'Diaspora' Palestinians Copy Jewish-Agency [Updated]

Apparently their goal is not your father's Palestinian state:

Jewish-Agency-style ‘Palestine Network’ launched in Bethlehem

Palestinians from 23 countries organize to build a "sustainable, democratic, secular" Palestinian state.

...The state of Palestine does not exist; the courts are still not working, local government has numerous problems, not to mention health care, education and infrastructure. Representatives of Palestinian communities abroad have come to Bethlehem to kick off the independent “Palestine Network.”

“Welcome to your second home,” announces Ramzi Khoury, executive director of the Palestine Network. “You are representatives from 23 countries who have chosen to be engaged in building this Palestinian state and not just talking about it. This is a do tank, rather than a talk tank. This is not a political club.”

Of the estimated 10 million Palestinians living today, at least half live in what Palestinians call its diaspora – away from the region. According to Khoury, the Palestine Network is establishing chapters across the world that will serve as a conduit for professionals, entrepreneurs and intellectuals to lay the foundations for a Palestinian state.


“If you want to build a democratic state, you need to tackle all the sectors of that state,” Khoury says. “So doctors need to come down here and revamp our health system, engineers need to come here and help us build, lawyers and judges need to come and help us create an independent judiciary and a state of law, and we need educators.”

The Palestine Network is not just another charity or source of funding. The Palestinians have many economic backers. In 2008, global financial aid to the Palestinian Authority exceeded $2 billion, including about $526 million from Arab countries, $651m. from the European Union, $300m. from the US and about $238m. from the World Bank, according to the Arab League’s 2009 economic report.

The founding conference, sponsored by the governments of Germany and Belgium, was held in the opulent Convention Center on the outskirts of Bethlehem, hub of Palestinian culture and tourism.

The network’s goal is to use expertise from Palestine’s diaspora communities to develop the local economy, judiciary, education and health infrastructures in what will be the future state.

I thought this was interesting:

The Palestinians are the first to admit they have borrowed from the Israeli experience, which set up the Jewish Agency to build Israel.

“It is a model, why not,” Khoury says. “It was a network like this that established the Jewish-state idea. What they did is create all the programs on the ground to bring in Jews into Palestine and create the infrastructure that is still needed for the State of Israel today.

“Today there are many networks out there which are there to support Israel,” he continues. “Some of them are left-leaning, others are right-leaning. You find them clashing and arguing and they are not harmonious. But at the end of the day they are there to support Israel... and this is what Palestine needs.”

Yeah, he'll learn.

Read the whole thing.

Also, check out the video from The Media Line News Agency

Considering their declared goal of a secular democratic Palestinian state, the Palestine Network may very well find their greatest opposition coming not from Israel, but from the leadership of their own people.

UPDATE: The fact that Palestine Network copies the Jewish Agency does not mean that they recognize the history behind the Jewish Agency and the Jewish state.

The Palestinians are the first to admit they have borrowed from the Israeli experience, which set up the Jewish Agency to build Israel.

“It is a model, why not,” [executive director Ramzi] Khoury says. “It was a network like this that established the Jewish-state idea. What they did is create all the programs on the ground to bring in Jews into Palestine and create the infrastructure that is still needed for the State of Israel today.

Actually, Mr. Khoury, the idea of a Jewish state dates back to over 3,000 years before the Jewish Agency--going back to the Torah.

But if Khoury limits the comparison between Jewish and Arab Palestinian nationalism, there are those who will bend over backwards to find parallels. In If I Am Not For Myself, Ruth Wisse writes:

The symmetry between Arabs and Jews that Amos Oz is still a little embarrassed to introduce, except by way of leading questions, is taken by Grossman as the premise of his chronicle The Yellow Wind. He devotes all his artistic powers to equating the moral energy of the Arab desire for Palestine with the Jews' age-old longing for Zion. When a sixteen-year old Arab girl talks to him about the city of Lod, "where the sky was always blue," he does not remind her that she is sitting only a few miles away but translates her nationalism into a Jewish longing:

I remembered the wistful lines of Yehuda Halevy, "The taste of your sand--more pleasant to my mouth than honey," and Bialik, who sang to the land which "the spring eternally adorns," how wonderfully separation beautifies the beloved, and how strange it is, in the barrenness of the gray cement of [the Arab refugee camp] Deheisha, to hear sentences so full of lyric beauty, words spoken in a language more exalted than the everyday, poetic but of established routine, like a prayer or an oath: "And the tomatoes there were red and big, and everything came to us form the earth, and the earth gave us and gave us more."

Grossman does not even pay attention to his own evidence: the contrast between Yehuda Halevy who is prepared to find the sand as sweet as honey and the Arabs who imagine the land that they don't possess to be more magically fertile than the land they actually cultivate. It does not occur to him to ask why, if there is such symmetry in the nature of Jewish and Arab "longing," Arabs should now be in possession of 250,000 squarer miles while the Jews have a mere 8,000, which Arabs still clamor to conquer. He is determined to prove equivalence--between the Arab boy playing on a comb and the fabled Jewish fiddler on the roof, between the Arab grandmother and his own Jewish bobenyu. One might ask why Grossman should travel among Arabs at all when they are so undifferentiated from the folks back home, but that would able to miss the political purpose of the book of which establishing perfect symmetry between Arab and Jew is but a first necessary step.

[Hat tip: Soccer Dad]

But if there are Jews who yearn for parallels between Jewish and Palestinian aspirations, Palestinians are having none of it:

The U.S. government, via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has provided support for a glossy 39-page "Palestine Guide Book." Just released by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Tourism, it declares on its first page, "Palestine lies between the Mediterranean Coast and the Jordan River." Not until Page 10 are we informed - under the heading "Country" - that "Palestine comprises the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."

You only have to look at this excerpt of the booklet to see where they are going with this:

Personally, I think that line about how "Palestine has been a meeting point for diverse cultures since prehistoric times" is a nice touch. I suppose it is only a short jump from dragging a woman back to your cave and making her wear a hijab once you get her there.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Palestine Network.