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Middle East Forum
The Myth of Palestinian Centrality
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Executive Summary
The "Palestinian cause" has been at the forefront of
discourse on the Middle East for nearly a century. It has long formed the
primary common concern of pan-Arab solidarity and its most effective
rallying cry, yet neither the Arab states nor Palestinian leaders have
truly acted in the interest of the "liberation of Palestine."
While the "Nakba" may seemingly be of chief concern
to the Arab states, Palestinian refugees have endured marginalization and
abuse from their fellow Arab nations since 1948 in countries such as
Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait. In the meantime, countless
opportunities to establish a Palestinian state and develop Palestinian
civil society have been rejected by Palestinian leaders. Rather than seek
to rectify the "Palestinian problem," their leaders have
immersed their hapless constituents in disastrous and wholly unnecessary
conflicts, while lining their pockets from the proceeds of this ongoing
tragedy.
As such, any notion claiming a link between finding a resolution to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and attaining regional peace and
stability is both false and misleading. The Palestinian leadership has
continually shown no sign of actually wanting neither peace with Israel
nor an independent state. Accepting reconciliation would transform the
Palestinians in one fell swoop from the world's ultimate victim into an
ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state, thus terminating decades
of unprecedented international indulgence. It would force Palestinian
leaders into responsibility, accountability and the daunting task of
state building. It is therefore of little surprise that whenever
confronted with the International or Israeli offer of peace or statehood,
Palestinian leaders will never approve.
Introduction
No cliché has dominated the discourse on Middle Eastern affairs more
than the supposed "linkage" between the resolution of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the attainment of regional peace and
stability. According to this argument, since Arabs and Muslims are so
passionate about Palestinian statehood, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate
feeds regional anger and despair, gives a larger rationale to terrorist
groups like al-Qaeda and to the insurgency in Iraq, and obstructs the
formation of a regional coalition that will help block Iran's quest for
nuclear weapons. As President Obama asserted after his first meeting with
Prime Minister Netanyahu in May 2009: "[Making] peace with the
Palestinians…. actually strengthens our hand in the international
community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat."[1]
This study demonstrates that this argument is not only completely
unfounded, but the inverse of the truth. For even though the
"Palestine question" has long formed the main common
denominator of pan-Arab solidarity and its most effective rallying cry,
neither the Arab states nor Palestinian leaders have truly wanted the
"liberation of Palestine."
The former have manipulated the "Palestine" cause to their
own ends while blocking the Palestinians' road to statehood, perpetuating
the refugee problem, and abusing their guest Palestinian populations. The
latter have immersed their hapless constituents in disastrous and wholly
unnecessary conflicts, while lining their pockets from the proceeds of
this ongoing tragedy. As this study will show, for nearly a century
Palestinian leaders have missed no opportunity to impede the development
of Palestinian civil society and the attainment of Palestinian statehood.
Nor have ordinary Arabs evinced any interest in the Palestinian cause.
Quite the reverse in fact; from their arrival in the Arab states during
the 1948 war the Palestinians were deeply resented and despised by the
host societies and this sentiment has changed little over the years. Not
once has the proverbial "Arab street" driven the Arab regimes
to war with Israel; it was rather the Arab masses, indoctrinated for
decades with vile anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred, who have been
repeatedly goaded into violence by their unelected rulers so as to divert
attention from their own marginalization and repression.
Denying Palestinian Statehood: The Pan Arab Ideal
It is the doctrine of pan-Arabism, postulating the existence of
"a single nation bound by the common ties of language, religion and
history.... behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign states"[2] that has transformed the
"Palestine question" from a minor local dispute between Arabs
and Jews into an international problem of the first order. This, however,
has had nothing to do with the protection of Palestinian national rights
for the simple reason that pan-Arabism does not consider
the Palestinians a distinct people deserving statehood, but rather an
integral part of a wider Arab framework stretching over substantial parts
of the Middle East (e.g., "Greater Syria") or the entire
region. In the words of the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti:
There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not….
[It is but] a very small tiny spot there on the southern part of the
eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by a vast territory of
Arab Muslim lands, beginning with Morocco, continuing through Tunis,
Tripoli and Egypt, and going down to Arabia proper, then going up to
Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq - one solid Arab-speaking bloc -
50,000,000 people.[3]
It was indeed common knowledge at the time that the May 1948 pan-Arab
invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more of a classic imperialist
scramble for Palestinian territory, than a fight for Palestinian national
rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman
Azzam, admitted to a British reporter, Transjordan "was to swallow
up the central hill regions of Palestine with access to the Mediterranean
at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. [The] Galilee would go to
Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to
Lebanon."[4]
Had Israel lost the war, its territory would have been divided among the
invading Arab forces. The name Palestine would have vanished into the
dustbin of history. By surviving the pan-Arab assault, Israel has
paradoxically saved the Palestinian national movement from complete
oblivion.
Ironically, this denial was shared by Palestinian Arab leaders during
the British mandate era (1920-48) who, as products of the Ottoman imperial
system where religion constituted the linchpin of the sociopolitical
order of things, had no real grasp of the phenomenon of nationalism,
hence had no interest in the evolution of a distinct Palestinian nation.
Instead they subscribed to the pan-Arab dream of a unified "Arab
nation" (of which "Palestine" was but a tiny fragment) or
the associated ideology of Greater Syria (Suriya al-Kubra),
stressing the territorial and historical indivisibility of most of the
Fertile Crescent.
As early as October 1919, Musa Kazim Husseini, a former Ottoman
official, elected Jerusalem mayor under the British, told a Zionist
acquaintance that "we demand no separation from Syria."[5] Six months later, in April
1920, his peers instigated the first anti-Jewish pogrom in Jerusalem.
This was not in the name of Palestine's independence, but under the
demand for its incorporation into the (short-lived) Syrian kingdom,
headed by Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca, the celebrated hero of the
"Great Arab Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire and the
effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. Four years later, in a
special report to the League of Nations, the Arab Executive Committee
(AEC), the umbrella organization of the Palestinian Arabs, still referred
to Palestine as the unlawfully severed southern part of "the one
country of Syria, with its one population of the same language, origin,
customs, and religious beliefs, and its natural boundaries."[6] And in June 1926, the league's
permanent mandates commission was informed of an Arab complaint that
"it was not in conformity with Article 22 of the Mandate to print
the initials and even the words 'Eretz Israel' after the name
'Palestine', while refusing the Arabs the title 'Suria al-Janubiyya'
('Southern Syria')."[7]
In July 1937, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the AEC's successor,
justified its rejection of the Peel Commission's recommendation for the
partition of Palestine on the grounds that "this country does not
belong only to [the] Palestine Arabs but to the whole Arab and Muslim
Worlds."[8]
As late as August 1947, three months before the passing of the U.N.
resolution partitioning Mandate Palestine into Arab and Jewish states,
the AHC's mouthpiece, al-Wahda, advocated the incorporation of
Palestine (and Transjordan) into "Greater Syria."[9]
Jerusalem Mufti, Hajj Amin Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs
during this period, never acted as a local patriot seeking national
self-determination, but rather as an aspiring pan-Arab regional advocate.
An early admirer of the "Greater Syrian" ideal, he co-edited
the Jerusalem-based paper Suria al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria), as
Palestine was named by pan-Arabists, and presided over the city's Arab
Club, which advocated Palestine's annexation to Syria. He cast his sights
much higher after fleeing the country in 1937 to avoid arrest for the
instigation of nationwide violence.
