Palestinian accomplishments
17 June 2024
As a lifelong resident of Southeast Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab-Americans in the United States, and as a pathologist, attorney and small business CEO, I have met many exceptional Palestinian-American professionals, entrepreneurs and others. In addition, Palestinians occupy many prominent positions in the Gulf states (based on this 1985 report and my communications). Thus, we would expect that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would be winning many Nobel Prizes (like the Israelis), and establishing a prosperous country rivaling Israel and the Gulf States.
Unfortunately, Palestinian leaders and many Palestinians have focused their energies on promoting Palestinian deaths and suffering to be used as a weapon against Israel. This self-destructive behavior began in 1948 when the United Nations Partition Plan established separate Palestinian and Jewish States. The Arab nations rejected this plan and launched a war against Israel, which Israel miraculously won. Since the Palestinians could not militarily defeat Israel, they started a public relations war against Israel by causing Palestinian deaths and suffering which they blamed on Israel. This has led to these unique Palestinian accomplishments:
1. Refugee status for 76+ years.
The Palestinians appear to be the only group that has obtained essentially permanent refugee status and that has a United Nations agency (UNRWA) dedicated to maintaining this status. After the 1948 war, Jews were expelled from Arab countries and resettled in Israel. Palestinians left or were expelled from Israel. However, Palestinians have largely refused resettlement; even today, there appears to be no effort to resettle the estimated 1.5 million Palestinians in UNRWA camps.
2. Pioneers of Global Terrorism.
The Palestinian terrorist organizations had a pioneering role in the use of terrorism as a strategic tool on the global arena. The two main Palestinian organizations, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Fatah, were the backbone of this process of radicalization and violence, trailed by smaller Palestinian factions. No other organization in the world, of any ideological color, had such a long, wide range and influential terrorist activity between the mid-1960s to the 1990s. Source
3. Popularizing childhood suicide bombers and explosive (suicide) belts.
As part of the Arab–Israeli conflict, especially during the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, Palestinian militant groups used children for suicide bombings. Minors were recruited to attack Israeli targets, both military and civilian. This deliberate involvement of children in armed conflict was condemned by international human rights organizations.
According to Amnesty International, "Palestinian armed groups have repeatedly shown total disregard for the most fundamental human rights, notably the right to life, by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians and by using Palestinian children in armed attacks. Children are susceptible to recruitment by manipulation or may be driven to join armed groups for a variety of reasons, including a desire to avenge relatives or friends killed by the Israeli army." Source
4. Creating the world’s first terrorist society in Gaza.
Gaza’s estimated 30,000 to 40,000 militants are scattered throughout its 141 square miles, a small area about twice the size of Washington, D.C. However, these Palestinian militants have widespread collaborators throughout the civilian population. Other than small children, I suggest that there are very few innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Non-militants are manufacturing weapons, building the massive Gaza metro tunnel system, diverting humanitarian aid to use for military and terrorist activities, indoctrinating children into terrorism and serving as human shields for the militants. “Uninvolved” Palestinians in the densely packed Gaza Strip must know where the terrorist leaders, weapons and hostages are being hidden and by remaining silent, they are assisting the Palestinian war machine.
Regarding the recent Israeli hostage rescue:
The “uninvolved” were part of the Hamas system, which held all seven hostages that the IDF has so far released in “civilian” residential apartments: Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv (in Nuseirat), Fernando Simon Marman and Louis Har (in Rafah) and the soldier Ori Megidish (in an apartment in the Shati refugee camp).
Many of the “uninvolved” neighbors knew. Most remained silent. Hamas itself, in order not to appear as having been negligent in guarding the hostages, admitted time and again that “the released Israeli prisoners were with civilians, not with Hamas,” thus providing further proof, for those who still needed it, of how involved the “uninvolved” were in Hamas terrorism. Source
5. Normalizing human sacrifice and the use of human shields.
Unique to modern human civilization, Palestinians have intentionally promoted the deaths of Palestinians by firing weapons at Israel from schools, mosques, residential areas and medical facilities so the nonmilitants would act as human shields to protect the militants. Israel, similar to any country, cannot allow these attacks to continue and must attempt to destroy the militants. However, since the Palestinian militants operate through the use of civilians, Israeli military responses that kill militants will necessarily kill many nonmilitants; there is no way to stop the militant attacks without attacking those who are hiding the militants. The world condemns Israel but the Palestinian government is intentionally promoting these deaths:
The military leader of Hamas has said he believes he has gained the upper hand over Israel and that the spiraling civilian death toll in Gaza would work in the militant group’s favor, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing leaked messages the newspaper said it had seen.
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Yahya Sinwar told other Hamas leaders recently, according to one of the messages, the WSJ reported Monday. In another, Sinwar is said to have described civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices” while citing past independence-related conflicts in countries like Algeria. CNN
As noted previously, the Biden administration, Israel's defense minister, many Israelis and some Palestinians agree that the optimal goal for a stable Middle East is to create a non-terrorist, relatively non-corrupt Palestinian country that coexists with Israel and other regional countries. However, this will require Palestinians to create and support new leadership that promotes this vision of peace and coexistence instead of hatred and terrorism.
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