Palestinian national character

It is ostensibly unscientific to talk of Arabs as treacherous, cowardly, and backward, yet those traits are paramount to understanding the Palestinians. Treacherous Bedouin serve in the IDF against their Arab and Muslim brothers and routinely assault Israeli Jews. Culturally similar Bedouin in Jordan keep the local Palestinian majority in check. Treacherous Palestinian notables in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries kept selling land to Jews, and at the same time stirred Palestinian masses against the encroaching Jews. Cowardly Palestinians disliked alien Jews and definitely resented the changing face of their country, but didn’t fight the Jews. Not even twenty thousand Palestinians joined the gangs in the riots of 1920s and 30s, and few answered Arafat’s calls for uprising. In both cases, many Arabs were paid to fight the Jews: from Qaudji’s Liberation Army to Fatah security forces. It testifies to the consent and apathy of the Palestinian Arabs that even financial inducements and improvements in social status—from jobless to gun-toting guerrilla—failed to rally many of them: Shukayri couldn’t form the Palestinian Liberation Army around 1959 despite the full support of Nasser and the Arab League.

It’s wrong to argue that poor people cannot afford nationalism. Scores of poor peoples have fought invaders to the death. The Afghan mojahedeen amounted to as much as 10 percent of the able male population, and even secular Iraq, with no real occupier delivered a number of insurgents close to 3 percent of able males. Hamas—the best-organized Palestinian militia—rallied hardly 2 percent of Gaza’s males, even though the majority there is unemployed anyway, and doesn’t risk their UN rations when joining Hamas. The Hamas militia acts more like a security agency than an army of freedom fighters; it refrains from attacks on Israel and generally musters no more than 600 militiamen at a time. Palestinian guerillas are woefully inept: Fatah-Hamas clashes expend millions of bullets but cause few casualties. It is common for the Palestinians to fire above their heads, expecting the other side to reciprocate. Palestinian guerillas are notoriously soft interrogation targets; they crack after a few ritual slaps.

Danny the Admin 2009 August 04

Ah, ok, got it about the enemy territory. Hamas is a militia. They have uniform, but use it sporadically in attacks, so that they can claim civilian casualties.
The thing is, you cannot go on capturing soldiers in the enemy territory. Israel don’t go on kidnapping Syrians – because there is such thing as ceasefire, explicit or implicit. Now the problem is, Israeli-Hamas ceasefire was implicit – Israelis say we were not bombing Gaza at the time and so there has been ceasefire; Hamas says there were other hostile measures, and there have been no ceasefire. That’s called a situation short of belligerency, a gray area.

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