Hajj
Amin Husseini and Adolf Hitler
|
Presenting himself to Hitler and Mussolini as a spokesman of the
entire "Arab Nation," Husseini argued that the "Palestine
problem" necessitated an immediate solution not because of the
national aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs, but because it constituted
"an obstacle to the unity and independence of the Arab countries by
pitting them directly against the Jews of the entire world, dangerous
enemies, whose secret arms are money, corruption, and intrigue." His
proposed solution, therefore, was not Palestinian statehood but "the
independence of [unified] Palestine, Syria and Iraq" under his
leadership. As he put it in one of his letters to Hitler, "[T]he
Arab people, slandered, maltreated, and deceived by our common enemies,
confidently expects that the result of your final victory will be their
independence and complete liberation, as well as the creation of their
unity, when they will be linked to your country by a treaty of friendship
and cooperation."[10]
While the young generation of diaspora Palestinian activists in the
1950s who sought to avenge the 1948 "catastrophe" of the
creation of Israel did not share the Mufti's grandiose ambitions, they
were no less committed to the pan-Arab ideal. This was evidenced inter
alia by the name of the first "resistance" group - the Arab
Nationalist Movement (ANM). The pan-Arab ideal was also evident in the
diverse composition of the movement comprising Palestinian (e.g., George
Habash, Wadi Haddad) and Arab activists (notably Hani Hindi, scion of a
respected Damascene family).[11]
Another prominent adherent to the pan-Arab ideal was Ahmad Shuqeiri, a
Lebanon-born politician of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi, and Turkish descent
who served as the Arab League's deputy secretary-general, as well as
Syrian and Saudi delegate to the UN. On May 28, 1964 he became the
founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
established that day by the Arab states at the initiative of Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
"Palestine is part and parcel in the Arab homeland,"
Shuqeiri told the Security Council on May 31, 1956";The Arab world
is not prepared to surrender one single atom of their right to this
sacred territory." Clarifying to which part of the "Arab
homeland" this specific territory belonged, he added that Palestine
"is nothing but southern Syria." In his account, "the
Palestine area was linked to Syria from time immemorial" and
"there was no question of separation" until the great powers
brought this about by creating mandates under the League of Nations, with
Britain controlling Palestine and France administering Syria.[12]
Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the PLO's hallowed
founding document, the Palestinian Charter, adopted upon its formation
and revised four years later to reflect the organization's growing
militancy, has little to say about the Palestinians themselves. Devoting
about two-thirds of its thirty-three articles to the need to destroy
Israel, it defines the Palestinians as "an integral part of the Arab
nation", rather than a distinct nationality and vows allegiance to the
ideal of pan-Arab unity - that is to Palestine's eventual assimilation
into "the greater Arab homeland" - while seeking to harness
this ideal to its short-term ends:
The destiny of the Arab Nation and, indeed, Arab existence itself
depend upon the destiny of the Palestinian cause. From this
interdependence springs the Arab nation's pursuit of, and striving for,
the liberation of Palestine. … Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine
are two complementary objectives, the attainment of either of which
facilitates the attainment of the other. Thus, Arab unity leads to the
liberation of Palestine, the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity;
and work toward the realization of one objective proceeds side by side
with work toward the realization of the other.[13]
Even the November 1988 "declaration of independence" by the
Palestine National Council, the PLO's "parliament," while
obviously endorsing the idea of Palestinian statehood (in language that
massively plagiarized Israel's proclamation of independence),[14] vows allegiance to the
pan-Arab ideal by describing the "State of Palestine" as
"an integral part of the Arab nation, of its heritage and
civilization and of its present endeavor for the achievement of the goals
of liberation, development, democracy and unity."[15]
Azmi Bishara, founding leader of the nationalist Balad Party (with
seats in the Israeli parliament since 1999), highlighted this in a
statement he made in 2002: "My Palestinian identity never precedes
my Arab identity.… I don't think there is a Palestinian nation, there is
[only] an Arab nation.… Palestine until the end of the nineteenth century
was the southern part of Greater Syria" and the idea of a distinct
Palestinian nation is a "colonialist invention" that happens to
coincide with the consistent Israeli attempt, by both left- and rightwing
parties, to ignore the reality of pan-Arab nationalism.[16] He made this statement eight
years after the PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) was established
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to lay the groundwork for Palestinian
statehood in these territories.
While such plain speaking is hardly commonplace in PLO/PA current
rhetoric, these words help explain the group's continued subscription to
the pan-Arab ideal. This is also evidenced by the PLO/PA's deliberate
failure to revise the Palestinian Charter so as to acknowledge the
distinctness of Palestinian nationalism; the frequent articulation of
pan-Arab themes by its tightly controlled media; its constitutional
definition of the prospective state of Palestine as "part of the
Arab homeland" committed to the "goal of Arab unity";[17] and the steady reiteration of
the claim that the Palestinians are not fighting for their own corner but
are rather the Arab nation's "front line of defense."[18] No less important, the PLO
continues to subordinate its policies, and by extension Palestinian
self-interest, to pan-Arab approval, and vice versa, as illustrated most
recently by Mahmud Abbas's successful rallying of the Arab League behind
his "absolute and decisive rejection to recognizing Israel as a
Jewish state."[19]
Upholding this position - sixty six years after the creation of a Jewish
state by an internationally recognized act of self-determination -
effectively amounts to rejection of Palestinian statehood for the simple
reason that Israel would not self-destruct while the Palestinians and the
Arab state are in no position to bring this about.
Denying Palestinian Statehood: Islamist Imperial Dreams
If subscription to the pan-Arab dream has made the Palestinian cause
captive to inter-Arab machinations, stirring unrealistic hopes and
expectations in Palestinian political circles, and inciting widespread
and horrifically destructive violence that has made the likelihood of
Palestinian statehood ever more remote, adherence to Islamist ideals has
subordinated Palestinian identity to the far wider ambition of Islamic world
domination.
Consider the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic
acronym Hamas. Since making its debut in the 1987-92 intifada,
Hamas has established itself as the foremost political and military
Palestinian force, winning a landslide victory in the 2006 general
elections and violently evicting the PLO from Gaza the following year.
Far from being an ordinary liberation movement in search of national
self-determination, Hamas has subordinated its aim of bringing about the
destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state on its
ruins to the wider goal of establishing Allah's universal empire. In
doing so, it has followed in the footsteps of its Egyptian parent
organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which viewed its violent opposition
to Zionism from the 1930s and 1940s as an integral part of the Manichean
struggle for the creation of a worldwide caliphate, rather than as a
defense of the Palestinian Arabs' national rights. In the words of the
senior Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar, "Islamic and traditional views
reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state … In
the past, there was no independent Palestinian state. … [Hence] our main
goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or
pan-Islamic."[20]
He further explained: "Our position stems from our religious
convictions … This is a holy land. It is not the property of the
Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in
all parts of the world."[21]
Echoing standard Muslim Brotherhood precepts, Hamas's covenant adopted
in 1988 presents the organization as designed not merely to
"liberate Palestine from Zionist occupation" but to pursue the
far loftier goals of spreading Islam's holy message and defending the
weak and oppressed throughout the world: "As the Islamic Resistance
Movement paves its way, it will back the oppressed and support the
wronged [throughout the world] in all its might. It will spare no effort
to bring about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this
place and everywhere it can reach and have influence therein."[22] As the movement's slogan puts
it: "Allah is [Hamas's] target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran
its constitution: Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is
the loftiest of its wishes."[23]
In other words, the "question of Palestine" is neither an
ordinary territorial dispute between two national movements, nor a struggle
by an indigenous population against a foreign occupier. It is an integral
part of Islam's millenarian jihad to expand its domain and prevent the
fall of any of its parts to the infidels: "[T]he land of Palestine
is an Islamic Waqf [Islamic religious endowment] consecrated for future
Moslem generations until Judgment Day... The day that enemies usurp part
of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem."[24]
In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other
parts of the world conquered by the forces of Islam throughout history.
