Howard Epstein – ARE THE PALESTINIANS BECOMING LIKE THE AMERICANS?
LATE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER THAN NEVER.
It was Winston Churchill, a crossbreed of usefully-mixed parentage – with his true-blue, English aristo father, a direct descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, the vanquisher of the French at Blenheim in 1704, and his rather incongruous mother, from a moneyed background in Brooklyn, NY (Well, how else was the roof of Blenheim Palace going to get fixed?), such that his life was destined to be extraordinary before he was born – who incisively observed: You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.
This now prompts the question: Are the Palestinians becoming like the Americans?
Churchill was as close to a Zionist as a British pol of the early 20th century could get, and considerably closer than many highly-perched Jews of the era. It is fitting therefore that his was the above-noted keen observation about the Americans, suggesting that he might have watched too many of those movies in which the US Cavalry arrive, but only alongside the last few sprockets of the final reel, that prompted the feeling: Well, better late than never, I suppose.
So an Israeli who had disdain for the Yankee idea of timeousness would have reacted with cynicism to the news disseminated this week, that, led by multi-murderer, long-incarcerated Marwan Barghouti, a new Palestinian policy is evolving: that of peaceful protest. but only after they have tried everything else, from throwing Jewish kids out of upper floor windows to their certain deaths (in Ma’a lot in 1974), through the bus- , mall-, and restaurant-bombings of Intifada II to, most recently, Intifada III – the Steak-Knife War, from which we may now be exiting.
According to the Times of Israel on April 11[1], there has emerged:
“a comprehensive plan to jointly campaign against the Israeli occupation until it is brought to an end”
involving
“unprecedented steps within the framework of what is dubbed “nonviolent resistance” which, the sources predicted, could prove immensely problematic for Israel. The goal is to force Israel out of all areas beyond the pre-1967 lines via a nonviolent intifada coordinated by a unified Palestinian leadership under Barghouti”
Who are said to be the progenitors of this long-awaited change of heart? According to the Times of Israel [but my emphases]:-
Barghouti, Qadura Fares, Sarhan Davikat, and Mohammed Horani. All of them were considered senior members of the Palestinian Tanzim organization during the 90s and all of the Hamas leadership, including Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas’s political wing, who is based in Doha, Qatar. Afterwards, they continued with meetings in Istanbul with the participation of Hamas leaders Moussa Abu Marzouk, Salah al-Aruri – considered to be behind many terror attacks against Israeli targets in the West Bank and in Israel – Osama Hamdan, Husam Badran and others
Think about that assemblage of would-be peaceniks. Does anyone seriously expect us to believe that they have been infused with the spirit of Ghandi-Mandela-King?
A little etymological research shows that: “Marwan” is a common historic Arabic name without a clear meaning. Some sources say it refers to a white stone used for igniting fires.
“Churlish”, you are thinking of me. All that sanctimonious guff (in my past blogs) about how we will shower the Palestinians with gifts if they demonstrate the desire to live in peace with us; and, at the first whiff of white grape-seed, you perceive me rejecting a bloodless solution from our would-be neighbors.
Well, as Sophocles said: Foes’ gifts are no gifts: profit bring they none. Put another way, this amounts to: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts – for that thoroughbred steer, the sort of gift the Queen of England would receive on a visit to a Kentucky ranch, might just be a Trojan horse that would destroy from within. It is one thing to observe the barbarians beyond the gates and quite another to admit them to canter at will within.
Who were the leading proponents, in our times, of peaceful protest? We remember with awe for their gentle, possibly divinely-inspired, clear-sightedness, and ability to inspire millions of followers to tread the path of peace:-
- Mahatma Ghandi, who wanted the British out of India, and lived to see his dream fulfilled;
- Nelson Mandela, who from a Roben Island cell dared to require the dismantling of Apartheid in South Africa, likewise rewarded in his lifetime; and
- Martin Luther King Jr[2], who conferred a quiet dignity upon protest, but failed to see the realization of his dream that one day there would be full equality of opportunity and otherwise between the whites and not-so-whites of the USA. (Even now, we await such deliverance for those whose difference from their white fellow Americans is only skin deep.)
Let us examine their respective journeys and legacies.
