Original Thinking from Barry Shaw.
BARRY SHAW | Nov 3
Arafat speaks at UN in 1974. Photo by UN Services – YouTube – View/save archived versions on archive.org and archive.today, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia
When the conflict was the Arab-Israeli wars between 1948 and 1967 it was too Middle Eastern a perspective for the West to dabble in corrective morality.
At the time, however, it was bon ton for leftists and liberals to support Israel, a tiny nascent socialist state that had been attacked by five Arab armies. Israel was “flavor of the month” and roundly applauded for its spectacular, even miraculous, military victories.
It was, I believe, the confluence of two significant factors that drove Western elites, particularly the left-wing section of that constituency, to abandon the Jewish state and dump their post-colonialism, post-Holocaust, guilty conscience on to Israel.
After repeated and embarrassing military defeats, the Arabs began to promote Yasser Arafat as the leader of a new Palestinian movement. Adopting the name of Palestine as his violent anti-Semitic, cause, they allowed Arafat, the first modern-day Islamic arch-terrorist, to spearhead a Pan-Arabism targeting Israel as the epitome of the West that they hated. He was their terror proxy where conventional warfare had failed them.
Initially, Arafat saw himself as the champion of Pan-Arabism. He even went so far as to deny a Palestinian aim in his fight against Israel. In a 1970 interview with Italian journalist, Arianna Palazzi, he said, “The question of borders doesn’t interest us. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation. The PLO is fighting Israel in the name of Pan- Arabism. What you call Jordan is nothing more than Palestine.”
What Arafat said was, and still is, factually, legally, and demographically true with the vast majority of people living in Jordan calling themselves “Palestinians”.
The “Palestinian people” is an anthropological fabrication. This was admitted by Feisal Hussein after the Oslo Accords when he said that his cause was a “Trojan Horse” to conquer Israel.
Palestinism became the hook on which the Arabs, the Muslims, the radical left, and the European intellectual elite, hung their animus of anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, all the “anti’s” that fed off a proposed European guilt for their version of a past history.
One “anti” was anti-Semitism. They didn’t call it that, but that is what it was – what it is. Their anti-Semitism has been exposed by the atrocities that are an end product of this unque type of hatred. A hatred that went dormant for decades, waiting to re-emerge as criticism of Israel hustifed in support for the Palestinian cause. It merged with the noisy actions of a well-funded, well-organized radical campaign.
Triumphant from tactics employed to overthrow the white regime in South Africa, they adopted more of the same in their next experiment, namely the elimination of Israel.
At the same time, Israel was turning away from the socialism of the Labour Party. It was liberating itself into a free market economy. This success was seen in the emergence of Israel, the “The Start Up Nation.”
But the rejection of socialism was an anathema to the Western left, especially the more aggressive and radical wings who are tireless in plotting and planning a world in their image. They had by now added a “human rights” element to their argument. By craftily airbrushing out deeply felt Arab hatred of Jews, by ignoring Palestinian violence and terror that targeted the citizens of the Jewish state, they sold a fraudulent picture of Palestinian victimhood and oppression when facts showed that Israel was always acting in defense of its people against the assaults initiated by a hate-filled enemy population positioned just minutes away from an Israeli civilian population that had taken collective and individual steps to reach out to them. The Marxist-Islamists, in a Red-Green alliance, however, were developing a narative and campaign to convert liberal-democratic Israel into a pariah state, isolated from the global community soft selling a shallow thinking public into supporting the warring Palestinians into a perceived underdog.
In a post-Holocaust era, the West fashioned a doctrine designed to prevent further genocides. They failed in this noble mission because the ones building the formula were Marxists and Islamists. Massacres commited by Islamists occur with alarming regularity. Even grossly today in seversl parts of Africa where the Christians have been the primary targets, Not only have they been unable to prevent them from happening, the West has compeltedly ignored this massive Christian holocaust, preferring instead the pillory the Jewish State that is surrounded by the same letal enemy, an enemy supported becuase it carries with it the imprinatur of being Palestinian.
Talk about koshering a deliberate and openly stated intent to holocaust the last bastion of Judaim in the Middle East.
Today, lame Western Socialist leaders misinterpret and misapply Geneva conventions to conflicts unrelated to the intentions of the original Geneva drafters. The prime example being the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Some use Geneva-talk. They finesse expressions such as “occupation” and “illegal settlements.” The United Nations have gifted Arabs who call themselves Palestinians a special refugee status and a special unique UN body that applies to no other refugee or displacement population anywhere else in the world, people with better, more legitimate claims than Arabs who are third generation citizens in another country yet choose to call themselves Palestinians.
“Transfer of population into occupied territory” is applied to Israelis living on biblical land, but not to Turks occupying northern Cyprus.
“International law” is quoted where none exists.
