Yesterday, during a panel discussion, someone in the audience asked: Why have Palestinians never amounted to anything on a collective level, like the Armenians, for example?
The Armenians, after the genocide, built prosperous communities wherever they went and assimilated without losing their particularity.
But the Palestinians kept the spirit of violence wherever they went.
The man asked whether the reason was something in the air or the water in the Middle East.
One of the panelists answered that Palestinians were exploited by Arab regimes and never got the opportunities the Armenians had. If they had been given the same opportunities, they would have been just as successful and assimilated as well as the Armenians.
@hahussain pushed back and said that was not true because Palestinians in Jordan were given the same rights as Jordanians, yet what did they do with that opportunity? They tried to overthrow King Hussein.
I met with the professor who gave that answer before Hussain responded and discussed with him how Palestinian Christians (except the communists among them) were successful, assimilated into the societies that took them in, and became loyal citizens, and how it was Islam, that thing in the water or the air, that kept the victimhood narrative alive.
Israel absorbed 800,000 refugees who were displaced from Arab countries, while Palestinians have remained in refugee camps to this day, not only because Arab regimes have been capitalizing on their grievances, but also because Palestinians and Muslims in general are susceptible, because of Islam, to living in a perpetual state of violence and destruction.