RUTHFULLY YOURS

A British woman, Kay Wilson, apparently realized that when a Palestinian terrorist “plunged a knife into her chest”, left her for dead and then murdered her friend, it was British taxpayers who had paid for it.

“Is the UK funding the terrorists who tried to murder me?”, she asked.

Yes, it is. “According to data collected by Israel’s Defense Ministry, the PA spent a total of 1.237 billion shekels ($358 million), or about 7% of the PA’s total annual budget, on terrorist stipends last year.”

International payments to Palestinians that are used to pay terrorists in jail, as well as their families, serve both as a “reward for bad behavior” and also as a powerful incentive for youths to become terrorists.

They are a jobs program.

Some Palestinians are complaining that Arab countries are discriminating against them, and even going as far as calling themselves victims of “shameless Arab Apartheid” against Palestinians.

Such an accusation is unfair to many Arab countries, especially Egypt, which has sacrificed the blood of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to support the Islamic jihad against Israel.

Palestinians have a point in demanding support from Arab countries. After all it was Arab nations who shamed Palestinians into taking the Islamist cause of destroying Israel for them; making them the hit-men. The Palestinians, for their part, never resisted falling into the Arab trap of “let’s throw the Jews into the sea”. They seemed all too happy to oblige. Now, however, that Arab countries are waking up from the illegitimate cause to destroy Israel that has devastated them for so long, it is time for the Palestinians to follow suit.

For decades, Egypt’s economic stability and prosperity was put on hold and suffered a stagnant existence for the sake of Palestinians. As a result of many wars with Israel to help Palestinians, Egypt spent a fortune and lost much of its military as well as its territory in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. These wars, all initiated by Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors, also resulted in the migration and suffering of millions of Egyptians who abandoned three cities on the Suez Canal. For years, Suez, Ismailia and Port Said were ghost towns.

After the devastation of the 1967 war, Egypt’s economy sank below the level of third-world countries, all for the sake of supporting the “Palestinian” people. Even Egypt’s political leader, President Anwar Sadat, who wanted peace in return for Egypt’s retrieving the Sinai Peninsula, was accused by Palestinians of treason and assassinated by Islamists, supposedly for having signed a peace deal with Israel.

In Egypt, Palestinians were given preferential treatment over Egyptian citizens and free education in Egyptian universities. The thank you Egypt got, however, was often Palestinian activism that challenged Egypt’s sovereignty.

Today Egypt’s boarder with Gaza is chaotic and dangerous; terrorism has been rampant throughout the Sinai Peninsula and is often linked to Gaza. Tunnels are dug not only on the Israeli side but also on Egypt’s border with Gaza to smuggle arms and people in and out of Gaza.

Palestinians today still complain that they get no preferential treatment in Arab countries such as Iraq, a war-torn nation that can hardly take care of its own citizens. These are the same Palestinians who just a few years ago, in Kuwait and Iraq, were on the side of Saddam Hussein and cheered for him, a man who single-handedly destroyed Kuwait — which had been funding the Palestinians — and had gassed his own people.

Ever since 1948, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza who called themselves Palestinian have been given preferential treatment in many Arab countries, as mentioned, such as Jordan and Lebanon. betrayed the Arab nations that hosted them, as in Black September in Jordan; support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iraq on Kuwait, after which Kuwait’s expelled many of its Palestinian citizens; or their insurgency in Lebanon.

Now, years later, this worldwide preferential treatment of Palestinians must end. For the sake of Palestinians, this must end. Palestinians need to remember or relearn how to care for themselves, just like the rest of us. Wherever they are — in Gaza, Arab countries or the West — preferential treatment cannot last forever, and even brotherly Arab nations can no longer tolerate such an unnatural existence for Palestinians.

Palestinians need to start taking responsibility for their own existence and stop relying on the world to take care of them while they use the money freed up — by the international community — to launch jihad and intifadas. Preferential treatment cannot last forever and even brotherly Arab nations can no longer tolerate such an unnatural existence for Palestinians.

