Israel Matzav

Haaretz to 'Palestinians': 'Look in the mirror. Time is running out'

Even the left is getting tired of the 'Palestinians.'

Anyone who has read this blog for any period of time has seen me refer to Haaretz as Israel's 'Hebrew 'Palestinian' Daily' (a term which was not coined by me, but by Steven Plaut). Bradley Burston is one of Haaretz's most left-wing writers. But look what he's telling the 'Palestinians' now.

We in the post-modern West have spent years educating ourselves to believe that all cultures are equally valid - with the possible exception, of course, of our own. We have taken it on faith that to criticize the culture of an indigenous people is obscenely imperialist, paternalist.

In short, we gave you a pass. And we encouraged you to give yourselves one. In respecting you for your steadfastness, we refrained from calling you on your passivity. In accepting and amplifying your contentions as to Israel's acts of wrongdoing, we chose not to hold you accountable for your own, or to explain them away as a function of occupation,

You learned, over time, to hold Israel responsible for the whole of your plight. You learned, over time, to ignore, explain away, blame entirely on Israel, or otherwise deny the ways in which your actions and, in particular, your passivity, have deepened and fostered your misery. You learned to excuse your leaders their corruption, and their policy of foiling Israeli and foreign attempts to improve your conditions. You learned to excuse your Arab brothers their duplicity and their lip service and their exploitation and their cold shoulder and their contempt and their consummate failure to come to your aid.

In the process, you may have grown accustomed to a definition of time, and of indigenous peoples, that bears re-examination. There is, first of all, this:

The Jews are an indigenous people here, no less than you.

The Jews have every right to have a nation here, no less than you. [I am amazed to read this in Haaretz! CiJ]

The Jews are stubborn and proud and fundamentally fierce as hell, no less than you.

You have dismissed the Jews as a foreign influence. You have dismissed their history, waved away their blood and sinew tie to Jerusalem, acted as though they have no business here but evil.

But in the decades you have spent misleading yourself about the true nature of the culture and the origins of the Jews, generation upon generation of Jews has been born here. They are natives. They are not going anywhere. And even the leftists among them are willing to die in defense of staying on this soil.

Worse, perhaps, is the way in which you took deadly aim at the concept of land for peace, and destroyed it, perhaps for all time. Your artful justifications of using Gaza settlement ruins for Qassam launchers wash with no one. You have justified every last claim and prediction of the Israeli right. You have lost immeasurable international support. You are looked upon abroad as Polarized to the heart, paralyzed by internal strife, and unable to arrive at, abide by, or implement decisions.

Your unfortunate ally Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rising to your defense, marked the anniversary by telling you that Israel "has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese" and that "Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken."

Your unfortunate ally Osama Bin Laden told you last week that Israel's 60th anniversary was "evidence that Palestine is our land, and the Israelis are invaders and occupiers who should be fought."

"We will continue, God permitting, the fight against the Israelis and their allies ... and will not give up a single inch of Palestine as long as there is one true Muslim on earth."

What your unfortunate allies are saying is that it is more important to eliminate the Jewish state than it is to create a Palestinian one.

For this entire decade, the Palestinian national movement has acted accordingly. At the same time, it has effectively done the bidding of the Israeli right, doing everything in its power to raise the status of the settlers from an unruly, unfocused, marginalized, declining entity to that of a prophetic force.

Thanks in no small part to you, the settlement movement is flourishing as never before, confident that your rockets and your rhetoric will see to it that, as the years and generations pass, the settlers will come to be seen as, yes, indigenous.

The settlers will never be able to repay their debt to you.

You may have noted that in the wake of the second intifada, hundreds of suicide bombings in Israel's main cities, and thousands of Qassams, mortar shells and Katyushas, the Israeli left is furious with you, the Israeli center wants never to hear from you again, and only the Israeli right is delighted with the decisions you have made and the actions you have undertaken.

You made conclude from this that the left were untrustworthy to begin with and all Israelis are the same.

Or you might think twice.

True, Israel was once isolated, stigmatized, universally condemned, boycotted [and Burston and his colleagues at Haaretz long for those days. CiJ]. But your actions, and those of Bin Laden and Iran, have effectively welcomed Israel into the good graces of a range of countries which have begun to think twice about you. And have ceased to care about you. No country in the world - Israel included - has cried wolf more often in the past than you have. Now, when your distress is truly worse than ever, the cry has fallen on deaf - or hostile - ears.

We in the media coddled you, supported you, cast you as the noble underdog. In response, you decided that the Jews control the media, take Israel's side, slander the cause of Palestine.

Look again.

Your celebration of terror has alienated many of your closest friends.

You did this. You. No one else. You have convinced exactly those Israelis who were willing to trade the West Bank for peace, that this would be a literally fatal error. [And it would be. CiJ]

Last month, as if to remove the remainder of doubt, the veteran Palestinian Authority Representative in Lebanon, Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, told a Lebanese television station, "Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine."

You owe your children more than this. You owe your children more than pipedreams, nightmares, threats and delusions. You owe them more than victim status. You owe your children, and theirs, more than a culture of failure and passivity and graft and violence and loss. You owe your children and theirs - and ours - an honest search for peace.

Or would you rather that I simply shut up? Just the rantings of another untrustworthy Jew? Still want to believe you did everything right? Still want to believe that your few friends remaining in the Western left are more than just powerless cranks? Still want to believe that if you hold out long enough, everything will come your way?

As you wish.

Read it all.

There's a lot that Burston says with which I don't agree (for example, he defines the 'Palestinians' as 'indigenous' when the historical evidence shows they are not). But that's not really the point. What this shows is that even the Israeli left is beginning to see through the sham of a 'Palestinian state' and that it is nothing more than an excuse to extirpate the Jewish state. If our leftists can see it, maybe they will stop working at cross-purposes against us and maybe the world will see it too.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:42 AM