One can recognize the suffering of an enemy without it excusing their evil.
The people who call themselves Palestinians (and as fake as the name is, it’s the only name that’s instantly identifiable for them, so I’m going to concede the linguistic territory for the time being) have been screwed. Up and down, back and forth, and side to side. Screwed like few people have been screwed in the modern age.
Yes, it’s only been for 75 years, and as a Jew, I find it hard to weep for people who have no idea what suffering really is, but in the end, comparing suffering is unhelpful. Telling someone, “I’ve suffered more” doesn’t lessen their suffering in any way.
So let me explain how these Palestinians have been victimized for the past 75 years.
1948
Or perhaps I should start with 1947. Because the idea of Jews establishing a Jewish state in the “Arab Sea” of the Middle East was a horror to Arabs. Even the lowest class Arabs knew that Jews were lower than they were. The idea of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in Arab lands was like something out of The Planet of the Apes. A world turned upside down, with a sub-class on top.
More to the point, many of them believed, in their guts, that Jews would do to them what they’d always done to us. Treated us like dirt. And given the pogroms Arabs had been committing against Jews in recent decades, they thought we’d take a terrible vengeance.
So a lot of them started packing up and leaving as soon as the UN General Assembly approved the proposal for a Partition Agreement between the Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan River. Others took off after the Arab armies that were poised to invade Israel told them to get out of the way while they pushed the Jews into the sea, and then they’d be able to come back and have the Jews’ property.
All of these Arab who ran away became refugees after Israel, with God’s help, defeated those Arab armies.
So what happened to these refugees? There were millions upon millions of refugees after WWII. They were helped to resettle. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) saw to that. But these refugees, a bit under half a million people, weren’t so lucky.
They’d fled, primarily, to Arab countries. To Jordan, or Egypt, or Lebanon, or Syria. And not one of those countries allowed them to settle down and become integrated in their new homes. Instead, they were herded into refugee camps. Why? Because the Arab believed that allowing them to settle down would be acknowledging that Israel had won. And they wouldn’t even mention us by name. We were “the Zionist entity”.
The UN established a new agency to deal with these Arabs, and called it the United Nations Relief Works Administration (UNRWA), and UNRWA was tasked, not with helping these refugees to resettle, but with maintaining them permanently as refugees. Hereditarily, unlike any other refugees. Billionaires born in other countries, with citizenship and comfort, if they were descended from any of these refugees, continued to have refugee status, all dutifully recorded by UNRWA.
So the refugees, virtually all of them refugees by choice, were condemned to be refugees forever. And they were told, repeatedly, that the only way they could ever stop being refugees would be to reverse the catastrophe of 1948, and destroy the Zionist entity: Israel.
1964
In 1964, the Soviet KGB and the Arab League created a group called the Palestine Liberation Organization. But don’t get the wrong idea. This wasn’t a group created for the Arabs living in the “occupied territories”, because those territories were still being occupied by two members of the Arab League: Egypt and Jordan. No, the “Palestine” they wanted to liberate was Israel.
I’ve heard people mistakenly call the group the Palestinian Liberation Organization, as though the group existed to liberate Palestinians. But this is incorrect. No one cared about the Arabs who would later be called Palestinians. Just about land where Jews were sovereign. An intolerable situation.
1967
For 18 years after the Arab armies lost their genocidal war against the newborn State of Israel, Jordan occupied the areas of Judea and Samaria, renaming them “the West Bank”, to distinguish them from the east bank of the Jordan river, where Jordan was located. And Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, protruding from the Sinai into Israel like a fingertip.
Jordan even formally annexed Judea and Samaria, though other than Pakistan and Great Britain, no other countries, not even Arab ones, recognized the annexation as legal. Judea and Samaria became the home, primarily, of Arabs who had lived in land now held by Israel, who lived in refugee camps, and Arabs who had lived in Judea and Samaria (and Christians, in towns like Nazareth) before the Jordanian annexation, who got to live in actual towns and cities.
