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Yasser Arafat: "The womb of the woman will be our strongest weapon against the Zionists!" [1]

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Date: 2023-10-17  

How many times did the late PLO leader, fist pumped into the air, bellow those words over a PA system to cheering Palestinian crowds? It became a daily mantra for Arafat, and it’s had staying power. It’s one of the reasons why there are 2 million Palestinians jam-packed into the tiny sliver of Gaza City today, instead of just, say, 350,000. It’s why there are about 2.75 million Palestinians in the West Bank instead of only a quarter of that number.

Does advocating for the deliberate overpopulation of own’s people sound like the hallmark of someone who sincerely cares about their welfare? Women as birthing war machines? Children crammed into tiny apartments alongside multiple generations of relatives? The unmanageable sheer crush of numbers of people as a “weapon” against the enemy?

Now, one could say, for a strategy, Arafat’s plan has kind of worked: as far as Israel is concerned, not only haven’t the Palestinians not “gone away”, but they’re not going away anytime soon — forever. The Palestinians gambled, rolled the dice, and after thinking the Arab nations would wipe the Jews out so that they, the Palestinians, could keep the whole region to themselves, they lost everything in 1948 (and in 1967). But, unlike most conquered people in human history, the Palestinian Arabs haven’t just “gone away”, they’ve deliberately multiplied. Israel, I think, has never mentally been able to come to grips with this. They thought the Palestinians would do what the Jews themselves did thousands of years ago, and just 99% completely leave the area. But the bulk of the “losers” have stuck around.

Remember, though, why the Arab nations agreed to try to kick the Jews out in the first place. It wasn’t really because they truly sympathized with the Palestinian Arabs at all, but because they didn’t want hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees flooding into their respective nations. The Arab kingdoms understood that the existence of an “infidel” Jewish state would unleash all sorts of chaos in the Middle East, enough to cause disruptions that would destroy their own precarious regimes. What’s the greatest thing ever to happen to the Islamist movement, barely out of its infancy in the mid 20th century? The state of Israel, partly for being there. The Iranian Revolution was just an Islamist pipedream for years until the mere presence of a bunch of Jews in the region helped catalyze the sequence of events leading to the Shah’s overthrow. What helped trigger the Lebanon civil war, which destroyed its own precarious government ? The influx of hundreds of thousands of angry Palestinian refugees. There probably would’ve been a civil war in Lebanon eventually, anyway, but it was the Palestinian refugees which made it happen much sooner.

That’s a digression from this diary, but the earlier point should be reiterated: Israel has a lot to answer for, but Palestinian overpopulation isn’t one of them. The Palestinians have deliberately made things many times worse for themselves, and it’s been a conscious decision.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/17/2199745/-Yasser-Arafat-The-womb-of-the-woman-will-be-our-strongest-weapon-against-the-Zionists?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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