Israel goes the way of Ibrahim Pasha in demanding immediate victory. She applies unnecessary pressure to Palestinian Arabs and receives great resistance in return. Israel attempted to install collaborationist administrations in Arab villages, but that was wrong and predictably failed. The mukhtars were not administrators or enforcers, but rather liaisons between the Ottomans and the Arabs. Cooperation with them lacked the stigma of submission. The Ottoman genius was in bypassing the Arab communal institutions rather than fighting them head-on. That approach suits both relations with Israeli and West Bank Arabs: give them nothing until they implore; give them nothing directly, but only through collaborators; and treat their communities as black boxes—taxable, but not governable.

Israelis who don’t study history are surprised at Arabs like Arafat or Abbas who depend on Israel for everything yet deride Israel on every public occasion. The British encountered a similar situation when they recruited young Arab notables for district officials: the Arabs both craved British jobs and opposed the British. Such a position is an act of balancing rather than self-destruction. The Arabs, not burdened by idealistic honesty, behaved differently with their compatriots than with the British. So with Israel, Arab collaborators reason that Israel has no interest in verifying their loyalty, as she lacks alternative collaborators. Israel erroneously relies on stand-alone collaborators. Rather, she should co-opt large extended families, essentially clans of thousands of members. Such clans can protect their members and influence outsiders. Ever in conflict, such families always crave Israeli help—in return for their help.

Palestinian Arabs came to resemble the Jews in several secondary respects. Almost immediately after the nationalist term “Palestinian” was coined in the early twentieth century, Palestinian nationalism was threatened. Just like Assyria resettled foreigners in Samaria to stamp out the place’s Jewish identity, so the Europeans pushed their Jews into Palestine. Like Jews, Palestinians experienced a history of betrayal. Palestinian refugee camps have bred generations of Arabs who dream about returning home with the intensity of Jews hoping to return to Jerusalem—and will accept no settlement which deprives them of that dream. In practical terms, the Arabs are not tremendously committed to settling Palestine, but Jews, too, seriously discussed having their state in Uganda, and many live now in Canada. In the absence of employment, Palestinian refugees crave learning—a recreational activity for them, but one that differentiates them from other Arabs. Palestinian Arab refugees—different and somewhat militant—face hostility from the Arab nations they live among comparable to European anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab Diaspora has a short history of discrimination and persecution. Palestinian Arabs lost their real estate to Jews just like the Jews lost theirs to Europeans. Jews and Palestinian Arabs share superficial similarities, and similar peoples’ clashes are especially bloody: witness the First World War.

Britain was equally hostile to both, playing them one against another to further its own imperial interests. Pro-Jewish governors such as Herbert Samuel (a Jew) proved hostile to Jews, and pro-Arab viceroys such as Allenby benefited the Jews. The British (Herbert Samuel the Jew) appointed Jew-murderers to the highest positions (Husseini became mufti despite his role in the Nabi Musa massacre two years before), but also flirted with Zionist leaders who proclaimed the goal of dispossessing the Arabs of their country. Following the Western Wall massacres (after the Jews put chairs in front of the Wall without Arab authorization), the British restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases instead of punishing the Arabs, but reversed that policy in MacDonald’s letter a year later.

Governments ignore past grievances. Just as the Israeli government now looks at Russia with awe, so the Palestinian Authority approaches Britain. In its turn, Britain ignores its past troubles with Palestinian gangs, and supports the Palestinian Authority.

In the short period between Exile and post-Zionism, when Jews were normal, we had enemies one could be proud of: Egyptians, Syrians, Russians, even Americans in 1948. Unwilling to accept the burden of hating Egyptians, Jews turned their emotions against weak Palestinians.