To this very day, for example, Arabs and many Muslims unabashedly pine
for the restoration of Muslim Spain and look upon their expulsion from
that country in 1492 as a grave historical injustice. Indeed, even
countries that have never been under Islamic imperial rule have become
legitimate targets of Islamist fervor. Since the late 1980s, various
Islamist movements have looked upon the growing number of French Muslims
as a sign that France, too, has become a potential part of the House of
Islam. Their British counterparts have followed suit. "We will
remodel this country in an Islamic image," the London-based preacher
Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, told an attentive audience less than two
months after 9/11. "We will replace the Bible with the Qur'an."[25]
Khaled Mash'al, head of Hamas's political bureau and the
organization's effective leader, echoed this sentiment as a tidal wave of
Muslim violence swept across the world in response to satirical
depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. In February
2006 he declared:
By Allah, you will be defeated... Hurry up and apologize to our
nation, because if you do not, you will regret it. This is because our
nation is progressing and is victorious... Tomorrow, our nation will sit
on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but
a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today,
before remorse will do you no good.[26]
Nor is this supremacist worldview limited to Hamas. Since its rise in
the early seventh century, Islam has constituted the linchpin of Middle
Eastern politics, and its hold on Palestinian society is far stronger
than is commonly recognized. Contrary to the received wisdom in the West,
the PLO is hardly a secular organization. Arafat was a devout Muslim,
associated in his early days with the Muslim Brotherhood, as were other
founding fathers of Fatah, the PLO's foremost constituent organization. And
while the new generation of Fatah leaders in the territories may be less
religious, they, nevertheless, have a draft constitution for a
prospective Palestinian state stipulating that "Islam is the
official religion in Palestine" and Shari'a is "a main source
for legislation."[27]
They have, moreover, utilized the immense inflammatory potential of
Islam to discredit the two-state solution - and by implication the
prospect of Palestinian statehood - to express their grandiose supremacist
delusions. In the words of the official PA television, "Where did
Great Britain disappear? By Allah's will, He will get rid of the US like
he got rid of them. We [Muslims] have ruled the world; a day will come by
Allah, and we shall rule the world [again]. The day will come, and we
shall rule America, the day will come, and we shall rule Britain. We
shall rule the entire world."[28]
Within these grand overlapping schemes of pan-Arab regional unity and
Islamic world domination, the notion of Palestinian statehood is but a
single transient element whose supposed centrality looms far greater in
Western than in Islamic and Arab eyes.
Manipulating the Palestinian Cause
Having helped drive the Palestinians to national ruin, the Arab states
continued to manipulate the Palestinian national cause to their own ends.
Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the
parts of Palestine they conquered during the 1948 war. Upon occupying the
biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, King Abdullah moved to erase all
traces of corporate Palestinian Arab identity. On April 4, 1950, the
territory was formally annexed to Jordan to be subsequently known as the
"West Bank" of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. Its residents
became Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the
kingdom's economic, political, and social structures. And while Egypt
showed no desire to annex the occupied Gaza Strip, this did not imply
support of Palestinian nationalism or of any sort of collective political
awareness among the Palestinians. The refugees were kept under oppressive
military rule, were denied Egyptian citizenship, and were subjected to
severe restrictions on travel. "The Palestinians are useful to the
Arab states as they are," President Gamal Abdel Nasser candidly
responded to an enquiring Western reporter. "We will always see that
they do not become too powerful. Can you imagine yet another nation on
the shores of the eastern Mediterranean!"[29] Had these territories not come
under Israel's control during the June 1967 war, their populations would
have lost whatever vestiges of Palestinian identity they retained since
1948. For the second time in two decades, Israel unwittingly salvaged the
Palestinian national cause.
Nor was Syria more sympathetic to the idea of Palestinian statehood.
During his brief presidency (April-August 1949), Husni Zaim proposed the
resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Syria in return for financial and
political gain. Meanwhile, Hafez Assad (1970-2000), who as late as
September 1974 described Palestine as "a basic
part of southern Syria,"[30]
was a persistent obstacle to Palestinian self-determination. He pledged
allegiance to any solution amenable to the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) - appointed by the Arab League in October 1974 as the
"sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" - so
long as it did not deviate from the Syrian line advocating Israel's
destruction. Yet when in November 1988, the PLO pretended to accept the
November 1947 partition resolution (and by implication to recognize
Israel's existence) so as to end its ostracism by the United States,[31] Syria immediately opposed the
move. The PLO then took this pretense a step further by signing the
September 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-government
Arrangements (DOP) with Israel. This provided for Palestinian self-rule
in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip for a transitional period of up to
five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a
permanent peace settlement. But the Syrian regime strongly condemned the
declaration while the Damascus-based Palestinian terrorist, Ahmad Jibril,
threatened PLO chairman Yasser Arafat with death.
A no less instrumental approach was exhibited by Saddam Hussein,
another self-styled pan-Arab champion whose professed allegiance to the
Palestinian cause was matched by a long history of treating that cause
with indifference, if not outright hostility. Saddam stood firmly against
Iraqi intervention to aid the Palestinians in Jordan during the
"Black September" of 1970 and subsequently sought to exclude
Palestinians from coming to work in Iraq's booming, oil-rich economy.
Though a vociferous critic of Egypt's Anwar Sadat for reaching a separate
peace agreement with Israel in 1979, Saddam quickly reconsidered when he
needed Egyptian military aid in his war against Iran (1980-88), toiling
tirelessly for Cairo's readmission into the Arab fold. Nor was Saddam
deterred from collaborating with Israel against Syrian interests in
Lebanon (to punish Assad for his support of Tehran in its war against
Baghdad), or from seeking sophisticated Israeli military equipment. In
1984, at a time of pressure due to the war with Iran, he went so far as
to voice public support for peace negotiations with the Jewish state,
emphasizing that "no Arab leader looks forward to the destruction of
Israel" and that any solution to the conflict would require
"the existence of a secure state for the
Israelis."[32]
This support, to be sure, did not prevent Saddam from attempting to
link his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait to the Palestine problem. During
the months of negotiations with the Kuwaitis before the invasion, Saddam
made no mention of Palestine. Once confronted with a firm international
response, he immediately opted to "Zionize" the crisis by
portraying his predatory move as the first step toward "the
liberation of Jerusalem." But this pretense made no impression
whatsoever on most Arab states, which dismissed the spurious link as the
ploy it obviously was and fought alongside the West to liberate Kuwait.
Nor did the anti-Iraq coalition collapse when Saddam, in a desperate
bid to widen the conflict, fired thirty-nine Scud missiles at Israel - a
move cheered by the Palestinians and by demonstrators in marginal states
such as Yemen but otherwise greeted with conspicuous calm by the
proverbially restive "Arab street." Not a single Arab regime
was swept from power following its participation in the war, with the war
even producing an ad hoc tacit alliance between Israel and the Arab
members of the anti-Saddam coalition: Israel kept the lowest possible
profile, eschewing retaliation for Iraq's missile attacks while the
latter highlighted the hollowness of Saddam's pan-Arab pretenses by
sustaining the war operations against Baghdad.[33]If anything, it was the
Palestinians who paid a heavy price for their entanglement in the
conflict. The PLO's endorsement of the Iraqi occupation led to its
ostracism by the Arab world and the postwar expulsion of most of the
400,000 Palestinians who had been living and working in Kuwait, a move
that created a major humanitarian crisis and denied the PLO the
substantial income received from the earnings of those workers. With the
additional loss of Gulf financial contributions and investments in
Kuwaiti banks, the total amount forfeited by the PLO as a direct result of
the 1990-91 Gulf conflict exceeded $10 billion, bringing the organization
to the verge of bankruptcy.[34]
So much for pan-Arab solidarity with "the sole representative of the
Palestinian people."
Unwanted Guests
The political manipulation of the Palestinian cause was mirrored by
the dismal treatment of the Palestinian refugees based in Arab states
since the 1948 war. Far from being welcomed, the new arrivals were seen
by their host societies as an unpatriotic and cowardly lot who had
shamefully abdicated their national duty while expecting others to fight
on their behalf. In Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan there were repeated
calls for their return to Palestine, or at the very least of the young
men of military age, many of whom had arrived on the pretext of
volunteering for the pan-Arab force be assembled to fight in Palestine.
The Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian males between
eighteen and fifty and ordered all "healthy and fit men" who
had already entered the country to register officially or be considered
illegal aliens and face the full weight of the law. The Syrian government
took an even more stringent approach, banning from its territory all
Palestinian males between sixteen and fifty. When these restrictions
drove Palestinians to Egypt, they were often received with disdain.
