HAMAS IS TO GAZA AS BLACK LIVES MATTER IS TO CHICAGO.

I keep returning to that theme, and to a post originally composed during the Obama presidency.

The commentariat, so marinated in the Eastern Liberal Establishment's vision of Activist Presidents Promoting The Common Good in order to be able to devote Sunday mornings to mutual admiration with High Government Officials under pictures of the Capitol Dome, seem surprised that Our President is campaigning, rather than governing.  Read the full transcript, which summarizes the failings of Activist Government as seen by the ditto-heads.

The key to Our President remaining popular despite disappointing the commentariat by a lack of activism is in this passage.

You can point to Detroit; you can point to New Orleans; you can point to any state or city that's been run by liberals without opposition for any serious length of time, and you'll see an utter disaster. You've got the IRS running amuck. You know the details in the IRS scandal, and I can give you the latest today, and I will. You know all that. It's not just Obama. This is who liberals are.

More precisely, this is how ward-heeler politicians operate.  There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

Jason Shvili of Facts and Logic About the Middle East, an Israeli advocacy site, sees a similar dynamic at work, perpetuating the plight of those dispossessed Palestinians.  "Why Palestinians’ bad behavior has made them pariahs in the Arab world."

That bad behavior has enablers far more cynical than Barack Obama or those Democrats of long standing representing urban constituencies in Congress or their city halls.

Historically, Arab states have cared about the Palestinians to the extent they could use them as a trump card by which to shame Israel and isolate it in the international community. That’s why 1.5 million Palestinians still live in refugee camps set up during and after the 1948 war. The Arab states maintain these camps—and their squalid living conditions—to pressure Israel into granting a “right of return,” where millions of Palestinians would flood the Jewish state, negating its Jewish majority, and therefore, Israel’s existence.

In 1952, former head of UNRWA, Sir Alexander Galloway, described the Arab states’ policy towards the Palestinian refugees, saying, “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore . . . as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”

If the Arab regimes can’t keep the Palestinians in camps, they have other ways of making sure they don’t integrate into their societies. In Lebanon, for example, Palestinians are banned from 39 professions, including areas of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and law. In most Arab states, Palestinians are considered foreigners and are denied citizenship and all basic rights.

Compare and contrast. I submit the behavior of ward-heeler politicians in these United States is particularly reprehensible, as school desegregation, voting rights, affirmative action, and the good will of Normal Americans has accompanied the emergence of a middle class including entrepreneurs and professionals of all sorts of ancestries. And yet, the people who would like to keep the sore open in the States are still at it, with the predictably sad outcomes: rename a few streets, re-cast a few commercials and change the leading actors in the movies, and yet it's in the interest of the ward-heelers to retain a desperate community.  Former constituents who are on to the scam vote with their feet.

There are no such constraints on the behavior of the ward-heelers of the Arab states.

Arab states see the Palestinians as rabble-rousers who cause instability and even threaten the regimes that host them. Indeed, the Palestinians also have a history of violence in Arab countries. In Jordan, for example, the 1970-1971 Black September revolt saw the Palestinians try to overthrow the Jordanian government. The Jordanians responded by slaughtering an estimated 15,000 Palestinians and expelling the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which then relocated to Lebanon.

When the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, the Palestinians fought alongside some of the Lebanese factions, contributing to widespread distruction by the conflict. The civil war was further exacerbated when Israeli forces invaded Lebanon in 1982 in response to repeated PLO attacks. Today, Hamas and its ally Hezbollah, both backed by Iran, are launching attacks on Israeli territory from southern Lebanon, potentially dragging that already beleaguered country into conflict with the Jewish state once again.

Or, perhaps there is a constraint, only it's in the recognition that Iran's interest in keeping the Palestinian pot boiling is not the same as that of the Arab states.

The truth is, Arab states are getting increasingly fed up supporting the Palestinians. It’s why a growing number are pursuing peace with Israel without a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So far, four Arab states—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco—have established full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

For months, rumors have circulated that Saudi Arabia, too, would normalize relations with Israel in the very near future. Notably, a report in The Jerusalem Post last month cited “three regional sources familiar with the talks” on Israeli-Saudi normalization as saying that the Saudis would agree to normalize relations with Israel with or without major concessions to the Palestinians.

A desperate desire to derail this impending Israeli-Saudi normalization apparently caused Hamas to launch its genocidal rampage in southern Israel. Indeed, U.S. President Joe Biden, in a speech after the Israel-Hamas war began, said, “One of the reasons Hamas moved on Israel … they knew that I was about to sit down with the Saudis…Guess what? The Saudis wanted to recognize Israel.”

In short, most Arab states consider the Palestinians pariahs and use them as tools to reach their own goals. They have kept the Palestinians impoverished and stateless, refusing to integrate them into their societies in the hopes this will support Palestinian self-determination. For their part, the Palestinians have not endeared themselves to Arab rulers. Rather, they have proven themselves untrustworthy—creating instability and trying to sabotage the regimes that host them. Most importantly, they have refused every Israeli offer of land, statehood and peace.

The parallel I attempt to draw breaks down in that final paragraph.  I doubt that the ward-heeler mayors and Members of Congress consider their constituents as pariahs, although, I repeat, the continued penury of those constituents is a useful tool at re-election time.  It doesn't help that people who consider themselves "intellectuals" endorse a foolish notion of "authenticity" that enables self-sabotage and antagonizes voters who hold themselves to bourgeois norms.

Would a successful rebellion by the secular inhabitants of Iran against their theocratic rulers end the enabling of Palestinian revanchists?