The Palestinians were never a significant enemy. At the peak of the Jewish-Arabs clashes of the 1930s, which Israeli historians disparagingly call “riots,” not even ten thousand Arabs were involved in the attacks. Those who were involved were generally outcasts of Palestinian society rather than typical villagers. Examples of peaceful coexistence, including pacts between Jewish and Arab villages, were much more common than attacks. True, Palestinian villagers rarely opposed the brigands and often yielded to their threats and allowed them to station themselves in their villages. Such behavior is regrettably normal for human beings: recall the popular inaction in the face of the Holocaust. Jews also welcomed Irgun and Lehi members known for attacking Palestinian civilians. While we sensibly believe that Irgun had a better justification for violence than did the Palestinian groups, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that the Arabs thought exactly the opposite.

A higher proportion of Palestinians took part in attacks on Jews in towns than villages, Hebron being a prime example. That is easily understandable because towns were a refuge of the underclass, mostly landless peasants who had lost their village roots. Town populations are generally known for being receptive to incitement and prone to violence. The reasons are many: crowds in towns are too big for common sense to prevail, so their values sink to the lowest common denominator which is usually zero. Overcrowding makes people mentally unstable, constant rubbing against people of different values builds latent hatreds, and the inertia that should be kept in place by traditions and neighbors’ reproach is lost.

In 1947-48, Palestinian attacks on Jews were insignificant compared to the warfare by Egypt, Syria, and the British-trained Arab Legion of Jordan. There is no guilt in expelling the 400,000 Palestinians: we did a necessary thing, which was unavoidable if we wanted a Jewish state. But recognize that Israeli damage done to the Palestinians exceeds the damage they did to us by something like a hundred times.

During the War of Attrition, the West Bank was quiet; all the attacks came from Gaza—but from Egyptians rather than Palestinians. The Egyptians recruited Palestinian refugees for terrorism; they could as well have recruited them from any other country. Egypt, rather than Palestinian society, was responsible for terrorism.

In 1967, the Palestinians did not move a finger against the Jews. They were also quiet in 1973, 1982, 2006, and even the Gaza war of 2009.

Fatah’s terrorism was statistically negligible before the late 1980s. Dependent on donations from states, the terrorist group could not afford to create political crises. During its years in Jordan Fatah carried out very few attacks because it feared that Israeli reprisals against Jordan would spell trouble for Palestinians—which indeed happened. King Hussein used the hijacking of several aircraft by a splinter terrorist group as a pretext to expel the Palestinians from his kingdom. The Black September saw the only battles actually fought by Fatah. Even in Karamah, which grew into PLO legend, all the serious fighting was done by the Jordanian Army while Arafat fled the scene. Israel made the strategic error of helping Hussein evict the PLO rather than helping the PLO to take over Jordan instead of the West Bank.

The PLO’s terrorism in Lebanon quickly came to a halt because of Israeli reprisals and the unfolding Palestinian-Lebanese war. In the years before the 1982 war, the PLO mostly shelled Israeli territory in response to Israeli raids. The calm was such that Israelis had to find an absurd pretext for an invasion in Shlomo Argov’s assassination, which was committed by a terrorist group openly at war with the PLO. Israel repeated its error: they armed Lebanese Christians to expel the PLO instead of helping the PLO to carve a state for Palestinians in South Lebanon.

The intifada had little to do with the PLO. Now that the Palestinians have published the minutes of the Oslo negotiations, we know that Abu Ala was almost in tears to prove to Israelis that Arafat could not end the intifada. It was a spontaneous popular uprising. Many terrorist groups rode the wave, but Fatah was not one of them for a reason: before the Rabin-Peres clique brought Arafat into Gaza, Fatah had almost no presence in the territories, thanks to decades of IDF work. Fatah was popular as a symbol of resistance: Arafat could incite the intifada, but not quell it against popular wishes. Unable to commit real terrorism, Fatah compensated with wild rhetoric, which worked against the peace settlement.

Arafat was never an uncontested leader before Israel made him one by channeling foreign aid through him. Even Arafat’s closest associates were highly skeptical of him—until Israel promoted him from president-in-exile and made him into a powerful chairman.