"Why should we go to Palestine to fight while Palestinian Arab
fighters are deserting the cause by flight to Egypt?" complained
Alexandria residents upon the arrival of refugee ships from Haifa in late
April 1948. In Cairo, a large number of demonstrators marched to the Arab
League's headquarters to lodge a petition demanding that "every
able-bodied Palestinian capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to
stay abroad." By October 1948 the Syrian and Lebanese governments
were reportedly "following a policy of concentrating refugees in
their territories in as small an area as possible, in order to be able to
get rid of them quickly as soon as U.N.O [United Nations Organization] was
made responsible. They were totally convinced that U.N.O. ought to take
this responsibility and if it did not - it was quite possible that the
Arab Governments would simply allow the refugees to die."[35]
This attitude was entrenched and institutionalized over time. Yet with
their desire to offload their Palestinian guests, matched by the
lingering dream of Israel's destruction, the Arab states as well as the
Palestinian leadership rejected the U.N. General Assembly resolution 194
of December 11, 1948, which conditioned repatriation of the attainment of
comprehensive peace and partial refugee resettlement in the host Arab
states.[36]The
resolution's subsequent transformation into the cornerstone of an utterly
spurious claim to a "right of return" has only served to
perpetuate the refugee problem as the Arab states used this
"right" as a pretext to prevent Palestinian assimilation into
their societies in anticipation of their eventual return to their
homeland.
Nowhere has this state of affairs been more starkly illustrated than
in Lebanon, the most liberal Arab state up until the mid-1970s. Fearful
lest the burgeoning and increasingly radicalized Palestinian population
(which grew from 100,000 in 1948 to about 500,000 in 2012)[37] undermine the country's
fragile confessional edifice, the authorities barred their incorporation
into Lebanon's social, political, and economic structures. As a result,
the vast majority of Palestinians have remained stateless refugees with
more than half living in abject poverty in twelve squalid and overcrowded
camps (another five camps were destroyed during the Lebanese civil war of
1975-90), administered by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), created in 1949 for the exclusive
relief of Palestinian Arab refugees.[38]
Camp residents or not, Lebanese Palestinians have been excluded from
numerous walks of life and spheres of activity due to their alien status;
and unlike other foreign residents who can evade this discrimination by
virtue of their countries' reciprocity treaties with Lebanon, the
stateless Palestinians can claim no such rights and have consequently
been singled out for distinct mistreatment including severe restrictions
on travel, property ownership, and ability to work. For decades, they
were barred by government decree from more than seventy professions, from
doorkeepers, to mechanics, to file clerks, to schoolteachers, to
personnel managers; and while the ministry of labor lifted the ban on
fifty professions in June 2005, the actual application of this measure
has been haphazard at best. Likewise, only 2 percent of Palestinians took
advantage of the August 2010 legislation aimed at improving their access
to the official labor market and the social security benefit system, with
Lebanese law still barring Palestinians from at least twenty-five
professions requiring syndicated membership (such as law, medicine, and
engineering) and discriminating against their work and social conditions
(e.g., Palestinians are underpaid in comparison to Lebanese workers for performing
the same jobs and overpay for their pensions). Palestinian refugees are
still prevented from registering property in accordance with a
discriminatory 2001 law.[39]
Palestinian
refugees at the Jaramana Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria, 1948
|
While Lebanon may offer the starkest example of abuse, nowhere in the
Arab world have the Palestinians been treated like "brothers" -
by both the authorities and the population at large. In accordance with
Arab League resolutions, all Arab states reject naturalization and/or
resettlement as solutions to the refugee problem. As a matter of
principle, they all refuse to contribute to UNRWA's budget or to assume
responsibility for any of its functions. All restrict the freedom of
movement of their Palestinian residents as well as their property rights
and access to such government services as health, education, and social
benefits.[40]
When in 2004 Saudi Arabia revised its naturalization law allowing
foreigners who had resided in its territory for ten years to apply for
citizenship, the estimated 500,000 Palestinians living and working in the
kingdom were conspicuously excluded. The pretext: the Arab League's
stipulation that Palestinians living in Arab countries be denied
citizenship to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their "right
to return" to their homeland.[41]
Even in Jordan, where most Palestinians have been naturalized and
incorporated into the country's fabric, they remain largely marginalized
and discriminated against. Between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan was in
control of the West Bank, some 250,000-500,000 Palestinians moved across
to the East Bank or migrated abroad in search of a better life. But even
East Bank Palestinians have been subjected to systematic discrimination.
They pay much heavier taxes than their Bedouin compatriots; they receive
close to zero state benefits; they are almost completely shut out of
government jobs, and they have very little, if any, political
representation: Not one of Jordan's twelve governorships is headed by a Palestinian,
and the number of Palestinian parliamentarians is disproportionately low.[42]
The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that more than two
million Palestinians, most of whom have full Jordanian citizenship, are
registered as UNRWA refugees with some 370,000 living in ten recognized
camps throughout the country.[43]
This has in turn resulted in the perception of the kingdom's entire
Palestinian population as refugees who would eventually depart to
implement their "right of return."[44]This outlook can be traced to
the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964,
which quickly challenged Jordan as the focus of Palestinian national identity.
The situation came to a head in the autumn of 1970 with the
organization's attempt to overthrow the Hashemite dynasty. This forced
King Hussein to drive the PLO out of the country, gaining traction in
July 1988 when hundreds of thousands of West Bankers lost their Jordanian
citizenship as a result of the king's severance of "administrative
and legal ties" with the territory. After the signing of the DOP and
the July 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, the process shifted to the
East Bank where thousands of Palestinians were stripped of their
Jordanian citizenship.[45]
"For East Bankers, the right of return is often held up as the
panacea which will recreate Jordan's Bedouin or Hashemite identity,"
read a 2008 confidential memo by the U.S. ambassador to Amman:
At their most benign, our East Banker contacts tend to count on the
right of return as a solution to Jordan's social, political, and economic
woes. But underlying many conversations with East Bankers is the theory
that once the Palestinians leave, "real" Jordanians can have
their country back … In fact, many of our East Banker contacts do seem
more excited about the return [read: departure] of Palestinian refugees
than the Palestinians themselves.[46]
Brotherly Massacres
Not only have the host Arab states marginalized and abused their
Palestinian guests, but they have not shrunk from massacring them on a
grand scale whenever this suited their needs. When in 1970 his throne was
endangered by the Palestinian guerilla organizations, the affable and
thoroughly Westernized King Hussein slaughtered thousands of Palestinians
during a single month, now known as "Black September." Fearing
certain death, scores of Palestinian fighters fled their Jordanian
"brothers" to surrender themselves to the Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF). Civilian casualties were exorbitant with estimates ranging
from three thousand to fifteen thousand dead - higher than the
Palestinian death toll in the 1948 war.[47]
In the summer of 1976, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the
Syrian army, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the
Beirut refugee camp of Tel Zaatar. Six years later, these very militias
slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila, this time under the IDF's watchful eye. None of the Arab states
came to the Palestinians' rescue.
