Dreams of a Palestinian Utopia–Part I

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Imagine, if you will, the most naive, trusting, innocent, credulous, gullible, unsophisticated participant in the Columbia encampment. Not the hardened, corrupt, amoral political anarchists or activists who are at the black epicenter of the movement, but a true believer, perhaps a student of literature or early childhood education, with a big heart and a sensitive soul attuned to the suffering of others. Then picture her chanting, with fervor and true commitment, her eyes shining with the zeal of the irredeemably righteous, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Now imagine, if you will, the Palestine of her dreams, assuming that she ever took a moment to visualize it. On that glorious day when it springs into being, the darling of the United Nations General Assembly and the answer to the prayers of countless gender and Mideast studies professors, what will this replacement for apartheid, genocidal Israel look like? Would its citizens enjoy freedom of speech? Freedom of religion? Would there be free and fair elections? If so, would they occur more frequently than once every twenty years? Would there be an unfettered and  tolerant exchange of divergent ideas in a free press? Would people of all religions, or no religion, or–God forbid–Jews, be welcome? What would be its policies on “reproductive health”? Privacy? Homosexuality? Gender? What would happen to the ancient Jewish synagogues and cemeteries, and any Druze, Bahai, or Christian communities, within its devoutly desired watery borders? Would its citizens be better off than the present Arab citizens of Israel?

Would it be more like Switzerland or more like Iran? Does “free” just mean Judenfrei or really free?

OK. Visualization time is over. You can let your imaginary tent-dweller go back to chanting and drinking her soy latte. Or breaking for a gluten-free, probiotic snack. Because the answers are clear. There is no justifiable basis for assuming that this putative State of Palestine would be anything but another satellite for Iran, an oppressive authoritarian regime devoid of human rights, and a totalitarian nightmare for its inhabitants, the poor, beleaguered, put-upon Palestinians. And if anything remained of a Jewish State in the area, does anyone believe, after October 7, that it would be allowed to live in peace and harmony with its Palestinian neighbor?

Give me a break. The two-state solution, which was revealed on October 7 as the functional equivalent of Hitler’s notorious “Final Solution” to the Jewish Problem, died an inglorious death on that date, never to be resurrected.

The Palestine saga, we are told, is a tragic one, full of missed opportunities and terrible exploitation. It has many villains and many victims. Opinions on its genesis and on possible solutions to its Gordian complexity have become so hardened and rendered so inflexible by repetition and dogma, that very little honest dialogue exists, and, regrettably, very little thought. People on all sides just keep mouthing the same platitudes. Two-state solution. There is no Palestine. Jordan is Palestine. Greater Israel. Blah. Blah. Blah.

So what do we do? Do we just give up on a solution, a resolution that might end the perpetual violence and hatred? Or should we finish the war as best we can, achieve whatever goals are available, keep the status quo intact, and wait for the next eruption, enjoying whatever peaceful interim might prevail during its ephemeral existence? Do we give Hamas an unearned victory, as demanded by the mindless protestors whose hatred for Netanyahu has expelled all rational thought? Are we sufficiently fatigued to just throw in the towel and salvage whatever is left to be salvaged?

Or . . . perhaps we should take a new approach, using methodologies that have worked in other times and other contexts.

The so-called Palestinian refugee problem is generally agreed to have begun at the time of the war to maintain Israel’s independence against seven invading Arab armies. Their initial numbers aren’t precise, ranging from 250,000 all the way to 700,000, and there is no apodictic way of knowing how many were actually expelled, how many voluntarily fled the war, and how many left at the exhortation of those advancing Arab armies. But we do know that they were all eventually classified as refugees, and so, remarkably, are their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Only Palestinians have been accorded the unprecedented and nonsensical status of perpetual, hereditary refugees, together with all the rights appurtenant. Free housing. Free (mis)education. Free food. And now they are said to number 6,000,000-7,000,000.

Some genocide!

Their situation starkly contrasts with the 700,000-800,000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from Arab lands and came to Israel in 1947-1948, for the most part impecunious, as their assets had been expropriated by their Arab neighbors among whom they had lived for centuries. They were placed in absorption centers (like refugee camps) and then left to fend for themselves, with limited government assistance. Their progeny comprise a large part, perhaps a majority, of the Israeli population. They are no longer indigent refugees. On the contrary, they constitute a core element of Israeli society, politically and economically powerful. They are yet another Israeli success story. And to state the obvious, they are not white, European, or colonizers.

Similarly, those Arabs who remained in Israel in 1948 were afforded full citizenship, and they and their descendants enjoy the civil rights of Israeli citizens, rights that could barely be imagined in any Arab country, as well as almost total literacy, a reasonably high standard of living, a high birth rate, and full participation at every echelon of Israeli education and society.

Some apartheid!

The Palestinian refugees, on the other hand, were played as useful pawns by the enemies of Israel. They were not allowed to integrate into the societies in the Arab lands to which they fled, and they were forced to reside, permanently, in refugee camps that gradually grew into full-fledged cities, supported by the United Nations and international contributors. Essentially, they were maintained as highly visible indigents, wholly dependent on handouts, and taught nothing but hatred. Why were they treated so differently from their Jewish counterparts? Because irredentist Arabs saw them as a useful tool in the eternal battle against Israel. They needed to be preserved and perceived as poor and pitiful–for as many generations as necessary–to provide a cudgel with which to batter Israel. And they needed to be indoctrinated to hate Jews, so they could become heartless killers.

Recall that until 1967, the area of Judea and Samaria, then known as the West Bank, was administered by Jordan, and Gaza was administered by Egypt. Neither those friendly hosts nor even the residents of those areas considered establishing a Palestinian state during the period that there was absolutely no Israeli intervention or participation. Instead, these casualties of a hateful ideology were maintained in refugee camps by Jordan and Egypt, alongside others in Lebanon and Syria. None of those countries granted them political autonomy, and all but Jordan denied them access to certain professions and citizenship. Their care and feeding was outsourced to international donors and agencies, primarily UNRWA and European NGOs. As has been widely noted, their education system was a racist, antisemitic assembly line for terrorists, focused on hatred for Israel.

There is no other comparable group of welfare recipients in the world. And, yes, their fate might be characterized as tragic, if they had not so readily accepted it and acquiesced in the role assigned to them. Like other displaced people, like the Jews from the Arab countries, they may have deserved, and they might have achieved, better. But, upon the conclusion of the 1967 war, in which Israel emerged victorious and in possession of Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, instead of trying to find a peaceful way forward, representatives of the Arab nations convened in Khartoum and issued a resolution that sealed the fate of the Palestinians for decades, centered around what became known as “The Three Noes”: No peace with Israel. No recognition of Israel. No negotiations with Israel.

How different things might have been if the Arabs had evaluated and accepted their military defeat and seized the opportunity to negotiate a real peace. But instead of realizing that their fellow Arabs would benefit most from a more pacific posture to Israel, and trying to negotiate a lasting peace that might have provided a framework for coexistence, the combined Arab nation determined to use the Palestinians as tools, as a propaganda weapon to bludgeon Israel. The refugees had to exist in a condition that could be marketed to the world as stateless penury, as a permanent reproach to the offending interloper, Israel.

Much is made of the awful conditions of the refugee camps in such places as Jenin.  But the only true oppression, devastation, and murder occurred in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, where tens of thousands of Palestinians were massacred by other Arabs without a word of censure from the United Nations or a single campus demonstration. Jordan and Syria viewed the Palestinians as an existential threat. Jordan actually went to war with the PLO and expelled it. Not a single Arab country made an effort to integrate the Palestinians, though Jordan did grant them citizenship as a result of political pressure from its large Palestinian population.