Repeating a fallacy does not make it kosher no matter how many times the international community tells the lie. When Western governments construct false claims into an automatic denunciation of Israel, they should remember that it is an artificial machination. Notbuilt on fact or truth.
European guilt goes way beyond Auschwitz regrets. They have become insular. They have done nothing to set back radical Islam’s oppression of foreign lands. They have done nothing to stop the genocide of Christians in Africa. Nothing to stop Third World poverty and starvation.
Their individual and collective shame will not be redeemed by imposing their guilt into resolutions and sanctions that victimize Israel. Instead, they should stop their utopian altruism and false morality or at least tether it to a realistic political policy that takes into account decades of Palestinian violence, terror, and incitement for a world without the Jewish state. It may take two to tango, but Israelis and Palestinian Arabs may dance more harmoniously if the band leader played an honest tune.
Rushing a Palestinian state will not guarantee it to be the new democracy in the Middle East, no matter how hard they wish it to be true. On the contrary, steamrolling Israel underfoot will produce a rogue regime bent on its declared ambitions to eliminate the Jewish state.
Middle East countries do not share the European mindset, not in morality, and not in democracy. The West must understand the mindset of the Arab and Muslim world before they impose their liberal, democratic, values on a region that has zero tolerance for such niceties. Forcing Israel, the only liberal democracy in the area, to behave European, while giving a free pass to a rejectionist, rigid, and intolerant adversary, is not the path to peace. It is as useless and immoral as it has been with all the other genocides and massacres that have been perpetrated since the last Holocaust of the Jewish people as they forget that Israel is the only truly liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Judgmental anti-Israel activism and decision-making will not swathe a Western guilt complex. On the contrary, such a mistake could lead the Jewish people into yet another ghetto from which they will be unable to effectively defend themselves.
Or maybe this is their aim.
This as Western countries are being attacked from within by those who hate Israel – even as the West take their side against Israel, the collective Jew.
They are not only failing the Jews they are failing themselves.
One day they will wake to realize they allowed the enemy into their gates.
But that day will be too late to turn back the clock to a time when they really did have a more moral and courageous culture.
Just as Israel has today.
Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative’ and ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’ He is also the Special Consultant on Delegitimization Issues at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
There is a lot in this article that needs to be discussed:
Palestinians a la Arafat were a brilliant idea of the KGB to provide an alternative target for the anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic currents in the populations of European and western countries while encouraging the Arab countries to buy Russian arms. That plan succeeded spectacularly! The fact that the Arabs were defeated a number of times did help to promote the use of relatively cheap Russian arms that were not available to Israel..
The Jordanians are, as Arafat and others often declared, Palestinians at heart. Actually, they are mostly Syrians, Egyptians and Saudis who migrated into Israel due to the improved living conditions the Jews brought with them that could not be found in their own countries.
Comparing South Africa to Israel is a non-starter. The facts prove that the composition of the Israeli population is as many colored as Joseph’s garment.
The only truly democratic country in the Middle East came to be when the Labour Party in Israel lost its power in the Knesset. Unfortunately, they still have too much institutional power in the Workers’ Union and the upper echelons of the IDF, not to speak of the Israeli DOJ.
The rejection of socialism by the West simply shows how entrenched this kind of government policy really is. It seems to be mostly antisocial in many countries in the west while in the east, those populations “have had enough of it”.
The mention of misapplication of Geneva conventions and international law where none actually exist is a subject that needs a lot more work. The Geneva conventions are misinterpreted 24/7 against Israel, whatever it does, but never applied to other countries like Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Qatar just to name a few. International law is waved like “Alice in Wonderland” where the law is what I say it is.
Israel has studiously avoided transferring any of its people to Judea and Samaria but that doesn’t matter. Just allowing them to be there is breaking the international law. When, for example, Russia does that in order to get a Russia favorable vote in Crimea, nobody complains loudly enough to be heard.
While saying this, many European countries such as the Netherlands have been tying themselves up in knots trying to find a way to solve their immigration problem. Some other countries are worried about how to protect their own populations. When, for example, Merz in Germany suggests asking the daughters in order not to get the rich Arabs’ aggressive responses to the ongoing grooming, everybody is up in arms. They should review the situation in UK over the past 20 or so years.
Just by the way, telling abused women and girls that they have only themselves to blame, make the Islamic aggression of dressing their females, head to foot, in clothes, normal people wouldn’t want to be found dead in, is a further step towards Islamists getting their way.
No new democracy in the ME, but steamrolling Israel is such a nice game to play. The result will probably turn out to by a rogue Israeli regime bent on restoring its rightful place in the world. There is an old motto that the smart guy defers, until he is no longer smart.
Dream on. There are too many Jews in Israel who repeat the slogan, “Never again!” for this to succeed.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be all too true on Oct 7, 2023. Those terrorists knew exactly where to go and who to kill first.