What can we conclude from the dozen interviews with Palestinians in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem that we posted yesterday? First, of the total of sixteen Palestinians interviewed in twelve separate interviews, only one attempts to name, unaided, a single important Palestinian in the past – that is, someone who lived before 1900. That person, Interviewee #4, having given it some thought, finally offers as an answer “Salah al-Din,” that is Saladin, because he “conquered Jerusalem,” so, he assumes, must have been a Palestinian. But Salah al-Din, or Saladin, was not a Palestinian, not even an Arab, but a Kurd. Another interviewee, #9, appears stumped by the question about naming an important Palestinian in the past, until the interviewer prompts him: “What about Jesus? Wasn’t Jesus a Palestinian?” Yes, he agrees, relieved to be supplied with a name. “Jesus, yes, a Palestinian.”
The total inability to name a “famous Palestinian from before 1900” (I’m not counting Saladin or Jesus, because one was a Kurd and the other a Jew) does not faze any of these Palestinians. They all remain convinced that such people exist; it’s just that Mnemosyne, that trickster, has failed them: “I’ve forgotten” or “I can’t remember just now” or “I don’t know” or “I’m sorry, I don’t remember, they don’t teach us much,” or in several cases, a hopeless blank stare of invincible ignorance. None shows a glimmer of embarrassment about not being able to name a single Palestinian from the past. They don’t dare to admit to themselves that perhaps they can’t think of any famous Palestinians before 1900 because there were none — the “Palestinian people” were not invented until the 1960s.
Who do they name as important Palestinians today? In seven of the twelve interviews, Yasser Arafat is mentioned — sometimes by his kunya and nom de guerre Abu Ammar — far more often than everyone else. No other Palestinian is mentioned more than thrice. And in fact, Yasser Arafat was an Egyptian by birth. But let’s leave that aside, and pretend to believe that he was a Palestinian. Among those interviewed at random, when Arafat is mentioned, it is without much enthusiasm, just a question of giving him his due because he was sole leader of the Palestinians for 35 years, from 1969 to 2004. Perhaps the news published in the West about Arafat’s colossal corruption – at his death he was said to be worth between one and two billion dollars – has filtered down to the Palestinians and dampened whatever support for him they may once have exhibited. There is also the question of his sexual proclivities, with stories circulating about Arafat’s sexual activities with young boys and bodyguards. His late-in-life lavender marriage to Suha fooled no one.
Mahmoud Abbas, the current head of the PA, is mentioned as an “important Palestinian” only once in the twelve interviews, despite having been the leader of the PA for almost 20 years. That is testimony to his deep unpopularity; in recent polls, almost 80% of Palestinians have said they want Abbas to resign.
Mentioned more often than Mahmoud Abbas in these interviews is the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the co-founder of the terror group Hamas. He is cited in three of the interviews. Though described often, and misleadingly, as only the “spiritual leader” of Hamas, Ahmad Yassin was responsible for encouraging, and in some cases ordering, suicide bombings of Israeli civilians. That is why Israel assassinated him in 2004. His appearance in three of the interviews – more than anyone except Arafat — gives some idea of his relative popularity among Palestinians. They like him not despite, but because, he was a terrorist.
Mahmoud Darwish is mentioned twice. He was a poet and at the same time a propagandist for the Palestinian cause – his poetry so often veered into outright propaganda — and to judge by the versions of his poetry available in English, exceedingly banal as well. Here are some of those banalities presented as profundities: “A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.” “Poetry and beauty are always making peace.” “Without hope, we are lost.” “And I tell myself a moon will rise from the darkness.” “Palestinian people are in love with life.” In short, his writing is spiritual uplift for high schoolers, a cross between Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. But he seems to be the most lauded poet, apparently, that the Palestinians have managed to produce. Given the nonsense and lies that are the Palestinians’ daily fare from their despotic, thieving, and violent leaders, it would be unreasonable to expect better poets to have emerged from that dismal swamp and slough of despond.
Ghassan Kanafani was mentioned by one interviewer. Kanafani was a novelist, but that is not his claim to fame. He was also a member of the PFLP, and had been linked to the three Japanese Red Army terrorists who carried out the attack on the Lod Airport on May 30, 1972, in which 26 people were killed. A photograph circulated soon after, showing him with one of the Japanese killers just before the attack; that helped to seal his fate. Five weeks later, on July 8, when he turned on the ignition, Kanafani’s car blew up in Beirut. And that was the well-deserved end of one terrorist. Did the young girl who mentioned him smilingly know of the extent of his involvement with terror attacks on civilians? I suspect she did, and that may have been the very reason, rather than his novels, that she named him.
Haj Amin el-Husseini is mentioned by two of those interviewed. The Mufti of Jerusalem, he was the leader of the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine from the 1920s to the late 1940s. He is most famous for his pro-Nazi activities. He spent the war years in Berlin, where he met Hitler, offering the cowlicked madman his encouragement for the Endlösung (Final Solution), and helped raise three companies of Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen-SS. He is said to have visited Auschwitz at the invitation of, and accompanied by, his friend Heinrich Himmler; it must have been a satisfying sight for both of them. He just barely escaped being tried as a war criminal by the Allies; caught by the French in Berlin, he managed to escape to Egypt in 1946, like dozens of other Nazi war criminals who found refuge to Arab lands. Yet none of this unsavory history made a dent, it seems, on the two Palestinian interviewees — men in their forties – who named him as an important, and presumably admirable, Palestinian.
