Rage and Unreason

A death cult shuns Trump’s Deal of the Century.

By Howard Rotberg, FPM   Mon Feb 3, 2020<
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Merriam-Webster defines “rage” as “violent and uncontrolled anger.”

It is a sudden reaction, as in “road rage.” It is not planned and it is not controlled.

Hence, you cannot plan a day of uncontrolled anger due to a sudden reaction and call it a “Day of Rage.” Mahmoud Abbas of the so-called Palestinian Authority called for a Day of Rage in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century” — which would gradually give Abbas’ people a state alongside Israel in as much as 70% of the lands which Israelis term “disputed” and the Palestinians and their supporters term “occupied.”

This was not the first Day of Rage by Abbas. Liat Collins in The Jerusalem Postwrites: “Sadly, instead of looking ahead to a brighter future, the Palestinian leadership seems determined to look back in anger, one day of rage after another.”

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When such a reaction of rage is done by a child, we often call it a “tantrum.” A tantrum does not help the situation. After the tantrum reaction finishes, it is time to “reason.”

But the Palestinians under Abbas, backed as they are by European and American members of what we might call the “Leftist-Islamist Alliance,” see no reason to reason. With a history of using terrorism against civilians and a position that their goal is not a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but one in place of Israel, with an Islamist ideology that no Jews should live in lands ever controlled by Muslims, they decline negotiations, and decline peace deals, whether proposed by Israelis ranging from Rabin, Olmert and Barak or from the Israeli/American effort proposed by President Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. They see that terrorism has brought them more success in the West whose anti-Semitism appears in the long term to tolerate their maximalist aims.

Yet now even as so-called “progressives” like Bernie Sanders side with the terrorists, empathy for terrorism and incitement of their young to martyrdom through jihadist suicide bombings, is falling away from the least expected quarters: Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and even Egypt have responded with interest to the “Deal of the Century.” In the age of an aggressive Iran carving up the Middle East with its proxies in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, southern Lebanon and Gaza, the Sunni kingdoms and dictatorships are looking entirely differently at Israel, the high-tech, high-culture bastion of western values in a very rough neighborhood. They have more pressing concerns than supporting the latest rage-filled tantrum of the Palestinians. They have chosen reason over rage.

President Trump in several moves has used his deal-making “reason” to change the Mid-East paradigm. Firstly, the assassination of Solemeini demolished the myth of Iranian power to do whatever it wants. Secondly, we have the American withdrawal from the deeply-flawed, Obama-led deal with Iran, which would permit nuclear weapons within a decade or so to a country that has vowed to use them against Israel. Thirdly, in a deal which would provide the framework for a demilitarized Palestinian state which would receive some 70% of historic Jewish lands in Judea and Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”), the Palestinians have four years to apply reason, not rage, and negotiate the terms of their state, which would have a capital in a suburb of Jerusalem. The fact that Israel would be given security guarantees and control of airspace and such can hardly be criticized given the history of Arab-started wars and terrorism against the Jewish State.

Robert Spencer, writing in Frontpage Magazine recently, reminds us of the role that Islam plays in the unreason concerning Jerusalem and rest of the historic Jewish lands:

The refusal of analysts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to face the role of Islamic theology in the conflict is astonishingly naïve and ethnocentric. The Palestinians and their supporters will never accept the Trump peace plan because of Islamic imperatives that mandate that Islam must dominate and not be dominated, and that any land that once was ruled by Islamic law must be ruled by Islamic law forever. Unless and until these facts are taken into account, every peace plan is foredoomed.

Abe Greewald writes in Commentarymagazine that the refusal of Mahmoud Abbas to participate in this peace plan with its many open-ended provisions to be negotiated by the parties themselves is what gets to the “heart of the matter.” He states:

Palestinian leaders will take a day of rage over a decade of peace every time. And it’s their very refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to negotiate in good faith that’s doomed the long-suffering Palestinian people. Palestinian officials have refused to meet with Americans since Trump announced the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem in 2017.

