Larry Geller retweetledi
As Arabs, our message to the world cannot be restricted to eliciting global sympathy for the children of Gaza. We cannot depict ourselves as helpless children, behind whom we hide our failure to control our Hamas thugs who massacred 1300 non-combatant Israelis. This is a moral failure that the world sees but that we try to hide behind the “rights of the Palestinian people,” rights that none of us are willing to articulate. Free Palestine can mean anything, from an Arab Palestinian state living in peace next to Jewish Israel to an Arab Palestinian state instead of Jewish Israel.
For Arab Israeli peace to happen, and since Palestinians are either children, or Hamas thugs, or useless corrupt Mahmud Silicon-Face Abbas, non-Palestinian Arabs should step up to save the Palestinians from themselves and save the region ongoing sorrow. We, Arabs, have to show the world that we are at peace with the idea of a Jewish state, that we are willing to concede what we believe – rightly or wrongly -- is ours (1948 territory), that we genuinely want bygones to be bygones, without secretly holding grudges and passing them to our children. We must seek a better future for ourselves and our kids, as well as for Israelis and their kids.
The Palestine disaster (nakba) is not a disaster of land loss or military defeat. It is a disaster of absence of leadership that can articulate the Arab alternative to war and death. We ask the world to stop the Israeli war on Hamas, but what do we offer as an alternative to stopping the war? Just let those Hamas thugs who massacred 1300 Israelis get away with their crime (because there is a history of dispute)? Ask Israel to go back to October 6? Knowing that Hamas can break out of the Gaza fence and repeat its massacre any minute? Hamas must go. We Arabs must help get rid of it, and most importantly, we must show that we have a plan for the day after Hamas.
Let’s learn from the mistake of Iraq and Arab Spring countries, that once what we have is gone, what comes next looks worse. Let’s preempt the worse by offering the better.
As long as we, the Arabs, do not have answers to all these questions, the world will manage things without us. It does not matter if all of us, 1.3 billion Muslims, think that Israel is at fault. What matters is global perception, which clearly thinks that Islamist terrorism is the problem, not Israelis dancing at a music festival. And we, the Arabs, are not even talking to the world. We are talking to each other, patting ourselves on the back for being utopian and principled on Palestine, while we are in fact idiotically out of touch with reality. We insist on our backward message, then act surprised why many of our states are failing and why we are migrating in droves.
Please stop treating Palestine like religion, like we have to stick to our principles to win credit in the afterlife and to garner social acceptance among each other (Arabs and/or Muslims). Please think of Palestine like a problem that requires troubleshooting, compromise, pragmatism, and most importantly, looking toward the future, not the past.
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