A ballad for Saturday

From Victor Davis Hanson. Edits mine.

Major barbaric attacks by Arabs against Israeli civilians follow a predictable cycle. The most animalistic of all attacks, on 10/7/23, reset the cycle. Following an attack, there is overt or covert jubilation across the left-wing, Islamophilic world at the murder of Jews. That is followed by a refractory period of relative quiet, which in turn is followed by the ringing cry that it is high time for the victimized, dispossessed Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria to have a state of their own. That is the stage of the cycle we are in now.    

There are two insurmountable psychological reasons those Arab groups have no path to stable, democratic statehood. The first is widely understood. The Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria have never wanted to be a sovereign state. Giving the world a pretext to hate and murder Jews has been a well-paid occupation for them. Prior to 2023, Gazans enjoyed a comfortable, economically secure beach lifestyle. Virtually no one (.2%) lived in tents. First-cousin marriages made dating a breeze. They enjoyed an astronomical birthrate, and the thugocrat enforcers, Hamas, were quite satisfactory to them. That lifestyle is being replenished by the current fraud of peace. 

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In the Hebrew Bible, the word “hamas” means violence, cruelty, or injustice. In Arabic, Hamas is said to be an acronym for Islamic Resistance. Either way, the well-fed militia that the Arabs elected 20 years ago was a coiled cobra digging its nest and waiting to strike Israel, not a functional government. Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria have shown no inclination to give up the profitable solidarity of obsessive hate, terrorism, and attacks against Israel to become a self-supporting democracy. 

But there’s another, more profound reason why the renewed clamor for the “two-state solution” is a ruse. That reason is harder to see because it is the forest of Islam, not the trees of individual Islamic people. No overwhelmingly Islamic nation on earth has achieved the freedoms and opportunities of the modern democratic state. Many Islamic states cannot be called states at all. They are ongoing conflict zones which convulse into new illegitimate rulerships every few years. Even the more stable states tend to be so repressive they can’t be considered modern nation-states.

On the deepest level, the Arab rulers pay lavishly for death to Israel so they can say: “Look at the evil Jews; don’t look at the evils we commit.”  The Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria have submitted to the typical autocratic, murderous, repressive government which characterizes 90%+ of Islamic nations. They have not established a constitutional democracy because their religion has yet to support the moral or philosophical framework of self-determination and unalienable rights necessary to maintain such governance. No predominantly Islamic people have achieved a stable system of government directed by the consent of the governed.

The main difference between “Palestinians” and the repressive, often violent governments which are normal for overwhelmingly Islamic nations is that the former have accepted captivity by other Arab nations and ongoing accommodation of terroristic criminality in exchange for permanent material support.