<< Does Netanyahu know that "Western freedom" includes freedom to freely
cross the borders of the land where you live, and includes the freedom to
publicly protest when you disagree with those who rule your land, without
being shot at? >>
It also includes the freedom to go to a disco without some fanatic strapping
dynamite to his chest and blowing up 21 young people. Or does everyone in the
world have the right to freedom except Israelis?
One thing critics of Israel never take into account is that, beyond the
political posturing, the Israelis are still scared out of their minds.
Outsiders see Israel ruling the Palestinians; Israelis see themselves
surrounded by 100 million Nazis who have pledged to exterminate them. Israel
is supposed to trade land for peace. The flip side is that the Arabs are
supposed to trade peace for land - but nobody ever mentions that, nobody ever
puts pressure on the Arabs to offer real peace in exchange for land.
The funny thing is, the Arab states don't really want to destroy Israel, for
all that some of them claim they do. If Israel didn't exist, the people in,
say, Syria, might just get tired of their own ruling clique's incompetence,
corruption, and despotism. Now they can't say anything and are encouraged
instead to blame everything on Israel; were Israel not there, they might look
inward and discover the true source of their country's failures.
I'm not defending everything Israel does. Their treatment of the Palestinians
is harsh, perhaps unnecessarily so. The expansion of settlements is probably
an obstacle to peace. Netanyahu only got into power the last time because of
the murder of Rabin, and he's a corrupt scumbag. Sharon is a murderer and
quite possibly a racist.
But the real obstacle is the steadfast refusal of most Arabs to accept and
publicly state in completely unambiguous language that Israel has a right to
exist. How can the Israelis be expected to trust countries that still claim
Israel doesn't have a right to be there?
The true tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they have been misled and
traduced by their leadership for decades, who have done just about everything
wrong in their quest for a homeland. The other Arab states have deliberately
kept them in misery so as to have an external cause on which to focus their
own people's dissension. The other Arab states don't like Palestinians
themselves; after the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 300,000 Palestinians -
without a single word of condemnation from the kind of people who shriek
bloody murder when Israel does anything at all. I see a lot of the
pro-Palestinian sentiment from the rest of the world (many of whom are
barbarous murderers themselves) as the rankest kind of hypocrisy, from people
who don't really give a shit about the Palestinians, they just hate Jews.
Israel isn't perfect. But the unelected, self-appointed, corrupt, clueless
Palestinian leadership, like that of most of the rest of the Middle East, is
vile filth. At least Israel can get better if its people can someday stop
feeling like they're surrounded by 100 million potential SS.
Tom Beck
