Palestinian Arabs To The World: You Owe Us!

I suppose that the Arab worldview and perhaps the incompetence and corruption of the Palestinian Authority can be explained in part by the fact that the Arabs living in Judea and Samaria take no responsibility for their actions. That is the point made by Evelyn Gordon when she examines Raja Khalidi’s Revisionist History:

Last week, the Palestinian Authority sought an urgent Arab League meeting to discuss its financial crisis: PA employees received only half their salaries in July, because donor states had delivered only one-third of their promised $970 million in aid. The delinquents were mainly Arab states, not Western ones, and UN development economist Raja Khalidi offered an instructive explanation for this fact in an interview with Haaretz this week:

“Even two generations after 1948, no Western donor, especially European and American, can be oblivious to their historic responsibility [for the Palestinians’ plight], and to the immediate security and political interests that the continuation of this conflict implies. Hence anything needed to keep a lid on things is to be expected, and indeed comes without asking the cost. As for Arab donors, they do not feel at all the historic responsibility for this situation.”

At least Khalidi recognized the responsibility of the Arab world for the part they played in the problem of the Arab refugees, although he does not really spell out why.

In any case, Gordon address the absurdity of Khalidi's claim and how he ignores historical fact:

For those with any historical knowledge, this statement is mind-boggling – because Arab states certainly should feel historic responsibility. Had they not rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, a Palestinian state would have arisen in 1948. Had five Arab armies not invaded the nascent Israel that year, there would have been no Palestinian refugees. Had Jordan and Egypt so chosen, they could have created a Palestinian state anytime from 1948 to 1967, when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. Had three Arab states not declared war on Israel in 1967, Israel wouldn’t have captured these territories. And had the Arabs accepted any of Israel’s numerous peace offers since then, a Palestinian state could have arisen long ago.

Western states, in contrast, have no historical responsibility whatsoever: They supported a Palestinian state back in 1947 and have tried hard to midwife one ever since.[emphasis added]

Besides the part played by the Arab world in creating the problem, it is important to remember that the creation of an Arab state--where none had ever existed--was rejected by the Arabs.

This makes the following analysis by Khalidi even more unreal--the Palestinian Authority has no responsibility to reduce its reliance on donor support:

"The idea that reliance on donor support must be reduced as a matter of principle - despite the conditions of occupation, with no Palestinian sovereignty or national rights on the horizon - is a bit of a diversion and is in fact unfair to an economy that has been deprived of its capacity to produce, trade, grow and develop for over 40 years.

Considering how that support has been wasted--including using it to pay terrorists at a time that the Palestine Authority cannot even pay the salaries of actual workers is mind-boggling.

What Khalidi and the Arabs desperately need--even more than competent leadership, is a strong and overdue does of reality.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to be forthcoming.

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