{Originally posted to author’s website, FirstOne Through}
Recently, the New York Times editorial page led with a piece titled “The Palestinians Desperation Move.” The opinion piece advanced the case that acting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas must be frustrated in his mission to create a new Palestinian State.
Creating a State? Desperate people take what they can. They view their options as limited and prospects as weak. They seize any opportunities to advance their main goal, whatever that might be.
Witness early Zionists agreeing to any size and configuration of a Jewish state, despite their dream for a larger state based on the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922. They voted “yes” to a United Nations partition in 1947. They voted “yes” to greater Jerusalem and greater Bethlehem being international cities.
The Arabs, on the other hand, consistently voted “no” at every juncture.
- They launched riots in 1936-9 to stop Jewish immigration and creation of the Jewish state
- The Arabs voted no to any partition of the land in 1937
- Voted “No” to the 1947 UN Partition plan
- Joined a war with five Arab armies to destroy Israel in 1948
- Aligned with Arab armies again in 1967 to destroy Israel
- Said “No” to recognition of Israel; “No” to peace with Israel; “No” to negotiations with Israel in Khartoum in 1967
- “No” to the US President Clinton’s plan to create a Palestinian state in September 2000
- Voted for Hamas to 58% of the Palestinian parliament, a group which is rabidly anti-Semitic and calls for the destruction of Israel and a new Palestine over the entire region
- Gave no response to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s two-state proposal in 2007
- Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi described “the maximum proposed by Olmert did not approach the minimum acceptable that Abu Mazen needed to reach an agreement.”
- An insistence on setting pre-conditions before peace talks would even commence under US President Obama in 2009
- Abbas waited nine months into the ten-month settlement freeze to begin negotiations with the Israelis
- Advanced a ridiculous narrative that Jews living in the area makes a Palestinian state “non-viable”
- Abbas refused to advance talks with Israeli PM Netanyahu in March 2014, and opted to unilaterally join international forums (contrary to the Oslo Accords) and signed a unity pact with Hamas
These are not activities of a people that is “desperate” for a state. These are not actions of leaders who are willing to make compromises to establish a country and move their people forward.
Maximizing a Jew-free State and/or Destroying the current Jewish State Palestinian actions have consistently had three main areas of focus:
- Creating a new state free of any Jews
- Maximize the size of the new Palestinian state: either the entirety of Israel+West Bank+Gaza or using the 1949 Armistice Lines
- If there remains a state of Israel, it should be small and not Jewish
A Jew-free Palestinian state: Palestinians have sought to recreate the conditions of the Arab-controlled regions that expelled and barred the Jews from 1949 to 1967. The Palestinian leadership has continually called for preventing any “settlements”, meaning barring any Jewish people from living anywhere in Gaza, the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem that was controlled by Jordan from 1949-1967. Various Palestinian efforts towards peace talks have demanded a pre-condition of Jewish settlement freezes before any peace talks could begin. They have lobbied the United Nations to condemn any and all settlements as illegal (even though Jews always lived in the lands before the illegal Jordanian takeover in 1949).