When in 1983 the PLO tried to reestablish its military presence in
Lebanon, having been driven out the previous year by Israel, it was unceremoniously
expelled by the Syrian government, which went on to instigate an
internecine war among the Palestinian factions in Lebanon that raged for
years and cost an untold number of lives. So much so that Salah Khalaf
(aka Abu Iyad), the number two man in the PLO, accused Damascus of
committing worse crimes against the Palestinian people than "those
of the Israeli enemy." [48]
In the summer of 2007, the Lebanese army killed hundreds of
Palestinians, including many civilians, in the north Lebanese refugee
camp of Nahr al-Bared, inflicting widespread environmental damage and
driving some 30,000 persons to seek refuge in a nearby camp.[49]
Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Syrian civil
war, and tens of thousands have fled the country with refugee camps
subjected to military attacks and prolonged sieges that reduced their
inhabitants to destitution and starvation. The large Yarmuk camp south of
Damascus, once home to some 250,000 Palestinians, including 150,000
officially registered refugees, is now "nothing but ruins, and
houses only around 18,000 residents who couldn't escape to Lebanon,
Jordan, or elsewhere." "We live in a
big prison," a local resident lamented. "But at least, in a
prison, you have food. Here, there's nothing. We are slowly dying."[50]
Brotherly Nakba
Much has been made of the Palestinian exodus of 1948, though far more
Palestinians were actually driven from their homes by their own leaders
and/or by Arab armed forces than by Jewish/Israeli forces.[51] Nowadays, the collapse and
dispersal of Palestinian society has come to be known in Arab discourse
as al-Nakba, "the catastrophe," but it was not known as
this at the time. To the contrary, as a senior British official
discovered to his surprise during a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June
1949, "while [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews
(or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with
the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. 'We know
who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab
brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their
homes.... I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a
welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district
over."[52]
Given this attitude, it is hardly surprising that during their decades
of dispersal the Palestinians have been subjected to similarly traumatic
ordeals at the hands of their Arab brothers. As early as the 1950s, the
Arab Gulf states expelled striking Palestinian workers, while the Black
September events led to the expulsion of some 20,000 Palestinians from
Jordan and the demolition of their camps.[53] And this tragedy pales in
comparison with the eviction of most of Kuwait's 400,000 Palestinians
after the 1991 Gulf War. "What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people
is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the
occupied territories," Arafat lamented, as if it were not the PLO's
endorsement of Iraq's brutal occupation (August 1990-February 1991) that
triggered this deadly retribution.[54]
It mattered not that this community had nothing to do with the PLO's
reckless move. Within months of the country's liberation, only
50,000-80,000 Palestinians remained in the emirate, and by the end of the
year, the number had dwindled to some 30,000. Most of these were holders
of Egyptian travel documents, originally from Gaza; they were unable to
obtain visas to anywhere in the world, including Egypt, the governing
power in their homeland at the time when they left for the gulf. By
contrast, as noted in The Palestine Yearbook of International Law,
"Israel generally placed no obstacles on the post-war return to the
territories of Palestinian families from the West Bank,"
repatriating some 30,000 West Bankers and 7,000 Gazans with valid Israeli
identity cards who had been living and working in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia.[55]
No sooner had the dust settled on the Kuwait exodus, the Palestinians
experienced yet another expulsion, this time from Libya. In a speech on
September 1, 1995, as Israel was about to surrender control of the
Palestinian populated areas in the West Bank to Arafat's Palestinian
Authority (control of the Gaza population had been surrendered the
previous year), Muammar Qaddafi announced his intention to expel all Palestinians
living and working in the country, urging the Arab states to follow his
lead so as to expose the hollowness of the Palestinian-Israeli peace
process. He argued,
Since the Palestinian leaders claim they have now got a homeland
and a passport, let the 30,000 Palestinians in Libya go back to their
homeland, and let's see if the Israelis would permit them to return.
That's how the world will find out that the peace it's been advocating is
no more than treachery and a conspiracy.[56]
While no Arab state took up Qaddafi's advice and some implored him to
rescind his decision, none opened their doors to the deportees. Lebanon
denied entry to several thousand arrivals without Lebanese travel
documents and banned maritime transport from Libya to preempt the
possible flow of deportees while Egypt allowed Palestinians with Israeli
permits for entry to Gaza or the West Bank to cross its territory - under
escort - to the Palestinian-ruled areas, leaving thousands of hapless
refugees stranded in the Egyptian desert for months. Holders of residence
permits elsewhere were gradually able to move out; the rest were
eventually allowed to remain in Libya when Qaddafi rescinded his decision
in early 1997.[57]
Last but not least, the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003
unleashed a tidal wave of violence and terror against Iraq's
34,000-strong Palestinian community, driving some 21,000 people to flee
the country in fear for their lives. Yet far from protecting their long
time "guests," the internationally-propped Iraqi government was
implicated in the arbitrary detention, torture, killing, and
disappearance of Palestinians while none of the neighboring Arab states
(with rare, temporary exceptions) opened their doors to fleeing Iraqi
Palestinians. "It's hard to understand why Syria has provided refuge
to nearly a million Iraqi refugees but is shutting the door on hundreds
of Palestinians also fleeing Iraq," commented a leading human rights
watchdog. "The Syrian government's mistreatment of these Palestinian
refugees contrasts sharply with its declarations of solidarity with the
Palestinian people."[58] A few years later the same
watchdog was voicing the same grievance vis-à-vis the Lebanese government
for preventing Palestinian refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war from
entering its territory.[59]
No Love Lost
In fairness to the Arab states, their animosity and distrust were more
than reciprocated by the Palestinians. As early as the 1948 war, the
pan-Arab volunteer force that entered Palestine to fight the Jews found
itself at loggerheads with the community it was supposed to defend.
Denunciations and violent clashes were common with the local population
often refusing to provide the Arab Liberation Army, as this force was
ambitiously named, with the basic necessities for daily upkeep and
military operations. For their part, Arab army personnel abused their
Palestinian hosts of whom they were openly contemptuous.
This mutual animosity was greatly exacerbated in subsequent decades by
the recklessness of the Palestinian leadership, headed from the mid-1960s
to November 2004 by Arafat, which turned on Arab host societies whenever
given the opportunity. As noted above, it was the PLO's subversive
activities against the Jordanian regime that set in train the chain of
events culminating in the "Black September" massacres.
Likewise, the PLO's abuse of its growing power base in Lebanon, where it
established itself after its expulsion from Jordan, and its meddling in
that country's internal politics, helped trigger the Lebanese civil war
that raged for nearly two decades and cost hundreds of thousands of
lives.
"I remember literally screaming at him in my own house," the
Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi, then based in Beirut, said, recalling
his desperate attempt to dissuade Arafat from taking sides in the nascent
civil war. "I told him that we as Palestinians had no business
calling for the ostracism of the Phalangists, and that it would drive
them all the way into the hands of the Israelis."[60] This point was not lost on
ordinary Palestinians, who often blamed Arafat for their Lebanese
misfortunes. When in summer 1976 the PLO chairman visited survivors of
the Tel Zaatar massacre, he was treated to a barrage of rotten vegetables
and chants of "traitor" by the embittered refugees, who accused
him of provoking the camp's blood-drenched fall.[61]
This political meddling was accompanied by wanton violence wreaked by
the PLO on its host society. In a repeat of their Jordanian lawlessness,
Palestinian guerrillas turned the vibrant and thriving Lebanese state,
whose capital of Beirut was acclaimed as the "Paris of the Middle
East," into a hotbed of violence and anarchy. Several districts of
Beirut and the refugee camps came under exclusive Palestinian control, so
much so that they became generally known as the Fakhani Republic, after
the Beirut district in which Arafat had set up his headquarters.
Substantial parts of southern Lebanon or "Fatahland" were also
under Palestinian control. In flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty,
the PLO set up roadblocks, took over buildings and drove out local
residents, operated extortion rackets, protected criminals fleeing from
Lebanese justice, and committed countless atrocities against Lebanese
civilians. Most notable was the January 1976 massacre of hundreds of
residents of the Christian town of Damour, south of Beirut, and the expulsion
of the remaining population.[62]
Palestinian Self-Betrayal
As if the Palestinians' longtime manipulation and abuse by their
supposed Arab "brothers" has not been enough, their own leaders
have never had a real stake in leading them to statehood. This is both
because the hopes and wishes of their constituents did not figure in
their calculations, and because they have vastly profited from having
their hapless constituents run around in circles for nearly a century
while milking world sympathy for the plight they brought about themselves
in the first place.
