Bassam Tawil
To prevent this Palestinian State that
Europeans seem determined to push down our throats, many people are discussing
a "Palestinian Spring" revolution. They simply do not know what else
to do to protect ourselves from these "Goodists" of Europe.
Do they honestly think we will have better
lives in a "Palestinian State"?
What we talk about is how the Europeans and
their diplomats are paying our leaders to kill the Jews for them -- with their
money but with our lives -- so that they can finish the job without getting
their hands dirty and still keep on feeling good about themselves.
ISIS operatives are already in Egypt, ready to
take over the Sinai Peninsula, and with their eyes set on Libya. Is this what
the Europeans really want?
Listening, in both English and Arabic, to the
latest speeches of Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas and his
fellow Fatah Central Committee members, we get the uncomfortable feeling that
the Palestinian State, now being promoted in Europe, will not only be a threat
to the stability of the entire region, but to us who have to keep living here,
as well to those countries in Europe who promote it.
As Palestinians discuss among themselves -- far
from the diplomats in their five-star hotels -- rather than accept this
"gift" that Europe seems determined to push down our throats, many
people increasingly see no choice but to launch a "Palestinian
Spring" revolution. It would not be, as you might think, to rid them of
Israel but finally to rid us of our wretched leadership and corrupt system of
government -- and to stop the European counties that are imposing this brutal
system on us by financing it.
We have been fortunate enough to see from
Israel how a democracy works. So although a Palestinian Spring revolution might
cause chaos in the region and elsewhere for a while, its chances of success are
far more assured than in the other places in the Middle East, where it has been
tried but has not always succeeded.
We do not want to do this, of course, but if we
are forced by Europe to have this corrupt dictatorship called Palestine,
terrorist groups such as Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and ISIS will flood
the West Bank in less than week, and our lives will be even worse than what we
have now. We simply do not know what else to do to defend ourselves from these
"Goodists" of Europe.
The Palestinian leadership, which represses
people rather than confers with them, would of course deny all this to the
European diplomats. The Palestinian leaders just want to keep the funds coming
and keep their jobs. And of course, the European diplomats do not talk to us,
the man on the street, the frustrated rest of us. They only talk to each other,
their "counterparts," as they call them, in their air-conditioned meeting
rooms and hotels.
What we talk about is how the Europeans and
their diplomats are paying our leaders to kill the Jews for them -- with their
money but with our lives -- so that they can finish the job without getting
their hands dirty and still keep on feeling good about themselves.
And they evidently think that we cannot see
through this plan. And to thank us they will to trap us under another corrupt
Arab dictatorship?
It is not the fault of the Israelis. In a weird
way, the Israelis are just the other victims whom the Europeans -- in collusion
with our leaders -- are manipulating us to hate. The Europeans pay our leaders
to shape how we think. It is a brainwashing that never lets up.
The Europeans put their own people on trial for
"hate speech" when they have said nothing but the truth; and yet they
pour millions into non-stop propaganda and bloodthirsty hate-speech on our
government-controlled TV -- the only kind we have here. They fund any baseless
sewage our leaders can think up.
The usual claim is "occupation," but
the Israelis are only "occupying" the West Bank because we -- in the
form of Jordan -- occupied land promised to them, and then repeatedly attacked
them.
A more recent claim is "settlements,"
but the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] was formed in 1964, before
there were any "settlements," so what exactly was it planning to
"liberate"? If you look at any Palestinian map to this day, it
encompasses the entire country of Israel. To the Palestinian Authority and many
Arabs and Muslims, all of Israel is one big "settlement." Last week,
Fatah Central Committee member Tawfiq Tirawi said, "Haifa, Jaffa, Acre and Nazareth are
Palestinian, despite the Americans and the Israelis." Next week it will be
some other pretext.
What is becoming more and more clear is that
just about everything going wrong here can be laid at the feet of Europe, at
the feet of the leaders there who fund and cheer on the corruption and
lawlessness which they would not tolerate in their own countries for a minute,
but which they expect us to.
Palestine is here, exactly where it always was.
It has been lived in for 4000 years, by Arabs, Christians, Jews and anyone else
who showed up. The Roman Emperor Hadrian called it Iudaea. Later, in 135 CE,
the Romans renamed it Syria Palaestina in an attempt to sever all connection to
it by the Jews.[1] It was part of the Ottoman
Empire until its dissolution in 1918, then called Palestine again under the
British Mandate. After Israel's war of Independence in 1948, it was and still
is called Israel.
