Palestinian Community
James D. Hardy, Jr., Ph.D. Leonard
J. Hochberg, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of History Associate Professor - Research
and
Senior Fellow, NMIRI
There is a story that
defines the virtues of extremism. A
question arose as to the proper time that should elapse between eating dairy
and eating meat. A distinguished rabbi
from
So it is with the
Palestinians. Only the most extreme
voices of endless enmity, of constant war, of hate, and of terror can unite the
entire community. All others are
divisive because they are seen to weaken the movement and give comfort to the
permanent enemies,
This sensibility applies
to all Palestinians. For those on the
front lines, in
What is true for those
within Palestine applies as well to those in “the near abroad,” to use the
Russian term, but meaning in this instance the Palestinians living in countries
located in close proximity to the West Bank or Israel. The Palestinian citizens of
So what policy, what idea,
what tactic, what stance could be sufficiently extreme as to unite their entire
Palestinian community, both in
Given the situation described
above, we suggest that the primary purpose of organized public life in the
Palestinian community, both in the Palestinian territories and abroad, is
the prosecution of a continuing campaign of terrorism. The charities, the schools and their lessons,
the unrelenting terrorist-based propaganda, the elevation of death as the
highest calling in life, the continuing ritual glorifications of “martyrs”
(“terrorists” to all who are not Palestinian), the elaborate public funerals
for those who die fighting Israel, the elevation to folk hero status of the
suicide/homicide bombers and snipers, and the armed struggle; all form the
primary, indeed the only, general community activity in the Palestinian world.
Ordinary civil government is neglected and economic development ignored
while poverty is blamed on
It is not a question of the
Palestinians being unable to organize and sustain anything sophisticated or
complex. They are perfectly capable of that,
as the geopolitical success of the Intifadah
indicates. It is, rather, a question of
choice, a choice of terrorism over development and a choice of ephemeral
advantage over long-term benefit.
The reasons for choosing
terrorism are disarmingly simple. If the
Palestinian Authority, or any regime that might succeed to its mandate to form
and run a Palestinian administration, were to concentrate its considerable
talents and efforts on developing the Palestinian territories and running
effective municipal government there, such action could only be considered as
treason to the movement. It would imply
at least a de facto acceptance of the status quo, and the Palestinian
movement does not accept any aspect of the status quo. Such action would mean no return, or any
right to do so, no
If a Palestinian leader
might be persuaded to abandon terrorism in deed as well as word, what impact
would this have on the Palestinian community?
A domestic policy of national development and municipal reconstruction,
while desperately needed in the Palestinian territories, would permanently
divide the community, severing those in the territories, who would benefit,
from those in the refugee camps in the near abroad who would continue to
languish. Communal unity and the dream
of driving the Jews into the sea could only then be preserved by a foreign
policy that, in the absence of terrorism, must be tantamount to a regional Arab
war against a nuclear power. Moreover,
in the area of national self-image and psychology, abandoning terrorism would
mean giving up the major tie that binds the community together; indeed, it is
not too much to say that terrorism was the primal factor in creating a
Palestinian national identity. To rule
without at least implied encouragement of terrorism is to stand apart from the
people, their history, their heroes, their unity and their dream. It would also require complete abandonment of
those Palestinians still living in
Furthermore, the
Palestinians do not appear to be convinced that they are losing. Nor, after examining the convergence of
forces leading to the current “cease fire” and “road map,” can anyone say that
the Palestinian Intifadah has failed to gain
advantage. The normal consequence of
losing four wars has been forgotten in the search for “peace,” as it is the
victors who are now asked to make concessions.
The Palestinians are the ones in a position of strength, selling a
formal public commitment (whatever the words could be worth) to a three-month
truce in return for solid political and territorial concessions from
There are those Palestinians
who fervently believe that they have justice on their side; and they ask the
question, in one fashion or another, “if the ends don’t justify the means, what
does?” There is justice in the
Palestinian complaints, as there is in the Israeli complaints. Whenever enemies present competing demands,
each grounded in a claim to justice, the world witnesses, to use a properly
descriptive term, a mess. That is why
all that can be hoped for in international affairs is neither an ideal nor even
a good solution, but merely the least bad.
