Always Someone Else's Fault

It is a very good day, indeed, when someone cuts through the thicket of confusion surrounding a hot-button issue and summarizes it in what Hollywood calls a “high concept.”

Extracting a high concept means boiling the problem down to a single sentence. The sentence should explain the problem, be easy to grasp and should serve to direct debate.

Such is the value I will attribute to a high concept introduced by one Mike Cote, in National Review. His concept involves what we are supposed to call the Palestinian problem. He asserts, with good evidence, that the Palestinian people have been misled by leaders who have failed to take responsibility for their condition and have consistently blamed someone else, the Israelis, first among equals.

If someone else is always to blame, then the sad consequence is that you are declaring yourself to be basically impotent to do anything yourself. Time to stock up on the Prozac.

If someone else is always at fault, if someone else is the only obstacle standing between you and success, you are reduced to extorting favors from other people.

Of course, other countries in the Middle East are not democracies. They are not prospering. They have a per capita GDP that is something like a tenth that of Israel. So, anyone who imagines that the Palestinian people are one free election away from prosperity are seriously deluded.

So, Cote argues that the Palestinian problem is ethical. They believe that when they fail, it is always someone else’s fault. 

If you have a friend who is always blaming others for his misfortune, you will think he is a moral eunuch. You understand that he has no moral character. You will certainly not sympathize with his condition.

The obvious example is that the people of Gaza have received hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. They have not used it to improve living conditions in Gaza. They have done nothing to build a prosperous and functioning society. They have used the money to build terror tunnels and rockets. That is, to kill Jews.

Cote begins with what Palestinians call the nakba, the calamity that was the advent of the state of Israel:

In their telling, the disaster of 1948 simply befell the Palestinian people, with the Jews forcibly evicting them from their land, making them into refugees, and committing war crimes against them. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” speaks to this lack of control. It presents the events of 1948 as fully externally driven, without Palestinian involvement.

As for what really happened, Cote explains it clearly:

The U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created a Jewish state alongside an Arab one in British Mandatory Palestine, was accepted by the Jewish population, even though it would result in a smaller state than initially promised. The Palestinian Arabs, however, refused the partition and launched a war of extermination against the nascent State of Israel. Seven Arab armies invaded alongside local Palestinian Arab forces, seeking to deny any homeland for Jews in the Levant.

Palestinian Arab leaders were so confident in their eventual success that they pushed for Arab inhabitants of the area to leave their homes to simplify the military operation. Many did so. To give their people motivation to evacuate, the leadership exaggerated battles like Deir Yassin into so-called massacres and demonized the Jewish people. A glorious Arab triumph would soon allow them to return to their homes. Yet many of those who left would later come to regret it, as the Jewish forces emerged victorious. Originally, the term nakba was used to lament this defeat — it described the Arabs’ own ignominious military failure — but it morphed into its current meaning in the 1990s as part of the denial-of-agency strategy. 

As for the notion that Palestinians are perpetual refugees, Cote easily dismisses it:

The families that left during 1948 were made into refugees by the war. This was not at all uncommon for the period, with large-scale population transfers occurring in East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Eastern Europe — as well as the mass ethnic cleansing of Jews across the Middle East. None of those peoples were turned into permanent refugees, but the Palestinians claimed special status, seeking a bogus “right of return” to the homes they fled. This unique status earns the Palestinians a large number of extraordinary benefits. The U.N. has a special agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), to provide these forever refugees with significant benefits meant to entrench the idea that the Palestinians are not the authors of their own fate.

Palestinians have settled around the Arab world, where they have no real rights, not to vote, not to speak freely:

For the past 75 years, Palestinians have lived in segregated ghettos around the Arab world. In Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere, they are not citizens and have no political rights, even after decades of residence. This clearly seems suboptimal, so why would Palestinian leaders choose this fate for their charges? The answer is simple: It allows them to garner undue international sympathy and blame Israel for the predicament they put themselves in.

Why do these people insist on being considered the world’s charity case? And why does so much of the world comply?

The Palestinian people, en masse, have embraced a near-religious devotion to the idea that they will be able to recapture the status quo ante bellum of 1948, returning to their homes and undoing the State of Israel. One would think that living in long-term refugee camps would be a miserable plight, but these are not the tent cities that the term conjures up in the mind’s eye. They are large-scale, concrete apartment blocks that look no different from any other residential neighborhoods of the region. And they’re paid for by international relief dollars. That enormous flow of funds through the United Nations and its NGO partners enriches the Palestinian leadership through corruption, provides jobs for large swaths of Palestinian society, and funds the terrorism meant to destroy Israel. It pays the families of terrorists, provides construction dollars for the building of tunnel networks, and funds salaries for Hamas cadres. 

Obviously, the world that Palestinians abandoned in 1948 no longer exists. They certainly have no right to occupy or to confiscate the world that Israelis built.

Finally, as to the blockade of Gaza that supposedly was the casus belli of the October 7 massacre, Cote notes:

The pre-war blockade of Gaza is presented as a cause of the conflict and is ascribed entirely to uncontrollable outside powers: imposed by Israel for no reason having to do with Palestinians’ own actions, an arbitrary and capricious exercise of oppressive power against a helpless people. In reality, the limitation of supplies into the Hamas enclave was imposed because of chronic terrorist rocket barrages and the importation of weapons and military components from Iran and other malign actors. And it must be remembered that Egypt, which also shares a border with Gaza, imposed its own blockade in 2013 — a cordon sanitaire intended to reduce weapons smuggling and prevent Hamas-linked terror attacks in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

He concludes:

Blaming everything on external forces outside of their control has created a version of learned helplessness among the Palestinian population, one that speaks poorly of their ability to run a successful nation-state. Combining that victimhood mentality and repudiation of control with the widespread approval of terrorist violence is hardly a recipe for peaceful self-determination.

This applies, nicely, to a multitude of life situations. If you think that whenever something goes wrong, it is always someone else’s fault, you are declaring yourself to be incompetent and are consigning yourself to permanent failure. If you have a friend or a neighbor who thinks such thoughts you do best to marginalize him.

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