Denis MacEoin
With the advent of a new US administration in January 2017, massive changes are expected, not just on the domestic front, but internationally. One of the first regions that will require immediate attention is the Middle East, where the policies of the Obama administration have led to a diminished role for the United States. Syria is certain to be the main focus of concern, bringing together a hideous network of interests, counter-interests, and Gordian knots involving Bashar al-Assad’s “Syrian State”, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iran’s Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, several rebel groups with links to al-Qa’ida, and hundreds of others. (For a remarkable list of armed groups in Syria, see here.)
More or less simultaneously, the State Department will have its hands full with Iran, the PCPOA nuclear deal, a crisis over renewed sanctions for which Congress voted overwhelmingly on December first, and the continuing role of the Islamic Republic in fostering, funding, arming, and providing armed forces for terrorism in Yemen, Syria, Gaza and Lebanon.
The United States is still invested in Iraq and Libya and needs to keep a watchful eye on Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan (where the Taliban are making a comeback), and a broader vision of further developments in the rise of Islamic extremism where it moves into Europe and North America with a possibly unprecedented increase in terrorist attacks.
Those issues alone should be enough to keep any president or secretary of state awake most nights, but they may not eclipse the longest-running crisis in the region – the pursuit of an ever-elusive peace between the people of Israel and the Palestinians. Over the eight years presided over by Barrack Obama, assisted by Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, the peace process (if we may call it that) has tilted seriously in what it would not be rash to term the wrong direction. Obama’s personal antipathy to the Jewish state (and to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu) was given free rein alongside overt sympathy for the Muslim/Arab/Palestinian side. The Palestinian narrative came to dominate thinking in the US and Europe alike, with Israel being given short shrift in negotiations, op eds, and UN resolutions.
But things may be about to change. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has been offered and has accepted the role of Secretary of State, and first indications are that he will reject some if not all of the Palestinian version of events and objectives. His closeness to Israel is well known. During the 2008 US presidential election, a group of eight Israeli experts declared him the best candidate for Israel. He recently stated “that the U.S. should oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until the Palestinians can prove they are capable of renouncing terror”.
If, as is expected, Trump appoints his son-in-law Jared Kushner to the role of a peace envoy to Israel, Giuliani will have someone on the ground to back up a shift from Obama’s pro-Palestinian position to a pro-Israel one. In one important respect, the myth of the illegality of Jewish settlements in the West Bank may now be discarded: Kushner is on record as having made financial donations to more than one settlement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_groups_in_the_Syrian_Civil_
If the new administration intends to move towards Israel, it must at the same time move away from the Palestinians in a certain sense. Certainly, the US must start to apply greater pressure to bring the Palestinians towards the negotiation table. The PLO and Fatah at least, because Hamas remains fixated both on their brand of religious absolutism and the rejectionist assertions to be found in Article 13 of their 1988 Covenant:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…. Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters.
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
With the prospect of a unity government between Gaza and the West Bank – a proposal advanced by the objurate PA president Mahmoud Abbas at Fatah’s November 2016 conference – that hardline attitude may be reinforced. After all, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have themselves stayed away from negotiations for some years now, and Abbas is now consolidating his own power after purging Fatah of most of his previous opponents.
Given all this, there will be little time for Trump and Giuliani to move if they are to reverse the pro-Palestinian drift of recent years. If negotiations are to be resumed, however, they will be complex since opinions among both Israelis and Palestinians are mixed. But harder work will have to be done on the international scene, in the UN, with the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the many Western countries who have embraced the Palestinian narrative.
If the new administration is to make rapid progress in the peace process (to the extent there is one), their first priority must be to demolish the Palestinian narrative. It is a false narrative from beginning to end. It tells historical falsehoods about the origins of the “Palestinian” people, the precedence of Jews in the land, the Jewish and Christian identity of holy sites, and the self-inflicted Nakba of 1947-48. But a purely historical approach is unlikely to appeal on the political or emotional level. Something more has to be addressed. That something more must, I am convinced, be a hard-headed dismissal of the narrative of Palestinian victimhood. It is this perception of Palestinians as the constant victims of an aggressive Israel that drives pro-Palestinian Christians, human rights activists, moral campaigners, socialists, and many others.
The importance of a shift in narratives cannot be overemphasized. It is the key to peace. This is put very well by Moshe Arens: “Just as real peace could come to Europe after World War II only after Germans abandoned the ‘German narrative’ and accepted the true history of the war that Germany started, so only abandonment of the ‘Palestinian narrative’ and acceptance of the true sequence of the events of 1947-48 can serve as a basis for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.”
The Palestinian Arabs, their leaders, and their manifold aiders and abettors worldwide have deluded the international media, the United Nations, politicians just about everywhere, religious leaders from most of the Christian churches, and human rights activists on every continent into believing them to be the world’s greatest victims, a struggling and persecuted people whose woes and sufferings have for decades eclipsed those of every other suffering minority on the planet’s face. You never have to look far for evidence of this.
Writing in 2015 shortly after Mahmoud Abbas’s visit to the UN General Assembly, Dr. Eran Lerman of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies expressed this sense of Palestinian victimhood thus:
The speech delivered by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly last week was proof, once again, that the Palestinian “narrative” of victimhood has become a threat to any practical prospect for peace. Palestinian leaders consistently advance an interpretation of history which is at odds not only with the facts but also with their people’s best interests.