Most Palestinians today want an arrangement with Israel, just as they have wanted it for the past several decades. They want jobs and personal safety rather than Jerusalem or some specific borders. Past offenses must be covered with dust: if Israel maintains friendly relations with Germany and Egypt, we have no right to tell the Palestinians about a speck in their eye. Instead of demonizing the Palestinians, Israel must abandon the Peres policy of supporting Fatah.

Israel lives in a dream in which evil Palestinians with stones and Molotov cocktails seek to destroy one of the world’s strongest armies. Sensing the implausibility of this, Israelis developed a concurrent line: Palestinians are weak, but all Arabs support their fight against Israel. This is false. Since the demise of their Soviet sponsor, even pro-communist Arab countries don’t want a major conflict with Israel. On the contrary, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major headache for somewhat moderate Arab governments because it fans pan-Islamic radicalism in their states. Long gone are the days when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict served as a vent for popular discontent in Arab countries; today, it is more of a catalyst, though in that role, too, it is fading. With ample leaks and secret documents published in the media, we know that Saudis, Egyptians, Tunisians, and Moroccans were jubilant about the Oslo Accords. Jordan’s king was gloomy for a single reason: of all the PLO’s friends, he alone was not informed of the secret negotiations. Even post-communist Russians were happy about the deal.

Israel has major religious and nationalistic reasons not to abandon Judea and Samaria. To disguise them with imagined security reasons is counterproductive.

A rare nation is fervently religious. Arabs rally around Islam where it provides a communal identity, but religion plays otherwise little role in their lives. Palestinian Arabs were notoriously irreligious. Religious professionals from Hamas slowly turn the Arabs to religion, a process helped by religion’s role as the national platform. Palestinian Arabs are not given to religious concerns, but rationally side with anyone who helps them against the Zionist enemy. From the anti-Zionist Muslim-Christian associations in 1920s to the current alliance with the EU, Palestinian Arabs are fighting against the Jews, rather than for Islam.

The Palestinian mentality evolved to be unwarlike. Palestinian Arabs dwelled safely in the Middle East’s backyard, protected by Ottomans against external enemies and by the hilly terrain against the Bedouin. Just like their Christian counterparts of old, primitive Palestinian villagers enjoyed robbery rather than war. Palestinian Arabs resisted Ibrahim Pasha’s demands for conscripts during the Egyptian conquest as much as they have distanced themselves from the PIJ’s calls for insurrection. Israel befriends the Bedouin, whose mentality is infinitely worse than that of the settled Palestinian Arabs. Lacking attachment to the land, the Bedouin acquired a “hit-and-run” mentality, ever ready to stab their friends in the back.

Palestinian Arabs have never managed to build large militia. Fatah’s security forces provided nominal employment; out of the tens of thousands of members of Fatah forces, only a minuscule number participate in guerrilla activity. Hamas, too, rallied a formidable number of gun-toting Muslims, but few of them participated in military actions. Guerrillas, however, need not be many. Jewish guerrilla groups such as Etzel and Lehi, though small, terrorized the British occupiers into running away from Palestine. Arabs assembled much larger units than Etzel, such as the gangs in 1929, Izz ad-Din Qassam’s Black Hand in 1930s (hundreds of active members), PFLP-GC, PIJ, and PRC. The small numbers of Palestinian Arabs who actually fight the Jews does not imply powerlessness.

