Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the “Palestinian nationality” and suggests a new strategy for dealing with the “Palestinian people”:
A poster at this website recently asserted, in response to my assertion that there are no “Palestinians”: “A nation is an idea, a shared identity, and Palestinians have that in spades. They are not going away. Even when they travel the world, they consider themselves refugees and maintain their national consciousness.”
But this does nothing to establish that the “Palestinian nationality” is not a politically-motivated construct. And that that politically-motivated construct of a “Palestinian people” out of local Arabs (those in Gaza and the area renamed by the Jordanians in 1948 as “the West Bank”), can be undone by non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Simply expose the idea for what it is. Refuse to write the phrase without quotation marks: “Palestinian people.” Quote endlessly from all the Arabs who made quite explicit why this phrase, and this idea, was developed. It has been foisted on the West. So was, in 1938, great sympathy, and understanding, for the campaign of Henlein and his master Hitler to achieve “the legitimate rights” of the “Sudeteners.”
Once the understanding spreads that the war against Israel is a classic Jihad, and is not, and never has been, a “clash of two tiny peoples” etc., this will bring a greater clarity not only to the confused Israeli public (and its largely unimpressive political leaders), but also to the larger Infidel world. The world needs to comprehend how that Jihad against Israel is only a subset of the more general, worldwide Jihad effort. That effort is expressed locally, and uses different instruments depending on what is possible, and effective, taking into account local conditions and the nature of the local Infidels.
Here’s a sample of what should be better known:
Before the Six-Day War, not a single Arab spokesman, at the U.N. or anywhere else, and not a single Arab document, referred to the local Arabs as the “Palestinian people.” They appeared, as if by magic — summoned by the public-relations advisors to Arafat — only after that war made clear that the Arab dream of going in for the kill had been dashed, and that a different, long-term effort was necessary.
The intention of that effort was to persuade former supporters of Israel in the Western world that Israel had won territory to which it had no legal, moral, or historic claim. Since the area had been known in the West as “Palestine,” then the local Arabs would become the “Palestinian people.” As the older and better-educated generations died out, the young, the naive, the uninformed, would come to think something along the simple-minded lines of “well, there’s a place called Palestine, and there’s these people who are the Palestinian people, so of course they must be the ones whose land it is.”
It was at that level that the “Palestinian people” was created — a level that required an absence of any historic sense, any real and detailed knowledge of the history of that area, and of the Middle East, not merely in the 20th century, but during the 1300 years before. The men who served on the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, none of them Zionists, had a much better sense of why the Mandate’s aims — the establishment of a Jewish National Home — were not only justified, but also admirable. That is why those who had a wider sense of history, and who were untainted by that widespread mental pathology that takes different forms in different people (even the form fruste can be deadly), such as Churchill and Smuts, were Zionist sympathizers to a man.
While the Shukairy “drive them into the sea” line was muted for the Western world, and the “Palestinian people” theme drummed into Western minds, in black Africa, where the Israelis had had a very effective foreign-aid program before 1967, things went more quickly. All that was needed was bribery of key government officials and diplomats; and overnight most African states cut relations with Israel. Those agricultural projects, those irrigation projects, that had been so useful, were forced to end. There was, of course, no real Arab aid ever given. It was only bribes to particular officials, and then, of course, money to extend the reach and power of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. One result was the revolt of Nigeria’s Christians against the new Muslim militancy — the Jihad, as Col. Ojukwu called it, against those Christians.
Western leaders, as well as Israeli leaders, should cease to use the phrase “Palestinian people.” Instead, they should start to use such carefully-constructed phrases as “the autonomy for local Arabs will of course depend on to the extent that such autonomy is commensurate with Israeli security, since there are already twenty-two Arab states. Also, we cannot remain unaware of the doctrine of Jihad as a permanent duty, so that opposition to Israel as an Infidel state should not be expected to diminish no matter what its borders. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that further territorial concessions that cause Arab Muslims to perceive Israel as more vulnerable will only increase the likelihood of open warfare, and will whet rather than sate the desire for combat to further the aims of Jihad.”
Who writes or says anything like that? It’s all true, and necessary, but no one does. But perhaps they will start, as they realize that they, the entire West, the entire Infidel world, are in the same boat with Israel, and this is no time for that boat to become a ship of fools.