Palestinians in fantasy land

David Goldman:

In 2015, the last time Palestinians rioted over the Haram-al-Sharif – the Temple Mount to Christians and Jews – a handful of pious Jews had committed the offense of attempted prayer. This week’s protest over the presence of metal detectors takes the dispute to a new level of unreality. After Israeli-Arab gunmen killed two Israeli policemen with weapons hidden on the site, Israel installed metal detectors, a common sight at mosques in many Muslim countries. After Israel removed the metal detectors under apparent pressure from Washington, the Muslim religious authorities announced that they would not accept any Israeli security measures of any kind, including cameras and remote sensing devices. Cairo’s Al-Azhar University denounced any and all Israeli security measures as “irresponsible and provocative,” adding, “All measures taken by the occupation authorities at Al Haram Al Sharif in occupied Jerusalem are null and void and are not based on any humanitarian or civilized principle.”

The outrage over security measures that are standard in public places in many parts of the world seems contrary to common sense. The trouble is that common sense is not an attractive proposition in the Arab world. Much of the Arab world clings to the belief that if the Jews do not control the Temple Mount, they really have not returned to Zion, and their presence in the surrounding city of Jerusalem and country of Israel must be a temporary aberration. It is a dangerous fantasy, and nothing good can come of nurturing it.

... Less than half of the children of the Arab world complete primary school, according to the World Bank, which puts the effective literacy rate well below 50%. Almost 30% of median-age Arabs are unemployed, without counting the public universities that disguise unemployment by warehousing the jobless young. Not a single Arabic-speaking university awards a degree that would pass the hiring department of a major corporation.
...
Of all the humiliations that the Arab suffer, the most painful is repeated defeat at the hands of a tiny number of Israeli Jews. Five times a day Muslims pray to acknowledge the absolute sovereignty of Allah, repeating “Come to prayer, come to success.” There is no success to point to. The success of the Jews – the perverters of the true revelation given by Moses and Jesus, according to Islam, and restored by Mohammed – is inconceivable in Muslim beliefs on salvation. Yet the Jews have come back to Israel and Jerusalem, and even the guardians of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the Saudi royal family, quietly seek help from the Jews to protect them against Iran. India, the largest developing country by population, has abandoned the Palestinian cause; its prime minister visited Israel without paying so much as a courtesy call to Ramallah.

Palestinian strategists have long since abandoned the hope of defeating Israel in the field, and hope instead to create a humanitarian catastrophe so loathsome that the world community will intervene on their behalf....
...

There is much more.

The Palestinian reaction to the emplacement of security measures on the Temple Mount is irrational at a minimum.   If the Saudis can put even more restrictive measures in Medina and Meccas, the Palestinian action makes no sense out said of their own religious and ethnic hatred and bigotry.  I am at a loss to understand the empathy for these people by Europeans when their fellow Arabs are finally fed up with this beggar culture.