Over at Israellycool, Dave has linked to a piece by writer and journalist Stephen Daisley about the soft bigotry of low expectations towards the palestinian Arabs.
He quotes the following two paragraphs and I want to highlight an underlying root problem which occurs time and again in almost all analysis of palestinian Arab actions toward Jews in Israel.
We expect almost nothing of the Palestinians, and certainly not for them to conduct their affairs as we do (or tell ourselves we do). In Jerusalem, we see Boers; in Ramallah, Zulus. This is not pro-Israel — it is based on the myth of Israel as a white European colonial enterprise — but it is flagrantly anti-Palestinian. Yes, these two cultures are distinct (though there is a deal of crossover). Yes, Palestinian culture has a lot of work to do to catch up on democracy, human rights, minority rights, and much else besides. But none of this is inherent to being Palestinian; these are political and social values and they, and the cultures that espouse them, can change. This, however, is at odds with the underlying assumptions of Western policy on the Middle East in which Israeli misdeeds are aberrations to be condemned and corrected while Palestinian misdeeds are shrugged off, excused or justified. This is just who they are.
The sentiment is sympathy but the logic is pure bigotry. We are not friends of the Palestinians. We are not lending them solidarity by indulging their outrages. We are treating them like a savage tribe from an Edgar Wallace adventure, benighted but noble in their own way, wide-eyed grateful to the white man for understanding their backwards customs. There is your racism.
My highlight: "But none of this is inherent to being Palestinian; these are political and social values and they, and the cultures that espouse them, can change."
I'm affraid that the ENTIRE reason for the difference between Jews and Arabs is Islam and Islamic values. Islam is the prevailing culture and political system for the Arabs here in Israel. Where Jews have asserted their culture and their values (and political system) Islam is somewhat tamed: where the Arabs have self autonomy, Islam is ascendent.
This dream that Islamic cultures will "progress" towards tolerance and benighted acceptance of "the other" (as Christianity seems to have largely done) isn't born out by observable facts anywhere or at anytime in history so far. Nobody has broken the link between the life of their prophet Mohammed and the actions of Muslims in the short
As I've always said: the model of Islam I see is a bungee chord tying adherents to the 7th Century. You can stretch the chord a long way (Turkey a few years ago, Iran before 1979, Afghanistan) but eventually it stretches too far and the Islamic society goes back to the 7th Century code laid out by Mohammed and his immediate successors as they used his imperial plan to conquer a large part of the known world.