Peasant revolts are often disorganized, but powerful. Jewish paramilitary organizations never achieved the level of violence seen in the 1936 Arab revolt, when thousands of Arab civilians attacked the Jews and the British. Arabs mined bridges, blew up railroads and oil pipelines, attacked British military installations, and disrupted life in Palestine for years. The British had to abandon the pretense of civilized humanity, and razed villages and hanged popular religious leaders such as Sheikh Farhan Saadi. The British eventually crushed the Arab revolt, which had lost momentum anyway, but the memory of the revolt was a major factor in the British decision to evacuate Palestine. The revolt was not primarily directed against Jews, but was a typical peasant turmoil involving racketeering, marauding, refusal to pay debts, indiscriminate attacks on property and (British) officers of the law, and class struggle generally. The Arab revolt ended when the guerrillas alienated the local population with racketeering, violence, and British retaliation. Hamas now assiduously avoids a similar alienation by collecting money abroad and keeping the gun-toting militants at bay—and trying to avoid Israeli retaliation. Fatah avoids Israeli reprisals, but cannot stop the racketeering and grassroots violence. The Palestinian population is now ready to temporarily embrace any regime, Israeli included, that offers safety. Civil war in Palestine is Israel’s best bet for a contented rule over the local Arabs.

Arabs don’t change; Jews do. Israeli leftists of the 1940s-60s were not peaceniks, but tough kibbutzniks with no regard for Arab life or limb. They shot Arab civilians in places such as Kfar Kasem and pardoned the perpetrators, banned Arab parties, exiled and imprisoned Arab leaders, confiscated Arab and Muslim religious properties, and did not hesitate to retaliate in full force when attacked. In the 1970s, the Israeli Left drifted toward libertarianism, both to distinguish itself from the rising Right, and to conform to the tastes of their foreign associates. At the same time, the Arabs increased their nationalist zeal and exploited Israeli political relaxation. Jews retracted, Arabs advanced. That said, the Left was always schizophrenic, killing and expelling Arabs with one hand, and financing their welfare and infrastructure services with the other hand. Liberal nationalists would have privatized infrastructure in Arab villages, let the Arabs ruin it, and then offered them tax deductions rather than subsidies. Since Arabs don’t pay taxes, tax deductions would not benefit them. Bereft of subsidies and municipal (Jewish-funded) projects, and refused employment in Jewish companies, Arabs would find Israel too expensive, sell their possessions, and emigrate. Jews wrongly create opportunities for Arab males to work; if job opportunities are to made available at all, they should be offered predominantly to Arab women, thus forcing Arab families to decrease their birth rates.

The Left introduced—at Jewish expense—some truly devastating policies, such as universal education among Arabs, which produced scores of semi-educated activists. Nationalism is an abstraction only inculcated through large-scale indoctrination. Palestinian Arabs were still not nationalists in the early 1960s, but Jewish schools educated them in nationalism, liberation, and national struggle—using Jewish examples. The insane Israeli government introduced the very same education in the occupied West Bank, and raised two generations of ideological Arab zealots.

Today, the ultra-left embrace the Arabs, though without reciprocity. Their relations have been hateful on the Arab side from the beginning. Socialists welcomed Arabs into Jewish trade unions in 1920s—in vain. Arabs even rejected Jewish help in establishing their own trade unions. At that time, the level of Arab nationalism was much lower than now and the issue of Jewish sovereignty over Palestine seemed remote. As in other countries, socialists in Israel were torn between internationalism and commitment to national workers, eventually opting for the latter. Thus the socialists pressed Jewish entrepreneurs to hire only Jewish workers, ostensibly to turn Jews into a working-class nation, but probably to cut down on Jewish unemployment, without regard to Arab needs.

The Arabs’ hatred of intruders is not unique. Xenophobia is a powerful evolutionary trait, which preserves groups. Imagine European Jews fleeing to sparsely populated Siberia and claiming statehood there; the Russians would have resisted the Jews just as the Arabs did. Russians didn’t even accept the Jews living lowly among them, but permitted Jews to settle only in the Russian Empire’s western lands. The communists returned to ethnic segregation by moving the Jews to Siberia. After the window of unrestricted immigration closed in America, entrance was refused even to Jewish refugees; imagine the American reaction if European Jews had streamed there, demanding a Jewish state in New York. Israel refuses admittance to the Darfur refugees the Jews are so fond of saving on paper; so why imagine the Arabs should have welcomed Jewish refugees? Admit it, Jews moved to create a state in the Middle East because we had no chances of carving a state for ourselves in Europe. Arabs are perfectly right when they say that Europeans got rid of the Jews at Arab expense. Europeans supported a Jewish state in Palestine not for any historical or religious reasons, or else they won’t be pushing Israel to surrender Judea and Jerusalem to the Arabs.

