Waiting for God

As a supplement to this post, here is Bradley Burston in an article in Haaretz, about Palestinian suicidal policies:

I understand, says Burston,

why you long ago came to believe that time was on your
side. I understand the many factors, demographic, cultural, historic,
geo-political, which have served to reinforce that belief, the strong conviction
that Palestinian statehood was inevitable, inalienable - in every sense, a
matter of time.

I understand why you have come to believe that
the state of Israel is merely the latest in a long series of fleeting colonial
episodes, that its roots are elsewhere, its strength is illusory, its endurance
eroded, its spirit broken, its future dim.

I understand that you believe you can wait these people
out, wear them down, outfight them and out-believe them and out-populate them
and, in the end, take them over.

I understand that you believe that rockets and
mortars from the north, south, east, and, eventually, west, can depopulate and
peel back and obliterate the borders of pre-1967 Israel until there will be no
need to agree to a Jewish state on those borders, no need to compromise on
refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, no need to talk, no need for self-scrutiny and
reconsideration, no need to bend...

The post-modern West gave Palestinian a pass, and encouraged them to give themselves a pass,

In accepting and amplifying your contentions as to Israel's acts of wrongdoing, we chose not to hold you accountable for your own, or to explain them away as a function of occupation...

But, Burston reminds them, Palestinians had better understand that

The Jews are an indigenous people here, no less than you.

The Jews have every right to have a nation here, no less than you.

The Jews are stubborn and proud and fundamentally fierce as hell, no less than you.

And urges them to disown those leaders who tell them that

it is more important to eliminate the Jewish state than it is to create a Palestinian one.

But holds very little hope that this will happen:

...would you rather that I simply shut up? Just the rantings
of another untrustworthy Jew? Still want to believe you did everything right?
Still want to believe that your few friends remaining in the Western left are
more than just powerless cranks? Still want to believe that if you hold out long
enough, everything will come your way?

Israeli Jews can wait, too.

And while they wait, they do this, while Palestinians listen to this.