In mandatory Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by
their alleged betters for the crime of "selling Palestine" to
the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves with
impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight
"until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or
becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country,"[63] facilitated the
transfer of 7,500 acres to the Zionist movement. Some of his relatives,
all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by
selling actual plots of land. Many prominent leaders including Muin Madi,
Alfred Rock, and As'ad Shuqeiri (father of Ahmad, PLO founder) also sold
land. Musa Alami, who bragged to David Ben-Gurion that "he would
prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred
years" if the alternative was its rapid development in collaboration
with the Zionists,[64]
made a handsome profit by selling 225 acres to the Jews. So, too, did
numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian Arab
clan during the mandate period, including Musa Kazim (father of Abdel
Qader Husseini, the famous guerrilla leader) and Muhammad Tahir, Hajj
Amin's father.[65]
Hajj Amin himself had few qualms about profiting from the Jewish
national revival which he sought to eradicate whenever this suited his
needs. Prior to his appointment as the Jerusalem mufti, he pleaded with
Jewish leaders to lobby on his behalf with (the Jewish) Herbert Samuel,
the first British high commissioner for Palestine, and in 1927, he asked
Gad Frumkin, the only Jewish Supreme Court justice during the mandatory
era, to influence Jerusalem's Jewish community to back the Husseini
candidate in the mayoral elections. He likewise employed a Jewish
architect to build a luxury hotel for the Supreme Muslim Council, which
he headed, while ordering his constituents to boycott Jewish labor and
products.[66]
Needless to say, the mufti never sought to apply to his own father his
religious authorization (fatwa) to kill those who sold land to
Jews.
"Arab nationalist feelings were never allowed to harm the
interests of the Husseini family," wrote the prominent Jerusalem
lawyer and Zionist activist Bernard (Dov) Joseph, a future minister of
justice in the Israeli government.
One of [the mufti's] kinsmen, Jamil Husseini, had once engaged my
services in land litigation which went as high as the Privy Council in London
… For years, one of the Mufti's close relations prospered mightily by
forcing Arab small-holders to sell land, at niggardly prices, which he
then resold to Jews at a handsome profit.[67]
This institutionalized racketeering skyrocketed to new heights under
the PLO. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the mandate had no
qualms about inciting its constituents against Zionism and Jews while
lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish development and land
purchases, so too have the cynical and self-seeking PLO
"revolutionaries". They have used the billions of dollars
donated by the Arab oil states and the international community to lead a
luxurious lifestyle in sumptuous hotels and villas, globe-trotting in
grand style, acquiring properties, and making financial investments
worldwide - while millions of ordinary Palestinians scrambled for a
livelihood.
This process reached its peak following the September 1993 signing of
the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-government
Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I) and the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority. For all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat
had never been as interested in the attainment of statehood as in the
violence attending its pursuit. In the late 1970s, he told his close
friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that
the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a
formal state, and that a Palestinian state would be a failure from the
first day.[68]
Once given control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and
Gaza as part of the Oslo process, he made this bleak prognosis a
self-fulfilling prophecy. He established a repressive and corrupt regime
in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships where the rule of the gun
prevailed over the rule of law and where large sums of money donated by
the international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian
population were diverted to funding racist incitement, buying weaponry,
and filling secret bank accounts. Extensive protection and racketeering
networks run by PA officials proliferated while the national budget was
plundered at will by PLO veterans and Arafat cronies. For example, in May
1997, the first-ever report by the PA's comptroller stated that $325
million, out of the 1996 budget of $800 million had been
"wasted" by Palestinian ministers and agencies or embezzled by
officials.[69]
Arafat himself held a secret Tel Aviv bank account accessible only to
him and his personal advisor Muhammad Rashid, in which he insisted that
Israel deposit the tax receipts collected on imports to the Palestinian
territories (rather than transfer them directly to the PA). Between 1994-2000,
nearly eleven billion shekels (about US$2.5 billion) were reportedly paid
into this account, of which only a small, unspecified part reached its
designated audience.[70]
Small wonder that in 2004 the French authorities opened a
money-laundering inquiry into suspect regular transfers into the Paris
bank accounts held by Arafat's wife Suha, who resided there with their
daughter. After Arafat's death Suha was reportedly promised an annual
pension of $22 million to cover her sumptuous lifestyle, paid from an
alleged $4 billion "secret fortune" managed personally by the
PA president and kept in a number of bank accounts in Tel Aviv, London,
and Zurich.[71]
Though this breathtaking corruption played an important role in
Hamas's landslide electoral victory of January 2006, the PLO/PA
leadership seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing.
Not only did Abbas, who succeeded Arafat as PLO chairman and PA
president, blatantly ignore the results of the only (semi) democratic
elections in Palestinian history - establishing an alternative government
to the legally appointed Hamas government and refusing to hold new
elections upon the expiry of his presidency in January 2009 - but he
seems to have followed in his predecessor's kleptocratic footsteps,
reportedly siphoning at least $100 million to private accounts abroad and
enriching his sons at the PA's expense.[72] In the words of Fahmi
Shabaneh, former head of the Anti-Corruption Department in the PA's
General Intelligence Service:
In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end
financial corruption and implement major reforms, but he hasn't done much
since then. Unfortunately, Abbas has surrounded himself with many of the
thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public funds and who
became icons of financial corruption.... Some of the most senior
Palestinian officials didn't have even $3,000 in their pocket when they
arrived [after the signing of the Oslo Accords]. Yet we discovered that
some of them had tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in their
bank accounts.... Had it not been for the presence of the Israeli
authorities in the West Bank, Hamas would have done what they did in the
Gaza Strip. It's hard to find people in the West Bank who support the
Palestinian Authority. People are fed up with the financial corruption
and mismanagement of the Palestinian Authority.[73]
Conclusion
For nearly a century, Palestinian leaders have missed no opportunity
to impede the development of Palestinian civil society and the attainment
of Palestinian statehood. Had the Mufti chosen to lead his constituents
to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he promised
the British officials who appointed him to his high rank in 1921, the
Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial
part of mandate Palestine by 1948, if not a decade earlier, and would
have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersal and exile. Had
Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation
instead of turning it into one of the most murderous and corrupt
terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have
been established in the late 1960s or the early 1970s; in 1979 as a
corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999 as part of
the Oslo process; or at the very latest with the Camp David summit of
July 2000. Had Abbas abandoned his predecessors' rejectionist path, a
Palestinian state could have been established after the Annapolis summit
of November 2007, or during President Obama's first term, after Netanyahu
broke with the longstanding Likud precept by publicly accepting the
two-state solution and agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian
state.
But then, why should they engage in the daunting tasks of
nation-building and state creation if they could drive their hapless
constituents to lasting dispersal and statelessness while basking in
international sympathy for the Palestinian plight and lining their
pockets from the proceeds of this self-inflicted tragedy? The attainment
of statehood would have shattered Palestinian leaders' pan-Arab and
Islamist delusions, not to mention the kleptocratic paradise established
on the backs of their long suffering subjects. It would have transformed
the Palestinians in one fell swoop from the world's ultimate victim into
an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state thus terminating
decades of unprecedented international indulgence. It would have also
driven the final nail in the PLO's false pretense to be "the sole
representative of the Palestinian people" (already dealt a
devastating blow by Hamas's 2006 electoral rout) and would have forced
any governing authority to abide, for the first time in Palestinian
history, by the principles of accountability and transparency. Small wonder,
therefore, that whenever confronted with an international or Israeli
offer of statehood, Palestinian leaders will never take "yes"
for an answer.
Professor Efraim Karsh is a senior research associate at the
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and a professor of Middle East
and Mediterranean Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Kings College London,
and principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia).
His books include Arafat's War and Palestine Betrayed.
Notes
[1] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "Remarks
by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel in Press
Availability," May 18, 2009.
[2] Walid
Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian
State," Foreign Affairs, July 1978, pp. 695-96; Hisham
Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (New York:
Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1966), p. 3.
[3] Hearing
before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Washington, D.C., State
Department, Jan. 11, 1946, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), V/9960/g, pp.
10-11.
[4]
"Interview [by] Clare Hollingowith with Azzam Pasha, Mar. 23, 1948,
S25/9020. See also: "Fortnightly Intelligence Newsletter No.
57," issued by HQ British Troops in Palestine for the period 6
Dec-18 Dec 1947, WO 275/64, p. 2; Cunningham to Creech Jones, Feb. 24,
1948, Cunningham Papers, VI/1/80; Kirkbride to Bevin, Dec. 23, 1947, FO
371/61583; Musa Alami, "The Lesson of Palestine," Middle
East Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1949), p. 385.
[5] Quoted in
Daniel Pipes, "Palestine
for the Syrians?," Commentary, Dec. 1986.
