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Last update - 14:29 26/05/2008
The Palestinians' time is running out
By Bradley Burston
Tags: Israel, palestinians, Nakba 

For my Palestinian friends, with sadness:

I understand why you long ago came to believe that time was on your side. I understand the many factors, demographic, cultural, historic, geo-political, which have served to reinforce that belief, the strong conviction that Palestinian statehood was inevitable, inalienable - in every sense, a matter of time.


I understand why you have come to believe that the state of Israel is merely the latest in a long series of fleeting colonial episodes, that its roots are elsewhere, its strength is illusory, its endurance eroded, its spirit broken, its future dim. I understand that you believe you can wait these people out, wear them down, outfight them and out-believe them and out-populate them and, in the end, take them over.


I understand that you believe that rockets and mortars from the north, south, east, and, eventually, west, can depopulate and peel back and obliterate the borders of pre-1967 Israel until there will be no need to agree to a Jewish state on those borders, no need to compromise on refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, no need to talk, no need for self-scrutiny and reconsideration, no need to bend.

I understand that you believe that this is your right, religiously, morally, politically. I understand why you believe that you can wait.

But this month, three generations since 1948, since your Nakba, this is what I ask you to consider:

Your time is running out.

If you do not begin to act with all of your wisdom in moving toward statehood, you run the risk of becoming the Kurds of the Mediterranean basin, the Native Americans of the Middle East, permanently stateless, eternally denied.

If you do not begin to rethink the course which the Palestinian national movement has taken, you must begin to consider the idea of a world without a Palestine. The world is beginning to feel more and more comfortable with that possibility, and it is time for you to think hard about the reasons why.

We in the post-modern West have spent years educating ourselves to believe that all cultures are equally valid - with the possible exception, of course, of our own. We have taken it on faith that to criticize the culture of an indigenous people is obscenely imperialist, paternalist.

In short, we gave you a pass. And we encouraged you to give yourselves one. In respecting you for your steadfastness, we refrained from calling you on your passivity. In accepting and amplifying your contentions as to Israel's acts of wrongdoing, we chose not to hold you accountable for your own, or to explain them away as a function of occupation.

You learned, over time, to hold Israel responsible for the whole of your plight. You learned, over time, to ignore, explain away, blame entirely on Israel, or otherwise deny the ways in which your actions and, in particular, your passivity, have deepened and fostered your misery. You learned to excuse your leaders their corruption, and their policy of foiling Israeli and foreign attempts to improve your conditions. You learned to excuse your Arab brothers their duplicity and their lip service and their exploitation and their cold shoulder and their contempt and their consummate failure to come to your aid.

In the process, you may have grown accustomed to a definition of time, and of indigenous peoples, that bears re-examination. There is, first of all, this:

The Jews are an indigenous people here, no less than you.

The Jews have every right to have a nation here, no less than you.

The Jews are stubborn and proud and fundamentally fierce as hell, no less than you.

You have dismissed the Jews as a foreign influence. You have dismissed their history, waved away their blood and sinew tie to Jerusalem, acted as though they have no business here but evil.

But in the decades you have spent misleading yourself about the true nature of the culture and the origins of the Jews, generation upon generation of Jews has been born here. They are natives. They are not going anywhere. And even the leftists among them are willing to die in defense of staying on this soil.

Worse, perhaps, is the way in which you took deadly aim at the concept of land for peace, and destroyed it, perhaps for all time. Your artful justifications of using Gaza settlement ruins for Qassam launchers wash with no one. You have justified every last claim and prediction of the Israeli right. You have lost immeasurable international support. You are looked upon abroad as polarized to the heart, paralyzed by internal strife, and unable to arrive at, abide by, or implement decisions.

Your unfortunate ally Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rising to your defense, marked the anniversary by telling you that Israel "has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese" and tha "Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken."

Your unfortunate ally Osama Bin Laden told you last week that Israel's 60th anniversary was "evidence that Palestine is our land, and the Israelis are invaders and occupiers who should be fought."

"We will continue, God permitting, the fight against the Israelis and their allies ... and will not give up a single inch of Palestine as long as there is one true Muslim on earth."

What your unfortunate allies are saying is that it is more important to eliminate the Jewish state than it is to create a Palestinian one.

For this entire decade, the Palestinian national movement has acted accordingly. At the same time, it has effectively done the bidding of the Israeli right, doing everything in its power to raise the status of the settlers from an unruly, unfocused, marginalized, declining entity to that of a prophetic force.