Finally, we have four Palestinians who are mentioned once, but what a literal Murderer’s Row they are: Marwan Barghouti for Interviewee #11, and for Interviewee #8, “Abd al Qader el Husseini was good, Izz Ad-Din Al -Qassem was good. Abu Jihad (Khalil Al-Wazir) was good.”
Marwan Barghouti is now serving five life terms in an Israeli prison for killing Israeli civilians as the head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. He not only planned terror attacks from afar, but participated directly in several of them. He is one of the worst terrorists whom Israel has yet captured alive. This is the arch-criminal named as an “important Palestinian” by the middle-aged woman interviewed in Ramallah.
Abd al-Qader el-Husseini was an Arab military leader in Jerusalem during the 1948 war. But before that war, he had lived in Iraq, where he supported the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali. After the British overthrew Rashid Ali’s rule, Abd al-Qader el Husseini went to Nazi Germany, where he received further military training from the Nazis, who were always happy to help prepare Arab brothers for their role in destroying the Jews of Palestine. While in Berlin, he may have met – it’s unclear – Hitler’s friend Haj Amin el-Husseini. This is the man whom Interviewee #11 mentioned as a Palestinian who was “good.”
Izz Ad- Din Al-Qassem was another unsavory Palestinian described as “good” by Interviewee #8. For many years, he was a close friend of the pro-Nazi Haj Amin El-Husseini. Having fought previously in Syria and Libya, Al-Qassem arrived in Palestine to help organize several thousand Arab fighters into cells of five men apiece, and trained them to attack both Jewish civilians and British soldiers. War was his element. In 1935, after Qassem’s men had murdered a British soldier, a manhunt ensued and Qassem was killed in a shootout with British soldiers. The forces he had organized continued to exist, and after his death continued to increase in size and violence; he is often given credit by the Arabs as the true instigator of the Arab Revolt that lasted from 1936 to 1939. Al-Qassem saw no moral difference between attacking well-armed British soldiers and unarmed, defenseless Jewish farmers. Yet that does not trouble many Palestinians, and certainly the interviewee #8 who named Al-Qassem in a short list of the Palestinians he described as “good” had no qualms.
Finally, Interviewee #8 names Abu Jihad (Khalil Al-Wazir) as an important Palestinian who was “good.” Abu Jihad was an arch-terrorist, first with Fatah, and then with the PLO. He accompanied Yasser Arafat when he was forced out of Jordan, to Beirut, and then again, after the Israeli assault on the PLO in Beirut in 1982, he stuck with Arafat when the PLO leader fled Beirut for Tunis. He was responsible for many of the most deadly attacks on Israelis. He planned the Savoy Hotel attack in 1975, in which eight Fatah militants raided and took civilian hostages in the hotel, finally killing eight of them, as well as three Israeli soldiers. The Coastal Road massacre, in March 1978 – the worst terror attack in Israel’s history — was also planned by Abu Jihad. In this attack, six Fatah members hijacked a bus and killed 35 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. Other attacks he was implicated in include the 1974 Nahariya attack, the Zion Square refrigerator bombing, and the 1980 Hebron attack. For all of these attacks, and many more during the First Intifada, the Israelis decided to assassinate him in Tunis. And so they did.
With the exception of Mahmoud Darwish, every single Palestinian mentioned by these sixteen Palestinians was, or is, a creature of violence and terrorism. I include Mahmoud Abbas because of his steadfast support for terrorists through his “Pay-For-Slay” program. And even his Prime Minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, appears prepared to keep that program going.
Is there not a single scientist, doctor, human rights lawyer, musician, painter, philosopher, scholar, or writer (one who rejects, bien entendu, the propagandistic littérature engagée of Mahmoud Darwish), among recent or past Palestinians, who might have been named?
Apparently not. Think about that.
FYI says
We can conclude that muslim Palestinians do not know that {or choose to ignore the fact that}allah CONFIRMS the right of the Jews to dwell in Israel:so they disagree with allah.
“Go into the land that allah has ordained for you”
koran 5:21
hizbollah{“the party of allah”}too seem to be acting in opposition to allah.
Why seek to destroy Israel when allah CONFIRMS Israel has been ordained for the Jews and so they have the RIGHT to dwell in the Holy Land?
allah AGREES that Israel is ordained for the Jews!
Logic and islam:separated at birth.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Maybe instead of Jesus, they could have named that fake prophet “Isa”. The guy who was never crucified, and who will return during end times to destroy all crosses & massacre or convert all Christians to islam
I’m sure that the sunnah probably places “Isa” in “Palestine”, doesn’t it? Anybody know?
FYI says
.And ALL pigs will die.No pig will be safe.Pigs will become extinct.
Jesus {the muslim version} will return to,.
..”break the cross and KILL ALL THE PIGS”
Sahih Al Bukhari vol 4 book 60 no 3448
“Jesus Christ was a muslim”
The muslims
“We JEWS know who we worship..”
Jesus Christ{John 4 v 22}
And Jesus HAS to be a JEW because” it is from the JEWS that salvation comes”
How could Jesus be a muslim?Ridiculous!
Yeah I’m with Jewish Jesus here.
OLD GUY says
You can’t remember what’s not there.