By RON JAGER—
The fictitious State of Palestine that was recently recognized as an observer non-member state at the United Nations will be an appropriate homeland for the “invented People”. It seems to matter little – as was also evidenced at UNESCO in the past, that there is no existing Palestinian entity anywhere in the world that can meet the requirements prescribed by international law for statehood – specifically the Montevideo Convention 1933. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention sets out the four criteria for statehood that have been recognized as an accurate statement of customary international law:
“The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states. A fundamental remark must be underlined: the conditions of article 1 are limited by article 11, which forbids the use of military force to obtain sovereignty”
Despite article 11, for the past 65 years, long before the 1967 Six Day War, prior to Israeli control of Judea and Samaria, long before the “occupation”, long before the settlements, before the Palestinian Arabs were ever considered a distinct people not only by other Arab nations, but even by themselves, they the Arabs living adjacent to the nascent Jewish state have been attacking relentlessly either through the use of para-military forces or through the Palestinian preferred method of raw terror. These Palestinian terrorists have murdered Jews in every possible manner – cutting the throats of babies and toddlers in their bed, axing bystanders on city streets, shooting at point blank, suicide bombers with metal balls embedded in their bomb vest, and the list goes on and on.
The Palestinian Authority and the terrorist organization Hamas who control the Gaza Strip do not meet even one of the conditions that should allow the United Nations to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Arabs. Continued blind support by the majority of nations for their UN supported nationhood only eternalizes the historical and religious fabrications that are passed on as truth and fact. The invented narrative of the Palestinian Arabs reversing the notions of truth and lies, victim and victimizer does not stop at the green line but pollutes and violates what would otherwise be simple deductive logic way beyond Israel’s borders. The greatest threat of this demented thinking can best be observed in the streets and major cities of the European Continent. Due to the intellectual confusion that has spilled over from the incessant exposure to the false Palestinian Arab narrative, we can easily observe the intellectual and moral decline towards relations with Muslims living in Western nations. The indiscriminate use of terms such as apartheid, crimes against humanity, and occupation against Jews and Israel itself plays directly into much of the Muslim paranoia harbored against Western culture. The belief that the West is conducting through Israel a conspiracy to destroy Islam gives convoluted credence to their own aggression against the West as legitimate self-defense, and anything that Western society does to defend itself is considered aggression against Islam. The logical extension of the untruths employed in the Palestinian Arab – Israeli conflict spills over to other fields and diminishes the credibility of intellectual endeavor, research, and inquiry.
Since the period of Enlightenment, per capita real incomes have increased exponentially, by a factor of fifty. We live longer. How has this come about? It is due to technical progress, to innovation, to knowledge and to increased productivity. It is the ability to produce more, with less input of time, labor and materials. Technical progress, of itself, is unambiguously good for human welfare. The essential ingredients of a successful civilization are the freedom to innovate in knowledge and in commerce, guaranteed property rights and the rule of law. Take away any of these ingredients and civilization’s grip becomes tenuous. Islam as practiced in the majority of Arab states undermines many of these basic tenets of a successful civilization. Hence we see so many countries in the Middle East, and in particular Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Egypt and the Gaza Strip that are becoming, or have become, failed states.
This fundamental fabrication about the Palestinian Arabs and its impact on the global discourse lends to a dialogue and intellectual myopia that not only enables so many nations of the world to violate basic human rights of their own people, especially the rights of women, but also creates an atmosphere that legitimizes the rejection of truth and denies reality. Logic and intellectual endeavor cannot exist in a parallel system, one for Israel and one for the rest of the world. If Hamas makes every effort to attack Israeli civilians with missiles and Israel makes every effort to avoid attacking Arab civilians even when they are used as human shields, yet the symmetry used to describe these events does not differentiate between the two, then one can easily claim that there is no difference between right and wrong, no difference between moral and immoral behavior.
Until the period before 9/11, the Western World perceived Arab terror as Israel’s problem. Similarly, the rejection of truth by accepting fundamental Palestinian fabrications will only backfire and create a similar rejection of Western truth and morality by Muslims who have made their homes in the Western nations. Accepting the fabrications fundamental to the Palestinian Arab narrative will only lead to rejecting truth and reality way beyond the green line.