At the core of Abbas’ (sic) plaintive narration is the notion of the Palestinians as innocent victims, whose right to statehood and independence has been taken away and brutally ignored for much too long. In this telling of history, the Palestinians deserve to be backed by coercive intervention, as soon as possible, so as to impose on Israel a solution which would implement their “rights.”
Lerman adds that “The false Palestinian narrative of one-sided victimhood is a major hindrance to all efforts in the direction of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Global actors need to help the Palestinians move beyond wallowing in self-pity and rituals of bashing Israel, and towards difficult compromises with Israel.
Writing on Honest Reporting in October 2016, Zahava Raymond speaks of an article in Ireland’s anti-Israel newspaper, the Irish Independent, promoting a photo exhibition entitled “This is Palestine” by choreographer and would-be Middle East authority John McColgan.
In the world of the Irish Independent and McColgan’s exhibition, every Palestinian is a victim of Israeli oppression. There are no Palestinians who harm other Palestinians, and there are no Palestinians who harm Israelis. It is the usual, one-sided, simplistic narrative that the media generally favor, where Israelis = oppressors and Palestinians = victims.
This trope of Palestinian victimhood is pretty well universal and is seldom resisted or exposed anywhere outside media and political circles unless they are pro-Israel or genuinely balanced. Whether it be the New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, or a host of other media outlets in print or online, the Palestinian people are the world’s victims par excellence.
But it’s not just the media that think that way. Many Protestant churches across the world adopt the same attitude. Writing for Commentary two years ago, Melanie Phillips declared that “within the Protestant world, many churches are deeply hostile to the State of Israel. They present the Palestinians as victims of Israeli oppression while ignoring the murderous victimization of Israeli citizens at their hands.”
Psychologically, it is easier to embrace a good cause (or, for that matter, a bad one) in black and white terms. For many people on the left of politics, a good cause is made up of people who suffer from imperialism and colonialism, plucky minorities, third-world victims of first-world oppression, revolutionary vanguards, and anyone put upon by the United States, Great Britain, France or any former imperialist power. Among such groups, the Palestinians have the most to offer, being permanently “dispossessed” by, of all people, the Jews. But since the Jews themselves have suffered from dispossession a great deal longer than any other people on earth, the pro-Palestinian cause has to be the blackest and whitest of all. Any hint of gray, any introduction of counter-arguments, any presentation of different facts is anathema. Only the flat and unvarnished Palestinian “truth” must be permitted.
Here is where it gets tricky. It does not take much study to learn that the Palestinians have actually been responsible for a lot of bad things themselves, that innocent Jews have been victims of decades of Palestinian terrorism, and that things are far from being black and white. This means that supporters of the Palestinians have to create a narrative of their own or embrace one invented by Palestinian propagandists. On one hand, the Israelis (aka the Jews) must have done all the bad things that are thought to have taken place in the territory set aside by the League of Nations for the Palestine Mandate. And, on the other, nothing bad has ever been done by any Palestinian. The violence, the killings, the terrorism can only be from one side, the Israeli side, whereas the Palestinian Arabs have always been seen as the victims of Israeli barbarism and Jewish ill will.
This one-sided concern to absolve the Palestinians of their many sins and, what is worse, to offload those sins onto Jews and Israelis has many consequences. Perhaps the most serious of those is that Palestinians are deprived of any sense of agency. To be ever passive, to suffer and never act, to complain yet never offer positive suggestions for a way out of suffering in the end strips the Palestinians of any sense of agency.
To become agents of their own destiny, it is time for the Palestinians as a group and through their leadership to take action to resolve their internal difficulties and their engagement with the outside world. This will require a realism that has been absent from their lives for so long, a sense of purpose for an achievable goal (i.e. a state that does not demand the abolition of Israel), and a recognition of their own mistakes over many decades.
Palestinian refusal so far to do any of these things exposes a deep psychological problem, a problem that has trapped them in an endless round of violence and rejection. This rejectionism is entirely contradictory to their own best interests. People who suffer generally opt for solutions they are offered, even if acting on them involves some pain. Someone dying of cancer or diabetic complications will usually agree to a mastectomy or and amputation on the understanding that it will save their life. Someone with unmanageable debts will as often as not choose bankruptcy in order to set themselves back financially. The Palestinians have no hope of ever beating Israel so long as they cling to the old Khartoum formula of “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” Yet they have consistently refused to take the least action that might bring them better lives, regardless of how far it is obvious that Israel seeks a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
If Rudy Giuliani and the new US administration seek to advance the moribund “peace process”, they could find no better place to start than direct confrontation with Palestinian rejectionism. No-one wishes to see ordinary Palestinians suffer needlessly, but so long as their leaders persist in a preference for victimhood, that suffering will not be alieved. This means that those leaders must be pressed as hard as possible to end their persecution of their own populations. If necessary, Palestinians must be presented with a stark choice between violence and freedom. There must be carrots, but there must also be sticks. The UN, the EU, and the OIC will offer only carrots. Will the US now add the threat of real consequences to that mix?
Dr. Denis MacEoin was a university lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
