Israelis And Palestinians: A Tale Of Two Cultures

What intrigues me about the whole Palestine as "confiscated land" mantra is that it was a multi-lateral decision to do so; one of the first (if not the first) mandates of the then-newly formed UN. Prior to Palestinian land being Israeli land, it belonged to the British who wrested it from the Ottoman Turks in the aftermath of WWI. Today's Palestinians always speak of "their land" when it never was a sovereign nation. It was always owned by somebody else, and the people who call themselves Palestinians were the subjects of those foreign occupiers. And here's the big rub: The Palestinians for over a thousand years never seemed to care. It's only when that land was allocated to the Jews that they got their kababs in a twist. And to be certain, if the Palestinians had tried with the Turks the same militant terror tactics they now use in an attempt to establish their own autonomy, the Turks would have slaughtered them with nary a wink's loss of sleep over it. The British had their hands full and were probably happy to leave the area due to escalating fighting between the Jews and Arab Palestinians and attacks by both on the British with regard to each side's interpretation of the League of Nations Mandate, the McMahon Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration.

The Palestinian hatred of the Jews is not blind, ideological, or religious; it's because the Jews are productive. As Jewish settlers moved into the area during the 1920's from Europe and elsewhere, they immediately made the land work for them, cultivating the soil using age-old irrigation techniques, transforming desert into productive olive and fig groves; while the shiftless Palestinians sat by and watched, knowing that all along they could have done the same thing, but for some reason didn't - or couldn't. Now many will say that is because the Palestinians never had the financial backing to do so, unlike the Jews who received financing from Zionists in the US and elsewhere. While that is true to some extent, most Jews came to Palestine with nothing and received little, if any, help from outside Zionist sources. One can go into any "poor" neighborhood in any city in any nation and see that not all the poor people living there live in squalor. Many take pride in what they have and keep a clean house and tidy garden, their children clean and well-mannered. And let's not forget about rich nations like Saudi Arabia who could just have easily aided their Palestinian cousins but didn't; the same wealthy House of Saud that funds global terror and has spawned many of today's terrorists. Surely they cannot claim that they were economically deprived or disenfranchised in any way. So, contrary to the prevailing Marxist "wisdom" of the modern liberal that socio-economic conditions dictate behavior and is the main driver of terrorist and other criminal activity, money has little to do with the two contrasting views of life. It has to do with the values of two different cultures - one that is industrious and productive, having contributed greatly to the advancement of every society in which it has assimilated; that has pride enough in whatever it has to turn lemons into lemonade - the other self-pitying, bitter, and resentful, having contributed nothing to even their own society for over a thousand years since it became the product of a death cult known as islam.

Yes, the Palestinian is bitter and resentful and understandably so. It must be hard to look at a fellow Semite - the Jew, the Israeli cut from the same ethnic cloth being so productive and positive about life - and then looking in the mirror and seeing a miserable failure.