AN EGYPTIAN'S ANALYSIS OF WHAT'S BEHIND GAZA: Mona Charen writes for The National Review about those who blame Israel for what is happening in Gaza--and one who does not:

a reform-minded Egyptian author published an online essay (translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute) that penetrates to the heart of what ails Palestinian society and the Middle East in general. Kamal Gabriel’s analysis would resound for its wisdom anywhere, but it is particularly noteworthy coming from within the Arab world — a useful reminder that voices of reason and benevolence are not altogether silent in that part of the world.

Gabriel writes:

[T]he all-against-all infighting and its basic code have become the mental and psychological makeup of the Palestinian people, as a natural result of the predominant discourse of hostility and incitement. [This discourse] has been adopted by Palestinians of all persuasions and in all the factions — religious, pan-Arab revolutionary, and leftist. It is a discourse whose aim was sowing hatred, having recourse to violence, and enjoying spilling blood.

At first it was directed against the so-called Israeli enemy, and it uprooted any possibility of or tendency towards rational mutual comprehension or of recourse to discussion, dialogue, and negotiation . . .

This was translated into political language in the slogan that the Arab-Israeli struggle is an existential struggle, and not a struggle over borders, and its implementation in practice was the so-called martyrdom-seeking operations for killing Israeli civilians. The hatred was transformed from hatred of Zionism to hatred of Jews, "the sons of apes and pigs."

Perhaps no one has noticed — for where are we to find someone to notice, in the absence of reason and rationality? — that when you take an individual or a group away from the culture of using reason and peaceful dialogue, and replace it with the culture of violence and of killing those who are different, you cannot then afterwards control it and direct it to be used against one single side.

. . . It starts with the Zionist enemy who is occupying the Holy Land, and the violence and the hatred spread dangerously, like fire, in the psyche . . . . They consume everything around them — and the first thing they consume is the light of reason. . . . Thus we observed, and gave our blessing to, the conflagrations of violence and hatred . . . and its expansion is the fraternal violence we see [today] . . .

In my estimation, this is the fruit that we are harvesting because we sowed thorns for over half a century.”

And it is a very big harvest too...

Technorati Tag: Israel and Gaza and Palestinian Civil War.