Silence is the sovereign contempt. – Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Jews are being stabbed to death in broad daylight, in Israel, by Arab Muslims and the Western world suddenly grows silent. Of course, there are always those wilfully sciolistic journalists avowedly reproving both Jew and Arab Muslim, as though Jews are also guilty of the violence—the Jew for provoking the violence, of course, simply because he/she is Jewish, and the Arab Muslim terrorist not so guilty for committing the violence as a consequence of Zionist provocation. After all, Heaven forbid the Jews, whether man, women or child, should be acknowledged as exculpated of any offence, real or imagined, even after their very existence has been expunged from the land of the living by a knife-wielding, jihad-inspired madman. They’re Jews, so they must be guilty of something.
In his critique of Efraim Karsh’s book Palestine Betrayed, Amir Taheri writes that it is “A must-read for anyone interested in the Middle East’s longest-running conflict.” But this is simply not true. The longest running conflict in the Middle East has not been between Arab Muslim and Jew but between Arab Muslim and Arab Muslim. Amir Taheri apparently missed this fact of Islam’s history. However, much of the world believes today that the Jew, as personified by the State of Israel, is the real trouble-maker in the Middle East and that the Arab Muslim merely the victim of his political transgressions. We are told, over and over, again and again, that it was the Jew who obtruded himself into an exclusively Arab Muslim Palestine (the invented and ethnically cleansed “Palestine,” the one without a Jewish presence for two millennium already) and not the Jew who has returned to the “landmarks of our fathers” from a diasporic existence proven perpetually dangerous, as evidenced unambiguously by the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their diligent collaborators.
Efraim Karsh relates in Palestine Betrayed, “Since the Holocaust is widely considered to be the most powerful modern-day justification for the existence of a Jewish state, and one that overshadows the carefully nurtured image of Palestinian victimhood, Abbas endeavored to prove in a doctoral dissertation, written at a Soviet university and subsequently published in book form, the existence of a close ideological and political association between Zionism and Nazism.” This is the same Abbas who today, as Jews are being attacked on the streets of Israel’s cities, feigns a heavily qualified support for peace initiatives, but in reality—in Arabic—has always endorsed these terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. As reported in the Jerusalem Post by Rachel Bresinger (November 2014), “The incitement coming from the Palestinian side is nothing new. Both Fatah and Hamas have long professed in Arabic that Israel has no right to exist. When Abbas proclaims to the West that he wants to see a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel, he is simply saying what all of the Western diplomats want to hear. They naively believe that Abbas is a true partner for peace despite what is being taught in Palestinian textbooks and broadcast on the Palestinian airwaves. Many Westerners truly think that if only the Palestinians had their own state in the Gaza Strip and the majority of the West Bank all of the problems between the Israelis and Palestinians would simply disappear.” The sadistic irony in all this is that the Palestinian terrorists actually believe (as do their Western supporters) that they are murdering not simply Jews, but Jewish Nazis. And why would Palestinian terrorists feel any shame in that?
Let’s be honest: If the Palestinians had ever really wanted to live in peace, contiguously, with Israel’s Jews (and I use the appellation because, for the Arab Muslims, the religious identity of their Jewish neighbour has always been, and will continue to be, their sole and ungregarious bone of contention), accept what are surely evident by now the contrary realities of a Jewish state situated within a stone’s throw (pun intended) of an Islamist-oriented state, an obvious measure of harmony between the two would have been achieved long ago. But, as anyone knows who has studied the re-emergence of Jewish Zionism in the Middle East, the Arab Muslim has never intended to live in peace with any Jews, secular or otherwise, not when Jews were still identified as Palestinians, before the State of Israel existed, before such an identity was amputated from the Palestinian narrative by pseudo-historians like Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, and not now, long after the establishment of the State of Israel, after the Nazi Holocaust and after wars and intifada employed by the Arab Muslim to destroy and/or condemn the very existence of the State of Israel.
There is a Latin proverb which declares, “He who controls the area controls the religion.” This has always been Islam’s modus operandi, and especially in the Middle East. The existence of a vibrant Jewish democracy there has become, since 1948, a bemocking obstacle to that religiously prescribed imperial stratagem. The so-called dream of Palestinian “nationhood” is nothing but an Islam-inspired hatred of everything Jewish, and particularly everything Jewish as it exists in the Middle East. Jews are being attacked on the streets of Israel’s cities today not only because they’re Jewish, but more to the point, because they’re Jewish and citizens of a nation whose courage has been honed by an ancient audacity that scoffs at the religious preponderance of their enemies.
“One swallow does not make a summer,” wrote Aristotle. And a third intifada is not the end of the State of Israel. Although political quacks like Tarek Fatah and Gershom Gorenberg can always find an audience of readers for their inculpation of certain of Israel’s leaders past and present as proponents of political intransigence (read: Zionism) because of their refusal to conciliate a “Palestinian state,” and even though the world remains virtually silent as Jewish civilians are being murdered, the sovereign contempt Mr. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve defined must be attributed, in my opinion, to those who are now eagerly blaming the Jews and the State of Israel as the only cause of this present intifada—their contempt for Jewish humanity made most manifest by their very overt and shameless support for the Arab Muslim terrorists committing, and the Arab Muslim politicians inciting, this battue.
Efraim Karsh, in his epilogue in Palestine Betrayed, says it best: “And so it goes on. More than six decades after the Mufti and his followers condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN partition resolution and waging a war of annihilation against their Jewish neighbours, their reckless decisions are still being re-enacted by the latest generations of Palestinians leaders. For to refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist, long after the acceptance of this right by the international community, and to insist on the full implementation of the ‘right of return’ at a time when Israel has long agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state roughly along the pre-1967 lines, indicates that in the Palestinian perception peace is not a matter of adjusting borders and territory but rather a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state.”
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