Palestinians must want peace with Israel.
They do not.
Unless of course one means the sort of peace that
prevailed and prevails in traditional Islamic societies, where the
non-Muslims live as low-profile minorities with no political
sovereignty. (The vast majority of Germans, one supposes,
would also have favored peace in 1940 if they could have
gotten it on Hitler's terms.)
The vast majority of Palestinians want to see Israel
destroyed, and support violence against Jews. Once Israel is
destroyed and large portions of its population are killed or
dispersed, no doubt the remainder will be permitted to live as a
minority under conditions resembling those of the Copts in
Egypt or the Armenians and Bahais in Iran. That is the only
peace Arabs support by majorities.
Sweeney was the name of an Irish king who believed he
was a bird and spent his life in treetops. (Really.) The Oslo and
road map peace processes are the direct function of the
Sweeneyization of the political establishment of Israel. Peres
Sweeney and Beilin Sweeney and now Sharon Sweeney
adopted the wishful thinking of American civic religion and
presumed that the vast majority of Palestinians preferred peace
and prosperity to continuing war and violence. They took it as
axiomatic that Palestinians would compromise over land and
sovereignty because, after all, they — the Israelis — were
willing to do so. Their evidence that Palestinians would place
peace above land is that Jews do so. Their belief that economic
prosperity would interest Palestinians more so than irredentist
aggression and terror is that decent, honorable people anywhere
should feel this way.
In short, Oslo is the godchild of King Sweeney taking
over the Israeli political establishment.
These Sweeney weenies are the same people who refuse
to even ponder the possibility that the vast majorities of
Palestinians (and other Arabs) not at all peace-seeking (at least
not when it comes to Israel and the U.S.), are not anti-violence,
are not anti-terror. In other words,
Oslo and the road map are based upon a fundamental denial of
empirical reality. Like the old Peter and Gordon song from the
60's, it is based upon the Sweeneyish assertion that “I don't care
what they say / I won't stay in a world without love.”
And what happens to Sweeneys who live in unlit
corners of the earth without love? They pretend to be birds and
rise above such mundane things as reality to live in treetops of
utopian dreams. Leaving the rest of us to face terror, murder,
violence, Arab fascism, and threats of genocidal extermination.
Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa.
His book ?The Scout? is available at Amazon.com. He can be
contacted at [email protected]