Three Overwhelming Facts/Arguments Being Ignored

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Mar 29, 2010 at 23:17

Although President Obama is behaving with singular obtuseness on the Palestinian/Arab Refusal-to-Recognize-Israel issue, I don't think the US relationship with Israel is in particularly dire straits. I don't even think Obama is unreachable as to changing his mind.

But it is giving hostages to fortune that three powerful facts are not being given the kind of wholesale publicity they deserve.

First, the decades-old fact that Arab states with Palestinian populations refuse to give them the option of citizenship, thereby keeping them as pawns in the struggle against the existence of Israel, should be continually highlighted.

When was this fact last mentioned by any major Western leader?

Second, and more important, the fact that there is one UN agency for all the world's refugees except the Palestinians, and a separate UN agency for the Palestinians alone, with a unique and expansive definition of "refugee", a definition given to no other refugee population and one calculated to constantly augment the number of such "refugees", should be widely discussed, criticized, and condemned.

Some major Western leader or opinion figure should give a speech on this outrageous situation. It is my understanding that the traditional definition of refugee would place that population of Palestinian refugees at 200,000 instead of the 5,000,000 currently indentified as such.

Third, and even more important, I understand that polls of the Palestinians in the disputed territories of Gaza and the West Bank show that those older than about 50 years are split evenly on whether they would recognize Israel's right to exist, while the younger population disagrees at the level of 90% that Israel has right to exist.

This statistic alone should be a definitive indictment of Fatah as well as Hamas, with

regard to continuing the delusional premise of a solution based on two states living "peacefully"

side by side.

Let the first fact be publicized, and the second and third facts be held up as insuperable arguments against the West seeking a two-state solution until they are changed. Either the imitative for any change in the current status of the Arab/Palestinian dispute with Israel should be squarely placed on their shoulders, or the West should, temporarily or permanently, take the idea of a Palestinian State off the table. Ron Thompson

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