by Dan Schueftan
If the Palestinian national movement had not been addicted to terrorism and violence and blind to historical processes, they could have had an independent state decades ago.
The Palestinian national movement is "celebrating" 100 years of anarchy. You don't need to be the Zionist enemy to judge it so harshly. Arabs, and even many Palestinians, know it, and recently have even been saying so in public.
The Palestinians should be condemned not for their opposition to Zionism, and not even because of their violence. They see their struggle as a post-colonialist liberation, which has always entailed violent elements. Their enmity to Israel is understandable: they have been beaten, oppressed, and a large part of their people exiled.
The ongoing lawlessness of their national movement has to do with its consistent evasion of responsibility for the fate of its people. The movement has become addicted to a pattern of behavior that combines failed aggression with serial whining. It's important to remind those who insisted on pitying the Palestinians because of their wretchedness that this behavior is what has brought most of their misfortunes down upon them. It's hard to respect them as a national collective.
Their attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to uproot the Zionist enterprise was effective. As Jews, it's hard for us to admit, but the widespread Palestinian terrorism did bring them closer to their goal. Every round of violence brought them closer to the desired result, in the form of British restrictions to aliyah, until Britain effectively dumped its support for the Zionist enterprise with the White Paper of 1939.
But even back then, the inherent lawlessness of the Palestinian national movement was laying the groundwork for its destruction 10 years later. Its leaders recruited the people into widespread violence against Jews (and the British) by legitimizing anarchy and terrorism. By doing so, they brought disaster to Palestinian society, which explains more than anything else their mass escape in 1948 and their ineffectual resistance in cases where they were expelled. In the 100 years the Palestinians have been a people, this is their main disaster, and they are the ones who created the conditions for it.
Even at the end of the British Mandate, it was clear that the Palestinians would not be able to fight the Jews alone, because the Arab states were not on their side and King Abdullah wanted to seize the heart of their country as much as Ben-Gurion did. To handle that threat, it would have been better for them to establish independence in the area offered to them under the Partition Plan and try to drum up support from Arab militaries. But even then, their destructive and lawless behavior made the decision for them: they clung to "historic justice" – a Palestinian state on the ruins of Israel – rather than the goal that would have saved them from catastrophe at the time.
After they were exiled and the first incarnation of the movement was destroyed, the Palestinians set up the second – the Palestine Liberation Organization under Ahmad Shukeiri and then Yasser Arafat – on the same basis: a demand to eliminate Israel through armed resistance. Like in 1939, the Palestinians initially made some progress and established themselves in the Arab and international arenas starting in the 1970s, but still clung to their "historic justice," and insisted on the ruin of Israel. Alongside consistent Palestinian terrorism in Europe and the Middle East, which brought destruction to Jordan and Lebanon, the Palestinians rejected a series of Israeli peace proposals that could have formed the basis of a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Even the plan for autonomy that Menachem Begin offered in peace negotiations with Anwar Sadat had the potential to develop into a Palestinian state.
Their main chance came, of course, with the Oslo Accords process, which was at its heart an Israeli illusion that the Palestinians had changed their ways. It quickly turned out that the Palestinians weren't even willing to allow the Israelis to fool themselves. All the elements of their struggle for "historic justice" – their addiction to terrorism, insistence on the "right of return," and the rejection of the Jewish state – eventually convinced most of the backers of the agreement in Israel that there was no Palestinian partner in the historic process. After the offers former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made in 2008, PLO Spokesman Saeb Erekat explained that for the Palestinians, even 100% of what they were demanding would only be a first step.
First, the Palestinians lost Egypt (in 1979), and then the Israeli public (200), and finally their national cohesion between the West Bank and Gaza (2007). Most of the Arabs are also growing sick of them, and some of the Europeans are, too. A century of anarchy comes at a price.
Dan Schueftan
Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-palestinians-100-years-of-lawlessness/
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