There are no “final solutions” in the diplomatic history of states and
peoples, just temporary fixes that trigger new conflicts and complaints.
Nonetheless, the road map
does offer a “solution” to Palestinian terrorism. It does not call for a three-month truce, which
would, the Israelis fear, give the terrorist organizations an opportunity
to rearm, regroup, and redeploy. Instead,
it requires the Palestinian Authority to dismantle the terrorist factions,
groups, and organizations and thereby establish its monopoly over the legitimate
use of violence within the territory it currently controls--the
What about the right of return? Will the refugees ever be able to return to
What is even more important to recognize
here is that Israeli society and polity already have absorbed hundreds of
thousands of Sephardim, that is the non-European Jews who were forced to flee
the Arabic and Persian lands stretching from
If the Palestinian Authority
cannot dismantle the terrorist organizations, if the Israelis are unwilling
to grant a right of return to the refugees, if the Lebanese, the Syrians,
and even the Palestinian Authority prefer to segregate the refugees, then
what “solution” remains? There is one
temporary fix, though few in the West will acknowledge it: Since the Palestinians and the Israelis do not
play well in the same sandbox, they should have two separate sandboxes.
Israeli Arabs who sympathize with the Palestinian cause should be required
to remove themselves to the
So, in the end, we are brought
back to the three rabbis. Preserving
one’s heritage and protecting communal unity against a hostile outside world
are not insignificant goals or accomplishments. They make the ordinary currency of road-map
diplomacy, Jewish settlements, public order in the Palestinian territories,
access to Israel, integration of Hamas into a Palestinian
“state” and the like, while not altogether unimportant, profoundly beside
the point.
The Palestinians, as a people and a
community, have had their national identity created by terrorism. In the absence of the Palestinian Authority’s
commitment to dismantle terrorist organizations, peace, the rabbinical story
implies, is further away than one might suppose. If there is ever to be true peace, something
must be found to replace terrorism at the core of the Palestinian
self-image. Meanwhile, a local cold war,
waged across a barrier separating the two communities, might possibly achieve a
temporary fix, provided the directions given by the road map begin to take into
account the Israeli Wall. Perhaps that
ought to be the overt aim of current diplomacy.[12]
Notes and References
[1]Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2001), 96 and 139; and for the geographic
reach of terrorist groups like Hamas, Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God,” The
New Yorker, October 28, 2002 or http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?021028fa_fact2.
[2] According to Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of
Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 323, “The
outbreak of the intifada in December 1987 had heralded a rapid growth in the
influence of Hamas and, to a lesser extent, Islamic Jihad, both at the expense
of the PLO, whose nationalist rhetoric had previously dominated the Palestinian
discourse.” For the impact of the Six
Day war on the emergence of a politicized Islamic ideology and action see
Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern
Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[3] The recent spread of Saudi-baked Whahabi religious
thought and institutions deserves particular mention. For an analysis of its worldwide impact,
consult Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from
Tradition to Terror (
[4] Obviously, the ultimate political goal – the
unification of the Islamic world under a Caliph – of reactionary “salafists”
(those seeking the imposition of traditional Muslim values and law), has not been
realized.
[5] This point regarding the Palestinian Authority is
not meant to contradict the fact that much of
[6]
[7] According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The
Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), p, 193, the Hamas
charter states the following: “The Prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said:
The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews; until the Jews hide
behind rocks and trees, which will cry, O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind
me, come on and kill him!”
[8] Quoted by “Palestinian Reactions to Abu Mazen's Speech at the
Aqaba Summit” MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), Inquiry and
Analysis Series #140,
[9] Howard Schneider, “For Palestinian Refugees,
Rhetoric Confronts Reality,” Washington Post Foreign Service,
[10]
Population transfers have repeatedly taken place in
recent history, the most notable recent examples being post independence
[11]
George Friedman, “The Wall of Sharon,” The Stratfor
Weekly,
[12]
For an opposed interpretation of the Wall and its consequences:
http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/. This web site shows a map of where the Wall
has been built and where it is likely to be constructed.
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