The Palestinians are missing something, and it's not territory
This article is based on an article by Michael Milstein
The IDF's operation in Gaza was intended, among other things, to shock Palestinian public opinion.
For the Palestinians, the massacre on the seventh of October is another link in a bipolar narrative that has existed for more than a century, ranging between aggression and victims.
They tend towards:
A fixed position of rapprochement, often without admitting the ability to commit war crimes
A permanent definition of Israel as a criminal, which must be brought to international justice
A difficulty or reluctance to develop empathy towards Israelis.
An absence of a mechanism that can move towards self-correction.
The Palestinians have a distorted view of Zionism, centered on an inability or unwillingness to recognize it as an authentic national movement and an insistence on describing it as an artificial colonial entity created as a result of a "Western imperialist plot".
The Palestinians are carrying "severe pathological elements" in view of its inability to set positive goals, alongside an obsession with denouncing Israel and putting it on the dock, goals that in his view were more powerful than the aspiration to establish an independent state.
Although history is replete with examples of aggressors being defeated, the case of Hamas is unique in this regard. Unlike nations and countries that attacked others, often committing war crimes, and as a result were beaten and developed a deep soul-searching or turned to a fundamental internal system change, the Palestinians act differently.
They present themselves as victims from the beginning of the military attack and the massacres, and even more so after Israel began a counterattack.
Germany & Japan at the end of WWII are an ideal model of defeated aggressors.
Both countries trampled on neighboring nations, committed horrific crimes against humanity, suffered many casualties and lost homelands. In both cases, societies turned to a deep soul-searching about the past, accepted responsibility for their actions and developed prosperous nation-states with a liberal political order based on the one that existed in them before the war.
Among unconquered aggressors, defeat often caused a deep shock at home and brought about a change in the existing order.
This was the case in Argentina following the Falklands War (1982) which promoted the end of the despotic junta of generals; In Serbia, where Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown following the NATO attack on the country against the background of the massacres committed by the regime in Kosovo in the late 1990s; and to a certain extent in Rwanda, where the murderous Hutu regime was overthrown by Tutsi rebels a few years before.
The Middle East tends to produce more stubborn models of defeated aggressors—those who take beatings and conquered limbs, but never develop soul-searching, home correction, or beating for sin.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a country that continuously attacked its neighbors, primarily Iran (in 1980) and Kuwait (in 1990), is a clear example of this. Saddam's defeat at the end of the first Gulf War (1990-1991) left him as leader but did not change the political or public discourse in the country; And the second and more dramatic defeat in 2003 did indeed undermine the very existence of the state, but in the absence of a civil society and a liberal heritage and in view of the ancient inter-religious and inter-denominational enmities, no collective discussion about the sins of the past developed in it.
Alongside Iraq were "semi-defeated" attackers in the region, such as Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War (2006), and to a large extent Egypt and Syria earlier, in the Yom Kippur War. In both cases, the indecisiveness of the aggressor, along with the absence of an active civil society and a liberal political order, allowed the defeated side to claim that the limited military success or even the military failure, accompanied by extensive territorial occupation of territories by Israel, was in fact a great strategic achievement because they denied Israel a definite victory .
For the Palestinians, the massacre on the seventh of October is another link in a bipolar narrative that has existed for more than a century, ranging between aggression and victims.
This pattern is deeply rooted in the national consciousness, and is accompanied by minimal, if any, mental consideration regarding the strategic decisions taken. The Palestinians are a people accustomed to suffering, disappointments, and blows, but also one that knows how to initiate attacks on its enemies, often while committing war crimes.
In this context, for example, the rejection of the partition plan in 1947 and the decision to embark on a campaign aimed at the extermination of the Jewish settlement, which was a central factor in the formation of the Nakba, stood out.
The acts of defiance by the Palestinian organizations in Jordan, which led to the outbreak of the events of Black September in 1970, during which thousands of Palestinians were massacred by the Hashemite regime.
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Not to mention the second intifada in 2000, which as time passes and the evidence grows, it becomes clear that it was not a historical accident caused by uncontrollable dynamics, but systematic aggression that got out of control.
Over the years, a functional soul-searching has been conducted in the Palestinian system, but not a valuable and broad one. As part of it, criticism was raised about the leadership's functioning, social cohesion, the lack of collective progress, the lack of hand of the Arab brothers in helping the Palestinians, as well as the making of wrong political or military decisions. However, there is no poignant discussion among the Palestinians in the context of values and morals, or one that gives rise to a different examination of what is defined there as the "Zionist enemy".
Former Knesset member Azmi Bashara, who fled Israel to Qatar, illustrated this in an article he published after the massacre in which he complained that the killing of civilians harms the external image of the Palestinians.
The Jordanian commentator Ayman Alhaniti made a similar claim when he called for the release of the children kidnapped by Hamas - not because of the fact that these are monstrous war crimes, but in order not to damage the image of the Palestinians and their ability to influence the international arena.
