{"id":978,"date":"2012-02-12T21:38:28","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T21:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=978"},"modified":"2013-03-04T21:41:47","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T21:41:47","slug":"harvard-promotes-the-palestinians-slow-motion-final-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/harvard-promotes-the-palestinians-slow-motion-final-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Promotes the Palestinians’ Slow-Motion ‘Final Solution’"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n

FrontPage Media<\/em><\/p>\n

There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won\u2019t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced \u201cIsrael\/Palestine and the One-State Conference\u201d scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Nineteen speakers and ten panels will spend two days explaining why \u201c\u2019two-states for two peoples\u2019 is no longer a viable option for Israel\/Palestine,\u201d as the organizers assert, and discussing a \u201csolution\u201d to the Israeli-Arab crisis that has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented.<\/p>\n

The adherents of this veiled assault on Israel argue that the \u201ctwo-state solution,\u201d \u201cin which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty,\u201d as President Obama told\u00a0Time<\/em>\u00a0magazine, has been a failure. Of course, the two-state solution has failed because since 1948, the first time Arabs rejected a Palestinian state, a critical mass of Palestinian Arabs have wanted something more than sovereignty: they want Israel destroyed and her land possessed by Arabs from \u201cthe river to the sea,\u201d as PLO chief Yasser Arafat used to say. The one-state solution, which envisions a single nation comprising Arabs and Jews under a single government, is a way to achieve the same aim. Such a state would obviously require the end of Israel\u2019s Jewish identity, and would result in an Arabic demographic explosion that in any kind of representative government would marginalize Jews. Moreover, we can see the most likely sort of regime that would rule the \u201cone state\u201d by looking next door at Egypt, where Islamists are now in control and relations with Israel have deteriorated. Whatever the result, such a state would not resemble the liberal democracy of Israel today.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the conference will address issues like Arab intransigence, genocidal anti-Semitism, and terrorist violence, but judging from some of the speakers, such balance seems unlikely. Among the usual obscure academics and Palestinian activists camouflaged as scholars, one finds anti-Israel luminaries like Stephen M. Walt, who along with John Mearshimer in 2007 published The Israel Lobby, an academic recycling of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which nefarious American Jews secretly control US foreign policy in service to their Zionist puppet-masters. Even more suggestive of the conference\u2019s bias is the presence of Ilan Papp\u00e9, whose\u00a0scholarly malfeasance<\/a>\u00a0got him cashiered from Haifa University over his involvement in a student\u2019s master\u2019s thesis that fabricated an Israeli massacre of Palestinians. Such an episode will surprise no one familiar with Papp\u00e9\u2019s own work, which as historian Efraim Karsh has written, displays a \u201cconsistent resort to factual misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood.\u201d Papp\u00e9 is clearly an ideologue and propagandist, as he frankly admits: he sneers at \u201cobjectivity,\u201d professes that he is \u201cnot as interested in what happened as in how people see what\u2019s happened,\u201d and crows that \u201cmy ideology influences my historical writings.\u201d That such a travesty of the profession of history is invited to speak at a prestigious university testifies to how intellectually and morally corrupt the American academy has become.<\/p>\n

This rather loose attitude towards evidence and fact embraced by Papp\u00e9 reveals itself as well in the\u00a0on-line<\/a>\u00a0descriptions of the panel topics, where one finds libels such as references to \u201cthe original 700,000 [Arabs] who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948 and 1967,\u201d moral cowardice in phrases such as \u201ca great deal of violence has isolated the two peoples from one another,\u201d and the\u00a0de rigueur<\/em>\u00a0question-begging epithet: \u201cHow can justice for the victims of racism or violence be achieved?\u201d You get the picture: racist Israelis who ethnically cleansed Arabs from their homeland and incited a \u201ccycle of violence\u201d need to abandon their Jewish identity and their ancestral lands in order to resolve a bloody conflict.
\nThe Kennedy School conference, then, is a propaganda exercise the effect of which is to further the Palestinian Arab \u201cphases\u201d strategy for destroying Israel. In this regard, history provides an interesting parallel to the way the Arabs have manipulated Westerners and obscured their true aim, the destruction of Israel. In 1938, Hitler began fulfilling his plan to create a racial German empire, one that also was put into place by \u201cphases.\u201d Just as the Middle East regimes today claim that their hostility to Israel results from the maltreatment of the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed of their homeland by an oppressive invader, Hitler justified his aggression against Czechoslovakia as, in fact, the liberation of his fellow Germans from an alien government oppressing them and violating their rights. Thus, Hitler\u2019s pretext that national and ethnic self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, necessary because of the Czechs\u2019 \u201cbrutal treatment of mothers and children of German blood,\u201d as Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels put it, was the reason he was interfering in Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n

This pretext, moreover, which exploited the principle of \u201cnational self-determination\u201d enshrined in the Versailles settlement, offered Czechoslovakia\u2019s allies France and England the seductive delusion that if only a settlement could be negotiated regarding the Sudeten Germans, a resolution could be achieved without violence. Meanwhile, Hitler\u2019s Nazi stooges in Czechoslovakia instigated violent riots and fabricated incidents of violence against Germans, at the same time they kept escalating their outrageous demands during negotiations. As Hitler\u2019s puppet in Czechoslovakia, Konrad Henlein, put it, \u201cWe [Sudeten Germans] must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.\u201d The goal was to force the Czechs to break off negotiations and thus justify a German invasion.<\/p>\n

Consider the similarities between Hitler\u2019s strategy and that of the Palestinian Arabs:<\/p>\n