If the demographic curve’s against you, resort to more direct means of righting the imbalance. Always ready to off Arabs, Netanyahu decided, to the cheers of his countrymen, that it was time for another round, this time through an assault on the refugee camp in Jenin (northern Israel), a squalid place since 1953.
But for the wrongness of it all, it would be a tedious story of one people — albeit a people intimately familiar with being subjugated; if anyone’s an expert on the subject it’s Jews — relentlessly subjugating another, decade after decade. Ho-hum; another tale of recurring injustice in the world; if you want to complain, get in line.
The stated aim this time is what it’s been on every prior calculatedly murderous, occasion: to root out “terrorists”. This appeals to Israel’s Jews. Who doesn’t want “terrorists” eliminated? But, since at least 1967, there has been the recurring need to remind Palestinians that their future in Israel is limited to subservience in perpetuity.
Israel (historically only its army, but now also its settlers) kills Palestinians for a story? Yes. If anyone understands the importance of story it’s the Old Testament crowd. With the modern fig leaf of decency foreclosing the option of mass murder, reminders-by-assassination will do well enough.
But why does Israel want to subjugate the Palestinians? At a primal level, it’s, We’ll do unto you as others for millenia have done unto us. More venally, one needs to understand what Israel’s objective has always been: to end up with, however unlawfully, all the land, including the portion intended since 1948 for the Palestinians.
It would delight Jews if Palestinians emigrated from Israel and the Occupied Territories. The incentive to that end is to make Palestinian lives miserable in countless ways large and small (e.g., Israel controls the calories that Palestinians in Gaza get to consume each day; it uses lethal force against stone-throwing kids).
The dilemma of which Israelis are keenly aware, is that, even if Palestinians chose to leave, no other country would take them. Nearly six decades since 1967, a strutting Israel choosing to be governed by rejectionists (there’s no such thing as a Palestinian) looks for a permanent solution to the Arab problem.
Israel knows that some Palestinians will not quietly accept subservience or cede their land. So, how to avoid their being a nuisance (“threat”)? Expect fire-breathers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to engineer violence intended to channel fleeing Palestinians into neighboring Jordan. Mass expulsion by another name. Clever.
Until that happens, what explains the recurring nature of what we see today? How has Israel’s illegal expropriation of West Bank land — an area long ago agreed as the core of a future independent Palestine — been enabled to continue? How does a camp like Jenin still exist? Because that’s what the “civilized” world wants.
