Advice for a Palestinian ‘Icon’ Ahed Tamimi, 17, and her peers shouldn’t be content as the next generation of cannon fodder. By Daniel J. Arbess
https://www.wsj.com/articles/advice-for-a-palestinian-icon-1534287633
Israel released 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi last month after she spent eight months in prison for assaulting an Israeli soldier. She immediately met with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, who lionized her as a “model of Palestinian resistance,” and others have since hailed her as an “Icon of Palestine.” Ten days before her release, Israel’s Knesset had enacted a law reaffirming that Israel is “the national home of the Jewish people” and that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
These two otherwise unrelated developments point to essential questions: Will the Palestinians finally accept Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and help fashion Israel’s democracy to serve better all who live there? Maybe—if Ms. Tamimi’s generation is willing to help make it happen. But they, and well-meaning Palestinian sympathizers in Israel and abroad, will need to move on from the past, accept the present and work toward the future.
In her first postrelease interview, the young icon inauspiciously says that the Palestinians’ problem “was never with the Jews, it’s with Zionism.” This is the familiar mantra of rejecting Israel’s right to exist, yet expecting to enjoy its economic and political benefits as if it were an ordinary secular liberal democracy like Canada or Sweden—where demographics might one day make the Jewish vote a minority.
This narrative of rejection is Ms. Tamimi’s family legacy. Her father, Bassem Tamimi, describes himself as a follower of Gandhi, but in 2012 an Israeli military court convicted him of “sending people to throw stones.” Ahed’s cousin Ahlam Tamimi was behind the 2001 Sbarro Massacre, in which a suicide bomber murdered 15, including seven children and a pregnant woman. Another cousin, Rushdi Muhammed Sa’id Tamimi, murdered an Israeli man near Ramallah in 1993. Ahed herself professes nonviolence, despite being jailed for assault and still pledging that “the resistance will continue until the end of the occupation.”
It’s a self-defeating attitude. Palestinian Arabs, and self-styled progressives everywhere, need to realize it’s time to stop fighting lost battles and accept reality. Israel is the ancestral and legal homeland of the Jewish people. Its capital is Jerusalem, as the U.S. has belatedly recognized, with other countries following. Israel’s enemies lost the Six Day War more than 50 years ago and relinquished the West Bank and the ancient city of Jerusalem. The 1967-borders-and-land-swaps formula of the 1993 Oslo Accord is an artifact of history, overtaken by developments on the ground. The Palestinians rejected it, and they have never initiated any proposal to achieve peace with Israel, before and since.
Comments are closed.