Within this one-dimensional framework, Palestinian speakers tend towards a fixed position of rapprochement, often without admitting the ability to commit war crimes; A permanent definition of Israel as a criminal, which must be brought to international justice; Difficulty or reluctance to develop empathy towards the other, or at all to personify him; And above all - the absence of a psychological mechanism that can be channeled into an internal examination, easy material for thinking about self-correction.
In this framework stands out the determined belief that the eternal victim cannot be guilty, even when he commits war crimes.
The current war echoes many of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement, which were prominently expressed in 1948. Along with adherence to aggression or victimhood, the public willingness to accept every blow as fate without raising a voice of protest or criticism stands out; There is a disconnection between the public and the national leadership, which is hidden underground, is not present in the public space and some are trying to escape from Gaza; It has a loose internal solidarity, which is reflected in the lack of commitment of the entire Palestinian system to the struggle of Gaza; And frustration accumulates at the reaction of the Arab world, which indeed yields mass demonstrations, Hezbollah activity and civilian aid, but at the same time illustrates that the self-interests come before those of the Palestinians, a situation that is expected to once again bring the latter to the cry - where are the millions of Arabs who are supposed to save their Palestinian brothers?
In a broader view, a direct line connects the aggressor-victim pattern that is reflected in the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Lebanese arenas to the reaction that prevailed throughout the Muslim world after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Although these caused a short-lived shock among groups of intellectuals, creators, and statesmen in the Islamic world, never they did not lead to a deep soul-searching about the question of how those mass murderers got out of the cultural womb of the Muslim world.
Furthermore, from the moment the US began promoting its strategic moves to change the Middle East, led by the systems in Afghanistan and Iraq, the voices of self-criticism faded and a familiar return to the warmth of the approaching discourse was realized in which the "reasons" and "connections" for the violence produced by elements in the Muslim world against anyone who is defined as his enemies.
The reactions to the massacre on the seventh of October are therefore another expression of a deep, long-standing, and wider rift in the Islamic world, which has difficulty performing introspection and continues to give rise to violent crises on a global scale.
The space between the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf has yielded only a few voices that indicate critical thought when it comes to the October 7 massacre or statements that reflect a single-valued moral backbone that differentiates between crimes committed against you and those committed against others. Among those few voices we can nevertheless name the United Arab Emirates, the only Arab country whose representatives described the actions of Hamas as terrorism and massacre and expressed public sorrow for the murder of Israelis; The Moroccan thinker
Taher Ben Jalon, who harshly criticized the cruelty of the Hamas people, and as a result received venomous criticism from all over the Arab world; As well as MK Mansur Abbas, who immediately after the massacre condemned it in a clear and unambiguous manner, as reflected in his harsh criticism of his party member Iman Yassin Khatib who denied the war crimes.
The rest of the discourse in the Arab world in general and in the Palestinian system in particular ranges from denial about the very existence of war crimes, as embodied in the interview with Queen Rania of Jordan and in the WhatsApp correspondence of the Israeli actress Mona Hawa; Demonstration of a humorous spirit saturated with praise, as embodied in the posts of the actress Maysa Abd Elhadi; And above all, establishing oneself in the comfortable space of "symmetry" and seemingly intellectual analyzes regarding cause and effect in connection with the massacre, which in practice serve as a camouflage for the root argument regarding the exclusive and age-old responsibility of the Zionist movement for all the negative developments occurring in the last hundred years in the region.
These conclusions are both discouraging and sobering.
In this context, it is worth recalling the scary insights that Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami brought up about 20 years ago during the Camp David talks and the outbreak of the Second Intifada.
Ben-Ami claimed that the Palestinians have a distorted view of Zionism, centered on an inability or unwillingness to recognize it as an authentic national movement and an insistence on describing it as an artificial colonial entity created as a result of a "Western imperialist plot". He described the Palestinian national movement as sad, tragic and as carrying "severe pathological elements" in view of its inability to set positive goals, alongside an obsession with denouncing Israel and putting it on the dock, goals that in his view were more powerful than the aspiration to establish an independent state.
The trauma of October 7 caused a deep shock in the Israeli collective consciousness, which will only begin to be internalized and processed at the end of the war. Many basic assumptions that prevailed in the Israeli discussion about the causes of the conflict, the basic similarity between the societies on both sides of the barrier, and the optimism about the possibility of realizing peace one day, have faded away and been replaced by a bleak world view. From that disillusionment, three existential conclusions should grow: first, that it is impossible to escape from discussion and decisions on the Palestinian issue, as many in Israel believed in the last decades; Second, that the roots of the conflict are deeper than any economic or political reason, and that only if and when a deep collective change of consciousness among the Palestinians is realized will it be possible to debate a stable coexistence; And thirdly, and most importantly, because the two communities were not meant to live together, and therefore solutions in the spirit of permanent control over the entire territory and population between the sea and Jordan may increase friction instead of solving problems. Zionism's supreme task in the coming years will be how to reconcile the strategic tension between the need to separate these two communities, without jeopardizing security.
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