Palestinian teachers have been on strike for several weeks, demanding higher wages that had been promised to them.Understandably, Palestinians have been very interested in this story, because it affects their kids' futures - it might push the school year into the summer, forcing kids to study during Ramadan fasts, and some might not be ready for college entrance exams.
But Amira Hass of Haaretz is very frustrated that there is no anti-Israel angle to this story. Since that is all she knows how to write, she must invent one.
For the perplexed left, this strike doesn’t sit well with the definition of the Palestinians as victims and as combatants rightly opposing our violent rule. Some people don’t understand why teachers are investing their energies in internal matters. Why don’t they march up to army checkpoints and participate in demonstrations against the separation barrier? And how is it that they are demonstrating about wages while their current and former pupils take part in the lone-wolf uprising, being killed by Israeli gunfire?According to Hass and Haaretz, Palestinians simply do not have any responsibility - ever. They are always victims (except for when they cooperate with Israel; then they are monsters.)
However, if instead of converging on Manara Square these teachers were to march en masse towards the civil administration building, east of Ramallah, which houses the bureaucrats who represent the Israeli government, the real arbiter of everything, the IDF would massacre them. The wily Oslo accord turned official Palestinian institutions into a buffer zone between Palestinian subjects and the military rulers.
...The teachers are taking a stance not of victims, but as members of a society that knows it can be an agency of change, not just a needy and passive entity. At the same time, their protests relieve Israelis of the need to understand their own responsibility, as well as relieving pressure on Israel the occupier.
In the incredibly condescending world of the radical Left who pretend to care so much about Palestinians, the Palestinians themselves have no more responsibility for their actions than animals do.
This anti-Arab racism of the Left is a truly remarkable phenomenon that is terribly under-reported. But you can see it every single day in Haaretz, +972 and other fringe publications that are taken seriously by too much of the world.
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