RUTHFULLY YOURS

Scheduling it to coincide with Land Day — one of many made-up modern Arab “holidays” the purpose of which is to rile up street mobs and foreign media outlets against the “Zionist entity” – is a way of giving it a veil of legitimacy (pun intended).

Declaring that Arab Christians should join their Muslim counterparts to protect their holy sites from the Jews is an attempt at diverting attention away from the ongoing persecution of Christians in Muslim societies.

What fun for Hamas and the PLO, who get to pretend that the parade to Israel’s borders from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt — and the solidarity demonstrations in front of Israeli embassies elsewhere — is a testament to how much the world worries about the plight of the “Palestinian people.”

But they know something that their Western backers don’t bother noting. They know that if it weren’t for the stupidity of some fellow travelers, the knee-jerk ideology of others, and a new legitimized anti-Semitism disguised as “criticism of Israeli policies,” their self-proclaimed nation would long ago have been forgotten or annihilated. Not by Israel, mind you. No, Israel isn’t into mass murder, in spite of what the radical Islamists who enjoy beheading men and circumcising women constantly claim. And it’s a pretty clever propaganda tactic on their part, since they actually respect barbaric practices, and believe their prophet, Muhammad, did too. But they read The New York Times, the Guardian and Haaretz just as carefully as their left-wing apologists in democratic countries do. You see, despite the myth that suicide terrorists and their dispatchers are the product of poverty and despondence, many of them are in fact graduates of MIT, Oxford and even the Hebrew University. Osama bin Laden may have lived in a few caves after 9/11, but he was plenty familiar with room service and wireless Internet.

The now totally impotent Palestinian Authority – on whose supposed behalf liberals’ hearts bleed to the point that they imagine it is different from Hamas – is fully aware that if it were up to its Arab-Muslim brethren, it would have died a stillbirth in 1967. Indeed, over the last 45 years, it has been utterly dismissed, financially abandoned and loathed by any and every Arab country in the region that actually has a Palestinian population to contend with. And though it is said that the Palestinians are the most educated group in the Middle East (other than Israelis), they are nevertheless considered by their “brothers” in the region to be the dregs of the earth.

That the Arab-Muslim world has used them as a tool for their own hegemonic aims is neither new nor surprising. After all, the Palestinian leadership – from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas to Ismail Haniyeh – has itself always made cynical use of the very populace it purports to promote.

Not only has it kept people in squalor for decades in refugee camps as a PR ploy, but it has pocketed all the billions of dollars and euros and shekels that have been earmarked for institution-building and food. And what hasn’t been appropriated for personal use has been spent on arms.

Another thing that the PLO and Hamas know is that the “Arab Spring” has nothing to do with a widespread yearning for democracy in the Middle East, but rather with Islamic fervor fighting secular autocracy, on the one hand, and with angry Arabs wanting their own turn at torturing civilians who don’t follow their orders on the other. The last thing the Palestinian leaders want now is to be slaughtered (a la Moammar Gadhafi) by bloodthirsty revenge-seekers over whom they currently have control.

What could be better than killing several birds with one stone, and using Israel as the scapegoat? And what better issue could there be around which to unite than “affirming the Arab and Palestinian character of Jerusalem” and “against the Zionist policies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and Judaization”?

Let us not kid ourselves about the motive of the march. It is not about land. It is not about a two-state solution. It is not about Jerusalem.

It is what all such campaigns have been since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It is about what Arafat spelled out when he created the PLO in 1964 (three years before the Six-Day War). It is about what he and his successors continued to assert in Arabic.

It is about making the Middle East, and eventually the rest of the world, Judenrein, cleansed of Jews, which is why the Iranian regime is behind it every step of the way.

Ruthie Blum, a former senior editor at The Jerusalem Post, is the author of a book on the radicalization of the Middle East, to be released by RVP Press in the spring