There never has been a Palestinian state. Ever.
The West Bank was Jordanian, the Golan Heights were Syrian and the Gaza Strip
was Egyptian.
The truth is that PA President Mahmoud Abbas
has been trying to turn the State of Israel into the State of Palestine. He has
been trying to create confusion in Europe and at the UN -- evidently,
unfortunately, with some success. He has been falsely accusing Israel of
committing "genocide" in the Gaza Strip. Regardless of the fabricated
numbers issued by Hamas, more than half of the 2,000 Gazans killed over the
summer were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist operatives, not
"innocent civilians." It was Hamas that ordered its own people onto
the roofs of apartment buildings in Gaza while Gazans were firing rockets,
mortars and missiles into Israel. It was Hamas that used its own people as human
shields to prevent Israel from being able to defend itself, or, when it did, so
there would be more Palestinian "dead babies" to show to the intimidated television crews, to make Israelis look villainous.[2]
It is Hamas that expresses in both its charter
and daily statements the intention of committing genocide on the Jews -- not
the Israelis, the Jews.
Article 7 of the Hamas charter openly calls for the genocide of the
Jews, an act "legitimized" by Islam, as part of the religious legacy
of Muhammad's oral tradition (the hadiths).[3]
Abbas has also been calling for a "peaceful
popular resistance" against the Israelis, by "using all available
means" within "international law" -- courtesy of Europe.
"The Palestinian resistance," evokes brave Frenchmen daring to attack
Nazis, not Palestinian terrorists driving cars into people, emerging from
tunnels to kill and kidnap kindergarteners, or slaughtering old men while they
are praying.
The truth is that Mahmoud Abbas' appeals to
world leaders are to help him circumvent the Israeli government, peace
negotiations and legally binding peace agreements, all in order to achieve a
Palestinian state unilaterally -- without having to recognize Israel as the
homeland of the Jewish people and without reaching a final status agreement
with it.
If I were Israeli, I would understand that when
Mahmoud Abbas says he wants a safe passage between the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank, as well as full control of air and sea lanes, he means he wants to
receive arms from Iran without interference.
So, are we actually accusing the Jews of
"genocide" while it is we who are striving kill all of them and drive
them "into the sea"? Are the Europeans actually buying this nonsense?
We all ask ourselves: If Europeans like to feel so righteous about themselves,
then why are they acting as the accomplices and accessories to criminals? Does
that not make them criminals, too?
It is Abbas, who, instead of distancing himself
from Hamas's ISIS-like dreams of establishing an Islamic Emirate on the ruins
of Israel, has yoked himself to the same Islamist terrorist ideology. He and
his close associates are not only trying to sidestep negotiations to which both
sides committed themselves in the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but they daily keep whipping up violence.
He also clearly seems to be to be hoping that
European countries and the United Nations will recognize Palestine as a state
even before it promises to end the daily violence, which now will be funded
even more lavishly, thanks to the new Palestinian rapprochement with the major
funders of terror, Qatar and Iran.
It is clear that Abbas, despite constant
tensions, instead of siding with Muslims who genuinely believe in peace, and
who condemn terrorist organizations such as Hamas and ISIS, actually sides with
Hamas. Hamas is his partner in the "Unity Government" between the
Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Both Palestinian governments commit war crimes
and distort the true meaning of Islam.
Furthermore, the Palestinian Authority, Fatah
and Hamas continue to promote violence. The government-controlled PA TV
calls for attacking Israelis, and daily honors terrorists and
calls for funds to be given to their families.
Much of these funds are supplied by the
European Union, with no transparency or accountability despite
years of efforts to have the amounts of this funding made public, as is
required by law in the EU's own mandate. Therefore, we have no choice but sadly
to conclude that the EU is just as cynical and corrupt as the sclerotic dictatorship
to which it is trying to consign us.
Mahmoud Abbas and his associates in the Fatah
Central Committee have been continually escalating their anti-Israeli rhetoric
-- the result of his surrender to the might of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank. Instead of trying to beat Hamas, which is clearly beyond his
capabilities, he has joined Hamas -- the coward's way out ever since Hamas
threw him out of the Gaza Strip in disgrace in 2007, when he barely escaped
with his life.
