We attach ourselves to narratives because they comfort us. It’s comforting to think that the terrorist who killed seven Jews walking out of a Jerusalem synagogue was striking a blow against the “civilized world,” as President Joe Biden insisted.
But he wasn’t, Mr. President. Alkam Khairi, a 21-year-old resident of East Jerusalem, was specifically targeting Jews.
His Palestinian brothers, who celebrated his murderous deed by dancing in the streets and handing out candy, were not thinking of the civilized world. They were rejoicing over the death of the Jews.
When the Palestinian Authority glorifies terrorists who murder Jews, as they recently did with Karim Younes, or teaches its children Jew-hatred, it is about the opera halls of Vienna or the art galleries of Paris. Not thinking They are thinking of the terrified Jews who had the chutzpah to return to their biblical homeland after 1900 years.
When Hamas launches rockets from Gaza to kill Israeli civilians, they are not thinking, “Boy those Jews are civilized, we better get rid of them.” No, they are thinking of the Hamas charter that obligates them to destroy the only Jewish state in the world.
This is not a comfortable narrative.
It is too “civilized” to sanitize and generalize our conflicts; This helps us manage and control them. If we can frame Palestinian terror against Jews as an attack on a great idea like the “civilized world,” it reduces our frustration and anxiety. Instead of dealing with a conflict that is ugly and personal, we can unite around a noble ideal.
The problem is that hatred for Jews in much of Palestinian society is just that – ugly and personal. There is nothing civilized or universal about teaching Palestinian children that “the Jews are not here.” That is the hatred of ambitious destruction. No amount of clever reframing can change that.
Three decades ago, Israel made the mistake of purging and ignoring that hatred by pretending that a political settlement based on geographic borders could end the conflict. I was one of those dreamers, and part of me still dreams of that day.
But ugly, deep, personal hatred dies hard. The narrative that has always been so difficult for Westerners to think about is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a political one but an existential one. This narrative is deeply uncomfortable for the simple reason that it does not lend itself to solutions—the drug of choice of civilized diplomacy.
Israel was born 75 years ago, continuing to build a vibrant nation with the strongest military in the region, Israel has been a victim of its own success, becoming a constant source of humiliation for its Arab neighbors. Who could never compete with that success. . This is especially true for the Palestinians, who have been cursed with corrupt leaders who have denied every Israeli peace while fattening their own bank accounts and blaming their people’s suffering on those “Zionist aggressors.” Rejected the offer.
But unlike the Palestinians who kept saying no and built their identity around victimhood, the Zionists took what the United Nations gave them in 1947 and built a powerful state. The contrast with the Palestinians can’t help but be insulting. Here are the Jews, who for centuries had to accept their second-class “Dhammi” status in Arab and Muslim countries, freed to a place of empowerment by the Jewish state. No amount of political appeasement can absolve the Palestinian leaders of this humiliation, this epic failure to actually serve their people.
If anything, in the wake of this embarrassing failure, Palestinian leaders have a more obvious incentive to maintain their status as the world’s most embattled victims of persecution by the “little devil” Israel. You can take your status where you can get it.
It may also explain why murdering Jews who, in the perverted Palestinian algorithm of Jew-hatred, come out of a synagogue, is as abhorrent as it is acceptable. The act of terror itself serves to intensify and dramatize the despair of the victims.
Until a fundamentally new and braver leadership infiltrates Palestinian society, teaching its people that Jew-hatred is violently opposed to their interests, we are left to deal with the facts on the ground.
Until a fundamentally new and braver leadership infiltrates Palestinian society, teaching its people that Jew-hatred is violently opposed to their interests, we are left to deal with the facts on the ground.
Those facts are this: terrorists will continue to try to kill Jews, and Jews will continue to try to stop them. This may not be much comfort to the civilized world, Mr. President, but to the Jews of Israel, it is the only world they know.
