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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

What could be worse than the "Nakba"?

For Palestinian Arabs, the "nakba" has little to do with the creation of hundreds of thousand of refugees and everything to do with the establishment of a Jewish state. Hence their Nakba celebrations are timed to coincide with Israel Independence Day (and the anniverary of the UN Partition of Palestine) and not with, for example, the events at Deir Yassin.

The leader of the Islamic Jihad just confirmed this:
Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Abdullah Ramadan Shallah said Palestinian recognition of Israel would be "more dangerous than the Nakba of 1948", the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi reported on Wednesday.
In a speech delivered by telephone for an event in Gaza on Tuesday, Shallah said: "What is more dangerous than the Palestinian people's Nakba is that the ones with the rights recognize their enemies and deny their own rights. Everything that is happening in Jerusalem is the result of the deals, agreements and negotiations with the Zionist enemy."
To the West, they will whine about Israeli massacres and atrocities and the "refugee" problem and use them as reasons to vilify Israel. In the minds of Arabs, however, the existence of a Jewish state in an all-but-ignored backwater of what they had lazily considered to be Arab land is the real crime, and everything else is a smokescreen to try to eliminate that aberration. Sometimes the methods sound peaceful, and sometimes aggressive, but the end goal has been consistent. The pain that the Arabs feel from Israel is not physical but rather its very existence is an affront to their manhood and their pride.

No amount of concessions will ever mollify that.