Arafat Started the Fires

Arafat must have started all those fires in our country. Or was it Haj Amine Al-Husseini? After all, we all know the Mufti was the one who convinced Hitler to go after the Jews in Europe. Or could it be Mahmoud Abbas since we can slap him at will?

One of the fables from my Arabic language fourth-grade reader told of the bad wolf and the innocent lamb. On a spring day at a riverbank the hungry wolf saw a little lamb close by and started calling him names and accusing him of stirring up the mud and dirtying the clean water. The lamb was really scared but gathered enough courage to explain that since he was downstream from the wolf he couldn’t possibly have muddied up the water in his part of the brook. The wolf responded with acrimonious reminders of whose son the lamb was. We all remember how often your father stirred up dirt in the river in his days, he retorted. And how dare the lamb raise his voice and speak disrespectfully to him. That was enough for the wolf to charge the lamb and finish him off. It was a very festive meal of course and everyone concerned enjoyed the spring weather and the sparkling water.

This all came to mind when I saw Aymen Odeh, the lead Palestinian member in the Israeli Parliament, arguing in Hebrew with an Israeli TV anchorman about the widely accepted Israeli view that so many fires in Israel were started by Palestinian arsonists, a view advocated by government officials across the field. It is of the same genre as Netanyahu’s panicked SOS about Arabs coming out in droves to vote: Palestinians don’t agree on anything that is not malicious. The fact that they are in the vicinity of every fire that broke out in the country proves our point. There is no doubt about the Arab’s culpability: Secret Police officials have confirmed that they suspect Arabs and have taken thirty of them into custody. In a recent piece Gideon Levy broke the silence and announced that the Shin Bet has evidence: They have caught one Palestinian with toilet paper in his pocket. Let us see Aymen Odeh explain that! It turns out officials at the tax authority are the ones claiming to have evidence for “pyro-terrorism” while the police and the fire department are casting doubts on the theory. But politicians, especially the settler colonialist types, know facts when they see them.

I was a little miffed by the fact that my friend Aymen, a lawyer, didn’t use his training, and he is trained in Israel no less, to share with the journalist the professional secret that in the inner sanctuaries of Israel’s halls of justice a person is assumed to be innocent till proven guilty. Well, we all can write off the one with the toilet paper in his pocket. But what about the other twenty-nine? And some news media make the outlandish claim that some of the Arabs seen close to the fires were in fact firemen. Pyromania knows no limits. Take a look at the map our consulate in New York sent out in which it acknowledges and thanks all the countries that helped extinguish those fires. Each has a plane with its own flag. Do you see one with a Palestinian flag? Don’t make me laugh, please!

Others speak of the impossible: They blame the fires on the hundreds of millions of pine trees that the JNF planted to cover all the eyesores that marred our beautiful countryside, all the rubble that the Palestinians left behind when they ambled off for their elective vacations with their next of kin in neighboring Arab countries in 1948. Well, they want you to believe that the drying effect of the winds off of the desert make the resinous pines self-combust. What imagination! Supposing we accept such nonsense for a minute, whose desert did those desiccating winds blow from? Yes, the Arabian desert of course. And they deny it all and argue that many fires are burning across the Middle East, so why not here? If anything, that proves our point. The Arabs are congenital pyromaniacs, every last one of them. I am glad we Israelis are Europeans by nature and nurture. Even Meri Regev is trying hard.

Let me just remind all those inventors of blood libels of their own admission of our superiority. Their own Islamic religion, the source of such scourges as Hamas and Hezbollah, relates the miracle performed by our patriarch, Abraham. When challenged by burning fire, all he had to do was to have God order the flames to turn “cool and peaceful.” And, lo and behold, cool and peaceful it was for him to tread on it like an expert yogi. Yet, now they think they can overcome us by starting fires in our towns and forests. We will have the upper hand no doubt. They have forgotten those German submarines. But we haven’t. Submarines operate in water. And water puts out fires. You follow the logic, don’t you? That is why Netanyahu was involved in that deal in the first place. Remember those boys pretending to play Soccer on the beach in Gaza? We took them off from far away at sea, didn’t we? Whoever developed that ability can develop the capacity to put out fires from submarines in the sea. And vise versa: Fires on land can submerge burning issues of submarines in international waters. That was the logic of the Prime Minister telling the world how the Palestinians were behind all those fires. The info automatically put out the explosive issue at sea that threatened to blow him out of the political waters.

Naftali Bennett has figured it all out. Who is better than him, our minister of education, at the mathematics of a zero-sum situation: He has “blamed the fires on ‘nationalist terrorists’, adding that the fires could not have been started by Jews.” So who is left to start a fire? The answer is obvious: “only someone to whom the land does not belong is capable of burning it.” As we showed above the Arabs are burning the land. Ergo it is not theirs! You follow? And don’t start getting any ideas. “[W]hen Arab lawmakers speak of their love for the land, radio broadcaster Aryeh Golan wonders whether this declaration of love isn’t like telling the Jews that this is not their land.”

Wow! That is Bennett’s straight-line reasoning, the either-or logic. In fact it is known to logicians the world over as the “Naftali Bennet Binary Meme” (or NBBM). Other authorities on logic use the more descriptive name of Straight Hyperbolic Israeli Thinking. (Yes, you figured the acronym right!) It, of course, leads to my self-evident conclusion that Arafat started the fires: Mahmoud Abbas wouldn’t dare do it. So it must be Arafat.

You just can’t keep up with us, can you? We will always be a step ahead of you. I know the Saudis are trying to catch up with us. But they have no chance. Just watch us syphon off their oil money via the USA grants. We call it fighting fire with oil.