The Big Picture on Why the Palestinians Always Say 'No'
Addressing the Brookings Institution on December 2, 2011, U. S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta rebuked Israel for not doing enough to promote peace with the Palestinians, demanding that Israel's leaders "just get to the damned [peace] table." But the notion that Israel bears any (much less primary) responsibility for the absence of peace or Palestinian statehood is a difficult case to make.
During the British Mandate, the Jews of Palestine twice agreed to peace based on the country's partition into Arab and Jewish states -- first at the time of the 1937 Peel Commission Report and second with the U.N.'s historic 1947 partition vote. Both times the Palestinian leadership bluntly declined the offer. The same answer was given when Levi Eshkol discussed Palestinian autonomy with West Bank Arab "notables" (1968), when Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Framework for the West Bank and Gaza (1979), and when Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert made their respective statehood offers to Yasir Arafat (2000-01) and Mahmoud Abbas (2008).
The most obvious reason for all this Palestinian naysaying is that national expression for Palestinians has never been the goal of the "Palestinian" movement. The true goal (pursued in concert with the Arab world at large), is, and always has been, the eradication of Jewish national expression in Judaism's ancestral homeland. No one, perhaps, has expressed this fact more succinctly than PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, who told the Dutch Newspaper Trouw in 1977, "The Palestinian people does not exist. ... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism."
The assault on Jewish national identity, however, is actually part of a more pervasive strategy pursued by Islamists throughout the Middle East. "Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and Western decolonization," writes Professor Walid Phares, "dominant ethnicities in the Greater Middle East [i.e., Arab, Persian and Turkish] have subjected regional minorities to territorial and political repression on the one hand, and cultural and linguistic suppression on the other." Well-known examples of this assault on ethno-religious identities include Turkey's Armenian genocide (1915-23) and Saddam Hussein's use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds.
It was hoped that 2011's "Arab Spring" might lead the region toward greater democratic freedoms, but as the dictators fell, a less agreeable picture emerged. Libya and Egypt have moved inexorably toward sharia law (which traditionally treats non-Muslims as subjugated second-class citizens). The peril has already been felt by Egypt's Coptic Christians -- 100,000 of whom have fled the country since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
During the British Mandate, the Jews of Palestine twice agreed to peace based on the country's partition into Arab and Jewish states -- first at the time of the 1937 Peel Commission Report and second with the U.N.'s historic 1947 partition vote. Both times the Palestinian leadership bluntly declined the offer. The same answer was given when Levi Eshkol discussed Palestinian autonomy with West Bank Arab "notables" (1968), when Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Framework for the West Bank and Gaza (1979), and when Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert made their respective statehood offers to Yasir Arafat (2000-01) and Mahmoud Abbas (2008).
The most obvious reason for all this Palestinian naysaying is that national expression for Palestinians has never been the goal of the "Palestinian" movement. The true goal (pursued in concert with the Arab world at large), is, and always has been, the eradication of Jewish national expression in Judaism's ancestral homeland. No one, perhaps, has expressed this fact more succinctly than PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, who told the Dutch Newspaper Trouw in 1977, "The Palestinian people does not exist. ... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism."
The assault on Jewish national identity, however, is actually part of a more pervasive strategy pursued by Islamists throughout the Middle East. "Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and Western decolonization," writes Professor Walid Phares, "dominant ethnicities in the Greater Middle East [i.e., Arab, Persian and Turkish] have subjected regional minorities to territorial and political repression on the one hand, and cultural and linguistic suppression on the other." Well-known examples of this assault on ethno-religious identities include Turkey's Armenian genocide (1915-23) and Saddam Hussein's use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds.
It was hoped that 2011's "Arab Spring" might lead the region toward greater democratic freedoms, but as the dictators fell, a less agreeable picture emerged. Libya and Egypt have moved inexorably toward sharia law (which traditionally treats non-Muslims as subjugated second-class citizens). The peril has already been felt by Egypt's Coptic Christians -- 100,000 of whom have fled the country since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
No comments:
Post a Comment