Ah Yes, Palestinian Victimhood

Said Hamad, the Palestinian representative in Canada (why on Earth would Canada acknowledge a "Palestinian representative" to begin with - a non-state entity, given recognition of a kind normally reserved for legitimate and existing states - one wonders) contends that "To achieve real peace, it will be necessary for Israel to acknowledge its responsibility in the creation and perpetuation of the plight of the refugees."


Quite the statement, that, expressed in the firm conviction that Israel created the refugees, which it did not; they created themselves and have, ever since 1948, clung possessively and with grievance fully intact, insisted on remaining 'refugees'.  And, thanks to the helpful connivance of the United Nations under its very special refugee program uniquely tailored to the Arab Palestinians, steadfastly recognized throughout the world as 'refugees'.


That they needn't have remained so, and that in doing so they exist as a peculiar phenomenon unlike any other refugee population the world has ever known, in perpetuity, whereas others have always been gradually absorbed or re-absorbed, the Palestinians chose to fester and to grieve.  Their Arab brethren in surrounding states had no wish to welcome them and bid them await the opportunity to re-claim what had been theirs and theirs alone.


Discounting the presence of Jewish Palestinians in a land that had once been theirs as completely irrelevant to the story at hand, portraying them instead as foreign interlopers with no right to claim the land, as opposed to the Arab Palestinians who had come from Egypt and from Transjordan.  Mr. Hamad writes of Israel's jubilation in celebrating its independence as a Jewish ancestral homeland, which the Arab population recognizes as a personal disaster, the Nakba.


"On the 64th remembrance of the Palestinian Nakba, Palestinians extend our collective hand and invite Israel to acknowledge its responsibilities, recognize our rights and suffering, and work together for a historic breakthrough for peace and reconciliation and begin a new dream of equitably sharing the land that is today home to Israelis and Palestinians..."  A wily and insincere statement so plumped with creative interpretation it is certain to please all those who support the "Palestinian cause".


Palestinians have always whacked away the hand of Israel collectively extended to recognize Palestinian needs, and instead of coming to agreement over the many sacrifices Israel has been prepared to adjust to in an effort to placate and become reconciled with the Palestinians, offers have been rejected, time and again.  Yet the Palestinians continue to portray themselves as those who appeal to justice and fairness, eager to obtain their own independence, unable to as a result of Israeli intransigence.


"Today, there are more than six million Palestinian refugees", he wrote.  "They constitute the largest refugee population in the world and one of the world's longest unresolved refugee crises.  In Israel, there are more than six million Israelis living the Jewish dream after centuries of dispersal and persecution.  Israelis continue to fulfill their dream; Palestinians wait for the day to awake from their collective nightmare."


That 'nightmare', is one that the Palestinians and their supporters enjoy comparing to the Holocaust: the death knell of six million Jews.  The 'six million' Palestinian 'refugees' are the descendants of the original 726,000 indigenous Arab Palestinians who fled the geography, planning to return immediately the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq assembled to militarily wipe the fledgling state from the map and restore the area to Arab Palestinian possession.


The 800,000 Arab Jews living for millennia in those same Arab attacking countries were forthwith expelled from Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, their properties confiscated, and those 'refugees' were quickly absorbed by the welcoming new State of Israel.  Neither they nor their descendants have any wish to return to the countries that expelled them.  But the six million Palestinians insist on their 'right of return' to Israel.


With the already-existing one-and-a-half-million Arab Israelis with citizenship intact in Israel and the declared need for an additional six million Arab Palestinians to be absorbed there would be no Jewish state.  Either by war or through minimizing the population of Jews, the campaign to restore to the Palestinians what they claim to have been theirs exclusively is the obvious goal.


"Even the passage of time has not extinguished the right of individual Palestinians to choose to return to their homes", claims Mr. Hamad.  Why all the anguish, when initially, in 1948, when the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for Partition which the Jews accepted gladly and the Arabs rejected truculently and essentially walked away from statehood? 

In fact, Arabs did take the greater proportion of the land to be divided, calling it Jordan.  The greater proportion of Jordan is comprised of Palestinians, as it happens.  The Jordanian queen is Palestinian by birth.  Jordan is the only Arab country in the Middle East that has extended full citizenship to the Palestinians.  And Jordanian Palestinians remain an unruly lot.



"We must work to plant new roots of co-existence in Israel and Palestine.  This can only happen between equals, through the respect of each side's history and identity, and understanding the discourse of the "Other", he offers, reasonably.  It is then perforce equally reasonable to overlook the fact that Palestinians continue to attack Jews, with suicidal-murderous intent intact, and through rocket attacks from Gaza on border towns on an ongoing basis.


The 'respect of each side's history and identity' is utterly lacking other than as useful, mealy-mouthed offering of assumed good-will meant for Western consumption.  For the fact is, while Israel has unified Jerusalem, her heritage capital, Jewish worshippers may not access their most holy site because it offends the Arab Muslims who respect other religions so greatly that they build their own religious symbols atop those of others.