Really, where's the 'cancer'?

Nadav Shragai

It's good that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas decided on Tuesday to join the ranks of those fighting against "settlement cancer." Much to Israel's embarrassment, the radical Jewish Left -- including Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer, attorney Talia Sasson and their clique -- readily accepted Abbas' racist prognosis on the conflict.

The fact that Abbas decided to jump on the "settlement cancer" bandwagon affords a golden opportunity to offer some insights into the settlements, insights which will perhaps reveal where the real cancer and toxic metastasis lie in the conflict.

You'd be surprised, but most settlers do not glorify land over humanity. They are not hard at work breeding martyrs. Their textbooks do not systematically advocate hatred of Arabs. Settlers neither deny the rights of Arabs to dozens of their own countries nor do they reject the rights of Muslims to Islamic countries.

Settlers have children, but they do not send them to blow themselves up on buses in central Nablus. A sizable majority of settlers neither exhort their children to throw stones at Palestinian vehicles nor encourage them to hurl firebombs at passers-by. They do not goad them into stabbing Arabs on the street. The people living within this "cancerous tumor" do not conspire to uproot Arabs from their own legal or illegal "settlements." And, contrary to the prevailing urban legend, the vast majority of settlements were established on rough, rocky terrain, previously untilled and uninhabited.

Much like the Palestinians, the individuals living inside the extensive "metastasis" -- hundreds of thousands of people -- raise children, go to work, get married, talk, squabble, get angry, give birth, cry, laugh and are mostly proud to be a part of this incredible project of ushering the nation of Israel back to its land in places customarily referred to as the cradle of the Jewish people -- Hebron, Beit El and Shilo.

They accept the existence of an Arab minority living in Israel, while Abbas is not willing to accept the existence of a Jewish minority, however small, which chooses to stick to its land, continuing to reside on territory that Israel may one day have to relinquish to the Palestinians.

Let's face it, Abbas wants to transfer tens of thousands of Jews, but he's outraged by the prospect of transferring tens of thousands of Arabs (which is, truthfully, a scandalous idea).

Living within these so-called metastasizing, cancerous cells are the settlers, educating their children to love their fellow humans while condemning and despising terrorists, including Jewish terrorists. In Abbas' realm, despite all that, the powers choose to glorify terrorism. They name their streets, schools and urban centers after terrorists who murder the elderly, women and children. They direct plays in which child actors long for the fates of such martyrs.

And now the Europeans have decided to label and boycott products manufactured in the "cancerous" settlements. Sooner or later, they're going to mark all the individuals designated for extraction, much like the fate of cancer cells.

The Palestinian media also routinely declares Haifa, Acre and Lod "settlements." And Palestinian textbooks have expunged all Israeli territories from Palestinian Authority maps. Danger -- cancer.