‘Jewish Press’, a New York newspaper, refers to Palestinians as a plague and argues that any attempt by Palestinians to claim their homeland is tantamount to terrorist activity.
In a recent article in the ‘Jewish Press’ journalist Rachel Avraham argues that the Palestinian “philosophy is based on not how to live side by side with Israel”, completely ignoring the fact that Israel has been illegally annexing Palestinian land and that Palestinians are effectively living under an extreme form of apartheid and as such, it is Israel who never had any intention of living side by side with Palestinians.
She then goes on to argue that the Palestinian agenda revolves around “how to establish another Arab state on the ruins of Israel”, again completely striking out from memory that Israel was effectively established on the ruins of Palestine. Avraham warns her readers that the Palestinians “never gave up on their aspirations to return millions of people into Israel.”, as if to suggest that it’s unnatural for people who have been forcibly removed from their lands and placed under military and apartheid occupation to desire to return one day or to expect their occupiers to leave.
She then quotes a so-called Middle East scholar, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, who exclaims “They have never started to teach or to educate their young generation about peace with Israel.” That’s the equivalent of racist white Apartheid South Africans expected black South Africans to teach their kids that they should simply accept white occupation and lump it.
Avraham then proceeds to paint a picture of Israeli benevolence towards occupied Palestinians during the Coronavirus pandemic – as if stopping the spread of the disease wouldn’t have any beneficial consequences for the occupying state and let’s not mention all the times Israel has blocked vital medical supplies, denied access to life saving operations, cut off power and cut off (and sometimes evening poisoned) Palestinian water supplies. According to Avraham, Palestinians should be “grateful for the life-saving assistance”.
Oddly, Avraham then tries to assert that not all Palestinians are unhappy with their lot. She actually claims to have an unnamed “Arab Source” who describes Palestinians as feeling disillusioned and “indifferent towards the P.A., its institutions”. She adds that this includes “the terror groups due to their corruption.” Imagine Hitler arguing the British people are feeling disillusioned by the ineptitude and corruption of the British government and declaring Brits would be a lot better off under German occupation and let’s not ignore the fact that the British people wouldn’t have got a vote on that decision. Of course, neither did the Palestinians!
A sign of Palestinian indifference, she claims, was the poor attendance at this year’s Nakba protests when Palestinians would normally commemorate being driven from their lands. Of course she recognises that social distancing as a result of the pandemic would have made this impossible but then she gloats that even the online event was poorly attended. Protesting online is not the same as an actual protest because you can’t vent your anger directly at the occupation forces and you don’t get to record the protest in images or on video so you have nothing to share to the rest of the world. Also, you have to wonder how likely it is that people living in the deprived occupied territories would have easy access to internet facilities or even to electricity. According to this (I would assert fictional) ‘Arab source’, “Eastern Jerusalemites would prefer to be reigned over by the Israeli civil administration, rather than by a bunch of corrupt officials of their own blood.” So, basically, she’s trying to convince her Jewish readers that things aren’t as awful as the Palestinian ‘propagandists’ would have you believe and that there’s a popular opinion amongst Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid occupation, despite all the killings by the IDF, despite their children being arrested, jailed and even shot, despite the fact that they’ve been kettled into an open air prison and had their water and electricity supplies cut off at regular intervals, despite the fact they’ve had medical supplies cut off and access to vital operations denied, despite the fact they’re regularly attacked by settlers who poison their wells, burn their crops and rip up their olive groves, despite the fact that Israeli forces regularly bulldoze Palestinians houses and even medical centres, despite the fact that they’ve been bombed to within an inch of their lives (more than once) and despite the fact that they’ve been kicked off their own land, there’s all these crazy Palestinians that are happy to put up with all that because their a bit pissed off with the Palestinian authorities and because Mayor Moshe Lion gave out a few food packages in the eastern Jerusalem during the pandemic. Of course the fact that Mayor Lion used it as a photo opportunity isn’t relevant and neither is the fact that an image of him, presenting a food package to a Palestinian couple in East Jerusalem, managed to find it’s way into a propagandist newspaper article in a New York newspaper.
Avraham can’t help but express her hate for Palestinians. It would seem, from this article, in her world, any form of resistance is terrorism and, by that logic, all Palestinians who reject occupation are terrorists. She knows that the majority of Palestinians, if not all, resist the occupation and support the right to return. This is precisely why she describes the ‘problem’ as a “plague” – i.e. something widespread (you wouldn’t refer to a small dissenting minority as a plague after all). Some might think it odd then that Avraham deviates from script in order to assert that there’s some sort of up-swelling of praise for the occupation forces amongst the wider Palestinian population. It’s as if she’s trying to force two completely opposing arguments into occupying the same space. Perhaps the opportunity to embed a little pro-Israel propaganda was too much to resist in the end?
