Monday, January 15, 2018

Abu Mazen and the Agony of Defeat - Dr. Mordechai Kedar




by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Abu Mazen understands that without the Jerusalem and refugee cards, the Palestinian house of cards will collapse, and all the Palestinian plans to destroy Israeli will end in failure.




This week, Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and head of the Palestinian Authority, made a speech expressing tremendous anger against U.S. President Donald Trump, including the harshest curse that an Arab can utter: “May your house be destroyed”. This is a curse not only on a person’s abode but on the person himself, as well as the members of his family - that they should be thrown into the street to live in abject poverty, subject to the contempt and degradation of all. Only those with an understanding of Middle Eastern culture can grasp the severity of this curse.

What was it that caused Abu Mazen to burn his bridges with the U.S. president by making such a speech, which could result in cutting off key American support from UNRWA and the American president taking even more negative positions toward the “Palestinian issue”.

To be able to answer this question we must first understand the essence of the “Palestinian issue”. This issue is actually nothing but a house of cards that has been very skillfully built over the past seventy years owing to several factors: the Arab League, Yasser Arafat, a few Israelis as well as journalists and politicians from abroad. Within this house of cards are a few especially important ones:

The “liberation of Palestine”, as an overriding goal, but its territorial component has never been clear whether it includes the destruction of Israel or the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“The refugee problem”, which was created during the War of Independence in 1948, and was maintained during the past seventy years by UNRWA as well as funding by the U.S. and other sources. Throughout the years, the various governments of Israel have favored short-term benefits, continuing to fund the problem in order to avoid the situation where millions of hungry refugees, whose brothers had callously abandoned them to refugee camps, would begin marching in our direction, and by dint of the “right of return”, destroy the State of Israel.

The idea that “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine” developed after the Six Day War and gained strength after the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1992. Arafat repeated it as a mantra, and the response by senior Israeli figures – such as Simon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Alon Leia, etc. – was absolutely nothing. “They say this for internal consumption”, they told us. “A million martyrs are marching on Jerusalem!!!” shouted Arafat, morning and night, and they told us it’s okay, it’s just their dream – they’re not serious.

Other countries, led by Europe, took part in building this Palestinian house of cards, funding it with billions of dollars over the years, in an attempt at making it a strong, real building, ignoring the truth and reality. They supported the establishment of a “peace-loving Palestinian state alongside Israel” but ignored the fact that the ideology of the PLO was to destroy the Jewish State of Israel. And indeed, the PLO’s logo shows it as the entire area of Palestine – from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

The world perpetuated the “Palestinian refugee problem” despite the fact that in all other countries of the world there was no longer even a single refugee from the 1040s. Even Germany, which had absorbed and rehabilitated the refugees from Sudetenland that had been expelled from Czechoslovakia, did not demand the Arab world to behave as Germany did in absorbing and rehabilitating the “Palestinian refugees”, despite the fact that their problem was created as a result of the Arab military invasion into the State of Israel on the day after it declared its independence. Europe held Germany responsible for creating the problem of refugees from Sudetenland and expected her to solve it, but Europe did not hold the Arab states responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem. This is how the Palestinian refugee problem was created and how it became such an important bargaining chip in the negotiations between Israel and her neighbors. It had become such a sticking point that within the framework of the Taba Talks in 2001, Ehud Barak agreed to a “symbolic return” of tens of thousands of refugees, but he was the only one who agreed to it. 

The world did not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which made Jerusalem another bargaining chip in “peace negotiations” the entire purpose of which – for the  Arabs – was to minimize and weaken Israel so that the Jews, having lost hope in having a viable state, would leave to go back to the countries from which they came.

Trump and the House of Cards

And then came Trump, a businessman who was used to dealing with buildings - not houses of cards but real buildings; those that were meant to remain standing for generations. He understood that the Palestinian house was a house of cards that managed to remain standing only because of collaboration by the world, led by Europe, but also including liberal American groups, Arab countries and a few bleeding heart Israelis. Trump understood the hollowness of the Palestinian ideological structure and decided to remove two key cards from it: the Jerusalem card and the refugee card.

Ever since Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel the Palestinians – both the PLO and Hamas – have been engaged in frenzied activity, public disturbances and political activism in the international halls of power, since they understood that having Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a sort of “insurance policy” for the Jewish state. Jerusalem for the Jews is a true issue, anchored in history and the Jewish religion, while for the Arabs and the Muslims it is nothing more than “fake news”. But Jerusalem is still a theoretical matter because it is not as of now, the capital of Palestine. So its removal from the Palestinian house of cards is not what caused Abu Mazen to burn his bridges with the U.S.

But then, Trump also removed the refugee problem from the house of cards by announcing that he intends to stop funding, supporting and perpetuating it. This is a thousand times worse than the Jerusalem issue, since this is something real that has been operating for seventy years and to date, many billions of dollars have been poured into it. UNRWA maintains a huge mechanism of salaried employees, schools and a support system, and if the Americans stop funding it, UNRWA’s ability to continue breathing life into the “refugee problem” might end, since without support, the refugees would scatter and be absorbed into the neighboring areas that they came from, to the Arab countries as well as outside of it. If the “refugee problem” is eliminated, the danger that these refugees present to Israel would disappear.

The elimination of the refugee problem is something that Abu Mazen cannot ignore, for several reasons: first, Abbas himself is a refugee, having been born in Safed in 1935, and his entire personal legitimacy as a Palestinian leader is based on this fact. Second, the refugees have become addicted to living at the expense of external monetary support, so cutting their funds would obligate them to start working like any other people. Third, refugees who don’t receive foreign support will solve their problem independently: some would emigrate to other places, some would be absorbed where they currently live, thus causing the refugee problem, which the Palestinians and Arabs have managed to maintain, thanks to a lot of European and American money over seventy years, to disappear.

Abu Mazen understands that without the Jerusalem and refugee cards, the Palestinian house of cards will collapse, and all the Palestinian plans to destroy Israeli will end in failure. The sense that he has lost his way makes him lose his mind and his judgment, which have always characterized his activities, and he has returned to the very depths of Arab culture with his curse on Trump “may your house be destroyed”. What he means by this curse is that Trump’s house will be destroyed, his family will be thrown into the street and he and the members of his family will live in poverty as homeless people, humiliated among the passersby. There is no expression in the lexicon of Middle East culture worse than the sense of disappointment and despair that Abu Mazen feels, seeing his Palestinian house of cards collapse in front of his eyes, as Trump pulls out these two cards, Jerusalem and the refugees.

Abu Mazen’s speech to the PLO expressed this in extremely strong terms. He sees the Palestinian project in mortal danger, with, on one side, the State of Israel standing strong and gloriously rebuilt, a lively democracy with a strong economy and resolute society, and on the Palestinian side, cultural, ideological, political and personal divisiveness between the PLO and Hamas, paralyzing all political activity. He sees that his society is divided into clans and families that have never abandoned their traditional loyalties to the family; he sees that Palestinian society has never adopted the ethos of a Palestinian nationality and that the ideological house cannot survive without the Jerusalem and refugee cards.

Abu Mazen sees that even the Arab world does not stand behind him. On the contrary, the Iranian matter impels the Arab countries toward Israel, and the Arab countries are overwhelmed with so many internal problems that the Palestinian problem has become a nuisance for them. His speech this week, his “swan song”, clearly signified the collapse, death and burial of the “Palestinian issue” into the abyss, and now is the time to find another solution for it, outside the box, such as the “Emirates solution”, the only positive socio-political model that works successfully in the Middle East.

Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav
 

Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Source: https://tinyurl.com/ycquj4pj

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