[6] Jamal
Husseini, "Report of the State of Palestine during the Four Years of
Civil Administration, Submitted to the Mandate's Commission of the League
of Nations through H.E. the High Commissioner for Palestine, by the
Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress—Extract," Oct. 6,
1924, Central Zionist Archive (CZA, Jerusalem), S25/10690, p. 1.
[7] "Minutes
of the Ninth Session, Held at Geneva from June 8th to 25th, 1926,
including the Report of the Commission to the Council,"
twenty-second meeting, Permanent Mandates Commission, League of Nations,
June 22, 1926.
[8] "The
Arabs Reject Partition," quoted from Palestine & Transjordan,
July 17, 1937, p. 1, CZA; "Minutes of the JAE Meeting on Apr. 19,
1937," Ben-Gurion Archive (Sde Boker).
[9] The New
York Times, Aug. 25, 1947.
[10] The
Ambassador in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry (Enclosure), July 6, 1940, Documents
on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945 (London: HMSO, 1949), ser. D, vol.
10, pp. 143-4; The Grand Mufti to Adolf Hitler, Jan. 20, 1941, ibid.,
ser. D, vol. 11, pp. 1151-5; Record of the Conversation between the
Führer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on Nov. 28, 1941, in the Presence
of Reich Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Nov. 30, 1941,
ibid., pp. 881-5.
[11] Ghada
Hasehm Telhami, Syria and the Palestinians: the Clash of Nationalisms
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 49-50.
[12] "Excerpts
from Statements in the U.N. on Mideast," New York Times,
June 1, 1956; "Syria
Says in U.N. Palestine is Hers," ibid, June 1, 1956.
[13] The
Palestinian National Charter, Resolutions of the Palestine National
Council, July 1-17, 1968, art. 13-14; see, also, art. 11, 12, 15.
[14] Daniel
Pipes, "Declaring
Independence: Israel and the PLO," Orbis, Mar. 1989, pp.
247-60.
[15] "Declaration
of Independence (1988)," website of the "State of
Palestine."
[16] Ari
Shavit, "Ha'ezrah Azmi,"
Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Nov. 25, 2002; Bishara on Israeli Channel 2
TV, n.d., YouTube.
[17] 2003
Permanent Constitution Draft, Palestinian Basic Law, chap. 1,
art. 2, May 4, 2003.
[18] See, for
example, statements by Fatah's official spokesman Ahmad Assaf on official
PA TV and Egyptian TV, Mar. 19, 2014, "Fatah
Spokesman: Israel's goal is to rule 'from the Euphrates to the Nile,'"
Palestine Media Watch (Jerusalem), Mar. 23, 2014.
[19] Haaretz,
Mar. 26,
2014.
[20]
"Exclusive Interview with Hamas Leader," The Media Line,
Sept. 22, 2005; Walid Mahmoud Abdelnasser, The Islamic Movement in
Egypt: Perceptions of International Relations, 1967-81 (London: Kegan
Paul, 1994), p. 39.
[21] Zahar's
interview with Asharq al-Awsat (London), Aug. 18, 2005, in Special
Dispatch, no. 964, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI-
Washington, D.C.), Aug. 19, 2005.
[22] "Hamas Covenant,"
Yale Law School, Avalon Project, art. 10.
[23] Ibid.,
art. 8.
[24] Ibid.,
art. 11, 15.
[25] Gilles
Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), p. 306; Michel Gurfinkiel, "Islam in
France: The-French
Way of Life Is in Danger," Middle East Quarterly, Mar.
1997; The Observer (London), Nov. 4, 2001; Anthony Browne,
"The Triumph of the East," The Spectator (London), July
24, 2004.
[26]
Mash'al's address at the al-Murabit Mosque in Damascus as aired on
Aljazeera TV on Feb. 3, 2006, MEMRI, "Special
Dispatch No. 1087," Feb. 7, 2006.
[27] 2003
Permanent Constitution Draft, chap. 1, art. 5, 7.
[28] Palestinian
Authority TV, May 13, 2005, PMW.
[29] John
Laffin, The PLO Connections (London: Corgi Books, 1983), p. 127.
[30] Damascus
Radio, Mar. 8, 1974.
[31] Palestinians
leaders went out of their way to reassure their constituents that this
was merely a tactical ploy aimed at enhancing the PLO's international
standing and, as a result, its ability to achieve the ultimate goal of
Israel's destruction. "We vowed to liberate Palestine before
1967," stated Abu Iyad, Yasser Arafat's second in command. "We
will restore Palestine step by step and not in one fell swoop, just as
the Jews had done." "The borders of our state noted [by the PLO
declaration] represent only a part of our national aspirations," he
added. "We will strive to expand them so as to realize our ambition
for the entire territory of Palestine." A few days later he
reiterated this pledge: "The establishment of a Palestinian state on
any part of Palestine is but a step toward the [liberation of the] whole
of Palestine" (Al-Anba, Kuwait, Dec. 5 & 13, 1988). For
other Palestinian statements in the same vein see, for example, interview
by Khaled Hassan, head of the Palestine National Council's (PNC)
committee for external and parliamentary relations, with al-Musawar
(Cairo), Jan. 20, 1989; interview with PNC Deputy Chairman Salim Zaanun
with al-Anba (Kuwait), Nov. 21, 1988; interview by Ahmad Sidqi
Dajani, a senior PLO member, with Ukaz (Riyadh), Nov. 22, 1988.
[32] International
Herald Tribune, Nov. 27, Dec. 5, 1984; Davar (Tel Aviv), Nov.
12, 1987; Hadashot (Tel Aviv), Nov. 13, 15, 1987.
[33] For
further discussion of this issue see: Efraim Karsh & Inari Rautsi, Saddam
Hussein: A Political Biography (New York: Grove, 2003; revised and updated
edition); Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict
1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
[34] New
York Times, Mar. 16, 1991; "A New Beginning," US News
& World Report, Sept. 13, 1993, p. 30.
[35] See, for
example: Beirut Radio, May 4, 1948, in Foreign Broadcasts Information
Service (FBIS), European Section: Near & Middle East and North
African Transmitters, May 5, 1948, II2; Tzuri to Tene, "New from
Semakh after the Evacuation," May 10, 1948, Hagana Archive (HA),
105/31, p. 46; "Summary of News for the Alexandroni Brigade,"
Apr. 9, 1948, HA 105/143, p. 174; Philip Ernst (American Consul in Port Said)
to Department of State, "Arrival of Palestine Arab Refugees,"
Apr. 29, 1948 (dispatched May 11), RG 84, 800 - Refugees; Beirut Radio,
Apr. 25, 1948, in BBC – Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), No. 48, Apr.
29, 1948, p. 60; Cairo to High Commissioner for Palestine, May 1, 1948,
Cunningham Papers, St. Antony's College, Oxford University; C. Waterlow,
"Arab Refugees," Oct. 22, 1948, FO 371/68681.
[36] UN
General Assembly, "194
(III). Palestine - Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator,"
Dec. 11, 1948, Article 11. Refugee resettlement elsewhere was reiterated
in subsequent UN resolutions. See, for example: UN General Assembly,
"393
(v) - Assistance to Palestine Refugees," Dec. 2, 1950, Article
4; General Assembly, "Special
report of the
Director and Advisory Commission of the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East," Nov. 29, 1951,
A/1905/Add. 1, p. 4. For Arab rejection of Resolution 194 see: Israel
Foreign Office, Middle Eastern Department, "Arab Broadcasts: Daily
Summary," No. 36, Sept. 12-13, 1948, HA 105/88, p. 153; summary of
Emile Ghouri's article in the Beirut Telegraph, HA 105/102, pp.
43-43; "Arabs Firm on Refugees," New York Times, Sept.
9, 1948; British Middle East Office (Cairo) to Foreign Office, Sept. 11,
1948, FO 371/68341; Davar (Tel Aviv), Aug. 8, 1948; al-Masri
(Cairo), Oct. 11, 1948 as quoted in Israel's Foreign Ministry, Research
Department, "Refugee Repatriation - A Danger to Israel's
security," Sept. 4, 1951, FM 2564/1.
