The Palestinians Have Always Avoided Statehood
The former
Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, once said, “We can forgive the Arabs for
killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their
children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children
more than they hate us.” That day has not yet arrived.
There is a
widely quoted Bedouin saying, “I against my brother and my brother against our
cousin, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors, all of us against the
foreigner.” It takes various forms depending on the source, but it aptly
captures the mindset, the attitude of Arabs and reveals why, neither as
individuals nor as nations, they trust one another or anyone else. The Israelis
learned long ago the impossibility of negotiating an agreement.
As
Jonathan Schanzer chronicles in his new book, “State of Failure”, “In the
aftermath of the 1967 war, eight Arab leaders met in Khartoum, Sudan, and
declared that there would be ‘no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel,
no negotiations with it.’ It became known as the ‘Three No’s’”
On
September 26, 1947, Britain announced that it would be withdrawing from the
territory that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 had designated as Palestine. It
had been assigned the mandate to administer it. “Two months later, on November
29, 1947, the United Nations approved a partition plan, which divided the
territory up to into three contiguous Arab swaths and three contiguous Jewish
swaths, with Jerusalem slated for permanent trusteeship…The Arab states, for
their part, rejected the partition plan outright, which did little to help the
Palestinian cause as the world deliberated.”
“It was
not lost on the world that the Arabs called for outright war against some
400,000 Jews living in Palestine just three years after six million Jews had
been slaughtered in Europe.” Eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion’s
declaration of Israeli independence in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, President
Harry Truman announced the U.S. recognition of the new state.
There was
no Palestinian state then and there is none today. There has been, however, a
constant state of war against Israel for the last sixty-five years. Israel was
immediately attacked by its Arab neighbors who were defeated then and have been
defeated in subsequent wars. The one in 1967 vastly expanded Israel’s territory
to include the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza, plus control of the
entire city of Jerusalem, its ancient capitol.
It must be
very tiresome to be an Arab and worse by a factor of ten or more to be a
Palestinian.
I was
reminded of this in the wake of Israel’s decision to release 26 Palestinians
serving life sentences for murdering Israelis in what is surely just one more
vain effort to secure any accommodation from the Palestine Liberation
Organization, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority or whatever they are calling
themselves these days. It is a matter of record that a large number of jailed
terrorists reverted to violence after being released in earlier deals.
They are
led by Mahmoud Abbas who has overstayed his term as its president by several
years by simply not holding elections. Moreover, the Palestinians are divided
between the PLO and Hamas, an even more militant group headquartered in Gaza. They
are in Gaza because it was ceded to the Palestinians in another hopeless effort
to bring them to the negotiation table for a permanent peace. Hamas is
designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization and lives up to that by
rocketing and attacking Israelis.
We are
being treated to the absurd diplomatic efforts of the current Secretary of
State, John Kerry, as he flies about the Middle East trying to maintain or
restore any trust they might have in the United States at this point. Whole
books will be written about the way Barack Hussein Obama has sabotaged U.S.
relations with the region and has left Israel isolated against the very real
potential of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Shanzer’s
book provides the answer to why, decades after Israel’s independence, the
Palestinians have refused to take the road to their own state. “Not only are
the Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) divided between two
warring factions (Fatah and Hamas), it is also undeniable that both cantons
have failed to function as governments.”
“The
Palestinian Authority and its antecedents have been beset by bad governance.”
That is a major understatement and the pattern was set by the late, unlamented
Yassir Arafat who spurned then-President Clinton’s offer of a Palestinian state
on some 95% of the West Bank and 100% of Gaza.
In
addition to the enemies on its borders, the other center of opposition to
Israel has always been the United Nations which, to this day, maintains an
agency devoted exclusively to the so-called Palestinian refugees. On November
29, the UN celebrates an annual International Day of Solidarity with the
Palestinian people.
The
Palestinians have endured kleptomaniacs who have plundered the wealth donated
to their cause, as literally billions disappeared into secret bank accounts of
Arafat and his cronies, and now Abbas and his. The PA has been a rat-hole of
corruption and still is.
Literally
nothing the Israelis offer, from land to freed murderers, has changed ground
for any accommodation with a Palestinian state because those in charge do not
want a state and have demonstrated no ability to govern one.
What has
changed, however, is the loss of the American government as an ally. Successive
American administrations have tried to broker better relations, only to learn
that it is a fool’s errand. Regrettably, the Obama administration has become so
hostile to Israel that it has altered the diplomatic landscape. It is embracing
Israel’s enemies and that is a very bad thing for Israel, the Middle East, and
the world.
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
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