What If They Had Peace Talks And Nobody Came?

We couldn’t care less if all the refugees die. There are enough Arabs around.
Egyptian diplomat to British journalist

What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Arafat

This is no just an issue of Abbas refusing to meet Netanayhu face-to-face and engage in direct peace talk negotiations.

Instead, this is becoming an issue of the Arab world itself just not caring any more.

The Al Arabiya news channel conducted an online survey over the past week to gauge the extent to which ordinary Arabs are still interested in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. The results were quite astonishing; 71 per cent of the respondents affirmed that they do not care to know anything about the subject.


“This is an alarming indicator. The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself,” according to Saleh Qallab, a columnist with the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al Awsat.

Efraim Karsh writes that this lament is untrue and that it misses the point. The focus of the Arab world has historically been on territory, not Palestinian Arab rights:

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan “was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.”

Karsh gives a sample of the history of Arab world and Palestinian Arabs:

• In 1970, in response to the threat of the Palestine Liberation Organization, King Hussein of Jordan ordered the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, an event known as “Black September.”
  
  
• In 1976, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by Syria, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar.
  
  
• In 1982, Lebanese Christian militias slaughter hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon was held responsible for not anticipating the massacre, but then again--none of the Arab states came to the Palestinians’ rescue.
  
  
• During the mid-’80s, when the PLO tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria had them expelled.
  
  
• After the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaitis punished the PLO for its support of Hussein--cutting off financial support, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers as well as slaughtering thousands.

Karsh finds the apparent apathy of the Arab world to be a positive and necessary step in the search for peace:

Against this backdrop, it is a positive sign that so many Arabs have apparently grown so apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For if the Arab regimes’ self-serving interventionism has denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate, then the best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.

One could argue that the flotillas and other media-grabbing stunts of the self-described human rights activists similarly encourage Arab leaders such as Abbas to sit back and have others do their work for them as they wait for more concessions:

Instead, he [Abbas] says, he will remain passive. "I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life." In the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian.

It's time for Abbas to act like a leader and act on his own.

Technorati Tag: Arab World and Abbas.