On a reporting trip to Gaza, Amman, and Damascus in 1994, I made a habit of asking Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders whom I met with the following question: Did they think the Jews had a plan to dominate the world? I’ll never forget the enthusiastic answer of a pediatrician named Abdelaziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader, whom I met in his doctor’s office in Gaza. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I have a copy right here.” And he pulled down from a shelf an Arabic-language copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a response I heard again and again.
- Leftist Western academics have played a huge role in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Adopting propaganda devised and spread by the USSR and giving it a scholarly gloss, they helped spread the notion the Israeli Jews are settler-colonialists, like the French in Algeria. Thus, if they just wait out the Israelis and make life painful for them, the Israelis will eventually pack up and leave. The first problem with this is that Israelis have nowhere else to go, there is no France to return to. The even bigger problem is academic theory and so forth aside, Israeli Jews believe that they are living in their homeland, and they have 3000 years of history there to back that up. You would think that academics entranced with standpoint epistemology would recognize this, but they are too trapped in their ideological bubbles. Last weekend was the most painful time in Israeli history, but despite the grief and anger, Israelis are as united and committed to their homeland as ever. The sooner the Palestinian intellectual class accept the reality of the situation, and stop listening to the ranting of the Edward Saids of the world, the sooner that can be peace.
