| President Bush's plan for a provisional Palestinian state will
not bring peace to the Middle East. Peace will come only when Palestinians
love their children more than they hate Jews.
The formulation isn't mine. My son Rudy overheard it last week
while part of the Volunteers for Israel program, which sends American Jews
and Christians to volunteer on Israeli army bases.
There is a certain wisdom in the words.
According to a recent survey conducted by a Palestinian polling
firm, a majority of Palestinians say their goal is to eliminate Israel,
while only 43 percent support a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza.
In addition, according to most polls, between 60 percent and more than 70
percent of Palestinians support suicide bombings. Shocking as those
statistics are, they don't begin to describe the seething hatred that
prompts parents to cheer their own children on to their deaths, so long as
they murder Israelis in the process.
There is something horrifically unnatural in this: mothers who
rejoice in the blood of their own children if they are willing to slaughter
Israeli civilians before they die.
CNN decided this week to stop broadcasting interviews with the
families of suicide bombers after criticism that it has given more attention
to the murderers than to those they killed. The network has been accused of
blatant anti-Israel bias, especially in its CNN International broadcasts
that air overseas, but I'm not so sure this decision is the right one. Maybe
what we need is to hear more -- not less -- of the perverse venom that
infects so many Palestinians.
Let me be clear. The desire for self-determination is natural.
That the Palestinians want their own nation is perfectly understandable.
But, over the last 50 years, the Palestinians have had several opportunities
to secure their own nation, but their leaders have squandered each one. Most
recently, just two years ago, President Clinton tried to broker a plan that
would have given the Palestinians virtually everything they asked for,
including almost all of the land won by Israel in the 1967 war and shared
control of Jerusalem, in return for a promise to allow Israel to exist in
peace.
Instead of pursuing a negotiated settlement and abiding by past
agreements, Palestinian radicals have chosen to use the bodies of young
men -- and lately, young women, too -- as weapons to kill Jewish mothers,
infants and grandmothers.
But instead of recoiling at the thought of their own children's
bodies being ripped apart so that they could kill other mothers' babies, the
mothers of suicide murderers have reveled in the carnage.
Umm Nidal, the mother of 19-year-old Palestinian gunman Muhammad
Farhat, who killed five Jewish schoolchildren in March, recently told an
Arabic-language newspaper in London what it felt like to lose her son:
"I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah would cause the
success of his operation. I asked Allah to give me 10 (Israelis) for
Muhammad, and Allah granted my request, and Muhammad made his dream come
true, killing 10 Israeli settlers and soldiers," she boasts in the
interview, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which is
one of the few sources in the world of accurate information on the vitriolic
Arabic-language press.
"I began to cry, 'Allah is the greatest,'" this mother said when
she learned of her son's death. "I began to utter cries of joy, and we
declared that we were happy. The young people began to fire into the air out
of joy over the success of the operation, as this is what we had hoped for
him."
The thought of four Jewish schoolchildren shot dead at their
desks, while a fifth burned to death in his dorm room gave so much pleasure
to this Palestinian mother that she wept for joy, even in the face of the
loss of her own flesh and blood. She gladly sacrificed her son to accomplish
this butchery.
A "provisional state" won't stop this madness. In the last two
years, 71 Palestinians have killed themselves while slaughtering more than
250 Israelis. The killing will not end until Palestinians learn to put the
love of their own sons and daughters above their hatred of Israel.
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