Let me get this straight – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announces that his country will unilaterally withdraw from all of the Gaza Strip and a large part of the West Bank, evacuating all Jewish communities within, and turning them over to Palestinian control. In effect, Sharon is giving up on negotiations, finally admitting that there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side, and cutting Israel’s losses. Not surprisingly, the Greater Israel proponents are infuriated, seeing the disengagement plan as nothing less than surrender to Palestinian terrorism.
The response from the Palestinians and their allies, on the other hand, is rage, threats and condemnation.
The portion of the media that is friendly to the Palestinians denounced the Sharon plan as a “land grab” for holding on to part of the West Bank, conveniently ignoring that under the plan, Israel will in fact give up a large amount of land and pull out. The media also went ballistic when President Bush endorsed the plan, saying that he does not support a Palestinian “right of return” which would allow the Palestinian refugees and their descendants to move to Israel instead of a Palestinian state, destroying the Jewish state demographically.
(The “right of return” has been the subject of much misconception and misinformation over the years, so here’s a short primer on the topic:
In 1947, the United Nations approved a partition plan for what was at the time British Mandatory Palestine, dividing it between the Jewish and Arab communities, with Jerusalem to be internationalized. The Jews accepted the plan while the Arabs, threatening riots and chaos, rejected it, and when Israel declared independence in 1948, the surrounding Arab nations instantly declared war and invaded. While the fighting was ongoing, about half a million Arabs fled their homes in what is now Israel. Some were genuinely expelled by Israeli soldiers, in a tragedy long acknowledged by the Jewish state. But most left because they were told to do so by their own leaders, who promised they would only be away for a short time until the Jews were pushed into the sea. When the Jews perfidiously fought back and won, the Arab leaders promptly abandoned the refugees to the UN, who built camps to hold them as an allegedly temporary solution.
Over the years, Israel has made numerous attempts to rectify the refugee situation, only to have each and every one, even substantive improvements to the camps, rejected by the Arabs. Even when the PLO took over the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, nothing at all was done with the camps. This is because the Arabs do not want a solution to the problem; they want to keep the refugees as desperate and miserable as humanly possible, to be used as weapons against Israel, both in terms of propaganda and as a ready source of terrorists.
It is an interesting historical parallel that about half a million Jews fled or were expelled from various Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Unlike the Arab response to the Palestinians, the Jews were welcomed to Israel with open arms and quickly integrated into Israeli society. Thus, there is no Jewish refugee problem.)
Turning back to the current situation – what is wrong with this picture? The Palestinians are given large tracts of land on which to build a state, no reciprocal action necessary, and their reaction is to threaten war.
The simple fact is that, according to the Palestinians, everything Israel does is wrong. No exceptions. Nothing short of national suicide will satisfy them, because that is what they want. If you pay attention to the Arabic-language Palestinian media, you will quickly learn that the PLO speaks out of both sides of its mouth. In English, they call for negotiations, justice and peaceful coexistence. In Arabic, they call for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion and/or massacre of its Jewish citizens. (For numerous examples translated into English, see the websites of Palestinian Media Watch and the Middle East Media Research Institute.)
Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once said that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” When they were offered an independent state in 2000 at Camp David and again at Taba, which would have taken up all of Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, parts of East Jerusalem, and a portion of the Negev Desert to make up the difference, it was rejected with a hail of bullets and bombs. It was the best deal they will ever be offered. In this time of relentless terror, each proposal the Palestinians reject is guaranteed to be replaced with a worse one.
Hopefully, they will realize at some point that Israel is not going anywhere, and that it is in everyone’s best interests to accept a two-state solution. (This also applies to the Israelis who claim all of the West Bank and Gaza as literally God-given. The Palestinians aren’t going anywhere, either.) If the Palestinians turn their energies away from terrorism and hatred and instead focus on building a new society dedicated to peace and a new Middle East, there’s nothing they can’t accomplish.
But they have to take that first step before anything else. And, sadly, no one sees that happening anytime soon.
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