Their hatred of us is a badge of honor

Richard Cohen:

Tidying up the other day, I came across an old newspaper and, flipping through it, saw a picture that made my heart stop. It showed Palestinians, most of them young, all of them male, reacting with glee to a particularly heinous terrorist attack. The date was Sept. 12, 2001, and the Palestinians were cheering the deaths of about 3,000 innocent people in America the day before. You can, as they say, look it up.

What you don't have to look up is that this was before America's retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan or the war in Iraq. It was also before Guantanamo became shorthand for abuse of the president's constitutional authority and before the outrage of Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison in Iraq where terrorism suspects were sometimes even sexually abused. In other words, the demonstration by Palestinians (in the Lebanese refugee camp of Shatila) preceded most of the usual reasons given for why America today is held in contempt by much of the world.

It just so happens that I have been to the Shatila camp. It's an integral part of Beirut and has existed since 1949, a situation that in a sane world would simply be out of the question. The blame for Shatila's persistence can be assigned all around: to the Lebanese for failing to assimilate the Palestinians; to the often homicidal factionalism of the Middle East; to the Arab states for continuing to expound the chimera of a return to what was once Palestine (but which is now Israel); and, of course, to Israel itself for, among other things, allegedly abetting the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Christian forces. The Palestinians have been mistreated by just about everybody, including, of course, their own inept and often corrupt leadership.

Still, the chief reason for the cheering on Sept. 11 was U.S. support for Israel. Sometimes that support has been mindless and sometimes it has been over the top, but fundamentally it is based on certain truths. The first is that Israel is a legally sanctioned state, created by the United Nations in 1948 and recognized soon after by most countries, including -- amazingly enough -- Cold War adversaries the United States and the Soviet Union. The second truth is that at least one Islamic state (Iran) and a host of militant organizations -- Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and, of course, al-Qaeda -- fervently wish for Israel's destruction. There is no way the United States could appease these groups and not, in the process, trample on its own moral values. Israel on occasion is wrong -- and the settlements are an abomination -- but its existence is right.

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The "displaced" squatters of "Palestine" are a festering sore because we have subsidized their dependency and squalor. If we eliminated the UN subsidies and required assimilation this problem could have been solved decades ago. But when you are reminded at their celebration at the mass murder of our people, you have to ask yourself we we still continue to subsidize this hatred.