Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: Abbas wants 'not a single Israeli' in future Palestinian state [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)is about as fair as using Yitzak "Two legged-beasts thirsting for Jewish blood" Shamir to demonize all Israelis.
The Mufti has been dead for forty years now. He'd been politically irrelevant for twenty-five years before that. Yes, he was personally a total bastard but the Palestinians weren't responsible for him having his position(Haj Amin Al-Husseini-the specific person you're talking about here, the one and only "Grand Mufti of Jerusalem"-everybody else who ever held that position was simply "the Mufti of Jerusalem-the Brits threw in the "Grand" as a sop to his overweening ego- was given the job as Mufti, after finishing FOURTH in the advisory ballot taken among Palestinian Muslims, by Herbert Samuel, the British governor of the Mandate). And the Mufti didn't invent the Palestinian cause or nation...their wish for self-determination went back long before he was born. All colonized peoples yearn for the day they will no longer be part of somebody else's empire. And Palestinians would have wanted self-determination even if Zionism had never existed. They had wanted out of the Ottoman Empire from the moment they were subjugated by it.
And you can't put the Palestinian anger about the dispossession of those 800,000 people together with the Arab mistreatment of them. Nothing would be different if the Arabs HAD allowed those people out of the camps and into citizenship in the countries where the camps existed. They weren't ever going to give up their identity AS PALESTINIANS no matter what, because Palestinians are not generic Arabs(no other Arabs are either...Arabs are as widely varied in culture and viewpoints as are people of any other race or ethnicity-but that's another discussion).
And even if you were right about the Palestinian position just being antisemitism...there is nothing in the Israeli approach to the West Bank that could change. You can't oppress a people into tolerance and occupy them out of bigotry. The very idea is Orwellian.
The only way to change Palestinian attitudes towards Israel is for Israel and Israelis to give them breathing space. Nothing else can work. And military victory, for either side, is totally impossible.
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