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The Palestinian Statehood Gambit
(Wall Street Journal) Editorial - The Kurds - one of the oldest ethnic groups in the world - don't have a state. Neither do the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Uighurs and Tibetans of China, the Basques of Spain, the Chechens of Russia or the Flemish of Belgium. Yet when the UN holds its annual meeting in New York this week, the session will be dominated by the efforts of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to declare statehood. A vote at the UN won't create a Palestinian state and will likely retard the creation of one, perhaps for years. What Palestinians seek out of a UN vote isn't an affirmation of their right to a state, but rather another tool in their perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel. "We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years," Abbas said. That's another way of saying that the "occupation," in Abbas' view, began with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and not with Israel's takeover of the West Bank and Gaza after a war that threatened Israel's existence in 1967. Perhaps it's time to rethink the fundamental desirability of a Palestinian state so long as the Palestinians remain more interested in tearing down their neighbor than in building a decent political culture of their own.