I’ve been writing plenty about the war in Gaza. I may have lost the argument, as well as a friend or two in the process. Needless to say, there were no winners in the Gaza war. This was a losers only war. Most wars are. I realized, during and after the war, that no matter how just the cause is, the media will always hand the trophy to the side which can deliver more dead children, more burned houses, more civilian infrastructure damage. The media does not care, nor should it, that the battlegrounds were chosen, purposely, within a densely populated are. That children and women were used intentionally as human shields. The media did not care that the so called “democratically elected” leaders of the poor Gazans, chose to flee the battles, and that the poor civilians were left, with their heavily booby-trapped homes, for dead, forced to guard Hamas’ arms and explosives with their lives.
Of course, the above is expected from an Israeli. But is it possible that Palestinians are seeing a similar thing? Is it possible that the understanding that the Jihad, with all its romanticism, longing, and self-proclaimed justice, is bound to deliver nothing more than suffering and more suffering to the Palestinians? Well, surprisingly, this is indeed what I found (http://www.factsandlogic.org/hotline_archive/flame_hotline_020309.html). The title is original. But I must disagree. We’ve all lost. Many Israelis are starting to lose hope. I’m sure that many Palestinians feels the same. Can it change?
The War with Israel Is Over — and They Won
By Youssef Ibrahim, Jewish World Review, January 16, 2009 (An original version of this article appeared in The New York Sun in 2006)
To my Arab brothers:
Now let’s finally move forward. With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few years ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:
Dear Palestinian Arab brethren: The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children. We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the “eternal struggle” with Israel. Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years.
Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness. At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn’t going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa , Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation.
Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.
In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day. What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world’s have-nots? We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.
Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.
Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab. Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods – more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives—while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.
The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?
Another unexpected opinion was of Adel Emam, a prominent Egyptian actor.
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1230733174299).
Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury. The poor Gazans had a golden opportunity to rid themselves of the cruel Hamas administration and government. A government which plants hatred and harvests hostility. You, yes you, with the ridiculous organization called the UN at your head, deprived them of it. Well done. (Speaking of the ridiculous organization called the United Nations, you all should be aware that 1. it admitted that nobody was killed in the Israeli bombing of the UNRWA school in Gaza, and 2. Hamas had returned all the food and supplies it had stolen from UNRWA, and now UNRWA is back into distributing food to the needed).
[...] The media did not care that the so called “democratically elected” leaders of the poor Gazans, chose to flee the battles, and that the poor civilians were left, with their heavily booby-trapped homes, for dead, forced to guard Hamas ’ …Continue [...]