Melanie Phillips: The day of deranged inversion
The Israelis’ real crime, in the Arabs’ eyes, is to assert control of any kind on Temple Mount. The Arabs have threatened to unleash world war if Jews were ever to have free access to it or in any way alter the status quo. That status quo means Jews have their access to Temple Mount heavily restricted and are not even allowed to pray on it.David Horovitz: On Temple Mount, Israel long since made its fundamental compromise
This despite the fact that, as the site of the original Jewish Temple, it is the holiest place of all for religious Jews. The Arab and Muslim belligerency over Temple Mount is not just an attack on Israel but on Judaism itself.
The most frightening thing of all about this, the one thing that the secular west just cannot begin to grasp, is that the murderously-incited Arabs really do believe the lie that Temple Mount (and all of Jerusalem, and all of Israel) belong only to them rather than to the Jews – the only people for whom this land was ever their national kingdom.
Back in 2014, the distinguished medievalist (and originator of the term “Pallywood”) Professor Richard Landes wrote a fine piece explaining the cultural dynamic behind this otherwise baffling inversion of reality by the Arab and Muslim world. This is the key passage:
So, alongside the nakba (catastrophe) that struck hundreds of thousands of the Arab inhabitants of the former British Mandate Palestine, we find yet another, much greater psychological catastrophe that struck the entire Arab world and especially its leaders: a humiliation so immense that Arab political culture and discourse could not absorb it. Initially, the refugees used the term nakba to reproach the Arab leaders who started and lost the war that so hurt them. In a culture less obsessed by honor and more open to self-criticism, this might have led to the replacement of political elites with leaders more inclined to move ahead with positive-sum games of the global politics of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan. But when appearances matter above all, any public criticism shames the nation, the people, and the leaders.
Instead, in a state of intense humiliation and impotence on the world stage, the Arab leadership chose denial—the Jews did not, could not, have not won. The war was not—could never—be over until victory. If the refugees from this Zionist aggression disappeared, absorbed by their brethren in the lands to which they fled, this would acknowledge the intolerable: that Israel had won. And so, driven by rage and denial, the Arab honor group redoubled the catastrophe of its own refugees: They made them suffer in camps, frozen in time at the moment of the humiliation, waiting and fighting to reverse that Zionist victory that could not be acknowledged. The continued suffering of these sacrificial victims on the altar of Arab pride called out to the Arab world for vengeance against the Jews. In the meantime, wherever Muslims held power, they drove their Jews out as a preliminary act of revenge.
The Arab leadership’s interpretation of honor had them responding to the loss of their own hard zero-sum game—we’re going to massacre them—by adopting a negative-sum strategy. Damaging the Israeli “other” became paramount, no matter how much that effort might hurt Arabs, especially Palestinians. “No recognition, no negotiations, no peace.” No Israel. Sooner leave millions of Muslims under Jewish rule than negotiate a solution. Sooner die than live humiliated. Sooner commit suicide to kill Jews than make peace with them.
Please think about this when you read about the violence taking place against Israelis – then, now and in the future.
No concession, agreed by Israel in negotiations to resolve the current standoff, could come close to matching that most dramatic of compromises half a century ago, in which the revived Jewish nation, having defeated its enemies in a war foisted upon it and liberated the most sacred place in its religious heritage, promptly relinquished its religious rights there to the representatives of its vanquished enemies.
And no compromise agreed to by Israel today could compare in its repercussions to the impact of that agreement 50 years ago, which has empowered a Palestinian and wider Muslim false narrative that asserts the Jews actually have no connection to the Mount, no history there, no legitimacy there — and by extension no sovereign legitimacy in Israel either. Why did defense minister Moshe Dayan’s concession on June 10, 1967, fuel that false narrative? Because, the way it was perceived in much of the Muslim world, the Jews could not and would not have relinquished their authority over the site if it truly constituted the most sacred physical focal point of their faith. Israel’s restraint, its religious realpolitik, in other words, has come to be regarded as proof of our illegitimacy. And of our duplicity. We were not the returning liberators; we were interlopers, who could and would be resisted until we returned to whence we ostensibly came.
Why get into all that decades-old history again now? Why focus on Israeli forbearance half a century ago, and decades of Muslim delegitimization, when we’re grappling with immediate dangers swirling around the Temple Mount? Because that’s what all of this is really about. Israel made its big-picture choice 50 years ago. It opted not to insist on religious freedom for Jews at the Temple Mount. Indeed, it opted not to insist on religious freedom at the Temple Mount, period. Israel deferred to Muslim sensitivities because of its perceived wider interests in working to normalize its very sovereign presence in the hostile Middle East.
Was that a historic mistake? Well, maybe it was, or maybe it was a vital, nation-saving imperative. It’s emphatically a question worth exploring. But the fact is that, today, right now, despite endless false assertions in the Muslim world to the contrary, there is no indication that the Netanyahu government intends to revisit that fundamental decision, no sign that it intends to reassert Israel’s fleeting full sovereignty at the Temple Mount.
In which case, it has less than three days, at most, to find an arrangement both sides can live with — to add one more tweak to that most dramatic of concessions from 50 years ago.
PMW: PMW exclusive: Huge increase in PA terror funding in 2017
PA increases spending by 13% for salaries to terrorist prisoners and by 4% for payments to families of terrorist "Martyrs"
Direct terror funding expenditures by the PA now reach 1.237 billion shekels or $355 million in 2017
Below, for your convenience, are two PMW charts depicting PA terror funding in 2017
The PA has publicized its budget for 2017, which includes how much it will be spending on salaries to terrorist prisoners and to families of terrorist "Martyrs." Ignoring demands to stop rewarding terror by the United States, EU countries, Israel and many others, the PA in 2017 is actually increasing significantly these outlays. The PA expenditure for salaries to terrorist prisoners has risen by a huge 13%, from 488 million shekels ($135 million) in 2016 to 550 million shekels ($158 million), and the expenditure for payments to families of "Martyrs" has gone up by 4% from 660 million shekels ($183 million) to 687 million shekels ($197 million). In 2017, the PA's total expenditure for directly funding terror is 1.237 billion shekels or $355 million.