More Palestinian Recriminations

Marty Peretz, 2/4/07:

The rhetoric now shows itself to be empty, the rhetoric--Edward Said's rhetoric--about the nobility, the delicacy of "the children of stones." The Palestinians were so more civilized than the other Arabs. So much more advanced. But how much can you prove by sending the one pathetic, sad Sari Nusseibeh--his pathos being his cachet--around to Harvard and Oxford to show that the thugs have their betters?

This is cold comfort to the Israelis. Their enemies can still maim and kill. It is entirely preferable for the Palestinians to have their rump and run it as they will or can. But, please, enough about how civilized they are. They are on their way to being Iraqis.

Who Needs Recognition?

Marty Peretz, 9/29/06:

According to a Reuters dispatch in Haaretz online today, Hamas massed a huge rally in Gaza earlier today to "denounce the state of Israel and declare that they would never recognise its right to exist." So what else is new? "We ask God to punish the so-called Israel and the allies of Israel ... We vow to God that we will never recognize Israel even if we would be all killed." In the case of the last contingency, of course, no one would care. This is the rhetoric of nutcases, although I know that since their passions emerge from Muslim religious belief I should treat them with respect. I can't. OK, why don't you try?

...

In any event, this demonstration was not really against Israel. What does Israel care if thousands of Gazans scream themselves hoarse? So long as they're not firing Qassam rockets into Israel! Actually, the Friday mobilization was mounted against Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas's party, which has been holding protests against the Hamas government. And why against the Hamas government? Because it is has not been acting like a government at all. Actually, there has been no functioning government in Gaza (or, for that matter, in the West Bank either) for eons.

At any rate, who is recognizing whom? Israel doesn't need Hamas' recognition. It--thank God, or whatever power you thank for these sorts of things--is a real nation, unlike most Arab peoples, whether they have a state or not. It has its army, and its liberties and its social services, and its independent courts, and its intellectually open universities, and its dazzling sciences, and a truly functioning advanced economy. ...

Historical Agents

Marty Peretz, 10/02/06:

Khalidi is still making the case that there was no real war between the Zionists and the Arabs--and that this is a myth created by the victors to obfuscate and disguise their overwhelming force. Actually, 6,000 Jews were killed in the War of Independence. This was fully 1 percent of the Jewish population of Palestine at the time. Were they fighting phantoms? Or were the Jews a real functioning nation and the Palestinians (like many of their Arab cousins) still mired in more backward social formations, of which the brutal internecine warfare among the populations in Gaza and the West Bank remain devastating exemplars?

There is something pathetic in Khalidi's blaming the Jews for the absence of a reliable record of Palestinian Arab history. My God, the Jews kept records and made archives of their very extermination by the Nazis. These serious and definitive collections dot the world: Jerusalem, New York, Warsaw, Germany, and on and on. "There is no central depository of Palestinian records," whines Khalidi, and this has prevented a real national myth from having been written. Mind you, what he wants is not true history--as far as truth is determinable in complex circumstances--but what he calls official history. "The production of a standard 'official' Palestinian narrative was never really possible." Now, Khalidi himself has written such a volume--not "the" narrative but a part of the "official" narrative. It is Under Siege: PLO Decision-making in the 1982 War. Is it to be trusted? If this is Khalidi's ambition and intent, one cannot know.

If Khalidi wants a state he'd do better to try to grasp their instinct for fratricide than blame the Israelis for having "carried off" Arab archival materials to which, in any case, scholars have free and unfettered access. There is no sin here about which the Jews need atone.

Church and State

Marty Peretz, 9/21/06:

Some 2 percent of the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza are Christians. Not so long ago they were roughly 15 percent of the Arab population. The rest are Muslims, all Sunnis. What explains the decline? Birth rates, of course. Christians are better educated than Muslims (all over the Middle East), and they know that if you want to raise a productive, truly loving, and educated family, you'd be wise to raise fewer children and give them all more attention.

The other reason that so many Christians have gradually abandoned Palestine is that their living among Muslims was a frightful experience. (Christians began decades back in deserting Iraq, too--at least, those who were not slaughtered.) Now, many Christian clergy have lined up against Israel, because they know that the Jews will not harm them. Moreover, they don't want to and have no reason to. The Christian authorities in the territories (and in Jerusalem) try to pacify the Muslims by joining the ugly chorus against Israel. Although they have been playing this appeasement game for nearly a century, it has done them no good.

My own response to this is here.

Vox Populi

Marty Peretz, 9/19/06:

That the Palestinians are not quite rational in their political thinking has been obvious for years. But this schizophrenia takes the irrationality more than a few steps beyond the accustomed norm. The poor Europeans: They will have to make all this logical.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Marty Peretz, 11/19/06:

I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage when they protest what they call American (or Israeli) "atrocities." They are not shocked at all by what in truth must seem to them not atrocious at all. It is routine in their cultures. That comparison shouldn't comfort us as Americans. We have higher standards of civilization than they do. But the mutilation of bodies and beheadings of people picked up at random in Iraq does not scandalize the people of Iraq unless victims are believers in their own sect or members of their own clan. And the truth is that we are less and less shocked by the mass death-happenings in the world of Islam. Yes, that's the bitter truth. Frankly, even I--cynic that I am--was shocked in the beginning by the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq. But I am no longer surprised. And neither are you.

Note: Peretz, or more likely one of his minders, later pulled the post off of his blog.

Another Miserable State

Marty Peretz, 7/5/05:

What vision of a good society do the ideologists of Palestine proffer to their boosters all over the world? Really nothing, except another miserable state like the others in the Arab Middle East. The new fellow travelers lack even the feeble extenuations of the old ones.

Indeed, anyone who envisions a future Palestinian polity must wrestle with the grim and ongoing realities of a stagnant class structure, unproductive economic habits, an uncurious and increasingly reactionary culture, deeply cruel relationships between the sexes and toward gays, no notion of an independent judiciary, and a primitive religious mentality that gains prestige in society even as it emphasizes the promise of sexual rewards in paradise for martyrs — a crude myth that has served successfully as an incentive for suicide bombings not only in Israel but also in Iraq and throughout the Arab world. And no real challenge to any of these backward actualities has arisen in all of the turmoil the movement has sown.