The Foundation of Palestinian Victimhood

Someone once called me as a racist when I observed that Palestinians bring every misfortune upon themselves. By that I did not mean there was something intrinsically defective about Palestinians that brings about their suffering. I meant something very different.

I will start with this truism:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Most people eventually recognize when certain patterns of behavior consistently lead to failure and suffering. Rational actors adjust their behavior in pursuit of better outcomes. The tragedy for Palestinians and the victims of their violent actions, is that they have repeatedly chosen the opposite course.

I trace the history of Palestinian suffering and their current stateless condition to a single source, namely, remarkably poor leadership. The instigator of the violent relationship between Palestinians and Jews was Hassan Amin al-Husseini who was perhaps the most influential and powerful Palestinian leader during the period between World War I and the end of World War II. As a member of the most politically connected Arab family in Palestine, the British appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. He then became the supreme leader of the Palestinian Arabs with his appointment as President of the Supreme Muslim Council, effectively making him the dominant political and religious figure among Palestinian Arabs.

After World War I, nationalist movements emerged throughout the Levant, including Jewish and Palestinian. To the extent coexistence was ever possible, and by many accounts it was, Husseini dedicated himself to ensuring that coexistence would fail, using anti-Jewish sentiment in Islamic texts to incite anger among the Arab population encouraging violence against Jews.

The Spring of 1920 saw the first pogrom by Arabs against the Jews of Jerusalem.

The attitude promoted among the Palestinian Arabs is exemplified by this statement by then prominent pan Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi (who secretly acted as a broker on land sales to Jews):

“[W]e will not rest until Palestine is placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country. We will finish them off one by one: if not in a month, then in a year, in not a year, then in ten years. But our goal will be achieved, and there is nothing that can prevent us from achieving it slowly but surely.[1]”

But here we are a century later, with the Palestinians no closer to their goal, and in fact further from it than ever before. Yet the underlying rejectionist mentality continues to shape Palestinian politics. Time and again, Palestinian leadership has pursued the elimination of Jewish sovereignty rather than the construction of a viable Palestinian state despite the fact that it becomes increasingly unlikely with every defeat.

The Mufti focused his attention on convincing the Arab public that the Jews had designs on Al Aqsa Mosque with the intention of rebuilding the third temple there. This libel sparked the well-known massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929 which ended the Jewish community that had existed there for centuries.

In 1935, the British killed Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (the namesake of the Hamas military wing that led the October 7 attacks) a militant anti-Zionist preacher. This event triggered a significant uprising among the Palestinian Arabs beginning in 1936 and lasting until 1939. What came to be known as the “Great Arab Revolt” started with grassroots general strikes and ultimately involved violent attacks against the British and Jews.

At first these violent tactics seemed to work. The British responded to Arab violence against Jews by sharply limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine in an attempt to appease Palestinian leadership (a losing strategy for which they became well known). In response to the organized violence, the Jews formed their own militia known as the Haganah which defended against continued attacks and ultimately became the Israel Defense Force. In addition to preparing militarily, the Jews continued to focus on building the economy and international diplomacy.

As it became apparent that the Jews and the Arabs would not be able to share the same land, the Peel Commission adopted a recommendation to partition the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab state would have occupied 80% of what remained of Palestine (after the creation of Transjordan in the territory east of the Jordan River) with a Jewish state in most of the remainder, and with Jerusalem and Bethlehem to remain under the British mandate.

The Jews reluctantly accepted the plan. The Arabs rejected it outright. The Mufti demanded the abandonment of the plan to create a Jewish national home in any part of Palestine, the immediate and complete cessation of Jewish immigration, a halt to land sales to Jews and the creation of a single Arab state under Muslim rule where Jews would remain a minority. During the hearings before the Peel Commission, Lord Peel asked whether the new Arab state would be able to assimilate the 400,000 Jews then living in Palestine.

The Mufti responded in the negative.

“Some of them would have to be removed by a process kindly or painful as the case may be?” asked Lord Peel. The Mufti responded that “[w]e must leave all these things for the future.”

“You complain that there are too many Jews Would they b e safe in an Arab Palestine?” asked Lord Peel. The Mufti responded, “[t]hat would depend on the Arab government.”[2]

This exchange underscored what the Holocaust had revealed. Jews without sovereignty are unsafe. Certainly a Jewish minority in Palestine would have faced enormous threats and violence.

The Mufti’s irrational thinking and lack of concern for the well-being of his constituents resulted in their loss of what could have been an Arab state in substantially all of the available territory with only a token allocation to the Jews. But the Mufti’s uncompromising insistence that the Jews have no sovereignty anywhere in Mandatory Palestine, where it was obvious to the British that Jews would be no safer in Palestine under Muslim rule than they had been in Nazi occupied Europe, had disastrous results.

