Gutmann: In voting for Hamas, did the Palestinians opt for war and death, or for war and victory? I contend that they always opt for victory, but because their grandiosity leads to overconfidence and under-preparation, they end up with defeat.[T]he Palestinians had goodreason to be optimisticwhen Arafat led them into the Al Aksa intifada. Then, Israeli society was split between rather ineffectual hawks and peace-at-any-priceniks, and Israel's borders were terribly porous to suicide bombers who struck almost every day.

Meanwhile, the Jewish state was condemned - also on a daily basis - by the UN, the Brits and the Europeans. Worst of all, the IDF had recently and for the first time run away from an enemy force: it had bugged out of Southern Lebanon with Hizbullah right behind it, leaving weapons, intact military installations and unprotected Christian allies in its wake.

Given this background, the Barak/Clinton offer of East Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank was not welcomed by Arafat as a token of Israeli generosity, but as evidence of terminal Israeli weakness: "The Jews are beaten, they are suing for peace. If Hizbullah could chase them out of Lebanon, then Allah willing my Fatah boys can chase them from all of Palestine."

It took the election of Sharon, Operation Defensive Shield, the PLO's crushing defeat at Jenin, and Arafat's house arrest in Ramallah to temporarily correct this grandiose, essentially paranoid delusion. But only for a short while: Islamic dreams of slaughtering a cowardly, effeminate enemy can be temporarily refuted by reality, but they die hard. They flourish again when, in Arab eyes, the enemy reveals some shameful weakness.

Churchill once said, "The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat." Similarly with the Arabs; and I suggest that their oscillations between quiescence and ferocity are driven by the Shame/Honor dynamic that is central to Arab psyche and Arab society. Shame and loss of honor, while toxic to the Arab, cannot be metabolized within the Arab self. Instead, the stigma must be ejected, spat out from the self, and downloaded onto lesser beings: women, defeated enemy, infidels and especially Jews. Once the weakness that originated in the Arab is discovered in the Other, then - symbolically or literally - he must be killed.

Most recently, having crushed the Second Intifada, Sharon trades Gaza, which is a liability, for the strategic West Bank settlements around Jerusalem that he intends to keep. These would be guarded behind the security wall - the barrier that will, in the absence of a negotiating partner, unilaterally define Israel's final boundaries. Sharon has drawn back the better to advance; but, particularly now that Sharon is comatose, Hamas spins Sharon's calculated disengagement into a great victory for their own gunmen: "The Jews are running away from us. This is only the beginning; we will make them drown in the sea."

In its turn, the Palestinian street sees in Hamas, the "liberators" of Gaza, the agents of final victory over Israel and votes them into power. As in 1947 and 2000, the Palestinians smell blood in the water, indulge their triumphalist fantasies, and again choose the fever-dream of total victory over peace and statehood.

Not all Palestinians share this genocidal syndrome. Some no doubt voted against Fatah's corruption, while others elected for Hamas's Welfare State.But for Hamas's True Believers, why is the addiction to blood-drenched fantasy so powerful? Why this overwhelming desire to see the Jews blown to pieces, terrified, and running?

Again, we must refer to the dynamics of shame: I saw the Palestinians abandon their villages in 1947 without a fight, even before we of the Israeli Haganah had enough guns or men to make them run. Their resulting shame was compounded by their Arab "brothers" in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt who contemptuously shoved the dishonored Palestinians into squalid camps.

To repeat, Shame/Honor societies cannot manage shame except by inflicting it back on the enemy who shamed them. Until that happens, the timeless sense of humiliation festers in the soul, and breeds psychosis: Arab leaders still bristle at the word "crusade," and demand the return of Seville and Andaluz (Andalusia), since 1490 the "occupied territories" of Spain.

So of corse the Palestinians will always sabotage - as they did in 1947, 2000 and now in 2006 - a negotiated peace with Israel. For the Palestinians, the only acceptable negotiating partners are Jews who mirror the Palestinians of '47 and '48: defeated Jews, shamed Jews, whose terrified mobs run like lemmings to the sea. .

If the Palestinians constitute a typical Shame/Honor culture, then by contrast Jews - especially peaceniks - constitute a Guilt culture. The Arabs worry about what has been done to them by way of insults and humiliations; the Jews worry about has been done to others by them, or in their name.

History is a tale of blood, and statehood shoved the Jews back into history, into the middle of the battle, where the choices were to fight or die. The Israelis proved to be successful warriors, but many Jews - Israelis as well as Americans - have sickened of the killing, and are fashioning a separate peace. They have reached the point where they plead the enemy's cause against their own people, and ultimately against their own children.

The Palestinians won't be shame-free until they have defeated the Jews; the peacenik Jews won't be guilt-free until they have helped them do it.

Keyes: Hamas's victory in the Palestinian election shatters the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by "a small group of fanatics on both sides." It has reaffirmed the existence of profound radicalism among the general Palestinian community.