Moderate Israeli Palestinians stress that they only want equal rights in the Jewish state. But Muslims by definition cannot have equal rights in a Jewish state—because the state is Jewish, not Muslim. Naming the state is also the right of its citizens, but only Jews have such right in Israel. The Torah offers resident aliens (gerim) freedom from oppression, but also mandates that natives and non-Hebrews be driven away. The residents in question, therefore, are those who have accepted basic tenets of Jewish beliefs. Israeli Arabs reject the Jewish right to the land, including the Temple Mount, Hebron, and other places, and therefore cannot be considered protected residents. Most Israeli Arabs are content for now with equal personal rights and don’t demand political equality. That will certainly change, as people assured of their welfare always proceed to demand political liberties. Freedom of political vote—including the freedom to vote the Jewish state out of existence—is a basic political liberty, and Israeli Arabs won’t relinquish it. Blacks are a minority in America, but were able to change the racist laws that oppressed them; Arabs don’t even need to become a majority in Israel to force the change of our racist and symbolic laws. And if religion is set aside, Israeli laws and symbols are indeed racist.

Israel’s struggle with her Palestinian residents resembles Jordan’s. There too, a burgeoning Palestinian population threatens Jordan’s core Bedouin population. Jordan’s Palestinians are exactly like the West Bankers, descendants of the 1948 refugees from the West Bank. So far, Bedouins have kept their key political posts, but any semblance of democracy would bring the Palestinian majority to power. Jordan’s problem with the Palestinians is actually worse than Israel’s, as Palestinians surpass the Bedouin in rudimentary work-ethics and business skills, and dominate the Jordanian economy. Just like Israel refuses to annex the West Bank for fear of inundating herself with millions of Palestinians, so Jordan finally refused the West Bank for the same reason.

Palestinian victories in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria boost Israeli Arabs’ nationalism. Israeli Muslims are slowly assimilating into Jewish society, but quickly cementing into our Arab enemies’ fifth column in Israel. They are cheering fans of Hamas and Hezbollah now, but would form pogrom mobs if the Jews became weak. And when the Jews are strong, why should we leave Arabs in Israel?

Observers often mistake religious overtones for religiosity. The notion of jihad has reverberated in Palestine at least since Izz Qassam’s fiery speeches of 1920s, but his followers were near-secular bandits. Similarly, the Arab gangsters of 1936-39 were called mujahedeen. Quasi-socialist Arabs established a Syria-based Committee for National Jihad in Palestine in the late 1930s. Israelis similarly adopted biblical rhetoric for their atheist state. A religious conflict between Jews and Muslims would be odd: Jews have no religious problem with the monotheistic Muslims whatsoever, and Muslims have protective obligations toward Jews. A conflict between Jewish and Arab secular nationalism is understandable, and lacks a peaceful solution. In religious terms, Jews and Arabs share substantial values and can reach an agreement; in nationalist terms, our values are opposed and no middle ground exists: the ground is either the Jewish or the Arab.

Palestinian Arabs were unreligious. In rural areas, women rarely wore a veil. Friday mosque attendance, when it happened at all, was more of a party scene. Rural Arabs, like rural populations generally, were atheistic pagans given to superstitions. Hamas had a hard time rallying Palestinian Arabs around Islam, and attracted them with an extensive network of charities. Islam is only a nationalist doctrine for the Arabs.

Until the late 1970s, Israel suppressed Palestinian organizations with even the slightest nationalist potential, from political parties to sports clubs. Muslim religious expression was suppressed less rigorously. As the result, Palestinian discontent was sublimated into the religious sphere, and Israeli Arabs became relatively zealous religiously. Arabs also invested their efforts in grassroots charities, which were allowed by the Israeli government, and used them as a front for political gatherings. Israeli Arab charities sent money to Intifada “victims,” though it is inconceivable that American Japanese citizens would have sent money to Tokyo during WWII.