In yet another effort to appease Arab violence, in 1939, just as Jews were facing annihilation in Europe, the British issued a “white paper” which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, after which no Jewish immigration would be permitted without the Arabs’ consent. Jewish immigration was completely suspended from October 1939 until March 1940, which amounted to a complete repudiation of the mandate. But the Arabs were not satisfied. They demanded the immediate creation of an Arab state and the review of the status of every Jew who had entered Palestine after 1918.

The Mufti spent World War II broadcasting antisemitic propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the Nazi war effort and calling for the murder of Jews wherever they could be found. Another terrible decision. By aligning himself with Hitler, he not only morally disgraced the Palestinian national movement but also alienated potential Western sympathy after the war.

The Palestinians made this same mistake by taking the side of Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. This decision had devastating consequences for the Palestinians in Kuwait who fled or were forced out. (Strange I haven’t heard any condemnations of the mass expulsion).

After World War II with no end to Palestinian rejectionism in sight, the British decided to end the mandate and place the question of Palestine in the hands of the newly created United Nations. Like the Peel Commission before it, the United Nations proposed partitioning the land into two states – one for the Arabs and one for the Jews, but by now the Arabs were offered about 45% of the territory instead of 80%. Again, the Jews accepted the plan, and the Arabs rejected it and launched a war to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state.

Maybe they thought the Jews would not fight back as they largely had not during the 1936-1938 Revolt. But there were mistaken and found a formidable adversary in the Jews who had developed a sophisticated and organized military. Years of institution-building, economic development, and military preparation gave the Jewish forces a decisive advantage. The Arabs had used that time to fight amongst themselves.

In fact, it was at that very point that the Palestinians began to flee Palestine in large numbers. Some were urged by Arab leaders (who believed the Jews would soon be defeated) to leave temporarily so as not to get caught in (or hinder) the fighting. But the largest contingent of Palestinian refugees fled from fear of the advancing Jewish forces.

Had Palestinian leadership accepted partition instead of pursuing war, there would have been an Arab Palestinian state in 1948 alongside Israel. The Palestinian refugee problem would not exist today had the Palestinians made a different choice instead of pursuing the same path that had already failed several times.

By 2000 Palestinian leadership had still not absorbed the lesson of 1948. When Israel offered the Palestinians a state in almost all of the West Bank, with land swaps to compensate for lost territory, Gaza and with a capital in East Jerusalem, they responded by unleashing the Second Intifada, a campaign of suicide bombings and terrorism that devastated both societies and led Israel to construct security barriers and checkpoints. Palestinians and the so-called supporters complain about these incessantly. But they were not a foregone conclusion to this conflict. The Palestinians made a choice to reject statehood and pursue war.

Then came October 7, 2023, perhaps the starkest example of Palestinians bringing troubles on themselves. When Hamas led an attack on southern Israel murdering, raping and taking hostages in an assault that shocked the civilized world, the end result was the almost complete devastation of Gaza and the loss of countless Palestinian lives.

Regardless of what one thinks of the Israeli response to October 7, Palestinian leadership knew or certainly should have known the terrible consequences that would result from their actions. To launch the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust against a militarily superior neighbor and expect anything else was either reckless beyond comprehension or a conscious willingness to sacrifice Palestinian lives for ideological ends.

Some will insist on drawing a sharp distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian population. But Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations are not foreign occupiers; they are composed of Palestinians, including many young men and teenagers recruited from within Palestinian society itself. Nor was October 7 carried out by Hamas alone. Thousands of civilians crossed into Israel alongside the Nukhba forces, participating in looting, kidnappings, and other atrocities.

The world also witnessed crowds of Palestinians jeering and celebrating as Israeli hostages were paraded through Gaza, and families applauding the grotesque spectacle surrounding the return of the bodies of four-year-old Ariel Bibas and ten-month-old Kfir Bibas, innocent children whose murders became symbols of the depravity of that day.

None of this means that every Palestinian bears responsibility for these crimes. But it does mean that the comfortable fiction that October 7 was the work of a handful of isolated extremists cannot withstand scrutiny. The catastrophe that followed was not an unforeseeable tragedy. It was the predictable consequence of decisions made by Palestinian leaders and embraced by the society they represent.

The same pattern appears repeatedly throughout modern history: Palestinian leaders initiate or escalate conflict with Israel, lose, and leave their own population in far worse condition than before.

Let’s be real. If the goal of the Palestinian people is to live in dignity within the borders of their own sovereign state, they have chosen a poor way to achieve that goal as they should know by now will not succeed. Some may call that stupidity. But I don’t think they are stupid. I think that all they want is an absence of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the territory not necessarily a Palestinian state.

In fact, prior to 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, there was little demand for an independent Palestinian state. The central issue is not about Palestinian sovereignty, but rather about the existence of Jewish sovereignty.

If they insist on pursuing a goal that is clearly unattainable, namely the elimination of Jewish sovereignty, Palestinians themselves will continue to bear the heaviest consequences.