RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s time to take a close look at an often ignored subject: what ordinary Palestinians think about Israel, Jews, and terrorist attacks on civilians.

he most recent wave of Palestinian terror attacks, now entering its second month, has been mainly the work of “lone wolf” operators running over Israeli civilians, soldiers, and policemen with cars or stabbing them with knives. The perpetrators, many in or just beyond their teenage years, are not, for the most part, activists in the leading militant organizations. They have been setting forth to find targets with the expectation, generally fulfilled, that after scoring a casualty or two they will be killed or badly wounded. What drives these young Palestinians, experts say, is a viral social-media campaign centered on claims that the Jews are endangering the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and that Israel is executing Palestinian children.

Pundits and analysts in Israel and the West, struck by the elements that make this round of violence different from its predecessors over the past decade-and-a-half—which typically featured well-orchestrated shootings, suicide bombings, or rocket fire—have focused on the motivations of individual attackers, on how and why the Palestinian political and religious leadership has been engaging in incitement, and on what Israeli officials or American mediators might do to quell the violence.

Absent almost entirely from this discussion has been any attempt to understand the perspective of everyday Palestinians. Yet it is precisely the climate of public opinion that shapes and in turn is shaped by the declarations of Palestinian leaders, and that creates the atmosphere in which young people choose whether to wake up in the morning, pull a knife from the family kitchen, and go out in search of martyrdom. Whether commentators are ignoring the views of mainstream Palestinians out of a mistaken belief that public opinion does not matter in dictatorships, or out of a dismissive sense that they are powerless pawns whose fate is decided by their leaders, Israel, or regional and world powers, the omission is both patronizing and likely to lead to significant misunderstandings of what is happening. In this essay I aim to fill the lacuna by addressing what Palestinians think both about violence against Israelis and about the core issues that supply its context and justification.

Despite what he termed the “setback” of last Friday’s jihad massacre in Paris, Barack Obama announced Monday that he was pressing forward with his scheme to flood the U.S. with at least 10,000 refugees from Syria, terming opposition to his plan “shameful.” Obama seems intent on recreating in the U.S. the circumstances that led to the jihad attacks in Paris – which were perpetrated by at least two “refugees” who had just recently arrived in Europe.

“We have to, each of us, do our part, and the United States has to step up and do its part,” Obama said. He didn’t explain why Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar don’t have to do their part, and have taken no refugees at all, citing the risk of terrorism. Repeat that concern in the U.S., as have the Governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and Texas, and you’ll be charged with “racism,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia.”

One problem for anyone trying to offer a defence of Israel in the face of the determined intellectual assault on the country in recent years is that while the assault is simple and easily understood – conducted in an adolescent emoji language of epithets and images – the defence is harder to explain. To defame the country one merely needs to say ‘colonialism’ or ‘apartheid’, and add a photo of a soldier manhandling a child. To defend Israel requires an understanding of at least 100 years of history in both Europe and the Middle East, of how we reached this moment, and of what Israel’s choices really are right now. Anyone trying to explain Israel’s case needs to be worldly enough to make sense to people outside the bubble of those who are reflexively sympathetic to Israel anyway, and it helps not to be ideologically rigid or so angry you can’t speak calmly.

Not many people can do this well. The confrontational and clumsy government currently in power in Israel, for example, doesn’t have much luck. One of the most skilful Israeli advocates right now is Einat Wilf, the scholar, Cambridge and Harvard graduate and former Knesset member who has become something of an unofficial roving ambassador for Israel in recent years. (Originally a Labour Party lawmaker, she joined a group of MKs who left the party along with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak for a brief stint in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, after which she left politics in 2013.)