Greewald reasons:

without the undying support of the Saudis and other critical allies, the Palestinians have lost much of their leverage.

This is in part why the U.S. felt no pressure to wait on Palestinian input before rolling out its framework. And it’s also why, if Palestinian leaders once again fail to seize the opportunity before them, everyone will get along just fine except the Palestinian people.

Abbas pays pensions to the parents of terrorists who have killed Israeli children, and names streets after said terrorists. This is not the result of rage. It is a carefully planned and controlled abuse of his people. American supporters of the Leftist-Islamist alliance must realize that even the Sunni kingdoms understand this, and therefore these “progressives” are not progressive at all; they support the historical abuse of the so-called Palestinians by their own leaders who plan a faux rage as part of their perpetual public relations campaign, which has helped them in the immoral United Nations and European Union, but not a whit among their Muslim neighbors.

It is very significant that the Palestinian people are choosing against their supposed rage. If the people are not buying into their supposed rage, their supposed uncontrolled anger, then the leadership can be seen to be in trouble, as rage and terrorism seem to be the only political action that they undertake. The last two Days of Rage are instructive in this regard.

Dr. Adnan Abu Amer notes in the Middle East Monitor:

The Palestinian Authority called for 26 November to be a “Day of Rage” against America’s claim that Israeli settlements do not violate international law. The PA called on the people to hold on to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reject Washington’s alliance with the Israeli occupation and stand behind President Mahmoud Abbas.

A number of senior officials from Fatah, which Abbas also heads, said that the protests would be the start of a comprehensive programme to confront the US-Israeli measures, leading to an uprising against the Israeli occupation.”….

However, the response to the PA was modest; demonstrations were few and poorly attended, despite the widespread Palestinian rejection of all US and Israeli measures. A fair assessment is that the “Day of Rage” was a catastrophic failure for the PA, with only around 1,000 demonstrators on the streets of the occupied West Bank, where around 3 million Palestinians live.

This suggests that the main concerns of the Palestinian people are the economy and living standards rather than action in support of the PA… The largest city in the northern part of the West Bank, Nablus, did not witness a single meaningful demonstration. There was widespread indifference to the PA and its ‘Day of Rage’. A video released by the PA showed Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh in Ramallah to participate in the ‘protests’, but people on the street were ignoring him.

However, it is important to state that Gaza, under Hamas, is much more successful in staging demonstrations, and we have seen protests turn into riots. I have written about them at FrontPage Magazine.

This could mean that the radical terrorist leadership in Gaza is more successful among the people precisely because it does not pretend to be anything else than leaders of a terrorist army, and is not encumbered with Western support as Abbas is. Abbas, now in his mid-80s, must decide whether his legacy will be that of steering his people to a negotiated state with due compromise or a paving of the way for Hamas to also take over the so-called West Bank once he dies.

Accordingly, in Hamas-ruled Gaza, the Times of Israelreports that thousands of Palestinians protested there just ahead of the release of Trump’s peace plan later in the day.

But as to the so-called West Bank after the release of the plan, Canada’s National Post reports that “few demonstrators actually took to the streets despite Palestinians’ broad rejection of Trump’s proposal, a gap between rhetoric and delivery that exposes the scale of the challenge their leaders face in pressuring the United States and Israel.”

Sam Sokol of JTA writes of the latest Day of Rage:

Rather than displaying an openness to engage with the peace plan, or a deep rage against it, which Palestinian leaders have encouraged, the prevailing sense among the people here who would be materially affected is one of resignation.

But the leadership under Abbas, in the absence of rage or reason, is opting for a complete shunning of Israel, even dropping its security cooperation between security forces. The Jerusalem Post reports on February 1^st that Abbas announced that he has decided to sever all relations with Israel and the U.S. in protest against President Trump’s plan for Mideast peace.

If Abbas continues his position against negotiating any Palestinian state if it is alongside a Jewish State in Israel, and that he would rather completely shun both Israel and America, he will continue the Palestinian embrace of death and unreason.

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