Thanks in no small part to you, the settlement movement is flourishing as never before, confident that your rockets and your rhetoric will see to it that, as the years and generations pass, the settlers will come to be seen as, yes, indigenous.

The settlers will never be able to repay their debt to you.

You may have noted that in the wake of the second intifada, hundreds of suicide bombings in Israel's main cities, and thousands of Qassams, mortar shells and Katyushas, the Israeli left is furious with you, the Israeli center wants never to hear from you again, and only the Israeli right is delighted with the decisions you have made and the actions you have undertaken.

You may conclude from this that the left were untrustworthy to begin with, and all Israelis are the same.

Or you might think twice.

True, Israel was once isolated, stigmatized, universally condemned, boycotted. But your actions, and those of Bin Laden and Iran, have effectively welcomed Israel into the good graces of a range of countries which have begun to think twice about you. And have ceased to care about you. No country in the world - Israel included - has cried wolf more often in the past than you have. Now, when your distress is truly worse than ever, the cry has fallen on deaf - or hostile - ears.

We in the media coddled you, supported you, cast you as the noble underdog. In response, you decided that the Jews control the media, take Israel's side, slander the cause of Palestine.

Look again.

Your celebration of terror has alienated many of your closest friends.

You did this. You. No one else. You have convinced exactly those Israelis who were willing to trade the West Bank for peace, that this would be a literally fatal error.

Last month, as if to remove the remainder of doubt, the veteran Palestinian Authority Representative in Lebanon, Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, told a Lebanese television station, "Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine."

You owe your children more than this. You owe your children more than pipedreams, nightmares, threats and delusions. You owe them more than victim status. You owe your children, and theirs, more than a culture of failure and passivity and graft and violence and loss. You owe your children and theirs - and ours - an honest search for peace.

Or would you rather that I simply shut up? Just the rantings of
another untrustworthy Jew? Still want to believe you did everything
right? Still want to believe that your few friends remaining in the
Western left are more than just powerless cranks? Still want to
believe that if you hold out long enough, everything will come your
way?

As you wish.

Perhaps regrettably for both sides, we can wait.


_______________


Previous blogs:


We owe the Palestinians a state
Sixty years of Nakba, 60 years of nothing
Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism
For our worst enemy, Hamas, just two words
The New 12 Tribes of Israel
A place at the table
Bookmark to del.icio.us  
 
