Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday in an interview with Channel 2 that the Arab world erred in rejecting the United Nations' 1947 plan to partition Palestine into a Palestinian and a Jewish state.Yet Abbas is just as rejectionist as the Palestinian Arab leaders were in 1947, as he has rejected offers of peace that would end the conflict - and today keeps adding pre-conditions before even talking to Israel.
The Palestinian and Arab refusal to accept a UN plan to partition the then-British-controlled mandate of Palestine sparked widespread fighting, then Arab military intervention after Israel declared independence the following year. The Arabs lost the war.
"It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Channel 2.
So while hindsight is 20/20, Abbas cannot learn the obvious lessons:
It's amazing that Arab leaders keep claiming that time is on their side, and only realize that their intransigence has set their cause further behind decades after the fact.
And one only has to read the many articles in the 1950s and 1960s where Arab leaders say that Israel is not viable, that it cannot succeed economically, that all they need to do is wait - to see that nothing has changed.