Al Jazeera somehow got its hands on thousands of pages of documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Reports about the “Palestine Papers” paint a disturbing picture. On the Israeli side, it appears that Israeli negotiators did not respond positively when the Palestinians made reasonable proposals. If this is true, it is a scandal, and Israelis and supporters of Israel are entitled to demand to know the reason why.
On the Palestinian side, those same reasonable proposals—sharing Jerusalem, admitting that Palestinian “refugees” should settle in the Palestinian state, not in Israel—are considered a betrayal of the Palestinian “cause.” The fury on the Palestinian “street” again proves that too many Palestinians don’t want their own state if it means accepting a neighboring Jewish state.
Which brings us to Saree Makdisi. Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He writes commentaries on Israel and the Palestinians for the Los Angeles Times, and his piece on January 27, “The Palestinian people betrayed,”is a typical specimen. He’s a skillful writer, in the sense that he uses emotive words with negative connotations to consistently shape the reader’s reaction. But he’s not an admirable writer, because he isn’t very honest.
For example, Makdisi claims in his first paragraph that “Palestinians and anyone interested in the cause of justice” should abandon negotiations. What would be the alternative to negotiations? We don’t learn the answer until the final paragraph: the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. He claims BDS will bring Israelis to their senses, as it did the Afrikaners of South Africa.
One might think that Makdisi is advocating Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. But what he doesn’t tell the reader is that the BDS movement stands solidly behind the Palestinian “right of return.” Since this “right” would apply to millions of descendants of genuine refugees who are not themselves refugees, the “right of return” is intended as a method of eliminating Israel non-militarily, by demographically destroying its Jewish character.
Makdisi inadvertently confirms this with his furious contempt for the Palestinian negotiators’ “willing[ness] to bargain away the right that stands at the very heart of the Palestinian struggle . . . the right of return of Palestinians to the homes from which they were forced during the creation of Israel in 1948.”
Leave aside the fact that third- and fourth-generation Palestinian exiles cannot “return” to homes they and their parents never saw or inhabited. And leave aside the fact that for the most part the Palestinian Arabs were forced to leave by fellow Arabs, not Israelis—indeed, if the Arabs hadn’t started a genocidal war against the Jews there would have been a Palestinian Arab state since 1948. There is no reason for Palestinian “refugees” to settle in Israel rather than in a Palestinian state, except to eliminate Israel. Makdisi isn’t honest enough to say it outright, but he rejects the “two-state solution” for the “one-state solution,” in which the Jews of Israel lose their sovereignty and live as a minority in an Arab state (which has worked out so well for the Jews in the past).
Another notable aspect of the article is the elaboration of the trope that Jews are “colonists” and Palestinians are “indigenous.” There is no recognition that the Jewish people has lived in the Land of Israel for thousands of years, and no recognition that perhaps the Arabs are the colonists, having conquered the Land in the seventh century. In the long view of history, it’s likely that “colonial” and “indigenous” are not meaningful terms—the point is at least debatable. But Makdisi uses the terms “colonial” and “indigenous” not to convey information, but to short-circuit thinking and arouse emotion.
Another point worth noting. Makdisi reviles Israel’s claim to be a Jewish state as “racist,” another word used to end discussion and rational thought. But there’s a double standard at work here: the Left despises the idea of the “nation-state"—the country with an ethnic basis—and considers it racist by definition, but only if it’s “colonialist” or part of the West. “Indigenous” nation-states are fine. Thus, Italy as an Italian state, Israel as a Jewish state—that’s bad. But Makdisi obviously has no objection to a Palestinian state, although it would equally be a nation-state—the state of the Palestinian people.
Makdisi exemplifies an important facet of the Palestinian problem, and a key to why it’s insoluble in the short term: the rejection by too many Palestinians of any solution in which “peace” is defined as including a safe and secure Jewish state. There is no viable negotiated solution as long as hatred of the Jews and their country means more to the Palestinians than creating their own country.
