In the wake of candidate Newt Gingrich's assertion that the Palestinians are an invented people, Lee Smith wrote that indeed the Palestinians are invented but that it's a Useful Fiction:
The problem is that current Palestinian nationalism is not strong enough. If it were, Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas might have been more inclined to accept the peace deals offered by Israeli prime ministers and American presidents. If Palestinian leadership were more like the early champions of Zionism, who wanted a state for the Jews no matter its size, then the conflict might have been resolved at any point over the last seven decades.