Hamas has continued to try to kill Abbas, as he found out to his shock last
summer. But apparently, Abbas keeps on hoping. As the proverb says: a Muslim
doesn't let himself get bitten by the same snake twice.
Hamas follows the Muslim Brotherhood's
murderous ideology, which seeks only to impose itself on the entire world, in
direct contravention of the Qur'an, which states that people are not to be
converted to Islam by compulsion (Qur'an 2:256). Even Jordan's King Abdullah
II, in the United Nation on September 24, 2014, said that there was a civil war
in the Islamic world between the terrorist extremists and genuine Muslims.
If European leaders really cared about us,
instead of sending money to us to help rid them of the Jews, they would help us
find a better leadership -- a leadership that would care about the daily lives
and well-being of its people instead of just taking more and more free money
from Europe. It is now a big business for the Palestinian leaders, and comes
with no conditions; why should they stop? Even now, after the crushing defeat
of Hamas, no one in Europe has even suggested that Hamas should be disarmed and
the Gaza Strip demilitarized as a condition before funding its rebuilding.
Do European leaders honestly think we will have
better lives in a "Palestinian State"? At least now we do not have
Hamas occupying more land and exchanging the abuses we suffer now for religious
fanatics' abuses that would be even worse.
If we are going to be honest with ourselves, as
we here can see here every day on the ground, Israel has never called for the
destruction of the Palestinians; and research strongly suggests that they have
never tried to "destroy the Palestinians" or any other ethnic group --
not Christians, Muslims, Kurds, Yazidis or Copts.
Israel has never said or done anything that
indicated any plan to destroy the Palestinian people. On the contrary, Israel,
while protecting itself, has done its utmost not to harm Palestinian civilians,
even though it could inflict untold damage if it wished. We laugh about how
fortunate we are to have Israel as our "enemy;" that everyone should
have an enemy like that. Can you imagine what a massacre of the Jews -- and
Christians and others -- would be like if Iran or ISIS had the weapons Israel
has?
On the contrary, it is we, the Palestinians,
who for decades have been calling for the destruction of the "Zionist
entity" and for driving the Jews into the sea. Some of us still act
to achieve that aim.
The current leadership here, of course, has, as
usual, been seeking to turn these feelings of rising anger and frustration
against Israel. But increasingly the people here see through that and keep
talking about the literally hundreds of millions of euros a year the Europeans
are giving to the leadership and politicized so-called "human rights
charities" to keep it that way.
Here, people are now saying that the real
problem is not Israel and, certainly -- laughably -- not the lack of a peace
accord, as much as the Americans, like Neville Chamberlain 1938, might like to
have one to wave at gullible viewers.
Israel is tough, yes, but has largely been fair
-- more than one can say for other countries in the region. Israel, so long as
it is not provoked, has been a remarkably decent neighbor. Not everything is
perfect by far -- there are problems and have been unspeakably savage revenge
attacks by a few Israelis here and there. But those have always been
exceptions, and have always been severely condemned and punished by the
Israelis, not celebrated and glorified, as with the Palestinian leadership.
It is to this Palestinian leadership whom these
European leaders would like to abandon us: a government that not one of them
would want to live under for a day.
ISIS operatives are already in the Sinai
Peninsula, planning how to take over Egypt, and with their eyes set on Libya.
Is this really what the Europeans want?
Bassam Tawil, Gatestone Institute, Dec. 28, 2014
Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle
East.
[1] H.H. Ben-Sasson, A
History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press, 1976, page 246.
"When Archelaus was deposed from the ethnarchy in 6 CE, Judea proper,
Samaria and Idumea were converted into a Roman province under the name
Iudaea."
[2] Terror Tunnels: The Case
for Hamas's Just War against Hamas by Alan M. Dershowitz. Rosetta
Books, 2014.
[3] Abu Huraira reported Allah's
Messenger (saas) as saying " The last hour would not come unless the
Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews. The Jews would hide themselves behind a stone
or a tree and a stone or a tree would say, 'Muslim, or the servant of Allah,
there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.'" AbdallaSahih Muslim, Kitab
al-Fitan wa Ashrat as-Sa'ah, Book 41, 6985.
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