I Think He Learned about the Middle East from Watching the A-Team

Little Benny:

For decades, we’ve seen blame cast on Yassar Arafat, his Fatah movement, and the Israelis. The one group that has by and large escaped criticism is the Palestinian Arab population. We would prefer that the large mass of Palestinian Arabs be peace-loving, open-minded human beings who wish only to see their children grow and prosper in a society that values coexistence, education, and liberty. Unfortunately, that hope has blinded us to a larger truth: the Palestinian Arabs, as a people, are not peace-loving. They support terrorism because they think it right, not because they are desperate or hopeless. They support the annihilation of the State of Israel not because they have been misled, but because they truly – and religiously -- believe that Israel must be wiped off the map.

From Abraham Rabinovich's book on the 1973 Yom Kippur War:

Another concern was that the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip might rise up. Small forces, particularly border police, were assigned to deal with such an eventuality, but there were no incidents. Israel's own Arabs demonstrated remarkable loyalty to the state, given their natural sympathy for their fellow Arabs across the border. A reporter driving past the Arab city of Nazareth found Arab women at the main road intersection handing out soft drinks and cakes to soldiers on their way to the Golan front just like Jewish women were doing on roadsides around the country. Scores of Arab men volunteered for farm work at kibbutzim where the adult males were almost all on battlefronts, and Arabs donated blood for the war wounded. The mayors of Arab Nazareth and neighboring Jewish Upper Nazareth maintained daily telephone contact to deal with emergencies arising from the war situation. Such cooperation would succumb in a few years to rising tensions stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.