The New York Times has what is clearly meant to be a sympathetic article about the plight of the young in Palestine. The article is sad, deeply pessimistic, and incomplete in ways which reveal a surprising lack of curiosity:
Years of Strife and Lost Hope Scar Young Palestinians
NABLUS, West Bank — Their worried parents call them the lost generation of Palestine: its most radical, most accepting of violence and most despairing.
They are the children of the second intifada that began in 2000, growing up in a territory riven by infighting, seared by violence, occupied by Israel, largely cut off from the world and segmented by barriers and checkpoints.
To hear these young people talk is to listen in on budding nihilism and a loss of hope.
"Ever since we were little, we see guns and tanks, and little kids wanting little guns to fight against Israel," said Raed Debie, 24, a student at An Najah University here.
The article is filled with stories of unhappy, despairing youngsters in Palestine. The reporter assumes the typical point of view, that the cause of the Palestinians despair is the lack of a state of their own and the onerous Israeli occupation.
Israeli checkpoints, barriers and closures, installed to protect Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers, have lowered these young people’s horizons, shrunk their notion of Palestine and taken away virtually any informal interaction with outsiders, let alone with ordinary Israelis. The security measures have become even tighter since the election to power a year ago of the Islamist group Hamas, which preaches eternal "resistance" to Israeli occupation and rejects Israel’s right to permanent existence on this land.
There is only one brief mention of how the Palestinians have been educating their young; Ayman is a 16 year old:
Ayman, however, like most members of his generation, cannot imagine living in peace next to an Israel that has ripped up his town, or becoming friends with an Israeli who has rolled over his schoolyard in a tank.
"Israel should leave this land," he said angrily, then repeats what he has been taught, that all of historic Palestine belongs to Muslims.
"The Jews should go back to where they came from, to Europe, Russia and America," he said. "They have no place here."
Israel breaks all its agreements, Ayman says. "How can you make peace with them?" he asks. "Even the Koran says there will be war with them until the day of judgment."
Yet Mr. Fayyad [Ayman's father] has not given up all hope. He says he believes that this generation is still malleable, immature. "You can influence them through realistic solutions," he said. "If you delivered a real, two-state solution, believe me, they would go into the streets and dance. But if nothing changes, believe me also, they are lost — lost to all of us."
There is also only a cursory discussion of the conflict between Hamas and Fatah, a conflict that is dominating Palestinian life, especially in Gaza. However, nowhere in the article is there any sense that the Palestinians might have a great deal of responsibility for their own plight; they are forever victims of circumstances beyond their control.
When the Oslo accords were signed with such great fanfare, and the terrorist murderer received his Nobel Prize, part of the agreement was for the Palestinians to stop the teaching of hate which was a staple in their schools and in the state controlled media. This was never done and the hatred spewed forth at Jews, Israelis, Americans, et al, continues to poison the minds of Palestinian youngsters.
Mirvat Massoud was 18, the first child in her family to go to university, when she decided last November to blow herself up. The Israeli Army had taken over Beit Hanun, in northern Gaza, and was interrogating its inhabitants, looking for weapons, militants and those who fire Qassam rockets into Israel.
Inspired by a 2004 suicide attack carried out in Israel, by her cousin Nabil on behalf of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, Mirvat volunteered to become a suicide bomber. She was close to Nabil, who had lived upstairs in the Jabaliya refugee camp and was only a year older. The brigades declined her offer, however, saying that one young "martyr" in a family was enough. They told her father, Amin Massoud, a longtime Fatah member, who said he was shocked.
"I spoke to her of course," said Mr. Massoud, agitated, moving his hands through the empty air. "I said, ‘Your education will be jihad. Going to school is jihad. If you become a doctor, that’s jihad.’ But I don’t know what drove her — too much faith inside her, I don’t know."
But the wall above Mirvat’s desk is still covered with "martyr posters" from the dead of Jabaliya camp, and her parents knew she was becoming more religious and political. She was enraged by reports of a van of schoolchildren hit by shrapnel in Beit Hanun, and she slipped away. She volunteered again, successfully this time, for Islamic Jihad. She died, slightly wounding two Israelis.
Martyrs are the heroes for Palestinian children. Becoming a suicide bomber is a greater triumph than graduating college.
There is no doubt that the Palestinians are terribly inconvenienced and, yes, humiliated, by the Israeli occupation, yet the Israelis left Gaza. American Jews supplied money to pay for the Israeli Greenhouses to be given to the Palestinian people, greenhouses that could have been a source of jobs and exports for the Palestinians as they were when the Israelis controlled them. The Palestinians looted and destroyed the greenhouses almost as soon as the Israelis left. In response to constant attacks, Israel has been trying to separate from the Palestinians for quite some time, since the second intifada revealed the emptiness of talk of Peace in ways that are unmistakable even to most of the Israeli left (though not all.)
Raising a child to hate, filling the child with rage, nurturing the dream of achieving glory by blowing himself up, systematically using him to press an agenda for others, is child abuse of a particularly evil kind. These children are being used by the demopaths and sociopaths who control the streets of Palestinian territory. They have no hope and no future because it suits the needs of the terror groups who see a two state solution as, at worst, an anathema, at best, a way station on the journey to eject the foreign body from the Arab Ummah.
The Palestinians have always allowed their cause to be championed by the most radical, most intransigent, most hateful elements among their population. There is no real constituency for Peace, only some disagreements on dividing the spoils of their parasitic economy and defining the optimal path forward to the destruction of Israel. Until they begin to teach their children that Israelis, and Jews, are human beings deserving of respect, their children, nurtured by hate, will have only despair.
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