Desperately Dredging Dignity

"When Hamas manages, despite everything, to continue launching missiles at Israel and disrupting normal life there ... this restores [the Palestinian] feeling of human dignity."
Palestinian Authority former official

Here's the difference between us: We are using missile defence to protect our civilians and they're using their civilians to protect their missiles."
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu

Israeli Defence Forces Website

Palestinians are grimly devoted to their liberation from refugee status. They represent the world's largest, most long-lasting group of refugees with untold billions over the decades of funding delivered from the United Nations and the Western world to uphold and sustain their status as refugees. Their Arab and Muslim neighbours will not offer them citizenship with the exception of Jordan which is in effect a Palestinian state, and they grip their refugee status with rage and devotion.

Prepared to surrender it to the oblivion of bitter history if and only if and when and only when it can reclaim the land that Israel now sits upon as their very unchallenged own. Destroy Israel and return the land to the Palestinians who remember it as theirs, though it was never they who ruled it, but Britain and France, then Egypt and Jordan. The original Palestinians were always Jews.

They are devoted to the eradication of the great cancer in their innocent midst; the State of Israel that was created by an error in judgement of the United Nations Security Council and the instant opportunity grasped by the nascent, fledgling state to declare itself yes, a Jewish State, a final and absolute refuge from a world that periodically goes into a state of bloodlust for Jewish lives sent into the oblivion of vitriolic hatred.

So there they are, the two opposites; one struggling to maintain itself in a wide enclave of Arab/Muslim nations declaring Israel and Zionism anathema and monopolistically apartheid in insisting it be recognized as a Jewish homeland, in a geography where no self-respecting Arab country would want to tarnish itself by the presence of Jews, proud of their Arab-only heritage of exclusion once they kicked out the 800,000 Jews that had lived among them for millennia.

And the strategically antagonistic refugees who await the opportunity to obliterate the Jewish state returning what was never theirs to Palestinian rule. Ask the million and more Palestinians with Israeli citizenship if they are prepared to live under Palestinian rule and they hesitate. Hamas, presenting itself as the solution to the problem, does its utmost to deliver the crowning achievement it crows in its charter it is dedicated to delivering; a Middle East sans a Zionist state.

Zion abolished, written out of history by Islamist decree.

But then, it isn't only devout Palestinians, but secular ones living under Palestinian Authority administration, a secular branch of the Arab house of distaste for the presence of Jews. The current fighting spirit of the Palestinians has been proudly aroused with the spectacle of Hamas defying Israeli technical might with their home-made rocketry hoping for a direct hit that will bring jubilation to the Arab streets of Ramallah and Gaza City alike, just as abductions of Jews do.

"When Hamas manages, despite everything, to continue launching missiles at Israel and disrupting normal life there, this restores their feeling of human dignity", explains Jamal Zakout from his position of experience in the Palestinian Authority, as spokesman for former prime minister Salam Fayyad, a man who was involved in the Geneva Initiative to draft an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement; that fabled tease of nowhere-at-any-time.

Palestinians derive their sense of "dignity" from the honour bestowed upon them to destroy any part of Israel, be it a building, a person, or the hope for peace and acceptance. In Israel, 45% of children living in the south suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of never-ending rocket fire. Which doesn't compel them to wish to deliver death and destruction on those who declare themselves their enemies; they simply yearn for peace and stability.

The ongoing conflict requires the IDF from time to time to roar into action in defence of its territory and its people, when pushed to the brink, as it has now been. Hamas and its supporters have passionately engaged in activities and looted international funding and sympathy for the purpose of devising destructive instruments of war. Israel, on the other hand, has used its technical expertise to devise amazing instruments of self-protection, like the Iron Dome.

One side devoted exclusively to producing and effectively using offensive weaponry to instill fear and foreboding, terror and misery on those they accuse of harming their interests, and the other intent on producing a system that will protect itself from the violent paroxysms of rage and anger from a neighbour that refuses to relent in its hatred and learn to accept the presence of the "other", a different ethnic, religious and social group with a heritage not entirely unlike their accusers'.

Harming their very own populations as expendable for the larger, more prideful purpose of obliterating an enemy holds greater appeal than agreeing to peace terms that will bring stability to two separate autonomous enclaves and with it the opportunity to prosper, to raise their children to appreciate opportunities available to them that are closed off when bitter antagonism, and violent strife prvail.

If, and when, Palestinians find themselves equating dignity with the right to live unmolested, in peace and harmony with a neighbour only too willing to reciprocate simply because it is the reasonable, rational thing to do, to advance the opportunities to prudently meet the future resonating with opportunity taken to prosper, rather than to destroy, Israel will finally have a partner it can rely upon to share its own dignity and respect.