Terrorist donuts
U.S. Arabs irate over criticism of celebrity cook's kaffiyeh.
All the way to hell
Rosner's blog: It's Obama's good intentions that pro-Israel activists fear.
  1.   Predictable, Perennial "Even Handedness" 16:23  |  dyinglikeflies 20/05/08
  2.   #Clckfool,Lakshmi ,Durson,Indrayaya,Dutch,and some others. (1) 16:40  |  Jan Vlaming 20/05/08
  3.   #Clckfool,Lakshmi ,Durson,Indrayaya,Dutch,and some others. (2) 16:41  |  Jan Vlaming 20/05/08
  4.   Mr. Burston 17:40  |  a wandering Jew 20/05/08
  5.   Brilliant 18:17  |  Choni Davidowitz 20/05/08
  6.   Invitation Accepted #1 19:02  |  Knott Bushman 20/05/08
  7.   No 6 Knott Bushman 19:39  |  a wandering Jew 20/05/08
  8.   "Or would you rather that I simply shut up?" 20:09  |  Yisrael 20/05/08
  9.   #6-Here the Palestinians are settlers too 20:26  |  dyinglikeflies 20/05/08
  10.   Wow,slowly but surely reality hits Burstein hard between the eyes 20:42  |  Genuine Tosefta 20/05/08
  11.   Is this Burstein`s Good Bye from Haaretz? 20:44  |  Genuine Tosefta 20/05/08
  12.   Burstein writes as if Arabs were not like this forever 20:51  |  Genuine Tosefta 20/05/08
  13.   The problem is Israeli rejectionism 22:10  |  Ibrahim 20/05/08
  14.   A slap into the face 22:47  |  Zbynek 20/05/08
  15.   #Clckfool,Lakshmi ,Durson,Indrayaya,Dutch,and some others. (3) 22:58  |  Jan Vlaming 20/05/08
  16.   Is this a joke? 23:03  |  Jesse 20/05/08
  17.   European Jews are not indigeonous to Palestine 23:42  |  Denise 20/05/08
  18.   Rejecting Quassam Rockets Aimed At Civilians is Not a Problem 00:19  |  JP 21/05/08
  19.   Where`s the oil money? 00:34  |  a wandering Jew 21/05/08
  20.   No Jesse - This no joke at all 00:40  |  Elihu 21/05/08
  21.   "Palestinian" claim on Judea & Samaria is from thin air and I`m . 01:16  |  Chaim 21/05/08
  22.   To Jesse #11 01:25  |  Manu 21/05/08
  23.   to Ibrahim #8 01:30  |  Manu 21/05/08
  24.   Where`s the oil money? 01:56  |  a wandering Jew 21/05/08
  25.   Elihu from Efrat 03:01  |  Jesse 21/05/08
  26.   #17 Denise, Do you also want to burn books? 03:53  |  free thinker 21/05/08
  27.   Burston - patronizing, arrogant, deluded 04:42  |  Grif 21/05/08
  28.   Denise, I am a European Jew and the most secular 05:00  |  Bruce 21/05/08
  29.   Denise, PS 05:04  |  Bruce 21/05/08
  30.   Bradley Burston, I see your "horse is getting tired" 05:07  |  Bruce 21/05/08
  31.   To dyinglikeflies 05:08  |  Daniel 21/05/08
  32.   Ibrahim, who are the loud Palestinians? 05:19  |  Bruce 21/05/08
  33.   In a 100 years the BB descendants would say the same to 06:11  |  Joseph . E 21/05/08
  34.   The louder the Palestinians tell you one thing 07:50  |  x-ray 21/05/08
  35.   `European Jews`? 08:14  |  Margie in Tel Aviv 21/05/08
  36.   LOL 09:06  |  Jack 21/05/08
  37.   Sad But True 10:38  |  ERSB 21/05/08
  38.   Daniel, #31- Sometimes Things Aren`t "Even" 11:07  |  dyinglikeflies 21/05/08
  39.   ERSB and the leftists 11:08  |  Margie in Tel Aviv 21/05/08
  40.   Palestine Fading. 11:30  |  mike davis 21/05/08
  41.   Jessie: It`s not a joke: it`s a tactic #16 (2nd time Haaretz) 11:33  |  Margie in Tel Aviv 21/05/08
  42.   indigenous borned outside? 12:43  |  Manolo 21/05/08
  43.   Brilliant article 12:45  |  ScotGuy 21/05/08
  44.   the oil money paid the gulf war bill 13:08  |  Manolo 21/05/08
  45.   No.44 Manlo---- An Arab Solution, Not Israeli 13:54  |  a wandering Jew 21/05/08
  46.   Well lManolo, none of the Palestinian leaders 14:37  |  bleeeeehhhhhhhhh 21/05/08
  47.   Comparing with the Native Americans 15:25  |  Nabil 21/05/08
  48.   From census came the truth 15:28  |  Manolo peaceful man 21/05/08
  49.   wandering jew, better to still and think 15:48  |  Manolo 21/05/08
  50.   Fatal OMMISSION 15:49  |  B 21/05/08
  51.   Numbers without meaning?? 15:52  |  a wandering Jew 21/05/08
  52.   No. 49 Sorry, i have to make a living. 16:05  |  a wandering Jew 21/05/08
  53.   European Jews 16:14  |  Hardliner 21/05/08
  54.   Accept bantustans ? 16:31  |  Truth 21/05/08
  55.   Cortez from Hamas?? 16:51  |  ScotGuy 21/05/08
  56.   Partial truth 17:35  |  x-ray 21/05/08
  57.   Native Americans 18:11  |  Robert Haymond 21/05/08
  58.   it`s already too late because of the settlers not the palestinian 18:45  |  cristina 21/05/08
  59.   Response to Ibrahim 19:42  |  Israeli 21/05/08
  60.   I have long suspected that Bradley is either bipolar ... 20:04  |  Diane 21/05/08
  61.   finally.... 22:10  |  TAZ 21/05/08
  62.   poster that blame Israel for their problems and the "PALS" 22:15  |  TAZ 21/05/08
  63.   Burston`s changed his tune? 00:06  |  Michael Greeberg 22/05/08
  64.   Cristina it pays to do some research and not to lie 00:11  |  x-ray 22/05/08
  65.   A genuine two-state solution proposal 01:12  |  Manu 22/05/08
  66.   Americas, Australia, NZ, South Africa all have 1-state solutions 01:37  |  US=1 State Solution 22/05/08
  67.   How can Israel be 8 miles wide? Who would ever