Hating those who have sympathy for Jews: The most extreme Arab zero-sum thinking is now embedded in the West

Two weeks ago, pop star Madonna posted on her Instagram:

What is Happening in Israel is Devastating.. Watching all of these families and especially children being herded, assaulted and murdered in the streets is Heartbreaking.

Imagine if this was happening to you??

It’s Un-fathomable.

Conflicts can never be resolved with violence. Unfortunately Humanity does not understand this Universal truth. Has Never Understood it. We live in a World Ravaged by Hate.

My heart goes out to Israel. To Families and Homes that have been destroyed. To children who are lost.

To Innocent Victims who have Been Killed.

To All who are Suffering or who will suffer from this conflict.

Im Praying For you. I am aware that this is the work of Hamas and there are many innocent people in Palestine who do not support this terrorist organization. This Tragic attack will only cause more suffering for everyone

Let us all Pray. For Israel. 🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱For Peace. ♥️ For The World.

Immediately, her IG was filled with anti-Israel invective, saying not only that she was not mentioning Palestinians but that she must be anti-Palestinian for posting something expressing sympathy for Israeli civilians who had been slaughtered.. 

After she also expressed sympathy for all victims at a concert in London, as well as the young Palestinian boy who was horrifically murdered in Chicago, Haaretz reports, "Her remarks set off an explosion on social media, with hateful comments expressing doubt about her skills as a mother and calling her 'Kabbalah bitch.' Since then, Madonna’s security detail has been upgraded."

This incident indicates that the most extreme form of Arab zero-sum mentality about Israel has infected the West. If people are sympathetic to Jews, the thinking goes, they must hate Palestinians. You have to choose a side and put all your energies into opposing the other side. 

This is why so many anti-Israel demonstrations were organized and held within 24 hours of the news of Black Shabbat. Israel-haters believe that anyone expressing any humanity towards innocent Israeli civilians is the enemy and therefore it must be countered with a huge anti-Israel publicity campaign. To the zero-summers, there can only be one victim who can elicit sympathy; if people feel sorry for Jews then they are by definition anti-Palestinian. 

This is mainstream Palestinian thinking, and before the Abraham Accords, it was mainstream Arab thinking as well.  One of my favorite examples came from a Gulf News article by a UAE political science professor in 2006 that argued that - despite southern Lebanon having been decimated by war with Israel - it was a victory for Arabs: 

Logically, when Israel is in a worse condition, which is the case now, Arabs are definitely better off.

Although Israel was not routed in the battle, it surely seems defeated and frustrated. It is also living in a state of doubt and comprehensive review of its military and political performance during the war.

The equation of victory and defeat between the Arabs and the Zionist state has always been and will remain zero equation. 

This mentality permeates all levels of Palestinian society. Anything that is good for Israel - like the Abraham Accords ot the US Embassy in Jerusalem - is considered obviously bad for Palestinians, even if it does not affect Palestinians at all.  The extreme anger at UNRWA plans to teach about the Holocaust in their schools is one obvious example of this quite sick mindset. 

Most scholarly papers on zero-sum thinking look at the fallacy that it applies to economics - that if someone makes money, then others must be losing. The idea that all boasts can rise in a growing economy is not considered. 

But the Palestinian mentality that there is a limited supply of world sympathy and feeling bad about dead Jews takes away from being pro-Palestinian has taken hold in the West. Palestinians must corner the market on victimhood and tears.

As the case of Madonna shows, the psychosis is so embedded even in the West that anyone who feels sorry for victims of a massacre becomes the enemy and must be attacked. 

Similarly, the massacre itself is a victory because it hurt the enemy - "winning" trumps morality. Israel haters welcomes the massacre as schadenfreude even as they claimed that what Palestinians experience every day is worse. 

If Western nations are adopting this backwards thinking, they are in danger of turning into third-world nations themselves. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Palestinian zero sum game: "Israeli embassy in Manama is an attack on Palestinians"

One of the consequences of the Arab honor/shame culture is the zero-sum mentality. If one party is honored, then their rival is considered shamed, even if there is nothing in reality  that shames the other party.

This is illustrated by the statement issued today by the PFLP terror group. 

The PFLP announced that "the opening of a headquarters for the Zionist embassy in the Bahraini capital, Manama, represents a state of increasing decline of the Bahraini regime" and hat continued normalization between Israel and Bahrain is "an integral part of the aggression against our people."

