Making Palestine Safe for Fascism By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | 12/7/2007
The road map, which is still being invoked as a guide to the Annapolis-launched ?process? that is supposed to produce a peaceful, democratic Palestine by next December, states that ?In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence [and] comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood?.? Israel, for its part, ??withdraws from Palestinian areas occupied from September 28, 2000 [and] also freezes all settlement activity?.?
Or as the document later puts it: ?[The government of Israel] freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).?
Since the road map is an evenhanded document, it cannot just unequivocally demand an end to Palestinian terror as one might, for example, demand an end to Taliban terror with no quid pro quo from any other party. Instead a matching Israeli transgression has to be found, so settlement?which many people, from the Israeli Left to Jimmy Carter and James Baker, indeed regard as the fulcrum of evil in our time?fits the bill.
And since?as Mahmoud Abbas also acknowledged in Annapolis by calling for ?a halt to all settlement activities including natural growth??Israelis living in settlements, like all other people, have babies, this nefarious practice also has to be stopped, though just how the Israeli government is supposed to enforce this is not spelled out.
At any rate the Bush administration, having joined the zeal for a Jew-free Judea and Samaria (West Bank)?a zeal not at all dampened by what has happened in Jew-free Gaza over the past two years?probably shouldn?t be expected to be too alarmed about the prospect of a Christian-free Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. But according to an Israeli human rights lawyer, that, if things take their course, will be the situation within fifteen years.
Justus Reid Weiner, who is resident scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is quoted as saying that: ?The systematic persecution of Christian Arabs living in Palestinian areas is being met with nearly total silence by the international community, human rights activists, the media and NGOs. . . .?
The article goes on:
Facing a pernicious mixture of persecution and economic hardships as a result of years of Palestinian violence and Israeli counter-terrorism measures, tens of thousands of Christian Arabs have left the Palestinian territories for a better life in the West?. The Palestinian Christian population has dipped to 1.5 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, down from at least 15% a half century ago, according to some estimates.?Bethlehem, which fell under full Palestinian control last decade as part of the Oslo Accords . . . is now less than 20% Christian, after decades when Christians were the majority. Elsewhere in the Palestinian territories, only about 3,000 Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox, live in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, out of a strongly conservative Muslim population of 1.4 million.
Weiner, who in an earlier article gave more details of the persecution including forced marriages, death threats, land expropriations, and imprisonment on trumped-up charges, ?predicted that unless governments or institutions step in to remedy the situation,? Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank will totally disappear before long.
If you?re wondering where the Bush administration is in all this, it makes sense that, having embraced the goal of speedily creating Muslim-dominated, Jew-free Palestine, it wouldn?t want to focus much on the fate of Christians there. As Weiner pointed out in his earlier article,
The plight of Christian Arabs remaining in the PA is, in part, attributable to the adoption of Muslim religious law in the PA Constitution. Israel, by contrast, safeguards the religious freedom and holy places of its Christian (and Muslim) citizens?. Israel is the only state in the region in which the Christian Arab population has grown in real terms?from approximately 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 130,000 in 2005.
So transferring the West Bank to full Palestinian control, putting it out of Israeli and thereby Western reach, would leave the remaining Christians there to the same sort of helpless fate suffered by Christians in Arab countries like Egypt and Sudan.
Not something Bush and Condoleezza Rice want to highlight as they relentlessly push Israel into concessions. Indeed, if Rice in her numerous visits here shows ?humanitarian concern? it?s generally for the predominantly Muslim Palestinian population that?s inconvenienced by Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks. Responding to U.S. pressure on that score, Israel recently removed 24 of the roadblocks?almost immediately enabling terrorists (who turned out to be PA policemen) to shoot to death a 29-year-old Israeli man in his car.
The revised Bush Doctrine ca. 2007, then, means fighting radical forces only in Iraq and Afghanistan while enabling Muslim supremacism to tighten its grip on the rest of the Middle East by: apparently allowing Iran to nuclearize, effectively handing Lebanon over to Syria and its friends like the first Bush administration, and replacing what's left of the Jewish and Christian presence in the biblical heartland with dangerous, destabilizing Islamofascist rule.
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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at
http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
