The Palestinians have been offered a state of their own six times – but each time rejected it because it would have come with one condition: Recognizing a Jewish state next door.
They figured they would get rid of the Jews, but they were wrong. It turns out the Jews were tougher than they ever thought.
But the Palestinians haven’t been content to just be wrong. They’ve waged one genocidal war after another against their Jewish neighbors.
The most recent was launched on Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinians of Hamas launched a surprise attack, murdered more than 1,200 people and took more than 250 Israelis hostage into the tunnels of Gaza, where they were physically and sexually assaulted for months on end. The scale of these crimes is overwhelming; it takes a monster to deny the evidence.
The goal of that attack — which Palestinian supporters call “resistance” — was to deliberately target Israeli Jews for being Jewish and for being alive on that day, in that place. There’s a term for that, and it’s called genocide.
Now comes Bassam Issa of the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga and Annoor Academy to tell the world the opposite is true, that the Palestinians are the victims here. He concludes that everyone would be better off if Israel would just cease to exist.
He says some other things that are fanciful, to put it mildly.
I know Bassam; we’ve broken bread together, and I know he has strong views on this issue. We may never agree on it.
But while he is entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts. The war was started by the Palestinians of Hamas. Even now, if you ask Palestinians if they supported the attacks of Oct. 7, despite all the losses in Gaza that came as a result, a majority say yes.
It takes a fool to believe a group of people would want to continue a conflict in which they say they are the victims of a genocide. There’s not a single instance of a genocide in human history in which the victims wanted the conflict to continue. Not one.
That’s why Bassam is either lying to himself or to the rest of us. If the cause of the Palestinians were so urgent, so deserving of sympathy, or so in need of restorative justice, there is one thing the Palestinians could do: Stop trying to kill Jews. That would be a good first step. But Bassam can’t bring himself to say even that.
Instead, he pretends not to know that Gaza could be rebuilt and given a bright future if Hamas would simply do what it promised: Stop holding onto Israelis living and dead, put down their weapons, and give up their power over the Gaza Strip. Even other Arab nations sympathetic to Palestinians are frustrated with Hamas and its lies.
The facts here are beyond question: If the Palestinians wanted a nation of their own and a future of peace and prosperity, they could have had it long ago.
But they couldn’t put up with sharing the land with Jews, so they started one war after the next, hoping to clear Jews out of the way. It takes gall — some might call it chutzpah — to start and lose all these wars and then complain about the results.
That’s a pattern, and it goes way back. In 1937, the leader of the Palestinians was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husseini and the land was ruled by the British, trying to keep peace between its Arab and Jewish citizens.
Al-Husseini decided to support Hitler and collaborate with the Nazis, who were murdering Jews on an industrial scale in Europe. He expected the Nazis would win the war, finish off the Jews in Palestine and hand him the country as a gift. America had other plans for the Nazis, and Al-Husseini spent the rest of his days a war criminal on the run. But it was part of a pattern.
The Palestinians not only start wars to kill Jews. They lose those wars and then blame the Jews for winning. It’s a tired act, and worst of all, the only people fooled by it are people like Bassam Issa.
Michael Dzik is the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga, where he oversees the Jewish Cultural Center. He has led eight community missions to Israel from Chattanooga.
