The Palestinian Revolution's Vision of Darkness
By Avi Davis
August 6, 2002
It should have been no surprise to anyone that among the victims
in Sunday's bus bombing in the Galilee were Arabs. The Galilee's
population is 52% Arab and it is inevitable that any attack on
a bus in that region would have an impact on that population.
So too the destruction in Hebrew University's cafeteria last Wednesday.
A university that proudly boasts a population 15% Arab should
statistically have expected to find Arabs among the dead. It certainly
shouldn't have surprised most Israelis who can now finally appreciate
the true nature of the terrorist campaign they are facing: any
Israeli institution, including the ones that service or care for
Arabs, is a potential target. This would seem to include hospitals,
day care centers, fire stations and welfare organizations. It
goes a long way to answering the question posed by Alistair Goldrein,
a British student studying at the Hebrew University when he asked:
"Why would someone target this university - it is what was best
about Israel."
Why, indeed. The good intentions of liberal institutions or
service organizations are largely irrelevant to the master planners
of Palestinian terrorism. For them the secular education offered
by the Israelis is a trap, designed to goad Arabs from their culture
and shatter Palestinian unity. So too are the hospitals where
world class physicians often sweat to save Arab life. So are the
Israeli human rights groups who actively lobby for their interests
and protection. All of these well intentioned people are regarded
as indistinguishable from other Zionists "occupying" Palestinian
land - a land categorically defined by Hamas as stretching from
the Mediterranean to the Jordan.
The spiral of self deception into which the Palestinians are
rapidly spinning has as its practical source the acceptance by
the international media and European governments that Palestinian
terrorists are freedom fighters no different in nature than the
French resistance during Second World War. But a poorer analogy
could not be imagined. The French resistance, which eventually
unified communists, socialists and nationalists under the banner
of the Forces Francaises de l'interiuer, not only had as its goals
the liberation of German-occupied French territory, but the restoration
of a French democratic republic and the reinstitution of French
law.
Furious debate was entered by members of the resistance on the
nature of that renewed French republic, giving rise to the ideological
rifts that characterize French society to this day. But the important
point is that debate ensued and the unifying theme of that debate
was that only a vigorous democracy could save France from a decent
into renewed authoritarianism or even civil war.
The Palestinians have no such mechanism vouchsafing the progress
and prosperity of their in choate state. There is no visible debate
on the nature of such a state (although there is considerable
tension between the religious and secular in that society); there
are no intellectuals or statesmen who feel free to talk openly
about the challenges of democracy; there is no room for moderates
whose voices are silenced in the popular call for jihad. No, the
Palestinian state-in-making speaks only in the language of hatred.
Today the target is Israel but with the increasingly apparent
failure to achieve any concrete political objective, the rancor
and hatred unleashed by their venomous campaign is likely to turn
inward. The most probable outcome is therefore not victory but
civil war.
But an even graver malady afflicts the Palestinian people. Their
cause has been hi-jacked, not by a resistance front but by revolutionaries.
Hamas, which has stepped into the vacuum left by Arafat's corrupt
Palestinian Authority, does not merely seek to eject what it perceives
as foreign occupation of its land. It seeks no less than the total
transformation of Palestinian society. Its militant Islamist message
resonates as prescriptive change reminiscent of many other historical
revolutionary movements - conceived in high ideals, reverting
to violence and ending in butchery.
So those looking for historical analogies should not waste time
examining France of the 1940s. They should recall France of the
1790s when another revolution, conceived with noble aspirations
reverted to carnage and destroyed itself in a frenzy of blood
letting. That cynical Frenchman Albert Camus once commented that
"every revolutionary ends either as an oppressor or as a heretic."
He might have also added that most die at the hand of their own
people. The leaders of the Palestinian Revolution, wading knee
deep in blood and accustomed only to the language of hate, should
now be put on notice that history is unlikely to make an exception
for any of them. Born in blood, they will likely die in blood.
And no one should be surprised when this revolution begins to
devour its own children.