Fatah’s legendary battle of Karama was actually fought by Jordanian forces—and by any measure, lost. Later, the PLO consistently lost in Lebanon to local guerrilla factions. When Israel invaded Lebanon, it took the IDF some time to hole up the PLO only because the government avoided bombing civilian areas when the Palestinians hid.

In Tunisia, Arafat was a true nobody. Arab governments forgot him, certain than he would never be able to return even to Jordan, let alone to the West Bank. The Russians toyed with Arafat a bit because of their general interest in subversive movements, but tellingly did not arm or finance him. The Europeans maintained low-level contacts with the PLO just to maintain the illusion of involvement in the foreign policy of the Levant where Israel, the only real player at the time, was America’s client.

Peres brought Arafat from Tunisia specifically because he was powerless and presumed controllable. True, Peres initially viewed Arafat as the only person capable of stopping the Intifada, but Abu Mazen dispelled that belief immediately when the subject came up in the Oslo negotiations, and Peres is not the kind of man to harbor illusions. The Intifada started as grassroots violence and died out by itself. Neither Sharon nor Arafat contributed materially to its demise; the uprising followed the elusive logic of social ruptures, which start and end unpredictably.

In the years following the first Intifada, Fatah’s mainstream was largely removed from terrorism, which was mostly conducted by Hamas (another Israeli creature), the young militants of Tanzim, the independent terrorists of PFLP, and the Iranian proxy PRC.

Arafat sat in his bunker in old sportswear, degraded, ever foul-smelling, surrounded by a handful of loyalists who continually reassured him of his greatness. He did not steal billions of dollars of foreign aid, as many claim. A significant amount, yes, but nothing like billions. To maintain the image of a ruler, he gave handsome amounts to his acolytes and paid bribes (dubbed “salaries”) to some 90,000 “security personnel” whose only security role was to refrain from rioting against Arafat. He did not sign a peace agreement with Israel simply because he would not have been able to enforce it and was deeply afraid he would be assassinated for trying.

Anyone who saw the way Barak patted Arafat in Camp David understood that that was a provincial Arab with no real power or role in geopolitics.

The process is historically common: Russian liberals pre-1917 renounced terrorism and mob violence, but their goals inspired others who embraced both terrorism and mob violence. Moderation never wins; only ugly radicalism is sufficiently strong to break the old order’s defenses. Moderation is half-hearted, while radicalism is honest: if the goals are so sweet, surely they justify temporarily unpleasant means.

Terrorism works. Israeli officials promulgate the ugly lie that Palestinian terrorists harm their own cause and delay their statehood. On the contrary, the Palestinian cause received international prominence because of the daring terrorist operations against Jewish targets abroad. Polls show that Jewish support for the Palestinian state surges after major terrorist attacks in Israel. The terrorism of the Second Intifada forced Israel to evacuate her settlers from Gaza. If not for terrorism, Israel would ignore Palestinian demands for statehood. Terrorism is a viable military tactic against a stronger enemy.

Jews, too, embraced terrorism: not only by Irgun and Lehi against the British, but by Ben Gurion against the Arabs, such as in Kfar Qassem and various operations of Sharon’s Unit 101. Terrorism is not an occupation for the stupid or cowardly as some assert: forty years before the tactically brilliant attacks of 9/11, PLFP-GC hijacked three airliners simultaneously and landed them in Jordan, sparking the 1960 Jordan-PLO war.

Terrorism is more moral than common warfare, as terrorism achieves its political ends with a smaller death toll. Civilian losses inflicted on Israel by Palestinian terrorists are significantly lower even in relative terms than what the Allies inflicted on Japan. We might not like Palestinian terrorism, and we can surely oppose it to the utmost extent necessary with military power, but there is no point in whining about it.