Has Bahrain turned anti-Palestinian? I don't see any evidence of it. But to Palestinians, if Israel gains something, then they lose - by definition. 

It is a very childish way of looking at the world but it is accepted as normal, at least for Palestinians and most Arabs. 

A great part of the profound changes happening in the Gulf, and the reason that the Abraham Accords are so important, is that they represent a sea change in the old zero-sum mentality, and towards a win/win culture in the UAE and Bahrain. There is no contradiction between having relations with Israel and supporting Palestinian nationalism, unless you look at everything as zero-sum - or if you view a Palestinian state not as a goal but as a means to destroy Israel. 

The PFLP goes on "warn of the dangers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia embarking on normalization with the Zionist entity, especially since there are channels that have been opened in the sports and media fields, in addition to opening Saudi airspace for the passage of Zionist planes, which paves the way for the possibility of announcing full normalization with this entity. This would represent a major stab wound to the Palestinian cause."

If Israel wins, Palestinians lose - and vice versa. Which partially explains the celebrations and glee that accompany terror attacks that kill Jews. To Palestinians, any dead Jew is a loss for Israel and therefore a gain for Palestinians.

It is a sick mindset. And not enough people are fighting against it. Which is another reason why the Abraham Accords is so important - it introduces a different way of thinking into the Arab world, one that is attractive both because it is more optimistic but also because it is true. 

It is worth mentioning that while the West generally adheres to a win/win mentality, socialists like the PFLP and those in the "progressive" Left indeed do believe in a zero-sum game - that the world has a fixed amount of resources and if the rich gain, the rest of the world inevitably loses. Simplistic and ultimately wrong zero-sum thinking is something that the far Right and far Left have in common.

It cannot be a coincidence that the main fans of zero sum thinking also happen to hate Jews. I don't know whether that is a cause or an effect, probably both, but eradicating the zero sum mentality is perhaps the best  and most comprehensive way to combat antisemitism. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Even the most articulate Palestinians (like Noura Erakat) have the idiotic zero-sum mentality that helping Israel = hurting Palestinians

From the start, the "pro-Palestinian" movement has not been pro-Palestinian at all. It has been anti-Israel. And its supporters, no matter how educated or articulate, are so consumed with hate for the Jewish state that they literally cannot tell the difference between the two concepts.

Noura Erakat, the "human rights attorney" and assistant professor at Rutgers University, wrote an op-ed for NBC News that crystallizes this basic fact  - and thereby reveals a major reason why the Palestinians have remained stuck in limbo for so long.

Notwithstanding several early steps that distinguish him from his predecessor, President Joe Biden promises to continue [Trump’s] legacy. It’s true that the new administration intends to reinstate critical U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and will reopen the PLO mission office in Washington, D.C. Just Monday, it announced that it will rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, from which the Trump administration withdrew mostly in protest of its scrutiny of Israel.

But none of these policies, welcome though they are, will challenge the oppressive status quo sustained by the United States. Worse still, the Biden administration will uphold several of the Trump administration’s most damning precedents.

These examples are most revealing:

The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has made clear that the administration will not move the U.S. Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv; it will maintain, and celebrate, Israel’s normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan without ensuring a single enduring concession for the Palestinians; and it will continue to provide Israel with unconditional military support in the amount of $3.8 billion annually — a precedent established by Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama.

Late last week, the Biden administration also expressed “serious concerns” over the International Criminal Court’s effort to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli officials to prosecute them for war crimes, and is even considering maintaining the Trump administration’s sanctions on the court’s leading personnel.

She brings three examples of what she considers anti-Palestinian policies: keeping the embassy in Jerusalem, supporting peace between Israel and Arab states, and maintaining military aid that gets spent in the US.

None of these policies hurt Palestinians. None of them affect Palestinian lives at all, except for Gaza terrorists who want to murder Israeli civilians with rockets. None of them are speedbumps towards a Palestinian state.

They do support Israel as a sovereign nation – which this “human rights lawyer” considers “damning.”

The rest of the article is more of the same, complaining that a definition of antisemitism that includes demonizing the Jewish state’s very existence is somehow anti-Palestinian.

Erakat is so filled with hate for Israel that she literally cannot tell the difference between “pro-Israel” and “anti-Palestinian,” nor the difference between “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel.” She fully subscribes to a zero-sum mentality that what is good for Israel is automatically bad for Palestinians – and, worse, that nothing can be considered good for Palestinians unless it is also bad for Israel.

