Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected an Israeli offer to allow Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria to enter the Palestinian territories on condition that they forgo their “right of return” to Israel proper, Abbas told the Egyptian press on Wednesday evening.Western politicians and pundits always claim that "everybody knows" that the Palestinian Arabs will drop their demand for "return" in an eventual peace agreement and accept living in a state based on the 1949 armistice lines.
Following a meeting with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, Abbas said that he had appealed to the UN to intercede on behalf of Palestinian refugees living in Syria and demand that Israel allow them to enter the West Bank and Gaza.
Abbas said Ban was told Israel “agreed to the return of those refugees to Gaza and the West Bank, but on condition that each refugee ... sign a statement that he doesn’t have the right of return (to Israel).”
“So we rejected that and said it’s better they die in Syria than give up their right of return,” Abbas told the group.
They have never said anything close to that.
Here we see the stark difference between how Jews acted in the 1940s and how Palestinian Arabs are acting today. At a time that millions of Jews were in dire danger, the highest priority of Zionists were to save them and to create a safe haven for Jews worldwide, even if they had to compromise on their historic lands and their very capital city to do so - and even compromising on promises directly made to the Zionists by the international community only a couple of decades before.
Palestinian Arab leaders, however, don't give a damn about their own people. To them, "Palestinians" exist for a single reason: to destroy the Jewish state. They are not even cannon fodder; they are PR fodder. Their people's continued misery is considered their greatest political asset, and that misery is sacrosanct.
This is why they fight tooth and nail against Palestinian Arabs being naturalized in Arab countries. This is why they fight to keep "refugee camps" open in perpetuity, even in territory they fully control. This is why they are upset when even tiny amounts of Palestinian Arabs move from environments of real deprivation to Western countries. This is why they demand UN resolutions against any attempts to build permanent housing for "refugees."
And this is why they choose to let Syrian Palestinians die rather than save them. Their value as symbols far outweighs the value of their very lives, according to the Palestinian Arab value system.
What reason can there be that a condition that will never, ever be implemented is more important than saving lives today? Because that condition reflects the very raison d'etre for Palestinian Arab nationalism itself - not to build a nation for a people, but to destroy another people's nation.
(Note also that Abbas is arrogantly making the decision to allow the Syrian Palestinians to die rather than forgo this false "principle" - but he doesn't give them the choice to make their own decisions. Which is what one would expect from a dictator.)
Is there a single human rights group that would dare condemn Abbas for his callous disregard of his purported people's lives?
(h/t Ian, Herb)
UPDATE: Here is my published comment on the Washington Post for this piece:
Is there any greater proof that Palestinian Arab leaders don't give a damn about their people?
Is there any greater proof that Mahmoud Abbas, by arrogantly making a decision dooming many people rather than letting them make their own choices, is acting with the same callousness as the dictator Assad?
Is there any greater proof that the Palestinian Arab leaders are more interested in destroying Israel via the false "right of return" than they are in building their own state?
Anyone who insists that Israel needs to make more concessions for peace needs to read - and re-read - this article to understand the realities of today's Middle East.