These comments on the Palestinian's hatred for Israel were made in 1953 by Moshe Dayan, who I think we may suppose knew something about it. They are equally relevant today.
Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home. Let us not shrink back when we see the hatred fermenting and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who sit all around us. Let us not avert our gaze, so that our hand shall not slip. This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life...
I am quite sure that Dayan was familiar with the old saying "as ye sow, so also shall ye reap", and that he would be in no way surprised by what is happening now.
What do you expect from the Palestinians, really? The other Arabs don't want them, and will give little more than a rhetorical flourish to help them. The Israelis are as determined as ever to build a state "as Jewish as England is English", a state where the Palestinians can never be anything more than an eternal underclass. Does it surprise you that they behave abominably? That many of them feel that it might be better to die on their feet than to live on their knees, or that they might not prevent children who cannot be offered a life worth living from going out and dying for an utterly impractical ideal?
I don't approve of the Palestinians who deliberately provoke violence, but I can understand their actions. The actions of a Sharon, who is secure and privileged, who has no fear of powerlessness or want, and who retires to the rear as soon as the violence he provoked breaks out, seem far more despicable to me.
Of course the Palestinians are not like us; they have traditions and ways that we despise. Do they therefore deserve life as a conquered people? Widows still burn in India, perhaps we should re-establish the Raj; Africans still mutilate the genitals of women, shall we therefore oppose independence for them, and bring back the colonial powers? If people we like steal land from people we do not like, is that somehow more justified than the opposite situation.
There is, of course, no solution. Perhaps we should give Palestine back to the Palestinians and let the Jewish State be established in New York City, where the Jewish people are already more numerous, prosperous, and secure than their counterparts in Israel. Perhaps they could make the Bronx bloom, which would be an accomplishment.
I assume that you can recognize a tongue in a cheek. |
