How would you like it if grandpa kept whining about the fact that he lost his leg decades ago while driving drunk because a pedestrian appeared in front of him, and he had to swerve and hit a tree?
And what would make it worse is if grandpa kept making racist comments about the pedestrian.
Well, that’s exactly how I see the endless Palestinian complaining about the Nakba and the blaming of the Jews for it.
Look at the latest display of whining and historic revisionism that Palestinian president-for-life Mahmood Abbas just regaled us with at the United Nations.
In his latest boiler-plate anti-Israel speech, Abbas compared Israelis with Nazis and denied Jewish history in Jerusalem. Most importantly, he denied any Arab responsibility for the Nakba.
Of course, there has been a lot of Palestinian suffering. Of course, there has been Palestinian refugees (and a roughly equal number of Jewish refugees). Of course, the Palestinians are continuing to suffer. Anyone can see that, and no one should be rejoicing about it.
But the hair-raising hypocrisy of Abbas and his ilk is that they blame the Jews for all of it, as if the Arab rejection of the 1947 UN partition plan and the Arab attempt to wipe Israel off the map never occurred.
Actually, let me amend my grandpa analogy. In the real Nakba, the grandpa didn’t avoid hitting the pedestrian. He tried to run him over! And Grandpa got mad because, against all odds, the pedestrian found a way to stop the car.
Abbas also reiterated his demand for “a ‘right of return’ for millions of refugees”. In other words, in the Abbas version of a two-state solution, there would be two Arab states, one 100% Arab and the other with a minority of Jews after all the descendants of Palestinian refugees flood Israel, a country that they have never set foot on and obviously know nothing about since they call it an Apartheid state.
For good measure, Abbas also blamed Britain and the United States even though they both support a two-state solution and have tried many times to promote it.
Of course, he also blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. But while these politicians deserve criticism, they didn’t create the Palestinians’ problems. Of course, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and to some extent Netanyahu, want nothing to do with a Palestinian state, but these politicians weren’t in charge when Israel accepted two-state solutions (most notably in 1947 and 2000 but also on other occasions) and the Palestinians didn’t. In fact, these politicians are largely the result of decades of Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism. They are largely of Abbas’ own making.
The people that Abbas didn’t blame and has never blamed are his ancestors and their Arab allies who made the decision in 1947 that Jews didn’t deserve self-determination and had to be fought at all costs. And he of course never blames his predecessor Yasser Arafat for rejecting the offer of Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David Summit in 2000.
Abbas and his ilk know that the only way that their warped version of history can stand is if they ignore those bad decisions, and the only way they can ignore those decisions is if they claim that they were a natural reaction to Jews establishing a state in a place where they had no right to do so.
In other words, Abbas needs to deny Jewish history on the land of Israel, which explains his ludicrous denial of Jewish ties to the Temple Mount.
But Abbas’ would-be magic act isn’t surprising. The mainstream Palestinian position has consistently been to deny any Palestinian or Arab responsibility for the fate of the Palestinians, which is why they do not yet have a state. While the Jews have repeatedly (albeit reluctantly) accepted compromises to settle the conflict, the Palestinians never have. Their mainstream narrative has always been and remains, that the Jews are Western imperialists with no history on the Land of Israel.
Most Palestinians are utterly incapable of the self-reflection needed to see what they have done wrong and what they could do differently to have a better a future. Blaming the Jews while demanding the world’s sympathy and money is much easier.
The mainstream Palestinian position is pathetically immature, and president-for-life Mahmood Abbas faithfully represents that view.
