By Douglas J. Feith
Friday, October 23, 2015
In recent weeks, Arabs armed with knives and hatchets
have struck at dozens of Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Afula,
Beersheba, and elsewhere. Victims include children, women, and elderly men.
Imagine how the American public would react to a
political group that incited supporters to knife people on the streets of New
York, Cleveland, Denver, and Seattle. Fear, indignation, and anger would
translate into furious insistence that the government put an end to the evil.
No political grievance would be accepted as an excuse for the savagery.
Yet in this case, murders spawned by false, fanatical
accusations from Palestinian religious and political leaders spawn still more
foul words of a different kind: equivocation by U.S. officials who, having
completely lost their bearings, sound like apologists for the murderers.
Obama-administration officials urged both sides to
exercise restraint. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power
invoked the “cycle of violence.” Using the passive voice to cloud the picture,
she said that “mistrust has been exacerbated by viral images and videos shared
on social media, which further polarize narratives and foster suspicion, and
even hatred on both sides.” Secretary of State John Kerry spoke of the murders
with a hey-that’s-just-politics tone. Saying (inaccurately) that there’s been a
recent “massive increase in settlements,” he then commented understandingly,
“Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.”
If Americans were being systematically knifed on the
streets, no American official would be so morally blind as to excuse the
attacks as an expression of political frustration. Not a chance.
President Barack Obama took a similarly cool and neutral
line. He called on both Palestinian and Israeli leaders “to try to tamp down
rhetoric that may feed violence or anger, or misunderstanding.”
Commenting on mindless evenhandedness, Winston Churchill
once said he couldn’t be “impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”
But the Obama administration’s failure here is worse than evenhandedness. It’s
the insistence that normal standards of behavior — ordinary ideas of right and
wrong — don’t apply to Palestinians attacking Israelis. Whether intended or
not, this promotes a bigoted acceptance of anti-Jewish brutality, acceptance
that is not extended when violence is inflicted on other people going about
their daily lives.
The current rash of Palestinian stabbings exposes the
ideological nature of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The perpetrators are not an
organized force; they are individuals inflamed through indoctrination.
Bloodthirsty anti-Israel preaching is a standard feature of Palestinian
society, prominent in its textbooks, newspapers, TV shows, and political
speeches. The knifings reflect its potency. They are ideology in action.
Palestinians grow up hearing from teachers, preachers,
and officials that they should aspire to do away with Israel as a colonial
outpost of people entitled to no respect as a nation and none even as human
beings. Jewish nationalism is commonly described as inherently fascist and
racist, and Jews are routinely denigrated in Koranic language as the “sons of
apes and pigs.”
Dehumanizing enemies is a sin of many societies,
including Israel, but in Israel it shows up chiefly on the fringe and
embarrasses mainstream leaders. In those areas of the West Bank and Gaza
controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, such extremism is
mainstream, virtually universal, and promoted continually by the chief organs
of authority.
For decades, U.S. officials have turned a blind eye to
the ideology fueling the Palestinian war against Israel. U.S. officials have
preferred to define the conflict in practical terms, as a dispute about a set
of so-called “final status” issues. That way, resolving the problem through
peace talks appears realistic.
But the conflict is what it is. Little wonder that U.S.
diplomacy keeps failing. The Arabs now answering the call to kill Jews on
public buses and streets are a rebuke to this self-delusion. They aren’t
stabbing women and children in order to promote mutual accommodation on matters
such as borders, security, settlements, and water use.
Israeli officials have sometimes matched American
wrongheadedness on this point. During the Oslo peace process of the 1990s,
officials debated whether they should care that Palestinian leader Yasser
Arafat persisted in speaking of Israel with hostility. Israeli foreign minister
Shimon Peres belittled the criticism of Arafat, saying that what mattered were
actions, not words. Defenders of the Oslo accords embraced the paradox that
Palestinian leaders had to speak harshly against Israel to preserve their
political credibility, which they could then use to make peace.
When critics of the accords observed that Palestinian
Authority schools taught children to hate and kill Jews, Israeli prime minister
Yizhak Rabin answered dismissively: What do you expect, we’re not making peace
with friends, but with enemies. But Rabin’s remark was too clever by half. By
instructing students along those lines, Palestinian leaders were showing that
they intended the two sides to remain enemies.
Oslo’s failure and the current knifings teach similar
lessons: The conflict is not about Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlements,
or other issues subject to compromise. It’s about Arabs’ resentment, hatred,
deep-seated convictions about injustice, and commitment to remedy the supposed
injustice by eliminating the Jews and their state. In other words, it’s about
ideas. So words matter a lot.
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