The only salvation of the Palestinians

Submitted by Melvin A. Fechter (United States), Feb 20, 2014 at 22:36

I previously posted an extract from this diary entry. Here is the complete entry:

July 25, 2002 —

Peace and reconstruction for the Palestinians will begin when they recognize that they have lost the war. So was it for the Japanese in 1945; so was it for the Germans. So must it be for the Palestinians.

Yes, Arafat is the leader of the Palestinians. But he is and has been their leader into war. When they wish a leader into peace, they will find one. It awaits only the day they know they have lost. But despair not; recognition that they have lost the war would be the beginning of their regeneration.

For 2,000 years neither the indigenous people of the holy land nor the Arabs of other nations had much, if any, interest in forming a state in Palestine. By whatever miracle or happenstance, the land remained politically fallow for the Jews to return. Now, indeed there is a State of Israel. It has been sorely tested for more than a half-century, and it will survive. In 1948 when Israel was founded, the "Palestinians" too had their opportunity to form a nation but elected to forgo that opportunity in their outrage that a nation of Jews should be formed upon "Arab lands." Jordan seized the lands called the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, and retained them until 1967. During those nineteen years the Palestinians expressed no outrage that the Jordanians were occupying "land upon which they wished to form a nation"; there was no call upon their fellow Arabs to remove themselves from the land. There were no suicide bombers, no grieving over the Naqba imposed upon them by King Hussein.

When I was young, still in my mid-twenties at the end of World War II, and for many years thereafter, I favored the concept of two states, Palestinian Arab and Jew, living side by side with each other in peace. Now I must tell you that Arafat and other Arab leaders have inbred hatred into their psyches, that a fully sovereign, Palestinian State of whatever inviolate borders would only be a sanctuary for massive arms and terrorist attacks upon Israel.

Administrative autonomy they can still have, reconstruction, peace, happiness, prosperity, even and especially Israel's helping hand, but Arafat and other like leaders into war must go, not by Israel's wish but by the wish of the Palestinians themselves. Israel will retain the right to rout out their die-hard terrorists, and the Palestinians, if they choose this sensible course, will not resist but help. Call it a state if you wish, but there will be no sovereign Palestinian State, not at any rate a state with the capacity to make war upon neighboring states, no state with inviolate borders and the right to manufacture or import unlimited arms. No more is even possible now, and that only by the wish of the people. Whether the only relatively recent dream of a state will be forever lost remains to be seen, but the route to it would be long. It is not one that I in good health, at my age, could hope to see attained. Truly I doubt that any man, woman, or child alive today will live to see it.

They — the Palestinians — have lost the war. Understanding that is their only salvation.

[Note 10/02/07] They do not have one now, either in Ismael Haniyeh or in Mahmoud Abbas.

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