A condition of permanent pathology grips the Palestinian people: an inbred, across-the-board aversion to truth.

Ever since the Mufti of Jerusalem travelled to Berlin in World War II to mjoin in propagating the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews, Palestinian leaders have cultivated and then preyed upon their own people’s ignorance. Now, a fourth generation of Palestinians suffers for the cynical manipulations and prevarications of their  leaders and the leaders of the Arab world. The result has been to leave them functionally blind, incapable of seeing the myriad possibilities for their own advancement, as well as historically illiterate, unaware of the actual events that have brought them to their present situation.

And so, in rhyming complement to nakba day, when Palestinians are told to take to the streets to bemoan the founding of the State of Israel, their leaders this year added “naksa” day, on June 5, to publicly remonstrate against the anniversary of Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War.

That both anniversaries were the result of Jews defending themselves against life-or-death aggression aimed at them by Arab armies does not register in the minds of the nakba-naksa protesters. Aggression directed at Jews is simply part of the moral order of things in the Middle East. But Jews defending themselves is itself violence upon the aggressors’ inverted moral code and a stain upon the Arab coat of honour.  

Hundreds of protesters in Syria attempted on Sunday to overrun the border with Israel near Majdal Shams. Syrian TV reported that up to 23 protesters had been killed by IDF fire and more than 300 wounded in the resulting clashes. The IDF denied that it had killed anyone. Similarly, hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets near Qalandiyah, between Jerusalem and Ramallah. But no casualties were reported there.

“Like any country in the world, Israel has the right and obligation to guard and defend its borders,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, well in advance of the impending naksa day protest.

Especially after the violent incursion at the very same spot in the Golan on nakba day last month, Syrian leaders knew that Israel would take all reasonable steps to defend its border. In fact, they were counting on it, certain that the ensuing violence would distract world attention away from the ongoing  massacre and murder they were perpetrating against their own people. And yet, again, the Palestinians allowed themselves to be so derisively exploited and abused by the Syrians.

The pathology that infuses Palestinian society is pushing further away the dream of an independent state of their own, coexisting, of course, alongside the State of Israel.