Rick Richman writes in Commentary, What Happened Before Nothing Happened?- 10/2/ 11

He responds to a common refrain that the Palestinians are frustrated from a lack of progress:

(1) In 2000, the Palestinians were offered a state by Israel, and turned it down; (2) in 2001, the Palestinians rejected the Clinton Parameters; (3) in 2002, the U.S. endorsed a Palestinian state if the Palestinians built a practicing democracy (today the putative state is ruled half by a terrorist group and half by a party that hasn’t held an election in nearly six years); (4) in 2003, the Palestinians accepted the Roadmap but have yet to complete any of its three phases; (5) in 2004, Israel adopted a plan to hand over Gaza to the Palestinians; (6) in 2005, Israel removed every settler and soldier from Gaza, which the Palestinians turned into Hamastan in one week; (7) in 2006, the Palestinians elected a terrorist group to control their legislature; (8) in 2007, the U.S. convened the Annapolis conference to “accelerate” the Roadmap; (9) in 2008, after a year of final status negotiations, the Palestinians rejected still another Israeli offer of a state; and (10) in 2009, Israel offered the Palestinians negotiations again, which they refused, and initiated an unprecedented construction moratorium, which they ignored.

HKO comments:

Terrorism works because it achieves the attention and recognition that the hard work of building a nation does not. If the Palestinians were truly focused on acquiring statehood rather than destroying one, they would have had a seat in the UN decades ago.

Bruce Thornton writes Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy, May 24, 2011, as posted at Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Papers.

Excerpt:

Likewise, just as the Romans named the land after a people that no longer existed, so too calling the current Arab inhabitants “Palestinians” perpetuates a similar historical fraud. What constitutes a people are a shared language, culture, customs, traditions, and history distinct enough to set them apart from others. By these criteria, there is no such thing as “Palestinians.” The average Arab living in Israel or the West Bank is no more significantly distinct from one living in Syria, Jordan, or Egypt than a resident from California is significantly distinct from a resident of Arizona or Nevada. Whatever differences that do exist do not trump the more important similarities, and reflect rather the refusal of surrounding Arab nations to integrate their Arab brothers into their own countries, instead constructing a Palestinian identity based on victimhood, humiliation, and failure.

HKO comments:

The word refugee has also been perverted.  There has been a Muslim, Jewish and Christian presence in Israel/ Palestine for a very long time.  Some Jews emigrated to Israel from Europe under the Palestinian Mandate administered by Great Britain for the League of Nations. Many Jews were accepted into Israel after being exiled from the Arab nations after 1948. (No UN resolution was ever forthcoming about that ethnic cleansing.) And many of the Arabs in Israel prior to statehood came from neighboring Arab states.  The word refugee was stretched in many instances to include people who were not originally from Palestine.

The population and status of Israel and the Palestinians is very complicated.  Migrations from the last 100 years cannot be undone, and Israel is certainly not the only nation whose existence is owed to numerous complicated factors.

From this less than perfect set of circumstances and an offer made by the UN to both the Israelis and the Arabs in 1947 by the UN, the Israelis took one course and the Arabs (now called  Palestinians) took a very different path.

60 years later the Israelis have a nation they are proud of.  At what point do the Palestinians accept the failure of their chosen path, regardless of its justification, and change course?

During the turmoil that gave birth to the state of Israel in 1947 and 1948 over 700,000 Jews were ejected from the Arab states from Libya to Iraq.  Jews had lived in those countries for thousands of years. All of their property was confiscated.

Void of resources the new state of Israel absorbed those refugees and quickly made them citizens. Helen Thomas’s blindingly ignorant statement that the Jews in the Middle East should go back to Germany ignores not only the many Jews that had lived in the Arab world but the Jews that have had a presence in Israel for 3,000 years.

I do not believe that one UN resolution condemned the ethnic cleansing of the Jews in the Arab world in 1948, and this was so soon after the Holocaust that the ashes were still smoldering.

Many of the Palestinian refugees that cause such anguish amongst their supporters left in the anticipation of returning after the Arab armies extinguished the Jewish state.  Some were driven out by the fears and fortunes of war.   Many Arabs stayed in Israel and remain there today with rights of citizenship. It was not until the overwhelming Israeli victory in 1967 and the failure of the Arab invasion in 1973 that the idea of returning began to dim.

It was around that time that the idea of a Palestinian state and a Palestinian people took root.  In the early days of the British Mandate the Jews in Israel as well as the Arabs of the area were referred to as Palestinian.

As the Palestinians under the leadership of Arafat and the PLO became a distinct entity, they tried to exercise political power in Jordan.  After using Jordan as a base for terrorist activities including a few attempts on Jordan’s King Hussein’s life, the Jordanian army expelled the PLO from their country.  Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed by the Jordanian army during this expulsion in a period known as Black September. This became the name of a terrorist sub group of the PLO.

I do not recall any UN resolution condemning the Jordanians for their action against the Palestinians.  I do not know of any Israeli operation that has killed as many  Palestinians in such a short period of time.

