RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.romirowsky.com/24747/struggle-for-palestine

“The struggle for Palestine” has long been an axiomatic slogan in the Arab-Palestinian narrative and continues to be used to this day to galvanize the masses—but as the Middle East changes, the power of the phrase may be diminishing.

In his 1974 book Palestinians and Israel, the late Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote that following the Six-Day War,

The collision with the Palestinians is presented as the essence of the conflict, for this is allegedly a struggle for national liberation. Arabs explain, especially to foreigners, that the antagonism is not that of large Arab states versus a small state like Israel but of an oppressed people against a strong, colonialist oppressive state…The focus of the conflict has shifted. It is not between states but between a government and a people struggling for its liberation, which by definition is a just war that deserves support.

Over the years, the struggle became not only just but even divine.

A binary understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict has dominated thinking for decades. The conflict is presumed to be unsolvable as it is caught between demands for Israel’s total destruction and the inevitability of Arab-Palestinian exile and political oblivion.

But the paradigm may have shifted following the Abraham Accords and Israel’s normalization with the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan. Even the Saudis have noticed the change, as illustrated by a recent statement by Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz. He openly criticized Palestinian leaders with these words:

The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful. There is something that successive Palestinian leadership historically share in common: they always bet on the losing side, and that comes at a price.

This damning statement from a traditional Palestinian ally raises the question of the Palestinian endgame and, more importantly, the centrality of—and fatigue with—the Palestinian struggle in the Arab world.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/11/the-abraham-accords-transform-the-middle-east/

The Abraham Accords, officially ratified at the White House on September 15, have diminished the sway of the Palestinian political leadership in the wider Arab world. The concept of a future Palestinian state has not been abandoned, although the rejectionist policy of the Palestinian leadership has been emphatically discarded. The presence of the Jewish state in the region is now accepted by the vast majority of the twenty-two Arab states as an irrevocable reality—like it or not. In the case of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, at least, it is a case of accepted and liked. Already the attitude of the Emiratis and the Bahrainis towards Israel looks very different from the cold peace that has existed between the Egyptians and Israel since 1979 and between the Jordanians and Israel since 1994. The story of Zionism and the Arabs is taking an unexpected turn.

The anti-Israel brigade, from the BDS movement and the Palestinian Authority to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran, are right to be dismayed. Rapprochement between UAE/Bahrain and Israel constitutes a sevenfold triumph for the Zionist project.

In the first instance, it is a crushing blow to the rejectionist argument that the Jewish state, founded on March 15, 1948, is an alien entity imposed on the region. If the broader Arab Sunni world is happy to give its imprimatur to the existence of Israel, then who are we to disagree? The League of Nations formally accepted the right of a Jewish nation to exist in the “historical Land of Israel” in July 1922. No less significant was the decision of the United Nations, in November 1947, to recognise a Jewish state within the territory of Mandatory Palestine (Resolution 181). The Abraham Accords further affirm the legitimacy of Israel. Theodor Herzl, Zionist prophet and author of The Jewish State (1896), would be pleased.

There is a second reason why the Abraham Accords are a triumph for Zionism and a defeat for the political leadership of Palestinian Arabs. Normalisation suggests that Sunni nations are now less prone to being taken hostage by the most radical or maximalist wing of Palestinian nationalism, which either repudiates the lawfulness of Israel’s existence or professes acceptance of the Jewish state but thwarts every overture to establish a complementary Palestinian Arab state. For the Palestinian rejectionists, the practice of spurning UN Resolution 181 and the partitioning of British Palestine—starting with Haj Amin al-Husayni in 1947 and maintained by the likes of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas—remains in force. The PLO/PA has rebuffed offers of statehood (based on clearly defined borders) in 2000, 2003-04 and 2013-14. To this day it does not endorse Resolution 181. The UAE and Bahrain know it suits the Palestinian Authority  (PA) leadership to (a) perpetuate the unresolved Israel-Palestinian Arab dispute and (b) exploit this unresolvedness to slander Israel as an “occupier’, an “ethno-coloniser” and an “apartheid state” and, by so doing, prevent formal links between Israel and the wider Arab world.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-usual-suspects-against-jewish-construction-in-jerusalem/

A good way to evaluate a policy is by examining the identity of its critics. The controversy surrounding the tenders issued on Sunday by the Israel Lands Authority for the construction of 1,257 new housing units in the southeastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamatos is a perfect case in point.

Outrage at the building plan, which has been in the works for six years, was swift to emerge from the usual suspects: the Israeli NGO Peace Now, the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the United Nations. It’s basically all one needs to know before forming an opinion about the move.

Let’s begin with Peace Now. In September 2014, the organization that serves as a kind of settlement watchdog—growling and barking about every balcony added to an apartment in an area of the Jewish state that they deem “illegally occupied”—alerted fellow Israel-bashers across the ocean to the fact that the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee had approved the construction of homes in Givat Hamatos.

Never mind that the neighborhood, originally filled with caravans for the housing of new immigrants from Ethiopia, is outside the so-called Green Line.

According to a November 12, 2020 OpEd by Nabil Amr, a confidant of Mahmoud Abbas, published by the leading Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat : “Ballots with Biden’s name would have filled the boxes if placed in Ramallah…. [The Palestinian Authority] bets are that Biden’s victory [will] resume ties with the US Administration, pumping money into the Palestinian Authority’s virtually empty coffers, reopening the PLO’s Washington Office and the US Consulate in Jerusalem, tasked with dealing with Palestinian affairs…. The new Administration will also go back to talking about the two-state solution and repudiate unilateral actions like annexation…. Trump’s Administration took a totally different path….”

However, the “Palestine Firsters” among the future policy makers in Washington, DC, are infatuated with the Palestinian cause, assuming that the Palestinian issue is central to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the overall Arab agenda.  They have ignored the fact that Arabs viewed Palestinians as the role model for intra-Arab terrorism, subversion and ingratitude, a low level (and negative) priority on their agenda.

The “Palestine Firsters” should study the two hour October 5, 2020 TV interview by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a senior member of the Saudi royal family and a former head of the Saudi intelligence services and national security council:

“It is not surprising to see how quick are Palestinian leaders [criticizing the Israel-UAE peace accord] to use terms like ‘treason,’ betrayal’ and ‘backstabbing.’  These are their ways in dealing with each other…. They always bet on the losing side.  In the 1930s, [the top Palestinian leader] Amin al-Husseini was betting on the Nazis in Germany…. [Following WW2, the Palestinians embraced the USSR]…. [In 1970], Arafat’s headquarters were in Jordan, and he decided that it was time to liberate not Palestine, but Jordan [through a bloody civil war]…. They had only been in Lebanon a few years when they began to behave as they did in Jordan, and Lebanon became the new target.  It led to a [1975-1982] civil war…. No one can forget the image of Arafat as he visited Saddam Hussein in 1990, after the occupation of Kuwait [which was the most generous Arab host of the Palestinians]…. We saw Arafat in Baghdad, embracing Saddam, and laughing and joking with him…. We saw [Palestinian] youth in Nablus dancing joyfully in celebration of [Saddam’s] missile attack on Riyadh, holding pictures of Saddam…. We are at a stage in which rather than…serve the Palestinian cause, we have to pay attention to our national security and interests…. We are surrounded by a stormy sea [Iran’s Ayatollahs, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and Turkey’s Erdogan]…. We do not allow [Palestinian] liars and those who are disloyal to impose their tradition on us…. The Palestinian leaders have come to regard Tehran and Ankara higher than they regard Riyadh, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain, Oman and Egypt….”