An article in the WSJ summarizing research in documents from the period of the Mandate and the Israeli War of Independence.
And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the U.N. partition resolution, their reckless decisions are being reenacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders. This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006 replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority, but also to the supposedly moderate Palestinian leadership — from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia (negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to prime minister Salam Fayad — which refuses to recognize Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state and insists on the full implementation of the “right of return.”
And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the name of justice (no less) call today not for a new and fundamentally different Arab leadership but for the dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when these dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look forward to putting their self-inflicted “catastrophe” behind them.
There are, by the way, some interesting echoes of what’s now going on with AlQaeda in Iraq.
