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The UN Can't Deliver a Palestinian State

(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - The vote in 1947 on the question of the partition of Palestine was viewed as Israel's basic title to independence and statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow. The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. The Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them. The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn't the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can't be had in the world of nations. The writer is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
2011-06-01 00:00:00
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