The Suicide of the Palestinians
GELERNTER, DAVID
The Suicide of the Palestinians Beyond barbarism in the Middle East. BY DAVID GELERNTER WE OUGHT TO FACE squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli...
...But everything has changed...
...We now learn that suicide bombers are told to expect a heaven full of comely virgins as their next assignment...
...The killers call themselves "martyrs," but in their own minds they are the next thing to sex criminals...
...Even before the new violence, the world's outrage was hard to swallow...
...It needs a new currency with positive markings...
...It is strange but true that the only European country one can picture (by the remotest stretch of the imagination) cooperating on the sly with Israel to help create a Palestinian opposition is Germany—or maybe, if the United States made an issue of it, Britain...
...But surely (one optimistically assures oneself), Israeli intelligence could locate a few such families if it tried, and if they were removed to safe ground and protected...
...New" and "old" depend on your point of view...
...The whole population, man, woman, and child, is holding (is refusing to abandon) a dangerous forward position under fire...
...There are larger questions about Israel's role in the world that have been pressing for years, but nowadays seem to grow more acute by the hour...
...This is the civilization that condemns "licentious" America...
...You ask Israel, in effect: What do we need to do to make you all (not some of you...
...You have to fiddle the dial back and forth...
...The Israeli settlements are new, the Arab ones old...
...People who think this way are shielded from view, up to a point, by their own sheer evil...
...What's the difference...
...Not one who believes: "The 'leaders' who did this to my child must be stopped...
...Of course you don't dare say such things in the territories...
...We now know what Palestinians want, and what they think of Israelis...
...Not long ago I picked up a copy of Le Monde, which reports on the recent meeting where work was started on a constitution for Europe—the goal being to allow Europe to campaign, as the equal of any great power, "pour affirmer ses valeurs," to assert its values...
...Everyone knows about Munich, David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide Jerusalem—would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to the same people who had destroyed its synagogues, desecrated its cemeteries, and banned Jews from entering when they last ran the show...
...Who would even have the theoretical right to blame them...
...The Palestinian leadership would try hard to silence these families and their followers, but the message would get through: Our barbaric leadership is destroying us...
...After all, what exactly is the point of sending killers to massacre children at random...
...It isn't easy to leave home...
...you have nothing to fear...
...Evidently the whole world is outraged by Israeli settlements on the West Bank...
...Palestinians don't want to live peaceably among Israelis...
...Pardon me, sir or madam, do you know why I plan to murder your child...
...The analogy is not close, just close enough...
...Barak made his offer freely and in good faith...
...They don't like to talk this way, but they ought to steel themselves and do it anyway...
...and you can't help but wonder, exactly what "valeurs" are we talking about...
...Some European journalists refer to the great Temple Mount plaza as the "supposed" site of ancient Israel's holy temple—as in, "that beat-up white shell on the hill in mid-Athens is supposedly the 'Parthenon.'" The plaza was expanded to its current enormous size by King Herod of Judea during the final years of the last century B.C.E...
...In recent decades, though, especially since the end of Soviet tyranny, the safe-haven idea has lost cogency like an unwound watch running down...
...on the contrary: Such a move is likely to be dangerous, as Barak's offer turned out to be...
...Israel still pays its way using the world's only emotional currency denominated entirely in negative numbers...
...Arafat rejected the offer...
...But to a significant number of Palestinians, the offer obviously said: "We are weak...
...To any instance of Western man—American or not, Jew or gentile, male or female—Europe's spiritual collapse is heartbreaking...
...During the peace talks two thousand years later, in July 2000, a Palestinian negotiator helpfully explained why Barak's offer of control but not legal sovereignty over the Mount had been rejected: "We can't sell our Haram to the Jews," even though (he forgot to add) they built it...
...A trick question— because the obvious but wrong answer is so close to the right one that it's hard to tune the right one in...
...Jews have as much right as anyone to settle on the West Bank...
...But prospective leaders and politicians would come...
...it is time to talk lava...
...and many Israelis are determined that Jews will never again be driven from their homes into alien lands by thug mobs...
...Israeli thinkers ought to speak less about the tragedy (or the ordinariness) of Israel's 3,000-year history, and more about its luminous greatness...
...It's hard for Israelis to praise Israeli courage, but Americans ought to...
...Many people know about the Kristallnacht pogrom, November 1938: Germany's approach to the Jews turns from mere oppression to bloodthirsty violence...
...Israeli thinkers have talked enough desert...
...Much of the world is at a spiritual lowpoint right now, dragging its belly on the ground...
...They interpret weakness as an incitement to violence...
...Yet the difference between the two is crucial...
...In the last few years, Israel has started to look (on the contrary) like the most dangerous place for Jews in the world—if we exclude the small Jewish communities that still exist in Arab countries...
