By Lev Tsitrin
Being an ex-Soviet gives one a different perspective on things — including Macron’s and Co. recent recognition of the Palestinian state. Motives aside (I fully share the prevailing 
view that Macron and the Western leaders who joined him simply pandered to the Islamists at home, the recognition of Palestinian state being an act of domestic, rather than foreign, policy), I do not see the mental equilibristics (which of necessity required ignoring the anti-Israel mindset prevailing among the Palestinians) as being particularly difficult.
All that Macron and his ilk needed to do to get through the act of recognizing Palestinians state, was to label as “Palestinian” the mindset that is not Palestinian at all. He simply redefined Palestinians into nice, peaceable people eager to recognize Jewish rights to a state of their own, and willing to live side-by-side with it. Since getting them there would require some reforms in education and welfare, the state Macron recognized is in his mind populated not by the real, but by “reformed” Palestinians. Bingo! Call Palestinians “reformed” — and here is prosperity for Palestinians coupled with security for the Israelis! What more can one wish for? Terrorism-supporting (when not terrorism-committing) Palestinians of today turned, by a stroke of Macron’s pen, into nice reformed Palestinians of tomorrow, Middle East conflict solved!
To an ex-Soviet, Macron’s maneuver instantly brings to mind the central paradox of the Soviet reality. The Communist revolution ought to have produced a wonderful, highly efficient and prosperous society in which no money was needed because everyone worked hard just for the love of free labor — resulting in great abundance. The shackles of capitalist ownership of the means of production that resulted in exploitation broken, people freely gave the society what their talents and their work allowed, consuming what they needed, as they needed it.
Nice! And yet, what was supposed to happen after the pompously-titled “Great October Socialist Revolution” did not happen. Even after the power was seized by Communists and capitalists ran abroad or were killed off, Communism did not arrive — in fact, people in the Soviet Union were far poorer under Communists than they were in Russia under the much-hated Tsar.
How did the Communist propaganda resolve this paradox? Easily — by using the Macron method of redefining words. Communism, it turned out, is a society populated by “new men” — men who have no thoughts of owning property, men whose only interest is in selfless work. It is only after the current, selfish, greedy, grabby “man of the past” disappears, having morphed into a “new man” of selfless labor that Communism would be achieved.
Needless to say, turning the old man into a new man was a long and slow process — Lenin’s “new man” was still but an idea on the drawing board by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, its only heritage being generations of ruined lives. The only people who prospered under Communism were the Communist rulers who, despite their professed selfless ideology lived highly privileged lives and relentlessly feathered their nests. Even top-level Communists prospered the old way, not the new way. Even those who constantly declared the need for raising a “new man” were very much the men of the past — or rather, the men as they are by nature.
This lesson of history does not bode well for Macron’s Leninist trick of seeing in Palestinians what they ought to be while ignoring what they are, so as to allow him to declare a Palestinian state — thus appeasing the West’s by now far-too-numerous Islamists. In fact, western diplomats already have worked hard, but without success, on convincing full two generations of Palestinians born since Oslo that what they want is a Palestinian state — for despite some forty years of effort, the Palestinian cause is still the cause of destruction of Israel. The PA and Hamas may differ on the requisite tactics — diplomatic pressure and legal warfare is the method of the PA, while brute force being the tool of Hamas — their goal is exactly the same: destruction of Israel.
So much for a “new man” — be he a work-loving Communist who is indifferent to owning property, or a peaceable “reformed Palestinian” willing to accept the legitimacy of Israel, and living side-by-side with it in peace.
Seeing what is not there is a recipe for disaster — as Israelis learned on October 7. As Machiavelli keeps reminding us, what man is, is very different indeed from what he ought to be according to the enlightened among us — like Macron or Lenin. Lenin’s “new man” who is fit for the bright future of Communism, or Macron’s “reformed Palestinian” of the Palestinian state are f0igments of imagination — they are fruits of vain attempts to reconcile the harshness of unyielding reality with the “obvious truth” of their silly ideas.
Burned terribly on October 7, Israelis will do well to ignore Macronish fantasies of “reformed Palestinians” and stick to reality of Palestinian hate. The likes of Netanyahu, and not the likes of Macron, should be the ones who determine Israel’s future.
One Response
Well said. “…they are fruits of vain attempts to reconcile the harshness of unyielding reality with the “obvious truth” of their silly ideas”j. Is there anything more damning to the current European thinking than to rightly call it “silly”?