“We Arabs are damn lucky that Jews do not behave like Arabs.”

­­— Fred Maroun, Lebanese human-rights activist

There are conflicts whose tragedy lies not only in their casualties but in their choreography.

The Palestinian national movement, adrift since its inception, discovered early that the most advantageous political decision it could make was not strategic, territorial or diplomatic, but symbolic: It chose its enemy. It chose the Jew.

In that choice—theatrical, shrewd, almost mythographic—it found the gravitational force it lacked. For without the Jew, there is no stage, no audience and no global echo chamber. The world’s moral gaze fixes, almost magnetically, on the Jewish question. And thus, the Palestinians secured what no military victory could grant them: eternal protagonism.

See Full Page