[37] In 2012
there were 436,154 refugees registered with UNRWA, alongside
10,000-35,000 non-registered "illegal aliens" and tens of
thousands naturalized Palestinians. At the same time, some 100,000
UNRWA-registered Palestinians have reportedly left the country in search
of livelihood elsewhere. See: UNRWA, "Where We Work –
Lebanon," accessed December 8, 2013; Amnesty International,
"Exiled and Suffering: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon,"
October 2007, pp. 2, 10; Julie Peteet, "From
Refugees to Minority: Palestinians in Post-War Lebanon," Middle
East Report, No. 200 (Jul.-Sept. 1996), p. 29.
[38] Lena
El-Malak, "Betrayed and Forgotten: Palestinians Refugees in
Lebanon," Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, Vol. 9
(2002-03), pp. 136-37; Souheil al-Natour, "The Legal Status of
Palestinians in Lebanon," Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol.
10, No. 3 (1997), pp. 360-77.
[39]
International Labor Organization, "Palestinians
in Lebanon working under precarious conditions," Nov. 20, 2012;
Human Rights Watch, World
Report 2010: Lebanon, World Report 2011:
Lebanon, World
Report 2013: Lebanon; Amnesty International, "Exiled and
Suffering," pp. 18-22.
[40] See, for
example: "Recommendations by the Committee of Arab Experts in Reply
to the Proposals by the U.N. Secretary-General Regarding the Continuation
of U.N. Assitance to the Palestine Refugee" (Sofar, Lebanon, Aug.
17, 1959), in Muhammad Khalil, The Arab States and the Arab League: a
Documentary Record (Beirut: Khayat, 1962), Vol. 2, pp. 654-55; Abbas
Shiblak, "Residency Status and civil Rights of Palestinians Refugees
in Arab Countries," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 25,
No. 3 (Spring 1996), PP. 36-45.
[41] P.K.
Abdul Gharfour, "A
Million Expatriates to Benefit from New Citizenship Law," Arab
News, Oct. 21, 2004.
[42] Moshe
Efrat, "Haplitim Hapalestinaim 1949-74: Mehkar Kalkali
Vehevrati" (Tel Aviv University: Horowitz Center for the Study of
Developing Countries, September 1976), pp. 22-23; Don Peretz, Palestinian
Refugees, and the Middle East Peace Process (Washington, D.C.: United
States Institute of Peace Press, 1993), pp. 49-50; Mudar Zahran, "Jordan is Palestinian," Middle East
Quarterly, Winter 2012, pp. 3-12.
[43] "Where We Work:
Jordan," UNRWA. Figures as of Jan. 1, 2012.
[44] Minority
Rights Group International, "World
Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples – Jordan: Palestinians, 2008.
"
[45] Human
Rights Watch, "Stateless
Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality,"
Feb. 1, 2010; idem, "Jordan:
Stop withdrawing Nationality from Palestinian-Origin Citizens,"
Feb. 1, 2010.
[46] U.S.
Ambassador to Jordan David Hale, "Confidential
Memo on the Debate in Jordan Concerning the Palestinian Right of Return,
Amman, Feb. 5 2008," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 41,
No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 220, 222.
[47] Said Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator
(London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 114.
[48] Al-Majallah
(London), Nov. 26, 1983, quoted in Daniel Pipes, "The Hell of Israel is Better than the Paradise of
Arafat," Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring
2005), pp. 43-50.
[49] Amnesty,
"Exiled and suffering," pp. 5-6.
[50] Ramzy
Baroud, "Starving
to Death in Syria," al-Ahram (Cairo), Jan. 9-15, 2014; Jerusalem
Post, Dec.
19, 2013; Haaretz (Tel Aviv), Jan. 2,
2014; Guardian (London), Dec.
12, 2012; "Thousands of Palestinians Trapped in Syria Camp
'Slowly dying,'" Ma'an News Agency (Bethlehem), Feb. 28,
2014.
[51] See:
Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010); idem, "1948,
Israel, and the Palestinians: Fully Annotated Text," Commentary,
May 2008 (web only).
[52] Sir J.
Troutbeck, "Summary of General Impressions Gathered during Week-End
Visit to the Gaza District," Jun. 16, 1949, FO 371/75342/E7816, p.
123.
[53] Badil,
"From
Badil Refugee Survey 2008-2009: Forced Displacement in Host Countries -
An Overview" (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).
[54] Al-Musawwar
(Cairo), Nov. 15, 1991.
[55] Middle
East Watch, "Nowhere to Go: the Tragedy of the Remaining Palestinian
Families in Kuwait," The Palestine Yearbook of International Law,
Vol. 6 (1990-91), pp. 99-102; Steven J. Rosen, "Kuwait
Expels Thousands of Palestinians," Middle East Quarterly,
Fall 2012, pp. 75-83.
[56] "Libya's
Leader Urges Other Arab countries to Expel Palestinians," New
York Times, Oct. 5, 1995; David Lamb, "Arab Countries
Reluctant to Receive Expelled Palestinians," Tech, Sept.
12, 1995.
[57] Abbas
Shiblak, "A Time of Hardship
and Agony: Palestinian Refugees in Libya," Palestine-Israel
Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1995; accessed Dec. 28, 2013); Badil,
"The Palestinian Crisis in Libya 1994-1996 (Interview with Professor
Bassem Sirhan," (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).
[58] Human
Rights Watch, "Nowhere
to Flee: the Perilous Situation of Palestinians in Iraq,"
September 2006; idem, "Syria:
Give Refugee to Palestinians Fleeing Threats in Iraq," Feb. 2,
2007.
[59] Idem,
"Lebanon:
Palestinians fleeing Syria Denied Entry," Aug. 8, 2013.
[60] Andrew
Gowers & Tony Walker, Arafat: The Biography (London: Virgin,
1994), pp. 186, 200.
[61] Robert
Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), pp. 86, 102.
[62] Aburish,
Arafat, p. 151.
[63]
"Conversation with Awni Abdel Hadi," June 3, 1920, Hagana
Archive (hereinafter HA), 80/145/11.
[64] David
Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972),
pp. 15-6.
[65] Kenneth
W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 182, 228-39.
[66] Gad
Frumkin, Derekh Shofet Beyerushalaim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1956), pp.
216, 280-90; Eliahu Elath, Shivat Zion Vearav (Tel Aviv: Dvir,
1974), p. 245; Yehuda Taggar, The Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine
Arab Politics, 1930-1937 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), p. 83.
[67] Dov
Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem 1948 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 194.
[68] Ion
Pacepa, Red Horizons. Inside the Romanian Secret Service—The Memoirs
of Ceausescu's Spy Chief (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 28.
[69] Agence
France-Presse, May 24, July 30, 1997; Khaled Abu Toameh, "Money down
the Drain?" Jerusalem Report, Jan. 8, 1998, p. 26; Ronen
Bergman, Veharashut Netuna (Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot, 2002), p.
156.
[70] Ehud
Ya'ari, "The Independent State of Arafat," Jerusalem Report,
Sept. 5, 1996, pp. 22-3; Bergman, Veharashut Netuna, pp. 113-41;
Rachel Ehrenfeld, "Where Does the Money Go? A Study of the
Palestinian Authority," American Center for Democracy, New York,
Oct.1, 2002, pp. 7-10; Said Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator
(London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 306.
[71] Ynet
(Tel Aviv), Aug. 16,
2006; Sydney (Aus.) Morning Herald, Feb.
13, 2004.
[72] Jonathan
Schanzer, "Chronic
Kleptocracy: Corruption within the Palestinian Political Establishment,"
Hearing before U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on
the Middle East and South Asia, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2012, pp.
17-8; Bergman, Veharashut Netuna, pp. 162-3; Ehrenfeld,
"Where Does the Money Go?" pp. 9-10; Yediot Ahronot (Tel
Aviv), July 14, 2002.
[73] Khaled
Abu Toameh, "Corruption
will let Hamas take W. Bank," Jerusalem Post, Jan. 29,
2010.
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