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Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-892537
The Arab Case for Israel
(Jerusalem Post) Abigail Klein Leichman - Lebanese-Iraqi journalist and scholar Hussain Abdul-Hussain, currently a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has written The Arab Case for Israel, based on decades of firsthand experience in the Arab world. He makes two compelling overall observations: that the Jewish state is good for the Arabs; and that the Arabs have never articulated a cogent alternative, dwelling on an imagined past rather than an imagined future. "Palestinians have always wanted to rewind the clock, but to what time, exactly?...The problem for Palestinians has been that no matter which period in history they chose, they would never find a time when the Arabs of Palestine were sovereign over the land," he writes. "Throughout history, the only locals to have ever been sovereign over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were...the Jews." "Palestinians have never admitted their inability to imagine a future modern Palestine, or their failure to build a single modern institution in their history, let alone to build and manage a functioning state that is not the kind of medieval Islamist emirate that Hamas constructed in Gaza after 2007." Arabs should seek peace with Israel not "out of despair or fear, but out of a conviction that - as a friend and an ally - the State of Israel is much more valuable to the Arabs than ejecting it and constructing in its stead a Palestine that would, at best, be a mediocre state." "In over two millennia, since the Arabic language first started taking shape, there was never an Arab or Muslim dynasty that considered Jerusalem to be its capital." If the Palestinians ever choose to "prioritize measurable higher living standards over unquantifiable, manufactured, and manipulative concepts of pride, dignity, and national sovereignty, they will realize that peace with Israel, rather than defeating it, is their actual victory. It is Palestinians that need to be liberated, not Palestine."