Where Hatred Trumps Bread
What does the Palestinian nation offer the world?

BY CYNTHIA OZICK

"...When, some years ago, Golda Meir contentiously
remarked, "There are no Palestinians," she was
historically correct and evolutionally mistaken..

..History, in Benedetto Croce´s formulation, "is
about the positive and not the negative." No one
can refute the truth that the Palestinians have
fashioned a culture peculiarly their own--but one
so steeped in the negative as to have been turned
into a kind of anti-history. In order to deprive
Jews of their patrimony, Palestinians have
fabricated a sectarian narrative alien to
commonplace knowledge. Although the Arab invasion
of Palestine did not occur until the seventh
century, Palestinian Arabs are declared to be,
according to activist Salah Jabr, "the descendants
of civilizations that have lived in this land
since the Stone Age." With equal absurdity, other
such deniers of Jewish patrimony claim a Canaanite
bloodline. By replacing history with fantasy, the
Palestinians have invented a society unlike any
other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared
children unlike any other children, removed from
ordinary norms and behaviors. And they have been
assisted in these deviations by Arab rulers who
for half a century have purposefully and
pitilessly caged and stigmatized them as refugees,
down to the fourth generation. Refugeeism, abetted
also by the United Nations, has itself been joined
to the Palestinian cult of anti-history. A people
respectful of history, including its own above
all, will work to fructify and invigorate life; it
will not debase and vitiate it.

The salient attribute of any culture is
originality and its legacies. Genius, no matter
how rare, is a human universal. It sends into the
world new perception and new experience, inspiring
duplication: Out of Israel came monotheism, out of
Greece philosophy, out of Arab civilization
science and poetry, out of England the Magna
Carta, out of France the Enlightenment. What has
been the genius of Palestinian originality, what
has been the contribution of the evolving culture
of Palestinian sectarianism? On the international
scene: airplane hijackings and the murder of
American diplomats in the 1970s, Olympic
slaughterings and shipboard murders in the 1980s.
And toward the Jews of the Holy Land, beginning in
the 1920s and continuing until this morning,
terror, terror, terror, terror.


But the most ingeniously barbarous Palestinian
societal invention, surpassing any other in
imaginative novelty, is the recruiting of children
to blow themselves up with the aim of destroying
as many Jews as possible in the most crowded sites
accessible. These are not so much acts of
anti-history as they are, remarkably, instances of
anti-instinct.

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