...European values" (certainly "French values") has come to sound like "Palestinian moderates"— a contradiction in terms...
...But it long seemed to me (as to many other American Jews) that, leaving right and wrong out of it, the settlements were causing Israel more grief than they were worth and ought to be stopped...
...And moral deformity is the most frightening kind by far...
...People who say there is none can't be serious...
...How can Muslims of good faith allow such people to call themselves Muslim...
...Appeasement is not futile, it is dangerous...
...Lock up incipient terrorists...
...Israel must change the way in which it explains itself...
...Everything has changed, including (for many of us) our ideas about Islam...
...We ought to have paid more attention to the latest developments...
...Now everything has changed, and we are only gradually coming to grips with the implications...
...attack...
...To make you unable to look at a Palestinian without revulsion...
...But there is more to Israel than resolve in the face of a uniquely tragic history...
...But they do allow it...
...What does that mean...
...Why do they do it...
...You can goad a dangerous animal to attack by threatening or by shrinking back...
...Safe ground" couldn't be Israel or America, or the credibility of this new opposition would be fatally compromised...
...The axioms that underpinned Zionism have been turned inside out...
...But it could be Europe...
...But if old settlements are legitimate and new ones aren't, what are all those mosques doing on the Temple Mount...
...Unless you want to fight, the only safe maneuver is to stand still...
...Among all those mothers and fathers of children who have become suicide-murderers, not one...
...And is it possible that we have located here, in this inspiring vision of heaven as a whorehouse, the most loathsome idea in the history of human thought...
...But what of Europe...
...But overwhelmingly they have chosen to stay and stand fast...
...To the suicide-murderers, those waiting virgins are real as dirt...
...Indifference...
...To force you eventually to take the terrible step of setting up enclaves where Arabs are banned...
...Appeasement doesn't merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe...
...Khomeini preached the Iranian revolution from France...
...ought to talk up the nation's brilliant prospects, and the central role it has played from Moses to Wittgenstein in creating and molding Western civilization...
...Kristallnacht was "triggered" by the murder of a German diplomat by a deranged Jew...
...Modern Israel was conceived as a safe haven for Jews...
...Kill terrorists...
...Those few families would be mere people, not "leaders," not politicians...
...Nothing is harder or more frightening to look at than a fellow human who is bent out of shape...
...Then in September 2000 the new wave of murderous violence began, supposedly triggered by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount...
...outlaws interpret an openhanded offer as weakness, not generosity...
...When we look at Israel today, it is crucial that we not allow Palestinian barbarism to distract us from another part of this picture: the everyday heroism that lights the whole place up from end to end...
...Being (as a rule) without passion themselves, they are drawn by passion...
...It had other reasons for existing—but safety, and the dignity that only comes with safety, were Zionism's emotional mainsprings...
...Yoram Hazony made essentially this claim in his seminal The Jewish State of 2000...
...But some (not all) historians point out the obvious: A leading cause of Kristallnacht was Munich itself...
...And what is Israel to do...
...We instinctively look away, as we do whenever we are confronted with monstrous deformity...
...Who would blame them...
...The "lesson of appeasement" is not that appeasement is futile...
...Fine, but not enough...
...Hitler read the Munich agreements as a proclamation by England and France stating: "We are weak...
...What do you accomplish...
...Spiritual exhaustion...
...Who in his right mind could still believe today that to stop building new settlements (or even to abandon old ones) would appease the Palestinians...
...everyone) hate us...
...Israel has known before what to do about that...
...Develop the Palestinian opposition also...
...do what you like...
...you have nothing to fear...
...Partly for powerful negative reasons...
...Israel has addressed the whole world and wrought spiritual revolutions, and ought to do it again now...
...The Jew is a desert region," Wittgenstein wrote, "but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect...
...September 1938: Britain and France generously donate a big slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in exchange for "peace with honor," "peace in our time," and the Brooklyn Bridge...
...How could that possibly have happened...
...Israel is no Czechoslovakia and was not sold down the river...
...In short, the Palestinian response to Israel's generous peace offer was, "Drop dead...
...Because the authorities are offering me great sex—and, after all, I don't get many opportunities...
...Complacency...
...the natural conclusion is that they think about Israelis as they choose for Israelis to think about them...
...You impose hatred...
...Arabs refer to the Temple Mount as the Haram...
...They are painful to contemplate...
...A large proportion of Israelis have relatives or connections abroad, mainly in the United States, and they could run to safety if they wanted to...
...Israel's enemies claim that Israel herself provoked the ongoing Palestinian pogrom, and in a sense they might well be right...
...Some Israelis live among Arabs in settlements on the West Bank, some Arabs live among Jews in "settlements" (otherwise known as towns and cities) in Israel proper...
Vol. 7 • March 2002 • No. 27
