If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem, May My Gun Hand Wither and Ramallah Become My Capital

The city of Ramallah—whose Muqata was once the notorious siege-place of Yasser Arafat and today houses his crypt—is now the seat of the “Palestinian” government, such as it is, and building is booming, reports the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh; houses are selling, fancy new restaurants are opening, discotheques are thrumming, and five-star hotels are accommodating “a diverse crowd—young and old, Palestinian and Israeli, Americans and Europeans, as well as Christians, Muslims and even Jews.” What is more, “Among the countries that have ‘ambassadors’ and ‘representative offices’ in the city are Argentina, Australia, Austria, Korea, South Africa, Norway, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, China, Poland, Portugal, The Netherlands, Russia, Jordan, Brazil, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, India, Japan, the Czech Republic, Canada and Mexico.”

Thus, it is fair to say that notwithstanding the many tears, crocodile and otherwise, springing  from the eyes of “Palestinians” over “Al Quds,”or their protestations of love and longing for the city that was left to rot and ruin under the Arab hand and returned to its current Jerusalemite glory only with the tender stewardship of the Jews after 1967, Ramallah is quickly becoming the de facto capital of what may one day be the Palestinian state.

The Palestinian state if, that is, its citizens can renounce once and for all the creeping Islamism that would sooner see them suffering the miseries and oppression of twelfth-century religious and cultural practice than thriving in a modern society; if they can cast off at last the self-strangling mythology of their own victimhood;  and if they can shed their century-old yearning to set the blood of their Jewish neighbors flowing in the streets. And if, that is, those same despised Jewish neighbors can succeed in destroying the Iranian bomb that threatens the potential state, Palestine—whose capital will be Ramallah—no less than the Jewish state, Israel—whose eternal and undivided capital is Jerusalem—which in the meantime the “Palestinians” have erased from their maps and the schoolbooks of their children.