The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, said on Friday that Palestinian political leaders need to be aware that every day that passes is not in favor of the question of Palestine, and the Palestinian conflict and discord is not in the interest of any of the parties.Sounds like good advice, doesn't it? Everything he is saying is obvious and the conclusion is clear. Since the 1930s, Palestinian Arabs have always been rejecting plans that could have resulted in a nation and waiting will result in them getting less and less.
Ihsanoglu said that "every day you are losing [land]...Hundreds of thousands of settlers are going to settle in the Palestinian lands and change the reality of demographic and geographic map of the Palestinian homeland."
He added that "the Palestinian interest is to unite and agree on a single goal to get out of this crisis .. and you should know that the time is always not in favor of the Palestinian cause, since the partition resolution through today, nearly 65 years, and every solution that comes is less and worse than the previous solution, which was less than its previous solution .. and always keep in mind that the solution in the future is the weakest and worst solution to achieve the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. "
So why won't Palestinian Arabs take Ihsanoglu's advice?
The reason is that there is a lot that is unsaid in the Middle East. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu is Turkish, not Arab, and he is not conversant in the unspoken language of the Arab world. That's why he can say something that sounds so reasonable to Western ears and is completely nonsensical to Arabs.
The simple fact is this:
The Palestinian Arab leaders were never interested in building a state. They were, and are, only interested in destroying one.
When you look at it from that perspective, their constant "irrational" decisions make perfect sense.
That is why they rejected the Peel plan, the UN partition plan, the Israeli plan to withdraw from most of the territories after 1967, the Barak plan, the Clinton plan, the Olmert plan. All of those plans not only allowed a Jewish state to exist, but the later ones ensured that such a state would be more permanent than it was before.
That is the part that is completely unacceptable to them. Anything that adds permanency to a Jewish state cannot be allowed.
This explains the seeming flexibility of the Palestinians accepting "only" areas within the Green Line - because every single time they say that, they twin it with the 'right of return' that would destroy the Jewish state. Unfortunately, earnest Westerners wouldn't bother translating that part of what they said, pretending that it wasn't a serious demand. Yet as they have made crystal clear, it is.
They know that their fake refugee population is growing and many of them are forced - often by the Palestinian Arabs themselves - to live in virtual prison camps. They know that those millions of people only exist as "refugees" today for the purpose of one day flooding Israel with angry Arabs. And every day there are more of them.
If the goal was a state, they would never act the way they are acting. They would have had a state long ago.
But when you understand their real goal, then you can see why they believe that time is indeed on their side. No amount of suffering inflicted on their own people is harsh enough if it brings them closer to their goal of destroying Israel. Every year there are more Palestinian Arabs - more "refugees" - living in stateless limbo, used as pawns by their leaders, too scared to stand up for their rights in Arab countries, fed a steady diet of hate and incitement against Israel and Jews. Even a "peace agreement" forced on their leaders by superpowers would not lessen their indoctrination of hate. It continued to happen during the entire Oslo process. Remember - there were more suicide bombs during the "peace process" then there are today when it is in a coma.
It doesn't take a genius to see that any independent state of Palestine wouldn't last long. They have been largely governing themselves for nearly 20 years now, and they cannot even control their own territory without breaking into two groups. Hamas makes no secret that they want to be part of an Islamic caliphate, and Abbas has shown no desire to truly build institutions. All progress towards building a state has come from without - from NGOs, from the US and Europe, and from Salam Fayyad who is as much of an outsider to Palestinian Arab politics as one can be.
Statehood is not and never was the goal. Helping their people is not and never was their goal.
Ihsanoglu's observations make perfect sense to Western ears. They make zero sense to Arab ears.
The major challenge is to make the peace-loving Americans and Europeans understand this basic fact that Palestinian Arab "nationalism" is nothing of the sort and never was. A good first step would be for Western diplomats and journalists to ask, publicly, the very same questions implied by Dr. Ihsanoglu: if the settlements are gobbling up your land, then why don't you do the obvious thing to stop it and make compromises for peace? This question should be the first thing asked in every interview. (The answer will be invariably some sputtering about "justice", so the followup question is how many more generations of suffering should the Palestinian people endure before they can get an arbitrary definition of "justice"?)
We can understand that Arabs want to destroy Israel. We can understand that the socialist Left wants to destroy Israel. But there are a lot of clueless people, desperately wanting to see peace, who have been brainwashed over the decades about "settlements" and "1967 borders" and other non-issues.They are the ones who need to wake up and ask themselves this simple question:
Which goal is more consistent with historic Palestinian Arab actions - the building of an independent state or the destruction of Israel?
Any fair minded person can see the answer is obvious when framed that way. There are still some fair minded people in the West. They need to throw out all the propaganda they've been viewing and honestly answer that question for themselves.