The UAE and Bahrain (and to an extent Morocco and Sudan)  have abandoned the zero-sum mentality. No one can call them “anti-Palestinian” although the Gulf Arabs are justifiably critical of the current Palestinian leaderships.  They see Israel not as an enemy but as a partner that can help them thrive; not as a open Jewish wound in the Arab Middle East but as a permanent feature that improves the region and that can lift up Arab states.  Instead of zero-sum, they seek a win-win. The zero-sum mentality that they maintained for so many decades did not help them – or the Palestinians – one bit.

The zero-sum mindset is childish and counterproductive. If there is one lasting change from the Abraham Accords, it is that this puerile way of thinking is finally on the wane in the Middle East.

As long as the Palestinians – including their Western “defenders” – cannot grasp that basic concept, they will never get anywhere.

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BDSers - and the PA - furious over increased Israel/EU ties

On Tuesday, the European Union put out a document detailing ongoing ties between Israel and Europe and an increased set of initiatives. Here are excerpts from the document:

The European Union (EU) warmly welcomes this 11th meeting of the EU-Israel Association Council as a demonstration of the significance the EU attaches to its relations with the State of Israel. The EU reiterates the importance of further developing our broad bilateral partnership and looks forward to a comprehensive dialogue and cooperation with our Israeli counterparts.

The EU takes note of the efforts of both parties to develop bilateral relations in the period since the previous meeting of the EU-Israel Association Council. These efforts were framed by the general EU position, as it was established on the occasion of the June 2009 Association Council, that the 2008 decision to upgrade our relations in the framework of the ENP clearly stemmed from common awareness of the traditional links, the cultural and human values, and the economic and security interests that the EU and Israel share.

On exploring the opportunities of the current Action Plan, the EU recalls the exhaustive discussions on the issue, which resulted in a comprehensive list of up to 60 concrete activities in over 15 specific fields, including cooperation with a number of EU agencies within the current policy framework.... The EU welcomes the approval of these activities by the Association Committee and encourages the two parties to actively and urgently implement them, so as to fully demonstrate the capacity of the current EU-Israel Action Plan to deliver more benefits to the EU-Israel partnership.

Israel continued to benefit from a yearly allocation through the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI) in the form of institutional cooperation (twinning projects). The EU takes note with satisfaction of the successful completion in the past year of twinning projects with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and the Ministry of Communications.

The EU reiterates its fundamental commitment to Israel’s security, including with regard to vital threats in the region, which is best guaranteed through peace between Israel and its neighbours. The EU is appalled by recurring rocket attacks from Gaza and condemns in the strongest terms violence deliberately targeting civilians. The EU reiterates its call on all partners in the region for the effective prevention of arms smuggling into Gaza.

The EU and Israel signed an agreement on trade in agricultural, processed agricultural, fish and fishery products in November 2009, which entered into force on 1 January 2010. The implementation of this agreement has already led to a visible increase in overall bilateral trade in these sectors.

In the field of environmental protection, the EU finds the intensification of bilateral cooperation of the highest importance.

Predictably, the BDS crowd which has been pretending that they have been making progress into turning Isrsel into a pariah state is incensed:

The Palestinian Council of Human Rights Organizations (PCHRO), a coalition of 11 Palestinian rights groups, Thursday strongly denounced European Union decision to upgrade its cooperation with Israel, accusing the EU of betraying its own principles.

So is the PA, which still subscribes to the zero-sum game mentality that holds that anything that helps Israel hurts Palestinian Arabs (and vice versa):

Palestinian lawmaker Mustafa Bargouthi joined a coalition of rights groups on Thursday expressing outrage at the European Union's expansion of cooperation with Israel.

Bargouthi said the upgrading of bilateral ties was granted in contradiction to the EU's political position criticizing Israel's illegal settlement expansion, occupation and violations of international human rights laws.

Europe's decision will encourage Israel to continue its aggression toward Palestinians and breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Palestinian National Initiative leader said in a statement.

It seems beyond comprehension of the "pro-Palestinian" crowd that Israel's feelings of security, helped by announcements like these, make it more likely to make concessions to Palestinian Arabs, not less.

But then again, if their real objective is not to help build a Palestinian Arab state but to destroy the Palestinian Jewish state, then their statements and actions are perfectly consistent with their goals.

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