When Syria and Egypt declared war against Israel in 1967 by closing the Tiran Straits to shipping, which resulted in Six Days of war, at the end of which Israel had recovered Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip, with the bonuses of the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, both groups of Arabs were trapped “behind enemy lines”, so to speak.
Israel was in a quandary. What to do with all of these enemies? These foreign nationals now living in areas that were part of the Jewish homeland, but without any loyalty to Israel?
The Arabs who lived in the areas controlled by Israel after its War of Independence had become Israeli citizens. And that was fine. But to confer Israeli citizenship on so many more of them all at once would threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. And this, after all, was the whole reason for the State of Israel. To control our own destiny. Not merely to live in our homeland ruled by others.
Furthermore, Israel’s leaders saw an opportunity for peace with the rest of the Arab countries. The new idea they came up with was “land for peace”. They would offer to give all of the land captured in the Six Day War back to the countries it had been part of, in exchange for nothing but an agreement to live in peace. More than 2/3 of the area now controlled by Israel would be traded for no material gain whatsoever. Just peace.
The Arabs responded to this idea with a resounding “No!” And why not? They didn’t care what happened to the Arabs living under Israeli control any more than they had cared about them before. And now, all of the residents of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip who had not been living in refugee camps became refugees as well.
So consider the plight of these Arabs. Some of them had been essentially prisoners in refugee camps (controlled by Arabs) for 18 years. The rest of them were now in what amounted to a vast POW camp (controlled by Israel). Israel was willing to cede that POW camp and the land it was on to the countries who had tried to wipe Israel off the map, but those countries refused the offer. Because they still couldn’t accept the results of 1948. They still couldn’t accept the existence of the State of Israel.
And who suffered for this? The Arabs stuck in the POW camps of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.
Interlude: A Thought Experiment
Try this: Imagine American troops who were captured by the North Vietnamese during the Viet Nam War. Now imagine North Viet Nam offering not only to return all of the POWs to America, but to give America ownership of the land that the POW camps sat on.
Now imagine America saying, “No way. Not until all of North Viet Nam ceases to exist.”
Suppose you were one of the POWs. How do you think that would feel? I imagine you’d feel powerless. Furious. Enraged.
Back to Reality
Now imagine you’re an Arab living in 10,000 square miles of POW camp, controlled by Israel. Some of you have Jordanian citizenship. Some of you have no citizenship at all. And along comes Yasser Arafat, making a name for himself by committing infamous acts of terror all around the world, and saying that he’s doing it for you.
You may not like what he’s doing, but at the end of the day, he’s doing it for you. No one else is doing diddly-squat for you. Still, you can’t buy into that sort of thing.
But your children, that’s another story. They grow up on stories of the great “outlaw” who is risking everything for their sake. And so they start really chafing under Israeli rule.
1987
The Arabs of the Israeli controlled lands are now calling themselves Palestinians, after the name of Arafat’s terrorist group, and going all in on the story that they were once a nation called Palestine, and that Israel “done them wrong”. So they start what they call an “intifada”, which means “a shaking off”. Israelis are murdered left and right for years, which results in repressive measures by Israel.
1993
Finally, in a Hail Mary attempt to end the violence, Israel brings Arafat and his PLO back from their exile in Tunisia, and crowns them “the rightful representatives of the Palestinian people.” A title they’d been claiming for themselves, but which had been rejected by the Israelis as ridiculous and self-serving.
Now any possibility of rejecting the Arafatian way of “armed struggle” (read: terrorism) or of rejecting the “lost Palestinian country” narrative was over.
Between the Arab use of the Palestinians as a weapon in their war against the existence of Israel and the Israeli “admission” that there is, in fact, a Palestinian people, and that they do, in fact, have a claim on parts of Israel, there is only one thing left to do.
Total war on Israel. War to the teeth. No limits. No scruples. No quarter.
And it’s true that such an implacable enemy needs to be destroyed. But it behooves us to remember how they became such an enemy. They were screwed by their fellow Arabs, and they were screwed by the Israeli left. The only people who ever respected them, who saw them as human beings with agency and choice, were the Israeli right. And they were denounced for it as monsters and warmongers.