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The Palestinians, Alone

(New York Times) Efraim Karsh - It has long been conventional wisdom that the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a prerequisite to peace and stability in the Middle East. What, then, are we to make of a recent survey for Al Arabiya television finding that a staggering 71% of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? The truth is that while the "Palestine question" has long been central to inter-Arab politics, Arab states have shown far less concern for the well-being of the Palestinians than for their own interests. For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan "was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon." From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of life - which is part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. The writer, a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London, is the author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.
2010-08-02 10:15:22
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