Why is Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, determined to prevent Jews from living in the new independent Palestinian state? After all, it would solve the settlement problem if Jews were permitted to become citizens of Palestine. But that would require the new state to be democratic. It would have to honor human rights and would have to permit the Jews to vote. It would have to become as secular and democratic as Turkey, where Jews have lived for centuries.
So, instead of integrating these highly productive Jewish settlements in the West Bank into a new Palestinian state, Abbas wants them all to be dismantled. But because there are over 250,000 Jews living in those settlements, Israel is not willing to dismantle them as they did the Jewish towns in Gaza.
Indeed, the Gaza experience has created intense opposition to any such further removal of Jews from anywhere in the Holy Land. The West Bank is the heartland of the biblical Jewish commonwealth, and Zionist Jews believe that they have every right to settle and live there as they did during the days of the British Mandate.
But this is the kind of impasse that Abbas probably welcomes, because it makes it impossible for him to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel, which is what Hamas and other Islamic extremists want. They want perpetual war against Israel. That is why Abbas is seeking UN sanctioned statehood before signing a peace treaty with Israel, so that the Palestinians can continue waging war against Israel while enjoying the benefits of statehood. Should the UN approve statehood for the Palestinians before there is peace with Israel, they would be making a mockery of everything the UN is supposed to stand for. They would be taking sides in a war against a member state.
But this should not surprise anyone who considers the UN to be a sham to begin with. The purpose of the United Nations was, supposedly, to maintain peace among nations. But the UN has not only not prevented war, it has actually engaged in one — in Katanga, the breakaway province in the former Belgian Congo. It bombed the newly created state of Katanga into submission, and its noble leader Moise Tshombe, a Christian, died in a prison in Muslim Algeria where he was held illegally.
It might be useful to refresh our memories of what happened to Katanga over 50 years ago. I found a synopsis of this important bit of history on a website entitled “Remember Katanga!” written by David W. Neuendorf back in 1995:
The tragedy of Katanga started on June 30, 1960 when Belgium granted independence to its former province of the Congo. Leadership of the new nation fell to Moscow-sponsored terrorist Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was so highly regarded by Soviet dictator Khrushchev that he renamed the Moscow “Peoples Friendship University” the “Patrice Lumumba Friendship University” upon Lumumba’s death. In a directive to the heads of the Congolese provinces, Lumumba wrote that they should use “terrorism, essential to subdue the population.” His directive was carried out enthusiastically.
In order to avoid the nightmare that attended Communist rule in the Congo, the province of Katanga declared its independence. Its president, the Christian, pro-American Moise Tshombe, announced that “we are seceding from chaos.” Tshombe asked Belgium to send military officers to recruit and train a Katangese army to restore order in Katanga. Lumumba and his successor, Cyrille Adoula, asked for and got the aid of United Nations “peacekeepers” to force Katanga back under Congolese rule. It took two years of UN warmaking to accomplish this goal.
The troops transported to Katanga using US Air Force aircraft came from Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Ethiopia, and India. According to numerous eyewitness accounts, the troops of the UN’s Operation Morthor carried on one of the most brutal military campaigns of our century. In their 1962 report, 46 Angry Men, the 46 civilian doctors of Elizabethville, Katanga denounced the atrocities carried out by UN troops.
So much for the UN’s love of peace and freedom. But those were the years of the Cold War. Republican Eisenhower was President from 1953 to 1961 and Democrat John F. Kennedy ruled the White House from 1961 to 1963. So the UN’s war against Katanga took place during both Republican and Democratic administrations, whose foreign policy was in the hands of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kennedy had to authorize the use of the U.S. Air Force to bomb the Katangans into submission, which was one of the reasons why he would have lost his bid for a second term had he not been killed by a communist agent named Lee Harvey Oswald.
Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, we expect the President to veto any attempt by the UN to seat a new Palestinian state among its members. Meanwhile, some members are beginning to realize what a total farce this whole procedure is. With the recent release of over 1,000 Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli soldier, some of the saner members of the UN must wonder how much more surreal politics in the Middle East can become.
Another reason why Abbas doesn’t want Jews in Palestine is that they are too educated and too productive, and will eventually dominate the economy. All he has to do is consider the accomplishments of the tiny state of Israel in only 60 years. Israelis have the highest number of university degrees per capita in the world. Since 2000, Israel has been in a league of its own in the number of Nobel Prizes in science and economics, with three times more laureates per capita than the next-highest ranked countries. Israel’s $100-billion economy is larger than those of all of its immediate neighbors combined. Through its medical devices, medicine, and inventions, Israel saves more lives per capita than any other country in the world. Indeed, Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation and has one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed.
And what have the Palestinians accomplished in the same amount of time? They’ve managed to perpetuate a refugee problem so that many of their youth are encouraged by their leaders to do little else than blow up innocent Jews as well as themselves. Their contribution to mankind is in the negative. If Jews lived among them, they would have to stop being beggars and killers and have to start acting like normal, productive human beings.
Unless the so-called international community begins to demand that the Arab countries end their war against Israel and establish normal relations with the Jewish state, the Middle East will continue to be a source of instability and bloodshed. That Israel has been able not only to survive amidst such unending hostility but to thrive as a high-tech democratic state of more than seven million people, over a million of whom are Arabs, is a testament to the creative spirit of the human race. Palestinian Arabs belong to that same human race but, unfortunately, many of them prefer to act like barbarians. They have a choice: Start living like normal human beings or condemn their youth to lives of nihilist misery, for that is the end product of Islamic extremism.
