Dupe No More

In Hebrew, there are several words that simply don’t translate well into English. One of those words is “fryer.” No, it’s not a kitchen appliance or a small chicken. The best English definition would probably be “sucker” – a patsy who’s been fooled into doing something in conflict with their own interests. But sucker is just not strong enough a word. A “fryer” is an individual who was not tricked yet allowed others to get ahead at their expense. This patsy is aware of the process, making matters worse and much more humiliating.
Jeremy Ruden, The Jerusalem Post

There you have it. Jews have been imposed upon, tricked, done ill by, made miserable through others imposing upon one's good nature; someone making the assumption that they can further their own interests by imposing on yours, and assuming further that you're too stupid to understand and wouldn't mind even if you did twig to what was happening; that you'd become a mark. Of course the origins of unwillingness to be once more put upon, to put it mildly, has a long history.

And very little of that history is quite as banal or as harmless as someone persuading you to allow them to slip into the supermarket line in front of you to get to the cash desk quicker, telling you that they've only a few items, and when you acquiesce, wheels a shopping cart brimming to overflowing regally past you with your own plentiful purchases placed in waiting mode. For Jews, history imposed huge penalties: slanderous accusations, anti-Semitic attacks, bloody slaughters, pogroms, death camps, the Holocaust.

It's as though Jews in Israel - with the deathly vision of the Holocaust augmented by the reality of being surrounded by nations that would prefer to push the country and its inhabitants into the sea rather than acquiesce to having a Jewish state living amongst a Muslim geography ... even if Islam took its origins and precepts largely from Judaism, all the while scorning it and appropriating its most sacred heritage places as their own - inherited a collective memory.

Allowing oneself to be victimized, in ways large or small became a stigmatization of victimhood. Israeli Jews adopted an unspoken but collectively pugnacious covenant among themselves - never again would they be that careless of their human rights that they would neglect to protect themselves against any kind of imposition. A victim never again of someone else's craven misappropriation of their sovereign rights as individuals - as a nation.

Israel's current partner in aggrieved entitlements, its self-appointed antagonist, the Palestinian Arabs, largely Egyptian and Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian in origin but more latterly claiming themselves to be cohesively Palestinian, don't much mind playing the role of victim. It is a nomenclature mantle that becomes them, and they wear it defiantly, even covetously, for with it came the opportunity for useful manipulation of world sympathy catering to their claims and paying for their upkeep.

Israel had fond wishes of getting on with life, recovering after a huge swath of its Judaic demographic was consigned to ashes and bleak memory. That it might assume its heritage, its traditional place of residence from which it was time and again throughout history, exiled. The Diaspora found its way to Aliyah, returning from whence they came, joining those who had never left, those who kept their claims unto eternity in their own land alive.

Reality impinged. And it became necessary to negotiate 'in good faith' with a people who bemoaned their fate at having been nudged aside in a geography they once assumed to be theirs, though their national Arab masters never did formally permit their sovereignty over the land. Until the mass arrival of a nation determined to retake what had been theirs. In the beginning, as it were, the UN divided the land, and Israel was overjoyed and accepted, while the Arabs were downcast and rejected.

Since then, in the wake of too many assaults by joined national armies, all of which failed, negotiations that would satisfy the yearning of the Palestinian Arabs, much as the historical longing of the Jews who never failed to intone "...next year in Jerusalem...", one opportunity to settle differences after another was arrived at between the Jewish and the Arab representatives, and all failed. There was faith on one side, and a lack of good faith on the other which saw their glass empty, not half-full.

The PLO's founder Yasser Arafat was given the guarantees he insisted upon to reach a peace accord and a nascent state, and he finally demurred, preferring an Intifada. His successor was, in his turn, offered all of the conditions that he also in his turn as PLO head insisted upon to be fulfilled to his satisfaction, but he too was dissatisfied and walked away from peace, security and the side-by-side, separate and equal state that the international community was assured was all the poor Palestinians ever really wanted.

Except that it was not all that the Palestinian Arabs ever really wanted. And Israel steadfastly refused to be washed into the sea. Now, having triumphed with a nationhood statement at the United Nations, the Palestinians continue to advance their agenda: Mohammed Ishtayeh, top aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, righteously insists Israel may end with "an apartheid style state, similar to the one of former South Africa", if it continued to oppose world opinion, and withdraw all its settlements from the West Bank.

"In the long run, it will be against the Israeli interests because ... we Palestinians will be the majority and will struggle for equality", he said - in English doubtless, for an obviously specific audience; to be repeated with a twist in Arabic for another audience. Is it then apartheid that Bahrain, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia practise, along with other Muslim countries with their secular divides; often the more powerful minority ruling over and disenfranchising the majority?

When Muslim countries deny the Christians among them, or the Sunni the Shiites, and the reverse, with often bloody consequences, aside from equality and citizenship is this apartheid? Mr. Ishtayeh quoted his president, repeating his words as warning. He iterated that Mr. Abbas had stated repeatedly, speaking with Israeli leaders ..."told them frankly there are Palestinians who are now calling for the one-state solution, because they no longer see the two-state solution viable".

Might that have anything to do with the fact that many Palestinians believe what they have been taught since infancy through school textbooks, through public relations and speeches, through television shows instructing them to cling to the PA's encouragement of "struggle" against the "occupier"; that a day will come that their struggle will be rewarded by the disappearance of the Jewish state, when at last Palestinians will return to their homeland.

The fiction that West Bank settlements are a deterrent to settling the issue of achieving peace and a fair demarcation of territory, assigning one to the Israelis, the other to the Palestinians is useful for the Palestinians. They see no utility in the efficacy of trading land, to themselves absorb the geography within Israel where Arabs dominate, and accepting the reverse for Israel. For they believe that time is on their side, and in time Israel will be diminished and finally disappear.

Israel has become familiar with the ploys and the disingenuous quasi-negotiations, and the demands and the righteousness of victims who bask in their state of having been wronged. Israel knows all about being wronged, about relinquishing the designation of victim, and assuming self-responsibility; it has no wish to continue being duped and duped again.