally and do so legally, and for that, Mahmoud Abbas has only his own supremacism to blame.
There is no danger of a Palestinian state arising from the Peace to Prosperity plan. The “Palestinians” will see to that. The PA Prime Minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, threatens to declare statehood in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem at the same time as PA President Mahmoud Abbas threatens to destroy the PA by reducing its officials to destitution. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas’ nemesis, Muhammad Dahlan, has been biding his time, with plenty of men under arms. The Peace to Prosperity plan leaves four years for the “Palestinian nation” to destroy itself, time enough. Despite their grandstanding, the Palestinians cannot allow a sovereign Palestinian state, even a militarised one, for that would free Israel to deal with Palestine as it deals with any sovereign state that commits acts of war against it.
Only in Israel do Muslims live the exact negation of the Islamic commandments to kill all Jews. The fact that there is absolutely no prospect of co-existence between Muslim and Jew has nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Muslims. There might be truces, but truces are not co-existence. The prospect of Israel applying sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria is bringing other strains into the open, such as that many languishing under the PA do not value fear, squalor and terrorism as desirable, and would welcome life in Israel.
As this essay has shown, Islam is a barbarian culture: its highest virtues are deadly violence and mindless obedience. Muslims on jihad will never retreat until violently confronted with overwhelming force. That is to say, until now. Two key developments have taken place since the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate, both of which are very recent: key infidels have come to learn what Islam really is and are prepared to neutralise it; a class of critical-thinking Muslims has arisen and are leaving Islam in very large numbers, many intent on destroying it. Islam lacks the technical and economic resources to deal with the first, and lacks the cognitive and psychological wherewithal to deal with the second. In Judea and Samaria it is emerging that although Muslims may not yet be tired of being Muslim, they have had enough of being pawns in their leaders’ jihad.