The misfortune of the Palestinians did not begin on October 7, 2023. It began in the mid-1960s, when a deliberate project was launched to cultivate a particular type of Arab Muslim—one for whom neither future nor prosperity, nor even something as basic as education, would matter. The aim was to create human beings with a single overriding purpose: the killing of Jews. Conditions in Gaza were designed accordingly; the school system was shaped to this end; and the eventual rise of Hamas fit neatly into this pattern. For decades, the bills were paid by the European Union and by all those who today wring their hands over the fate of the Palestinians—precisely the people who, in truth, sustained the system.
The outcome was inevitable. Nobody wants to deal with them. Not even other Arab regimes. At times they issue statements of solidarity, but in reality they care about only one thing: keeping Palestinians off their own territory.
This should serve as a warning, because precisely the same model is now being sketched for the Baltic states, for the Czech Republic, and for several other nations in the region. The vision on offer is not of industrial development, not of scientific achievement, not of cultural creation. All of that, we are told, we should simply purchase from our Western allies.
Instead, the new vision casts Czech citizens as instruments in a larger project: the struggle against Russia. That, we are told, is to be the very meaning of our national existence. But such a project requires new history, and here lies the problem. In the long centuries of our past, genuine conflicts with Russia are virtually absent. We had no serious quarrel with them (to be clear, we also lacked any profound friendship; for the most part, we simply ignored each other). One searches in vain even for a notable tavern brawl.
Thus the new narrative rests on a single episode: August 21, 1968, when the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia because their leaders were displeased with our own communists. The Russians, naturally, were involved. For those who lived through it, the invasion was a trauma. For those of us who came a little later, it looked more like a scuffle between rival factions of communists. On that flimsy basis, we are now asked to construct an entire national mythology.
But let us be clear: this is not really about history. It is about the future. And the danger is that our future, if we consent to this vision, may end up looking uncomfortably like that of the Palestinians.