American aid. Under these conditions, says even our Third Worldly President Barack Obama, the United States should continue to affirm and guarantee the country’s defense. Because of Israel’s legal rights and democratic processes, the United States should ignore the country’s dire unpopularity with nearly all U.S. allies, international organizations, and trading partners that condemn its allegedly lawless and aggressive foreign policy.
At their best, these defenders of Israel pile up impressive mountains of evidence that Israel is “not guilty” of charges only a madman, a delusional academic, or a UN human rights expert could have brought in the first place. Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished law professor at Harvard, has contributed two popular books,
Not for nothing is Dershowitz one of the world’s leading defense attorneys. But the very act of responding to the claims of diabolical maniacs puts this great advocate of Israel in an inappropriately defensive posture, as if a country that requires so resourceful, agile, and punctilious a defense — like Dershowitz’s most notable former client, Claus von Bulow — must have something to hide, a skeleton in its Knesset, a metastasized horror in its history.
The central error of Israel’s defenders is to accept the framing of the debate by its enemies, whose idea is that peace depends on some marginal but perpetually elusive improvement in Israel’s behavior. Prefacing the usual defense are concessions that Israel is “far from perfect” and “has made mistakes” in “overreacting to terrorism and other threats.” As Lawrence Summers put it, “There is much… in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can and should be vigorously challenged.” Such statements from Israel’s nominal defenders slip readily from meaningless negatives: “Israel is not perfect” — to crippling concessions: “Israel overreacts to terror.”
Locked in a debate over Israel’s alleged vices, they miss the salient truth running through the long history of anti-Semitism: Israel is hated above all for its virtues.
No Israeli failure to comply with the dictates of the rulings handed down by the UN-run International Court of Justice in The Hague defending the free movement of suicide bombers, no Jewish falling short of the standards devised by UN human rights committees dominated by demented tyrants, can even begin to explain, let alone excuse, the celebrated kidnappings, beheadings, and bombings, and the frothy prophecies of extinction and calls to pogroms that reverberate daily through the streets and mosques of the Middle East with the regularity of the muezzin call to prayer.
From the PLO’s 1964 announcement, long before Israel had control of the West Bank or Gaza, of the PLO’s resolve to extinguish the state of Israel by “armed struggle,” to the daily calls by the venerable president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser for “Israel’s destruction” in the 1967 war; from the prime minister of Syria, Haffez al-Assad, invoking “a battle of annihilation,” to two recent presidents of Iran pledging to “wipe Israel off the map”; from the endless proclamations by Palestinian terrorist politicians seeking “liberation from the Jordan River to the sea,” to the various men of Allah declaring that Jews are “filthy bacteria” that must be “butchered and killed… wherever you meet them”; from the sponsorship and celebration of suicide bombers by various imams and exalted rulers, to polls of the Palestinian people affirming the same murderous worldview; these statements are no frenzied war cries uttered only during actual combat and regretted in peacetime. Representing the essence of the Palestinian movement, rabid anti-Semitism continues a commitment that began with Palestinian complicity in the Holocaust.
Everyone knows that the word “Nazi” is used promiscuously in today’s world. But the word does have a real meaning. It means the National Socialist Movement dedicated to murderous anti-Semitism. Socialism everywhere expresses envy of excellence by treating the works and wealth of the successful as the wages of sin. Nazism simply specifies the sin as the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
By this definition, the PLO has always been, at its essence, a Nazi organization. The first move toward pushing the Jews into the sea came during World War II from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. “Germany,” as the Mufti put it, “is the only country in the world that has not merely fought the Jews at home but has declared war on the entirety of world Jewry; in this war against world Jewry the Arabs feel profoundly connected to Germany.”
Fresh from aiding the massacre of Jews in Romania and Bosnia and recruiting Bosnian Muslims into the Nazi forces, the Mufti was a fanatical participant in the European Holocaust. His most passionate goal was to extend it to the Middle East. After visiting Auschwitz with Himmler, this founder-hero of the Palestinian movement urged the Nazis to accelerate and intensify the killings and then join him in extending the carnage to Palestine by massacring the half-million Jews living there. In this pursuit, he conspired with the Nazis under Walther Rauff, engineer of Auschwitz, to create a special force in Greece ready to make the attack. Only General Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel at El Alamein prevented the Mufti and his friends from pursuing their plan. Still unsated in his killing frenzies in late 1944, the Grand Mufti launched an attack of parachutists on the Tel Aviv water supply with ten containers of toxin. Failing in the attempt, he devoted the rest of his life to the cause of destroying Israel.
Cited as a war criminal, Husseini gained asylum with the similarly rabid Holocaust celebrants among the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. For his barbarities, the Mufti remains a revered historical figure among the Palestinians. Beginning in the 1930s, his Nazi animus originated long before any of the alleged Israeli offenses that are now cited to justify Palestinian violence and hatred against the Jews in Israel.
When Husseini died in 1974, his anti-Semitic cause was taken up by his distant relative Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader and eventual Nobel “Peace” laureate. Arafat characteristically bought Hitler’s
Arafat’s successor as head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is supposedly a “moderate.” This seems to be the term for anti-Semites who are ambivalent about whether to celebrate the Holocaust or to deny that it occurred. Devoted to the destruction of Israel, Abbas was a Holocaust denier from the time of his doctoral thesis — in his own words, a study of “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed.” Contesting Abbas for power and winning Palestinian elections in 2006 was Hamas, an organization whose founding charter proclaims its devotion to the killing of Jews. After Hamas joined Fatah in a unity government in May 2011, Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, declared on Al-Aqsa TV:
All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews. In just a few years, all the Zionists and the settlers will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil.
Perhaps the most menacing force for Palestinian “liberation” is Hamas’ ally, Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared in 2002 that if all the Jews gather in Israel, “they’ll make our job easier, and will keep us from having to go hunt them down all over the world.”
When experts in the United States urge the creation of a Palestinian state, they are effectively endorsing a Nazi national movement with roots in Europe. Pointless and fantastical are claims to favor a Palestinian national movement that renounces the murder of Jews. Murdering Jews is the essence of the only Palestinian national movement the world has ever known.
The creation of a peaceful and productive Palestinian state would require support from neither Harvard nor Hezbollah, nor any force outside Palestine itself. The Palestinian Arabs could be a nation tomorrow and a state the day after, if their leaders could let go of the notion that the Jews must die before Palestine can live. By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world’s most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy. Civilized people with the good fortune to live near brilliant entrepreneurs or thinkers go to work for them and attempt to learn their skills and master their fields of knowledge. Then they may start similar ventures on their own. It is the only way to succeed. In the past, Palestinian Arabs often excelled as entrepreneurs, and some do around the world today. But nowhere are the Palestinians less likely to prosper than under the current Palestinian regimes. Palestinian leaders tell their people to disdain the peaceful and collaborative demands of democratic capitalism. Palestinians are taught to say they find it “humiliating” to work
