The Arab world has a selective memory so finely calibrated, so surgically precise in what it retains and what it discards, that it amounts not to forgetfulness but to a deliberate architecture of erasure.

When Palestinians die, the Arab street erupts – but only when the killer is Jewish. When the killer is Arab, the street goes quiet, the flags stay folded, the hashtags never trend, and the dead are buried twice: once in the ground, and once in the silence of a political culture that has decided their deaths are ideologically inconvenient.

This is not a provocation. It is a documented, exposed, exposed, exposed pattern – exposed so many times and in so many theaters that the only remaining question is not whether the Arab world knows, but how long it intends to pretend it doesn’t.

Molière wrote Tartuffe to expose the man who prays loudly in public while sinning in private; but even Tartuffe had the decency to limit his hypocrisy to one household. The Arab world has scaled his act to an entire civilization – weeping for Palestine on every podium while caging, shelling, expelling, and starving Palestinians behind every closed door.

Begin with Lebanon, because Lebanon is the standing, breathing, seventy-seven-year-old monument to Arab hypocrisy toward the Palestinian people. There are approximately 250,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon today. They are not citizens. They have never been offered citizenship.

They are legally barred from owning property under a 2001 law that prohibits “any person who is not a national of a recognized state” from acquiring real estate – language crafted with the cunning of a locksmith who changes every lock in the building but swears he never targeted any specific tenant – to exclude Palestinians without naming them.

They are forbidden from practicing thirty-nine professions, including medicine, law, engineering, and pharmacology. They are required to obtain work permits that are rarely granted – in 2009, only 261 out of over 145,000 permits issued to non-Lebanese went to Palestinians. They live in twelve official camps and dozens of informal settlements characterized by what Human Rights Watch has called “appalling social and economic conditions.”

Ninety percent of Palestinian........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)