Some Islamic sheikhs often preach that Palestinians have no right to end their jihad against Israel because it is an Islamic cause and not just a Palestinian one.

Today, however, more Arab countries, and the world, have created a monster that must be financially fed constantly “or else”; a helplessly needy population that cannot take care of its own needs because all they were trained to do was jihad and terror, and to use both as blackmail to get whatever they want. This impossible situation is harmful and should not be allowed. No entity should be forever permitted to devote its resources to terror while the world is expected to owe them everything: financial support, jobs, citizenship, and even building the infrastructure that they keep destroying.

Since 1948, Arab League policy has banned Arab and Muslim countries from giving citizenship to Palestinians, ostensibly in order to preserve their “right of return” to Israel. In 1948, many Arabs had fled from the new country of Israel during a war that Arab countries started in to try to kill it at its birth. The Arabs started wars against it again in 1956, 1967 and 1973 — all of which they lost. When the Arabs who had fled in 1948 wanted to return, Israel declined on the grounds that as they had left of their own accord and not be of help to Israel, they were a potential a “fifth column” who were not welcome to live there again. These and their descendants are the people currently called Palestinians. (Those Arabs who stayed in Israel during that war, are still there, make up roughly 20% of Israel’s population and are called Israeli Arabs.)

The moral of the story is that if you do not want to lose wars, it would be better not to start them.

Now, however, preferential treatment for Palestinians in Arab countries seems to be winding down. This shift has caused Palestinians, who got used to preferential treatment, to complain. Some want to be treated as well as the citizens of Arab countries, others do not want citizenship in their current countries to preserve what they are told is a “right of return” to Israel. Because, however, they have initiated uprisings in nearly every country that has hosted them, such as Jordan and Lebanon, they are now also regarded as a potential fifth column in Arab countries, too.

While some Palestinians might be happy with citizenship in the Arab countries they have lived in from birth, they refuse to lobby the Arab League to lift the ban forbidding Arab countries from giving them citizenship in their adopted homes, also apparently in the hope of this wished-for “right of return.”

It is time for Palestinians to realize that Arab nations can no longer afford a fifth column that might threaten their sovereignty living among their citizens. The continued state of preferential treatment of Palestinian non-citizens in Arab countries by the international community and supranational organization, such as branches of United Nations, cannot and should not be tolerated any longer.

For years all political and social institutions of Arab countries were devoted to an illegitimate and disgraceful mission to destroy Israel. To achieve this goal, Arab nations put up with a lot of abuse. Finally, however, Arab countries — and many Palestinians as well — are finally realizing that the world has had it with the Palestinian cause. No sane nation should be expected to continue sacrificing its peace, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for the sake of a suicidal cause to replace the State of Israel with yet another Islamic Arab state. It is just not going to happen.

The mission “to throw Jews in the sea” cannot continue; that is why Arab countries need to help themselves by immediately stopping crippling the Palestinians. Some tough love might be welcome, applied by Arab and Western leaders on Palestinian leaders who appear to have gotten used to the pampering. The perpetuation of Gaza and West Bank as separate entities — which expect constant support to keep existing to achieve the Islamist dream to destroying Israel – must stop.

Palestinians today complain that the world no longer cares, and that is very likely true. The world has other, more urgent problems to worry about — such as being invaded or by their neighbors or the future to the region of nuclear proliferation. It is high time for the world to demand that Palestinians be absorbed into the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), as are all other refugees, and assimilated wherever they may be, to end this fraudulent “right of return” saga. The longer financial aid and the pampering of Palestinians continue as an “insurance policy” ostensibly to prevent terrorism, the longer the suffering, dependence, terror and conflict will go on. It is time for Palestinians to learn that threatening terror is not a way to earn a living.

Nonie Darwish, born and raised as a Muslim in Egypt, is the author of the book “Wholly Different; Why I Chose Biblical Values Over Islamic Values”.