There is a great article in the Weekly Standard by Lee Smith who interviews Joshua Muravchik related to his latest publication, Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. You can find the article at:
There are a couple of quotes that stand out to me, specifically related to the plight of the Palestinian people and the international community:
For instance, rarely does one encounter anger over the occupation of Tibet, although it has been occupied longer and more cruelly than the Palestinian territories, and unlike the case with Israel’s conquests in 1967, China’s occupation of Tibet was scarcely an act of self-defense. Were Beijing to offer Tibet the terms that Israeli prime ministers like Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians, the Dalai Lama would dance for joy.
As for thwarted national fulfillment, who is angry on behalf of the Kurds? Kurds are five times more numerous than Palestinians. Their national identity goes back a millennium while Palestinian nationalism is less than a century old. The Kurds have their own language(s), history and traditions. The Kurds yearn for a state of their own. And yet no one non-Kurdish seems to give a fig.
and related to what has happened in Europe since 1967:
No less important has been an intellectual transformation not specific to the Middle East but with profound effects on the perception of Israel in its conflict with the Arabs or Palestinians. This is a transformation of the central paradigm of Leftism. At the time of Israel’s birth, its detractors came mostly from the Right; but today the engine of hostility to Israel is on the Left. This is immensely important because while the Left constitutes a majority in few, if any, countries, it constitutes a decisive one in the precincts of academia, journalism, entertainment—in short, in the world of discourse.
… Instead of class conflict, the redemptive struggle of the new era became “the rest against the West” or the “people of color against “the white man.” The iconic arbiter of latter day Leftism, Jean-Paul Sartre, expressed the paradigm shift in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s canonical The Wretched of the Earth: “Natives of all underdeveloped countries, unite!”
When this lens is focused on the Middle East, the Israelis appear as the Western, white men, and the Palestinians as the anti-colonial people of color. The former are inherently wrong and the latter inherently right. It does not matter how either side behaves. History has decreed who are the good guys and who the bad.
The interview ends with a statement that whether there is a left/ labor leaning government (like Ehud Barak), centrist (like Olmert) or right/ Likud (like Netanyahu), the demonization of Israel will not reduce. It seems the Palestinians will continue not come to the peace negotiation table, the US will be unsuccessful in stopping Iran from becoming a nuclear rogue state and the UN will continue to its condemnation of Israel (‘s existence). So, I wonder what is there for Israel to do. It seems Israel is damned if it does anything and if it does nothing. The chess board is set, waiting for others to make the first move can be the beginning of a losing game.
For now, we will have to wait until after the March elections.
It is sad to think the West might change into Arabia, especially considering what happened to Jews in Arab countries after the UN Partition Plan in 1947. Check out Michelle Devorah Kahn’s article about her grandfather in Syria:
National Post – Tales of a Convicted Jew’s Escape from Syria
I sorely hope that Europe recognizes that what is happening against Israel, the Kurds, the Armenians, Yazidis and Christians in the Middle East, is only the start for radical Islam.
The reason there has not been a diplomatic solution between Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan River is that at its core the more than 100-year conflict is not a land dispute. Since for several centuries the entire region was under Islamic control, then it is quite understandable that any non-Islamic sovereign entity will never be accepted. According to Mordechai Nisan, a retired lecturer in Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Islam rejects Jewish sovereignty, Arabism rejects Zionism.”
The larger Arab/Islamic world will never accept a sovereign Jewish state in its midst. This is the truth that needs to be internalized if Israel wishes to continue to survive. This does not mean to imply that there are not good-intentioned Arabs or Muslims in the local region. Nevertheless, as a group they have no influence on the frightening trends that are sweeping the Middle East. For Israel, in the face of jihad – and that’s really what Israel is up against – capitulations are an act of suicide. (Ynet News)