“Without ‘armed struggle,’” wrote two Palestinian journalists in an essay published in the New Yorker last summer, the Palestinian “national movement had no clear ideology.” Robert Nicholson responds to this observation, taking as an example the case of three men named Jabareen who killed two Israeli policemen in July and were then shot and killed by police:
How could the Jabareens have possibly thought killing Israeli police officers would advance their cause? Didn’t they realize these senseless murders would make Israelis even more vigilant? Didn’t they understand that Palestinian violence has never worked since the time of the British Mandate? Apparently not. But the Jabareens aren’t alone. . . . Palestinian culture gives mythical power to the word shahid (“martyr”), making it impossible to contemplate gritty compromises like the 1947 partition plan and other peace deals. Far better to die in purity.
If martyrdom is the greatest Palestinian virtue, tatbi’a, or normalization, is the greatest Palestinian sin. A normalizer is a Palestinian who accepts Israel, cooperates with Israel, or suggests that Palestinians should get used to a Jewish state living next door. . . . This basic inability to cope with the fact of Israel is a major obstacle that needs to be overcome. . . .
The starkest difference between Israeli and Palestinian political culture is self-criticism. Israelis never stop criticizing each other and their policies; Palestinians almost never do, at least in public. . . .
The current position of the Palestinian Authority is that the future state of Palestine will be free of Jews—Judenrein, as [the Nazis] used to say. This is a position that Christians like me cannot endorse. Jews are an ancient people who belong there as much as [Arabs] do. . . . The real Palestinian martyr will be the one who stands up and delivers this bold message to his people, even if he is killed immediately afterward.
Read more on Providence: https://providencemag.com/2017/11/empires-feeling-fantasy-palestine-israel/