So why did the Palestinians elect this wretched organization? To be sure, in part it was a rejection of the systemic cronyism and dysfunction of Fatah. But Hamas's main goals since its founding have been the destruction of Israel in its entirety and the implementation of strict Islamic law. Through hardly conducted in an environment of true tolerance or freedom, a majority of Palestinians have expressed solidarity with these goals through the ballot box. At the very least, it can be said that Hamas's genocidal aims did not perturb the Palestinians enough to actually sway their vote.

Hamas's influence can be blamed in part on the nearly two decades of dictatorship and oppression under Arafat. Tyranny augments fundamentalism as subjugated populations seek an escape from daily suffering and repression. Totalitarianism and the absence of basic human freedoms are the wellspring of extremism and terror. The rampant hate speech spewed from Palestinian media and mosques have also have also fostered radicalism. Palestinian children are told daily by their leaders, teachers, preachers, and in some cases even families, that martyrdom and suicide are heroic acts rewarded by eternal bliss.

The amazing thing is not that so many Palestinians have chosen to strap bombs to their chest to kill Jews, but that more have not. From children's suicide-camps in Gaza to an-Najah University's glorified re-creation of a suicide bombing at an Israeli pizza parlor, generations of Palestinians have been indoctrinated into a cult of death.

As for any Israeli delusions of working with Hamas or moderating them, it can only be said that we have been here before. So much of what is being said about Hamas today is exactly what was said of the PLO two decades ago. Arafat was brought back from Tunis and needed only to sign a piece of paper renouncing terror. He uttered a handful of hollow platitudes denouncing violence in English and the world went forth appeasing this murderous tyrant. He became a frequent and honored guest at the [Clinton] White House. Rabin even said that Arafat could fight terrorism with greater efficiency because he was not accountable to human rights organizations.

This was the warped mindset that led to the disaster of Oslo. Meanwhile, Arafat never gave up his dream of destroying Israel and certainly never stopped funding suicide-bombers. Emboldened by Israel's recent unilateral disengagement, Hamas promises to be even worse than Arafat.But most Israelis are tired of fighting and will do nearly anything to end the conflict. Israelis are a peace-seeking people who have been besieged by implacble enemies for so long that they simply want it to end.Consider the following two statements by leaders in a time of war:

Winston Churchill in 1940: "We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender"

Ehud Olmert in 2005: "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.

That about says it all.

Levin: I agree with David Gutmann that the Palestinians' pursuit of their terror war against Israel, and election of Hamas, are less suicidal than genocidal. I also agree with his comments on the psychodynamics underlying the Palestinians', and broader Arab world's, genocidal agenda, except that I would emphasize the role of Arab leaders in cultivating and channeling individuals' psychodynamic predilections into murderous hatred toward perceived external enemies, most notably Jews.

On the recent Palestinian election, there has been much debate as to whether votes for Hamas were votes against PA/PLO corruption or for Hamas's exterminationist platform. But the distinction is based on a false premise in that - as David Keyes notes - the PA/PLO likewise promoted an exterminationist platform, using its media, mosques and schools over the past decade to further indoctrinate Palestinians into embracing Jew-hatred and believing in the illegitimacy of Israel, the necessity of its annihilation, and its ripeness for destruction.

Israelis and Western Jews who ignore the other side's explicit agenda and replace it with fantasies of what they want the other side's agenda to be - fantasies that the Palestinians are simply asking for redress of supposed Israeli misbehavior and that sufficient concessions will end the conflict - are the truly suicidal party, willing to risk their own lives and those of their children, their co-religionists and their countrymen for the sake of promoting their delusions....

As I argue in my book, The Oslo Syndrome, embracing the perspectives of one's enemies is a common phenomenon within chronically besieged populations, whether minorities marginalized, denigrated and attacked by the surrounding society or small nations under chronic siege by their neighbors. It has been a recurrent theme in Jewish Diaspora history as well as in Israel.

A major counterweight to the psychological corrosiveness of besiegement must be leaders who convey to the community its true choices and bolster its will to resist. The Israeli-Arab conflict is ultimately a test of wills in that Israel has and will retain the military capacity to defend itself - despite its small population, its lack of strategic depth, and the rabidness of its enemies. It is self-delusion and loss of heart to defend itself that is likely to remain its greatest threat.

Gutmann: Guilty by nature, convinced of their own sins against the victimized multitude of third-world innocents, the Jewish doves make the gestures of surrender. Turning the bared throat towards the knife they invite the Palestinians to punish them and their guilty nation for their sins.

I grew up among Jews like these, and agree with Dr. Levin that they are the truly "suicidal" party. While I'm surprised to see them roliferate in Israel, I can understand them. What I don't understand is the passive response of so many European Christians, citizens of advanced democracies, to the increasingly arrogant, murderous challenge that they face from the Eurabian Jihadists.

Like their grandfathers who appeased Hitler, the European doves find all kinds of reasons to spin and minimize the Jihadist fury that now openly mocks and threatens their comfortable lifeways.

Jamie Glazov is managing editor of FrontPageMag.com, where this symposium originally appeared in a somewhat longer version.

 

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