(ABC-Australia) Philip Mendez - There is no doubt that my emotional sympathies have switched since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000. The indiscriminate violence and extremism of the second intifada finally removed my infantile prioritizing of one form of national rights over another. I now accepted that the Palestinians had and always have had political choices, and that their actions seemed to be driven by a zero-sum political culture which demanded absolute rather than partial justice. The malevolence and irrationality of the second intifada also helped me to finally understand the factors that caused the 1948 Palestinian Naqba or "catastrophe." On both occasions (1947-48 and 2000-02) the Palestinians had initiated a conflict and lost. They had then blamed the Israeli victims of their aggression for acting in self-defense and winning instead of acknowledging that the war had been a horrible error. In 1948, the Arab states had refused to take responsibility for resettling the Palestinian refugees as permanent and equal citizens in their countries as the Israelis had done with an equally large number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and instead duped the refugees into believing that they would be able to return to their former homes inside Israel. Similarly in 2000-02, the Palestinian leadership refused to acknowledge that their actions had caused the deaths and injuries of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis, and achieved absolutely nothing. If the Palestinians had not reneged on the commitment they made in the Oslo Accord to peaceful negotiations, they almost certainly would have had an independent state with the support of Israel by the end of 2001. The writer is a senior lecturer in social policy and community development at Monash University.
2011-07-22 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive