So the Palestinians Want a State?
The current crisis in Israel illustrates this process beautifully. Many liberals see the issue as simply one of unfulfilled Palestinian national aspirations and the suffering caused by an"illegal" occupation. Using the same therapeutic calculus that explains crime as a natural response to material deprivation and wounded self-esteem, such people view the suicide-bombers as desperate neurotics"acting out" from frustration with Israeli recalcitrance and oppression. The solution is simple: give them a state in the West Bank with its capital in Jerusalem.
This interpretation works only if you ignore the facts. The"Palestinian state" has no basis in history, but was invented by the Arabs after the use of force to destroy Israel failed three times. The struggle then shifted to influencing Western opinion and appealing to Western ideals.
The idea of the nation, for example, is one foreign to Islamic civilization but dear to the West. The current nations in the Middle East do not reflect Islamic history or culture but were carved out of the Ottoman Empire by an Englishman with a pencil and a map. Since nationalist aspirations are deeply ingrained in Western culture, though, the Arabs cast the Palestinian problem as the struggle for a national identity embodied in a nation. But if a Palestinian state in the West Bank was so important to the Arabs, why didn't they create one when the West Bank and Jerusalem were both in Arab hands for decades?
Indifference to the facts of history fuels other opinions about the Middle East. Consider the mantra that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is"illegal" or somehow uniquely immoral. In actual fact, the Darwinian dynamic of human history has been the violent seizure of territory and resources occupied by others. And if aggression fails, loss of territory is the usual price. The contest is not decided by fairness or morality but by force--if you can take it, the other side doesn't deserve to keep it, and if you can't take it, you deserve to pay a price, often in territory. Most civilizations are the consequence of this process. French civilization, for example, is partly the result of Caesar's brutal pacification of the Gauls, at the expense of about one million deaths.
However, if we are going to reject this fact of history and create a moral principal that such occupation is wrong, then let's be consistent and demand that the Arabs leave Egypt and North Africa, and the Turks go back to their ancestral homelands in central Asia. After all, most of the Middle East was Christian for six centuries, and Greco-Roman for more than a 1000 years until this cultural continuity was disrupted by the conquests of Islamic and then Turkish invaders. This is the cruel engine of history. Yet somehow Israel's defensive occupation of territory from which three attacks were launched-- territory to which it has an ancient historical claim-- is uniquely evil. In this one instance we are supposed to suspend the simple law of human conflict: to the victors go the spoils.
A blindness to the tragic human condition illustrating every page of history makes possible another aspect of liberal idealism: the therapeutic obsession with suffering and the cult of the victim. Since humans are basically good and do evil only because of external constraints, their suffering is never their fault. Moreover, when it comes to the Middle East, Western imperialism and colonialism, of which Israel is a manifestation, must bear the real blame for the current troubles.
Hence the Palestinians have become one of the West's favorite victims, whose televised sufferings make a good show. Who can resist those images of children throwing rocks at tanks? Surely we cannot blame the Palestinians, who have been crammed into squalid camps for decades now. Of course, a historical inquiry into why these camps exist would once more raise the issue of Arab responsibility for its aggression, and the callous manipulation of the Palestinians as a propaganda tool, with the collusion of Palestinian leaders. The suffering of the Palestinians is an important weapon in the long-term strategy whose ultimate end is the destruction of Israel.
And we in the West have bought into this strategy. You can see it in the rhetoric of moral equivalency ubiquitous in the media and government, where the inadvertent deaths of innocents resulting from the attempt to prevent the deaths of one's citizens are deemed no different from the intentional deaths of innocents in order ultimately to destroy a whole culture. Suffering and our emotional response to it are the issue, not moral responsibility and the hard price one must pay for one's choices. This moral idiocy also reflects the liberal world-view that ignores choice and responsibility and always blames something outside the individual.
Our response to the current crisis in Israel suggests that the Arabs' strategy of influencing opinion by appealing to our historical ignorance and therapeutic prejudices is working. Why else do we continue to play the game of"special envoys" and staged"summits" while more and more Israelis are blown to bits? Why else do we grasp at vague straws like"normalization" and fail to demand that the Arabs explain exactly how they will stop terrorism and control those among them who do not want Israel to exist? In short, at what point will we wake up to reality and realize that the price of our pleasing fantasies is the blood of our Israeli friends and allies?
This article first appeared on FrontPageMagazine.com on March 29, 2002.