anti-Normalization: an excuse for failure in Palestine: Palestinians need to help Israelis fight their extremists!

Anti-Normalization: an excuse for failure in Palestine: Palestinians need to help Israelis fight their extremists!

Why are the Arabs really opposed to "normalization?" They say that it somehow legitimizes Israel if Palestinians interact in social environments with Israelis. It's the cornerstone of the BDS movement, which the bi-polar knee-jerk anger that passes for Palestinian activism against Israel caught between hate and legitimate boycotts.

Opposing "normalization" is on its face a failure, given that Israel has been a nation for 65 years and instead of being pushed back to the original lines of the UN's Jewish State Partition Plan, it has continued to expand into the area of what should have been a Palestinian State under the same plan.

Fighting "normalization," it seems, is merely an excuse for the failure of Palestinian activism. The Palestinian activists have failed. That failure continues to stoke the flames of their anger which in turn feeds their growing hatred. And their hatred blinds them from reason and commonsense.

There is nothing wrong with normalization. In fact, Normalization can strengthen the Palestinian and Arab cause. It can empower Palestinians by aligning them with moderates in the Israeli and Jewish community.

The primary means in which Israeli extremists are able to deny their brutality and oppression of Palestinians is by citing the more extremist actions of the Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims. And humans view issues, on first impression, based on "who does what worse."

Extremist Israelis point to the anti-Normalization movement as an example of the hatred they claim is the core of Palestinian and Arab existence. The Arabs hand Israelis the power to oppress Palestinians.

Normalization can undermine the extremist Israelis and engaging the Israeli system from the inside can begin a process -- long and slow given the 65 years of failed anti-Normalization mentality -- of changing Israelis and bringing them back to the center away from their own edge of extremism and fanaticism.

Palestinians need to help Israelis fight their extremists!

-- RAY HANANIA