Pretty well every day at present some Palestinian, usually a teenager, draws a knife on some Israeli, may or may not succeed in killing him, and is then himself shot dead by some Israeli security agent. The dead Israelis are random citizens in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for every one of them there are three or four dead Palestinians. These unfortunate young knife-wielders are really victims, though Mahmud Abbas speaking for the West Bank, and Ismail Haniya speaking for the Gaza Strip, present them as heroes.
The falsification of reality begins with incompatible images of Israelis wished on to Palestinians by their leaders and a controlled media — either they are caricatured as decrepit religious Jews running away in terror from a youngster with a knife, or as merciless aggressors with zeal enough to seize holy Muslim shrines and destroy Islam, no less. In mosques here and there sheikhs and imams are going up into the pulpit, brandishing knives and at the top of their voice exhorting the congregation to become murderers. Twitter in Arabic proposes six ways to abuse and torment Jews, “stabbing, burning, using Molotov cocktails, poison and explosives, running them over and dropping heavy objects from heights, such as cliffs and bridges.”
Positing conquest as a supreme value, Arab culture itself is dictating further falsification of reality. Honor and glory belong exclusively to winners, so that compromise with Israel can only establish surrender. In the course of a century, the Palestinians have achieved nothing because the logic of their position rests on the impossible contradiction of making out that loss must actually translate into gain. So they keep on demanding things that would give them the status of winners, but are unobtainable — sovereignty over East Jerusalem, for instance, or the return of millions of refugees to Israel.
The refusal of Palestinian leaders from Haj Amin the Mufti of Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat and now Mahmud Abbas to confront reality amounts to demanding that history has to provide a different outcome. Moreover, the perpetuation of unreality served these three leaders extremely well, allowing them to accumulate power and wealth. Arafat is supposed to have squirreled away in Switzerland 6 billion dollars, and Abbas, now in the eleventh year of a four year mandate, is currently building himself a palace costing 13 million dollars. Secretary of State John Kerry’s aim to involve Abbas in yet another peace negotiation is evidence of general naive acceptance of the Palestinian version of reality. Why would Abbas or any other Palestinian in his position put a stop to the violence that the rest of the world chooses to believe in and to reward? Until one of them has the intellect and courage to provide the truth about their plight, Palestinians have no alternative except to endure more of this pitiful self-harming.