#second intifada

Palestinian Christians throwing stones at IOF soldiers while flying a flag bearing the cross of Jerusalem in Bethlehem, Palestine, 2000

"Who authorized you to speak on behalf of [the children of] Gaza? Nobody did. [You're] self proclaimed, just like Mahmoud Abbas, just like Yasser Arafat, just like all the Palestinians who have been feeding on the pain of the Palestinian children. You are a parasite, a bottom-feeder - this is what you are. So before you speak against the prime minister of a democracy and accuse him of being a terrorist, you need to look at yourself in the mirror. You have been supporting Hamas, and it's recorded against you for eternity. So don't play the game now that your fight is for the children in Gaza. This is not your fight. You know who's fighting for the children of Gaza? The IDF, that is kilking Hamas, that is uprooting Hamas so the children of Gaza can have their freedom after 36 years of slavery. Those are the ones who qualify to speak on the topic: not you, sitting [in] your comfort, and you want to have an opinion about it? This is the problem that we are dealing with - scumbags like this."

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On the wall where Mohammed and his father took shelter, graffiti read: "What was taken by force." Land. Lives. Children. Our people are all too familiar with the end of that quote; it is written daily in every step of resistance. What was taken by force, can only be brought back through force.

...Senator, a great many Israelis have been willing over the years to divide this land with the Palestinians, but not because they didn't believe it was part of their historic homeland. Our right to it, they believed, clashed with a more urgent Palestinian right to independence. This was the view of a very large part of the Israeli left back when the left still won elections. That belief eroded only when the Israeli left collapsed as a political force in the wave of 140 suicide bombings that Palestinians call the "Second Intifada." The trouble, senator, our great confusion, lies in the fact that the Israeli left's willingness to compromise is understood by a great many Israelis, include ex-leftists, to have been the cause of that wave of brutality. We learned about this connection from Palestinians themselves. Palestinian ideological elites, in countless explicit, public statements, explained to their people that the willingness of many Israelis to compromise over what they claim as their homeland was proof that the Jews secretly knew the land wasn't truly and authentically theirs, and therefore would abandon it if faced with sufficient bloodshed and brutality. This argument is still very widely held and constantly repeated among Palestinian ideological elites. Just dip a toe into pro-Palestinian Twitter for two minutes and you'll see it everywhere, especially in Arabic: The idea that the Jews are something artificial, that their identity is fake and thin, that their attachment to the land is conditional and easily broken. The willingness to compromise, in other words, has long served as evidence to Hamas and its ilk that the destruction of Israel was possible - and if it is possible, Hamas argues, it is immoral not to reach for it. Senator, on the altar of this theory of us, Hamas and others have spent nearly four decades going to war against every peace attempt and rejected and still reject, openly and explicitly, any permanent compromise. And if you understood this thorny little catch-22 of the Palestinian political imagination, if you actually listened to Palestinian discourse rather than the apologia of diaspora elites and their progressive "allies," you'd be less interested in gotcha questions and more keen on separating the Palestinian cause from its catastrophically self-destructive standard-bearers. Study the bloody, tragic tale of the collapse of the Israeli left, senator, and you will understand why the Palestinian national movement keeps destroying itself.

May their memories be a blessing.

Sorry, not sorry.