Ghandi was never a terrorist. A South African by birth, he became an English barrister (trial lawyer) and moved to India with the aim of driving out the British by peaceful protest only. The bulk of the British left on the demise of the Raj in 1947, but those who remained, as ex-patriates, were neither purged nor persecuted. Instead, while they quietly lived out their lives in post-Raj India, ties between India and Britain have grown ever closer over the decades, with India, the world’s most populous democracy, appreciative of the gifts the British bestowed, and English one of India’s many official languages (and one of two used in the Indian parliament).
Mandela started life as a lawyer (the opportunity of a “staj” (vocational training contract) having been granted him by Lazar Sidelsky, a Jew – not that that cuts too much ice in Durban or anywhere else in the RSA these days). He became a communist and (allegedly) a terrorist, and was sentenced to long-incarceration, where he developed the policy of peaceful protest as a way of persuading the minority whites to relinquish the reins of control to the majority blacks. The absence of the blood-bath which the whites had always feared after the black majority achieved their dream of the sweeping away of the hated Apartheid system, can confidently be attributed to him – and his after-life influence is surely what allows the whites to sleep soundly in their beds.
As for Luther King, one can only marvel at his ability to inculcate a spirit of quiet dignified resolve in those who boycotted buses, and then rode them as Freedom Fighters, marched through Selma, and attended the great marches on Washington. Tragically, he was a part of the American Age of Assassinations, the two Kennedy brothers also falling to the bullets of non-entities, Lee Harvey Oswald (in the case of JFK) and Sirhan Sirhan (in that of brother Bobby), whilst James Earl Ray was the drifter who did for King, each with a surreal ease that has made for as many conspiracy theories as there are stars in the night sky.
Whilst Ghandi’s peaceful protest policy could only logically end in the British going home, they did at least have homes to which to go (whilst Israelis are already home and neither have nor wish for any other). Post-Mandela South Africa has not so far sought to eject the whites from their homes (unlike many hapless farmers in neighboring Zimbabwe – not yet, at least). And, of course, black supremacy was never part of King’s credo, the mere attainment of an equal playing field being the zenith of his ambitions for his people.
Now consider what we have been told is the birth of a peaceful movement on the part of the Palestinians. We would welcome it with open arms, a warm embrace, a kiss on both cheeks and a mini-Marshall plan for them, were we to be able to discern a new and refreshing Palestinian ideology that urgently abandoned:-
- anti-Semitism, from the writing out of the school books of the “Jews are descended from apes and pigs” nonsense (since when have Arabs been experts in Darwinian theory?) and “every child must aspire to be a Shahid and kill Jews”; and
- the “Occupation Covers the Whole of Palestine” (“OCWoP”) line, that ends with driving the Jews into the sea;
such that they could clearly be seen indeed – that is, in deed – to have tried everything else.
To the contrary, we do not hear that getting Israel to retreat to the 1967 borders is the end of the incipient process. And we know that Islam teaches that it is permitted to lie to achieve what you ultimately seek. For living and immediate proof of that, we have seen in recent days the spectacle of Abbas crooning sweet-nothings to Ayala Dayan for Israel TV’s Channel 2, whilst just a few days later reverting to his old all-or-nothing OCWoP line for Palestinian TV audiences.
So it would only be if we were to see peaceful protest coupled with clear proof that a fundamental, root-and-branch change of policy and heart, which includes us as part of the future of this land, were burrowing into the soil of the Holy Land, that we should feel elated that, having tried everything else, the Palestinians were (to satisfy the Churchillian witticism) at last doing the right thing.
If you have anything better to do, rather than sit and wait for the announcement of that sort of change of heart, I suggest that you go and get on with it.
Absent genuine expressions of goodwill, and a declared ambition of peaceful co-existence, the so-called peaceful protest movement in the hands of murderers, unreconstructed Hamas terrorists and assorted would-be final-solution nemeses of the Jews, we need to be prepared to explain to the world how this differs from the great peaceful protest movements of the twentieth century, and urge on Europe and the USA that a decorous appearance is only skin deep.
© Howard Epstein April 2016
[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/barghouti-plans-nonviolent-bid-to-free-west-bank-east-jerusalem/
[2] Whom I consider at length in my forthcoming book on America.
