Terrorist leaders, if they are lucky and escape justice, often become default statesmen. Thus the late Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra'ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini, which somehow reduces to “Arafat,” was President/Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a fictitious government.
The Palestine Liberation Organization is a terrorist gang. Arafat and his suicidal followers wanted their own country.
But these Arabs do not want just any piece of land out of which a homeland would have to be laboriously carved. Instead the Arafatians want the tiny postage stamp size country of Israel. They want a ready-made, plug-it-in-and-turn-it-on, modern country handed to them on a silver, if bloodied, platter.
The conflict, it seems to me, is that while the Israelis are willing to share the modern nation they alone created, the Palestinians want it all and, like Hitler, wants to kill off all the Jews. Understandably, the Israelis are resisting such a final solution to the Palestinians’ “Jewish problem.“
President Bush favors a plan to form a Palestinian State. I have news. There already is a Palestinian state, it’s called Syria. Syria’s population is largely Palestinian.
If the Palestinians now living in Israel and in refugee camps in Lebanon want their own homeland so bad why don’t they simply go home to Syria? Answer: because the Syrians won’t have them. The one thing Arabs seem to hate more than Jews and Americans is each other.
If not Syria surely room could be found somewhere in the thousands of empty square miles that make up the sparsely populated Arab world. Why not give the Palestinians an unused corner of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, or Libya and let them go to work and build their own country?
In ancient times when Islamic hordes swept the Jews out of what is now called Israel the land was a bare desert. Over the centuries it remained an arid wasteland until the Jews began to return to their ancestral home. In the last century, and especially since the Jewish state gained independence in 1948, the Jews worked a miracle.
Almost overnight, while scattered Arab tribes lived a primitive nomadic existence, Jews built cities, farms, skyscrapers, universities, airports, hospitals, schools, hi-tech industries, and the infrastructure it takes to make a modern state.
Such progress is viewed with envy by those who have advanced very little in the last two thousand years. It’s a classic example of the have-nots wanting what the haves have worked for and earned.
The question of who has prior claim fades away as the car bombs begin to explode.