The Palestinians took root in Lebanon, inciting a civil war in what was largely a Christian Arab state. After using Lebanon as a base to attack Israel, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to defend their northern border and to support the Lebanese Christians in their opposition to the Palestinians.  After a brief incursion from the United States under Reagan (we quickly withdrew  in 1983 after 241 Marines and servicemen were killed in a suicide bombing of their barracks) and world outrage precipitated an Israeli withdrawal, Lebanon was transformed from the peaceful nation it was to the Hezbollah hell hole and terrorist base it has become.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian were working in Kuwait when Iraq invaded that sovereign kingdom.  The Palestinians largely supported Saddam Hussein, and Saddam offered $25,000 incentives to Palestinian suicide bombers.   After Desert Storm removed Hussein from Kuwait, almost all of the Palestinian workers in Kuwait were ejected.

I do not recall any UN resolution protesting this action.

The suffering of the Palestinians has been largely the result of their own leadership and their fellow Arab nations.  They are the victims of a culture of death that places more value on killing Israelis than building their own civilized society.  They are the victims of enablers that do not hold them accountable for their own dysfunctional society, and who perpetuate their myth that their problem is the intransience of Israel and that any amount of land will satisfy their blood lust.

This is not to ignore violence that the Israelis have committed against Palestinians.  It is hard to avoid civilian casualties when they are used as fodder to control a narrative.  I am sure there are actions the Israelis wish they could undo.  I  doubt that the Palestinians feel the same.

The Palestinians were offered a state in 1948, and in 1967 and ever since.  It has been continuously rejected.  To consider borders from 1967, before the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, before the rise of the Iranian theocracy, and thousands of other changes is as ludicrous as considering that the United States return to the southern borders of 1848 to solve the problem of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The rise of the State of Israel came at a cost not only to the Israelis but to the people displaced by a half century of conflict.  Sixty years later Israel is now a fact on the ground.  The biggest obstacle remaining to a Palestinian state is the Palestinians themselves.

Written by Alan Dershowitz post 911, Why Terrorism Works, gives a simple answer: because we reward it.

Terrorism has earned the Palestinians recognition and legitimization.  Our response to terrorism has centered on fallacies that perpetuate the problem.  We have believed that the diplomatic and civilized approach to terrorism is not to respond with overwhelming force, but to address the underlying root causes, which we think are poverty and oppression.  Yet many other parts of the world suffer greater poverty and oppression than the Palestinians without resorting to terror. In fact no other “oppressed” group has been showered with as much attention and money as the Palestinians.  We have spent more money on the Palestinians than was spent to rebuild Europe after World War II, yet their attacks on Israel and their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Israel has only strengthened.

The foreign aid to the Palestinians has been a reward for their anti-Semitism and terroristic activity, thus both have continued.  We have accepted their argument for the moral equivalency of their terrorist activities; the academic ruse that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.  We have refused to establish moral boundaries.

In their fight for independence from British rule the Israelis had several splinter groups that committed acts of violence against the British, the most notable was the bombing of a wing of the King David Hotel housing British officers.  That act and other acts of violence were condemned by the main Israeli authorities and the new Israeli government insisted on the surrender of the militia groups like the Irgun to the Haganah which became the Israel Defense Forces.

But even the Irgun did not generally target civilians, did not advocate genocide and did not deny the British a homeland.  (Though the more extreme radical groups such as the Stern Gang did target Arab civilians in retaliatory raids.)

The claim for some version of the 1967 borders has been on the table for decades.  There could be an agreement on 90% of the land quickly- if land was the issue.  But it clearly is not.  The road block has never been Israel’s refusal to sacrifice land for peace; it has always been the refusal of the Palestinian leadership to accept Israeli legitimacy.  Witness the result of the Israeli’s abandonment of Gaza.  It served only to strengthen and radicalize those who wish to destroy Israel.

To maintain the promise of 1967 borders in the face of continued terroristic activity is to continue to reward terrorism.  What may be a casual reference in the security of Washington, DC means murdered  civilians in the streets and territories in Israel.

There are three requirements that must exist before any talk can begin.  The right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state must be accepted and recognized, without conditions or qualification.  Terrorism must be renounced, without any moral equivalency obfuscation. And the bitter anti-Semitism, a strain that would make the Hitler youth blush, must be removed from the pulpits and schools of the Arab world.

The roadblock to peace is not the refusal to give up land. It is not poverty or oppression.  It is a culture of a people that have come to define themselves by a hatred so sinister that mothers encourage their own children to commit suicide in expression of their hatred. This hatred is the toxic glue that holds the Palestinian people together. Without it the Palestinians would devolve into civil chaos.

Any appeasement or concessions without the change in their culture will only encourage more terrorism, anti-Semitism, and war.

Netanyahu understands this clearly.  We still need to learn it.

In Israel and Its Liberal Friends WSJ columnist Bret Stephens asks what if the standards of friendship Israel’s ‘friends’ claim is the source of their criticism was applied to the Palestinians as well.

an excerpt

Finally there’s the fact that liberalism has become a politics of easy targets. Liberals have no trouble taking stands against abstinence educators, Prop 8 supporters or members of the tea party. But when it comes to genuine bigots and religious fanatics—and Hamas has few equals in those categories—liberals have a way of discovering their capacity for cultural nuance and political pragmatism.