But here is the good news. Left to their own devices in the West Bank and Gaza, abandoned for all practical purposes by the Arab countries, the Palestinians determined to rely on their own yearning for peace and stability, and sought to find a way to live together with their Israeli neighbors in amity and economic cooperation. Meanwhile, Israel was always on the lookout for creative solutions and its enlightened leadership avoided any missteps that exacerbated the situation.

Just kidding.

While there is plenty of blame to be apportioned outside the community, one can not exonerate the Palestinians themselves. They have distinguished themselves as particularly undeserving and unsympathetic victims. Their leaders, from Arafat on, enriched themselves through grift, graft, corruption, and nepotism. Their governments are kleptocracies that, once elected, eschew further elections. They have repeatedly rejected offers, some extraordinarily generous, of statehood. They have unleashed wave after wave of violence, not least on their own internal opponents. They have encouraged and inculcated in their people support for savagery and hate. Carefully cultivating the role of victim, their leaders misappropriated the billions of dollars donated by the US and EU, or diverted it to produce munitions and tunnels. As a result, those leaders and their families are millionaires and billionaires, not because they are shrewd investors, but because they skim from the foreign aid and benefit from government access, favors, and largesse to an extent that would make the Biden family green with envy.

Their signal contribution to world culture is terrorism, suicide bombs, and an appalling system of incentivizing and rewarding the murder of innocents. This last is particularly repulsive. We don’t know much about the fellow who recently blew himself up in Tel Aviv on the way to perpetrate mass murder. But we know that his family will receive a pension for life. The Palestinian Authority prioritizes above all other expenditures its “pay-to-slay” expenditures to terrorist murderers of Jews, spending $350 million annually while bemoaning its impoverished condition.

And these are supposed to be our partners for peace in a future two-state scenario?

While we are apportioning blame for the absence of progress in what is appropriately scoffed at as the peace process, let us not forget the rest of the world that enables the Palestinians to irresponsibly skate with nary a reproach for their irresponsible and callous behavior. Once they are established as victims of colonial oppression and apartheid, notwithstanding the fact that they are victims of neither, the Palestinians gather at the trough of international philanthropy and undeserved goodwill. Would you like to be recognized as a State, even though you meet exactly none of the criteria? No problem. Membership at the UN, in violation of its charter?  Sure. Free education and indoctrination in hatred from UNRWA schools? Step right up. Oh, and even though everyone else in the entire universe has to qualify for the Olympics on merit, the Palestinians get eight invited competitors in track and field, swimming, archery, tae-kwon-do, judo, and boxing. One of them actually qualified through the regular process, but the rest were given special invitations because they were–well–Palestinians. The United States has sanctioned “settler” violence, even in the absence of violence, but it has not sanctioned any of the abundant Palestinian violence, because, well, what do you expect? They are Palestinians.

If there is such a thing as the soft bigotry of low expectations, what is the effect of being a people of whom the world has no expectations at all, other than periodic outbursts of violence? Why would they be expected to build anything? The world expects and demands nothing from them, not even decency. After the barbaric behavior of October 7, the world, including the loathsome Secretary-General of the United Nations, made excuses and concocted justifications for them. These future residents of a free Palestine from river to sea overwhelmingly support Hamas and oppose a two-state solution. They secreted themselves among civilians, in mosques, and in hospitals, and turned Gaza into a massive booby trap, guaranteeing that buildings would have to be destroyed if the terror network was to be demolished.  They inflicted carnage and they invited carnage.

And the world said, “Let’s make believe they aren’t terrorists.” “Let’s make believe that most of them don’t support terrorism.”  “Let’s make believe they are Olympic athletes.”  “Let’s make believe they are partners for peace.” “Let’s make believe there is (or ever was) a Palestinian state or a Palestinian people.” “Let’s make believe that they are victims of apartheid and genocide.”

When you have become a “make believe” people, is there any hope for the future?

Yes.

There has to be. Because the status quo is untenable and unsustainable. October 7, and the promise of more October 7s, demonstrated and guaranteed that there has to be some better way.

In Part II of this essay, I propose an approach to a possible solution.