Bret Stephens in the WSJ:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer rivets world attention the way it did a few years ago. Still it rolls along, as it has for decades and as it probably will for decades to come. And the reason for this is well-captured by Mr. Abbas’s use of the term “prisoners of freedom.”

Who are some of these prisoners? One is Ibrahim Ighnamat, a Hamas leader arrested last week by Israel in connection to his role in organizing a March 1997 suicide bombing at the Apropos cafe in Tel Aviv, which killed three and wounded 48. Another is Jamal Tirawi of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades: Mr. Tirawi had bullied a 14-year-old boy into becoming a suicide bomber by threatening to denounce him as a “collaborator,” which in Palestinian society frequently amounts to a death sentence.

And then there is 21-year-old Wafa Samir al-Bis, who was detained in June after the explosives she was carrying failed to detonate at an Israeli checkpoint on the border with Gaza. As Ms. Bis later testified, her target was an Israeli hospital where she had previously been treated–as a humanitarian gesture–for burns suffered in a kitchen accident. “I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews,” she explained at a press conference after her arraignment….

Talk to Palestinians, and you will often hear it said, like a mantra, that Palestinian dignity requires Palestinian statehood. This is either a conceit or a lie. Should a Palestinian state ever come into existence in Gaza and the West Bank, it will be a small place, mostly poor, culturally marginal, most of it desert, rock, slums and dust. One can well understand why Arafat, a man of terrible vices but impressive vanities, spurned the offer of it–and why his people cheered wildly when he did. Their dignity has always rested upon their violence, their struggle, their “prisoners of freedom.”

As sad and perverse as it is to say, some people like feeling oppressed. It gives their lives meaning. It lets them feel morally superior to those they see as their oppressors, and absolves them of responsibility for any vile act they undertake, which would be by their definition and moral calculus “retribution.” It is not remarkable by the way that there have no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. The Islamists have an ideology and a theology that dovetail nicely with the psychology of their situation: they are meant to rule the world, to govern with a universal code of laws from the seventh century, and all must submit to this code or die. But they are thwarted in their divinely mandated destiny by evil forces which must be overcome by any means necessary. They are oppressed by the evil infidels, so theirs is a life of constant struggle or jihad until this oppression is oversome.

In a world in which the 1.4 million Chinese people are picking themselves out of poverty in a breathtaking display of hard work, ingenuity and the right economic formula, the Islamist rants ring ever more hollow. Yet many Palestinians continue to embrace the gangrenous choice to revel in their oppression. Sadly, such a choice suits their thug leaders just fine.

UPDATE

It is fair and proper to add that for the individual, someimtes it takes great effort and courage and hard work to escape an oppressive environment:

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, before the Civil Rights movement–a place that was once described, with no exaggeration, as the most thoroughly segregated city in the country. I know what it means to hold dreams and aspirations when half your neighbors think you are incapable of, or uninterested in, anything better.

I know what it’s like to live with segregation in an atmosphere of hostility, and contempt, and cold stares, and the ever-present threat of violence, a threat that sometimes erupted into the real thing.

I remembered the bombing of that Sunday school at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate Denise McNair. The crime was calculated, not random. It was meant to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations, and ensure that old fears would be propelled forward into the next generation.

But change and escape can both happen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 4:20 am and is filed under business, China, General, Left of Left, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.